I recently set up an office in my home with the hope that I would be working from home more often. My office is down in the basement of my home in a finished room. I had a concern that my kids would come down and rush into my office when I was in the middle of a call or busy doing heads down work.
I started to look at various Busy Light indicators. Most were expensive and tied into software that I wouldn't be using. I had a couple of basic requirements and 1 very strong desire.
- The light had to be outside the room, thus probably wireless
- There isn't a well placed outlet outside the room. So needed to be battery powered or plug in some other way
- Needs to be able to show multiple colors
- Needs to be very obvious to those entering the hallway
- Desire to be able to be set via the command line
I thought about building this with a Raspberry PI, some LEDs, and an SNS topic or something. That would have worked, but would have required a lot of work to get up and going. Then I thought about Smart Bulbs. I could control them with an app on my phone and covers all of the requirements except the command line request. After looking I found that a lot of them integrate with IFTTT and that allowed me to write this tool.
Now I have several IFTTT actions that will change the colors of the bulbs. All I have to do is run
bulb set red
and an HTTP request is fired off to IFTTT and a couple of seconds later the bulb color is updated and my family knows if I am in the middle of something or not.