Story · Engineering culture
The musical, connected office bathroom
A worn lock indicator, a traffic light, a Raspberry Pi — and a small lesson in why playful engineering is good for a team.
The little locked/unlocked indicator on the office bathroom was worn and hard to read. So, naturally, we wired up a traffic light, hid a push switch in the door frame, and “secured” it to the wall with some clear packing tape.
Later iterations got more ambitious: proper ceiling-mounted lights, completely hidden wiring, and a Raspberry Pi server listening to lock/unlock events and setting the lights accordingly. It might also have played TV theme songs. There might have been an API you could query for which bathrooms were free. There might have been a chatbot you could ask.
Why? Because the indicator really was hard to read — and because we could, and it was fun. Teams that build silly things together build serious things better.
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