This project was born from a very common problem: our office’s floor is equipped with one bathroom that can’t be seen from every desk. Ensues unnecessary back and forth when someone walks to the bathroom only to find it occupied.
The solution ? A simple bathroom monitoring system composed of two devices:
- An emitter placed on the inside of the door of the bathroom to monitor. An infrared sensor is directed toward the lock’s knob. A piece of black tape is applied on the knob. The idea is the following: when the door is unlocked, the knob’s metallic surface is facing the sensor and reflecting a fair amount of IR light. When the door is locked, the taped part of the knob is now facing the sensor. Since the tape is black, the amount of IR light reflected decreases: we know that the door is locked. We use a radio emitter module to send the value read from the sensor to the receiver. A small Atmel microcontroller (the ATtiny85) acts as the brain of the system. The device runs on 4 AAA batteries and is put to sleep 5 seconds every time a reading is sent in order to save power.
- The receiver is used to display the status of occupancy of the bathroom remotely. It is built around the same microcontroller as the emitter. A RF receiver picks up the readings from the emitter. Depending on the value received, we light up an RGB LED in green or red. This device runs on a wall wart since the LED is constantly turned on.
