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I remember, about 25 years ago, a HUD on each an ever train carriage would indicate whether the toilet was occupied. The HUD was located above the baggage sect
by zhte415 13y ago
I remember, about 25 years ago, a HUD on each an ever train carriage would indicate whether the toilet was occupied. The HUD was located above the baggage section at the end of each carriage. Occupied was red, and unoccupied was blank. No Raspberry Pi was involved, but through careful social engineering, everyone in the carriage know what the sign meant, There was a physical hardware based fall-back also, which was an indicator on the 'toilet room' with not both red but 'OCCUPIED' displayed on the door, the operating process of which consisted of one locking the door.
This is not to discredit train bathroom engineers decades ago. Ensuring a piece of bathroom machinery operates consistently for up to thousands of miles per day with usage analysis certainty included is a very admirable achievement.
Decades later... the same efforts but in a small scale static environmental setting are posted to a website called Hacker News.
- icebraining 13y agoI'm not sure what's your point; I'm pretty sure this isn't being upvoted because people consider it an amazing accomplishment, but because it's a fun example of how easy it is to connect physical objects to the Internet using the Pi.
- hengheng 13y agoOn the other hand, it is /fun/.
- T-hawk 13y agoGood observations, but let's also review what this does accomplish. The train system is reliant on mechanical linkage and line-of-sight, so can serve only a limited audience. While the Pi-powered version scales, making the toilet status accessible to everyone everywhere in the world by leveraging the connectivity of the Internet.
- rtpg 13y ago>While the Pi-powered version scales It scales but the endpoint probably doesn't scale ( I don't know if 1 toilet can easily serve 100 people)
- userbinator 13y agoPassenger planes have had the same thing too.