The Quest for the "I'm in a meeting" Light

I’ve been searching for an easy way to hang a battery powered light on my office door that can automatically change color depending on my meeting status. It’s overly geeky and unnecessary but I’d love for people to have a way to know if it’s OK to knock. I have two issues I can’t find solutions to so I thought I’d open it up to the group. Are there battery powered “smart” lights? What can I do without connecting anything to my company’s wifi? This may not be possible, but it’s a good puzzle.

Well, there are companies that make “tablet” screens for meeting rooms to show who has them booked. IMHO, in an ideal world, you’d want something pleasant like that, that could say in words a message, rather than just a light. This would also be great for “On Vacation, back on date” messages.

That would be really cool! I was thinking of something that would connect to our O365 to get my availability and change the display accordingly. Something like IFTTT, yonomi, etc. I could of course go for the nostalgic play and mount a Magna Doodle to the door.

This sounds like something that @gigastacey might be able to help you with. Or maybe @mikahsargent

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We run an app called “Meeting Room 365” (https://www.meetingroom365.com/) on some cheap Fire tablets mounted outside each conference room. Integrates to O365 and shows busy when a room is booked on anyone’s calendar. Might be what you’re looking for.

This is pretty cool! I’m not sure I want a monthly fee for my pet project. But, thank you for the link. I passed it along to a bunch of people!

A friend of mine hard wired a light over the door to his home office and could trigger it via a key on his keyboard or when his bluetooth headset was in use. Pretty cool, but very custom (all done by him with some minimal hardware and some coding).

I was interested in doing something similar, but don’t really have the free time to invest in crafting a custom solution. So, I started checking into other options. This one came up, but I haven’t tried it yet – https://amzn.to/2BTaeM6

It looks kind of cool, and I might have to check into it more.

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Oh this is interesting! I’ll have to dig into it along with the other related items Amazon has.

You are a better researcher than me. That product came up in my Amazon search, but I didn’t look at it because I was looking for a small programable led sign to recommend. None of the led programable ones were good enough looking to recommend.

Do you really want to remember to charge your office light? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

An absolutely valid question. It’s between that and people interrupting me while in the middle of presenting.

May be worth checking etsy.com for things like “on air” or “recording” illuminated signs. Looked like some that I found were remote controlled, but results and prices appeared to be based on my location so you would need to do your own search to be sure of getting something relevant to you.

There are some beautiful options! I’m always impressed with the skills on Etsy!