Restroom hacks

The Datadog team, led by Chris Hoey and Daniel Benamy, aimed to create a system to monitor bathroom availability in their office. They wanted to avoid using video or sensors that could be perceived as intrusive, instead opting for magnetic reed switches and pin switches to detect lock positions. The team chose Raspberry Pi 2 Model Bs as the brain of the project due to their ability to run Linux and connect via WiFi, which simplified device management. To read sensor values, they used the GPIO pins as files, making it easy to access sensor status through a python script. They also kept things simple by using Netcat for bathroom availability checks and added bathroom status widgets on their Datadog dashboards. The project required minimal code, with most work going into figuring out sensor types, mounting devices neatly, and troubleshooting WiFi issues.

No tracked trend matches for this post yet.

Use this post, company, and trend context to find content marketing opportunities, perform competitive analysis, or address product feature gaps via the Plushcap MCP server or the Plushcap API.