A lab in our tech office – Part One
That made our kitchen LIT🔥
Regular breaks are encouraged at our Label A offices as they increase productivity and restore focus. Both our designers and developers, who work on complex problems for hours, need some distraction from work every once in a while. While we already have loads of fun stuff at the office, like an Xbox, a Playstation, a football field out front, books, games, VR-glasses, a chill corner, etc., some people want to distract their brain in different ways.
So… We built a lab. We marked a part of our office with warning tape, set up a desk, bought equipment that could spark the brain and set up only one rule:
Within the tape markings, anyone is allowed to make whatever they want, no matter the purpose. Within this area we don’t look at the business perspective.
Anyone at Label A can use the lab to work on personal hardware projects or office hacks, or anything creative they feel like building. Label A provides the equipment, the team builds.
#hardwaredontcare
This isn’t the first time we hack things or work with hardware. We previously hacked the Coca-Cola machine in our office so we can make it drop cans of soda with our phones, we hacked our office screens so they show who is calling (and called it Voicy) and we hacked our own open source version of charades for extra fun after hours. Besides that, we won several Hackathons over the past couple of months so it was about time we got our own hacking space in the office😎
Project Lumos: lighting up our kitchen🔆
Our kitchen wasn’t properly lit (pun intended) and we wanted to make it suitable for the Friday parties. For a while we have been wanting to put LED strips on top and on the bottom of our kitchen cupboards. But not only that, we also wanted to be able to control them remotely.
To achieve this, we needed some parts and equipment:
- A Raspberry Pi 3 running Raspbian
- Two strips of 145 LED lights (WS2801)
- A soldering iron
- A powerful power supply (5V 10A instead of the standard 2A)
How it works
The lights are connected to the Raspberry Pi’s general purpose input/output pins. The Raspberry Pi itself is running on Raspbian –a free operating system optimized for Raspberry Pi hardware.
We installed Apache to create a simple webserver, on which we created our own REST API. This API enables us to operate the lights remotely, but also potentially a lot more. At first a front-ender needed to send commands using an existing library. This library has the basic methods to send ANY hexadecimal color code to the light strips in RGB and to perform some other basic tasks like clearing the color and creating a color pattern. Any pattern. We can make the lights chase each other, we can create a unicorn color pattern and we can even create the good ol’ Nokia’s Snake.
As of yesterday we are now able to control the lights using an app called Hyperion (available for iOS and Android). This app has many cool preset patterns and of course every color imaginable. It is also available for Apple Watch, which is pretty neat.
The next step will be to connect it to the microphone input so the lights can react to the beat of the music.😎 But that is not all.
Changing the lights to our favorite colors is cool, but it doesn’t really serve a purpose. We are currently working on some other ideas that make the lights not only nice to look at, but also useful:
Some of our plans include:
- Connecting the lights to Voicy –our caller ID Apple TV app that is running on all the screens in the office– and make the lights change into the brand color of the client that is calling. Red for Coca-Cola, green for Greenwheels, yellow-blue-red for Porsche, etc.
- Display alerts in certain colors to notify the team. For example brown lights could mean that the coffee is ready and yellow could mean ‘beer o’clock’!🍺
- Connect it to our toilet sensor. ‘What? Toilet sensor?’ Yep, a much needed office tweak here. More about that in part two!
This was the first project built in our Label A Lab, and more will follow soon! Do you have any cool suggestions or ideas? Please leave it in the comment section!
