How to make your office more intelligent
This story starts with my coworker Rob telling me that we can’t see how well our startup is doing. Damn it, Rob just open the websites and track the metrics. Okey, okey I know he is right 😑, tracking metrics is annoying. Nobody likes doing it and I thought it would be better if I found an easier way to do it.
Then I decided to go home and after exiting the building I thought, hey it would be nice to be able to see the train schedule so I would know how fast I should walk (sometimes the trains have delays). Oh wait, there’s a service for that. What if I built a website that allowed you to embed a few of those services and display them with your own personal settings on display duration and services to be used.
Solving the problem
The software part
The app consists of a single page application written in Typescript. It allows you to create a slideshow from live links and allows you to log in if you want to save your slides forever.
Voilà!
Coding this has been pretty trivial. A front-end template and Firebase with Typescript. I made the app available online, in case you decide to add this project to your office/home. As a starter I embedded:
- Windy — provides information for the weather
- Our company metrics — we created a Grafana dashboard and embedded it into a slide
- TreinPosities.nl — provides actual information on the trains including delays
- BBC news
Rob suggested we also add a slide on the precipitation.
The hardware part
This has been the difficult part, not because of the individual steps involved but because Raspberry Pi 4 has some quirky issues. I bought one of those gadgets for €60 and decided that running my app in the browser should be enough for our purposes. I also bought a new screen for €100.
A few days after connecting the Pi to the screen a few problems became apparent. The Pi would crash every other day due to memory problems. This was resolved by restarting the Pi automatically every day which frees the memory.
Nonetheless, if you follow these instructions you will be able to create a screen that displays live weather, traffic and other kinds of information for your home for approximately €160.
Happy hacking!
