Door Notes
(For the lack of a better name)
Craig Hickman

I have been thinking about building this project for some time, but it was my recent acquisition of an iPhone that finally got me to do it.

I attached a simple rear illuminated LCD serial display to my office door at the University of Oregon. (I teach in the Digital Arts program.) The display is attached to an Arduino board that’s on the other side of the door and the Arduino board is attached to a Mac Mini running an Actionscript program. The Actionscript program contacts my web site once a minute and loads a file that tells it what to display on the LCD. My web site has a web page with a form on it that lets me enter and update the message from any place in the world. (I especially enjoy using my iPhone’s browser to do this.) I use a short Php program to read the info from the HTML form and update the file on the web site.

Any number of items can be displayed in rotation, each being shown for about 5 seconds. In addition to entering text into the form on the web page, I also established several macros that allow me to save key strokes (or finger strokes on the iPhone.) For example entering “/oh” will display my office hours and “/tm” will display the time of day. In addition to the LCD display, the housing also holds a small blinking LED which can be turned on and off with a macro command.

To what practical use can this be put? Good question, but I’m sure that at some point it will save the day.