Did You Know You Can Use Slack to Control Your Office’s AC?
Slack is a kind of business communication and project management suite rolled into one platform. It’s not particularly exciting stuff, but it is very useful when you’re working with a team. It’s also very popular, with customers ranging from NASA’s JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) to IBM. What you might not realize is that Slack can be used to control physical devices, in a way similar to IoT platforms do.
Raphael Baron shows us how he took advantage of the Slack platform to control the air conditioning in his office. The key to making this work is the Slack API, which allows you to build apps (or simple hooks) that integrate with features within the Slack software. One part of that software is an internal instant messaging system for communicating with your coworkers.

For this project, Baron wanted to, essentially, IM his office’s air conditioners to ask them to turn on, or off, or adjust the temperature. To make this happen, he setup a server and used Clojure (mostly because he wanted to learn about it) to hook into the Slack API. When the server sees a message directed at his AC Bot, it tells an ESP8266 to send infrared commands to the air conditioners (which have IR receivers built in).

Overall, Baron’s project seems to have gone pretty smoothly. However, one interesting hiccup was with the IR signals he was transmitting. Tests with other IR devices worked fine, but the air conditioners didn’t seem to want to respond. It turns out that this was because the IR library he was using didn’t support a long enough sequence by default. Increasing the signal buffer solved the problem, and now the AC can be controlled via Slack!


