There’s a screen next to the inner door in the Hackspace that I suspect is
going to be used as a POS kiosk for Hackspace info. After visiting Toronto
Hackspace (hacklab.to) I thought I might throw some ideas on what we could
add to this.
First, lemmie show you what theirs looks like:
It’s got a clock, day, date, latest weather, travel updates, cameras of
their parking lot and door, a music system, news headlines and IRC scroll
box (also an amusing section of Hacklab kittens and puppies).
Most of the basic stuff could be implemented in our own system like the
clock, day, date, weather, door camera and IRC box. The other things could
be considered but I’d like to go into the simpler ones first.
Clock / Day / Date / Weather
Pretty self-explanatory
Door Entry
This interested me a lot for thinking what we could improve with our own
one. Their door entry is set to auto-open the outer door when buzzed on
Tuesday evenings (their open night), and presents an amusing welcome
message (randomly picked among a few varieties, usually goes along the
lines of "Welcome to the Hacklab! We’re located on the 2nd floor in room 6,
come on up!). We could do the same for ours but set to Wednesday evenings
(make it auto-open only between 6pm and 10pm?), and have a OPEN / DENY
button on the POS to allow people to enter outside of those hours (this can
be linked with the camera too, so we can see who is coming in for security).
For members, the same key fob entry could be used, but have a different
message spoken to them (eg. “Welcome back to Manchetser Hackspace!”) and
have the custom entry sounds implemented inside the space as previously
talked about.
IRC box
Pretty self explanatory, but we can update this to include our Telegram
group chat as well since a lot of us use that nowadays too.
In the first picture, there are also some buttons in the top right to lead
to other menus, which I found another fun little thing:
This menu shows statistics of the hackspace, including the last members to
enter, recent activity, and a great game they like to call the ‘Door Race’.
It’s a leaderboard of who is the fastest to get from the outer door to the
inner door using their key fobs which might be amusing to use in our own
system. A fun way to get fit!
Thoughts? Any other ideas to throw in? I wouldn’t mind helping out to make
this system too 