Restroom Hacks

At Datadog, a team of makers and hackers decided to solve the issue of bathroom contention in their office space by implementing a monitoring system. The goal was to create a non-invasive, reliable, and professional solution that would indicate whether a bathroom was occupied or not without being creepy. They used Raspberry Pi 2 Model Bs as the brains of the project, along with various sensors such as magnetic reed switches, pin switches, and photoresistors to detect door lock status and room availability. The team managed to set up a system that allowed them to check bathroom status via network-connected devices or even add it as a widget on their Datadog dashboards throughout the office.