Raspberry Pi Busy Light Makes Working From Home a Breeze

With many of us working from home due to Coronavirus concerns, it's not surprising to see a few new innovative projects from the Raspberry Pi community. This week, a creator by the name of Jim Bob Bennett shared his Pi-powered busy light project. It's programmed to synchronize with an Office365 calendar, automatically changing color when a meeting is scheduled.

The Raspberry Pi interfaces with the Office365 calendar using a combination of Azure IoT Central and Azure Logic apps. The whole project is built on top of Raspbian. You can use Raspbian Lite as this project doesn't require a screen.

When a meeting is determined to be in place, the light changes to red. When a meeting is over, it changes to green. These commands are sent to the Pimoroni Mood Light using IoT Central. But life is full of surprises, what if you have an impromptu meeting? Jim Bob is already on it by including a Flic button to manually control the light. The color of the light can be instantly set at the push of a button.

If you want to read more details about how this project works, you're in luck! Jim Bob went above and beyond to share every detail of how to create the Pi-powered BusyLight project on Github. You can follow Jim Bob on Reddit for more projects and updates on this one.

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Ash Hill is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware with a wealth of experience in the hobby electronics, 3D printing and PCs. She manages the Pi projects of the month and much of our daily Raspberry Pi reporting while also finding the best coupons and deals on all tech.