roommateDetector
Sharing a house with 2 other busy people can mean you don’t always know who’s home. It turns out few people enjoy yelling “Lucy I’m home!” when they walk through the door (confession: I do). The amicable solution? The arduino based roommate detector. RoomateDetector monitors activity on the wifi network, checks against a database of known devices and their users, and lights up the appropriate LEDs to indicate presence of the specific person.
The always on wifi device requirement proved to be surprisingly reliable and a successful proof of concept. Maybe when network traffic monitors are commonly used at the household level I should revisit this idea. RoommateDetector was conceived and built in a day as part of the January 2009 4in4 event at ITP, using Processing, Arduino and 3 very large LEDs.
