Bathroom Monitor – Lee

So this project is more of an exercise than a creative endeavor. I have 2 xbees, a couple photo resistors, LED’s and a servo. What can I make with that?

I really focused in on the servo because it’s been in my toolkit for months and I’d yet to use it to actually make something move. This sparked the idea of analog public bathroom occupied signs. Now I know there’s no practical reason those switches should ever be replaced with digital wireless technology, that’s some crazy overkill, but the idea of making one of those analog style rollover signs seemed like an interesting exercise. I set about figuring out how something like that would work.

First I looked into what kind of range my servo had because that would determine to a great extent the limitations of the design. The spec sheet says 90 degrees, but I found it could do about 110 degrees, I decided to split the difference and make my window 100 degrees.

Next I choose an enclosure and measured the workable space I’d have and scaled my cutout window to it and then that determined how large the rotating sign could be. When the sign is vacant the hidden occupied portion needs to clear side and bottom of the enclosure.

Now it was just a matter of building my circuits.

At this point I decided to add some LED indicators as well in case the lights were off / could act as an ambient notification. It was time to test it out.

and testing out the range.

and my girlfriend though it was funny as well.