Raspberri Pi Powered Door Sensor

By using a magnetic reed switch with the magnet on the door and the switch mounted on the door frame we can easily detect if the main, lockable door is open or closed. We normally leave this main door open the whole time someone is there so it would be an easy way to remotely detect or display that someone is there and the space is “open”. We could also send this open/closed status to the world very easily using the Space API. The main idea for this project is to hook the reed switch on the door to one of the GPIO pins on a Raspberry Pi computer so we could very easily broadcast our open/closed status over the Space API over the internet in real time. We could even have a fancy OPEN neon sign image turn on or off on our main web site so visitors can easily see if we are open or not at that moment in case they wanted to visit.

Future Features

Ideas for features to be added later include: 1. Information announcement. As soon as the first person enters and it changes from “closed” to “open” it could announce over a speaker, “welcome back. The last person left yesterday at 9:08 pm. There has been 4 comments on the blog since then and 28 visitors to the site. Six new wiki page entries have been created.” and other announcements. 2. Web camera. Another web camera could be attached and used to view the space from the other side of the room looking inward to increase security and offer more options for visitors to see what’s going on and even add to the list of hackerspaces with live streaming video: Hackerspace Webcams