Blaring Notification Horn Demands Attention
To avoid missed notifications while working from home, you might want to build the WipperSnapper Summoning Horn designed by Tyeth Gundry.
Working from home means that you may often find yourself away from your desk. For example, maybe you're waiting on code to compile and so you take the opportunity to do some vacuuming around the house. But if a coworker or boss needs to reach you during that time and you don't immediately answer, then you'll be facing some uncomfortable accusations regarding your work ethic. To avoid such a faux pas, you might want to build the WipperSnapper Summoning Horn designed by Tyeth Gundry.
WipperSnapper is like a notification chime on steroids. The notification sound comes from 40-watt air horn loud enough to startle your neighbors. You'll hear it even if you're mowing the east lawn of your 40-acre property while wearing noise-canceling headphones. And WipperSnapper is able to detect your presence in your home office, so it won't give you a heart attack every time you get an email. Best of all, this is a "no code" project that doesn't require any programming experience.
This all works through the Adafruit IO platform for IoT applications. That communicates with an Adafruit Metro ESP32-S2 development board. The Adafruit Metro uses a PIR sensor to see if the user is in their office. If they aren't and a notification comes in, the board will toggle a relay to allow power to reach the air horn.
Gundry's guide demonstrates how to set up an Adafruit IO dashboard that indicates if someone is in the room, and gives the user the option to "toot horn." That will work if you give someone else access to the dashboard. But if you want WipperSnapper to act as a notification system, you can go further.
The Adafruit IO service can integrate with IFTTT, which itself integrates with many other services. So you can have IFTTT tell Adafruit IO to sound the horn (if the room is empty) when you get a new email on your Gmail account or when you get a message on Slack. The possibilities are endless!
We do, however, discourage the use of WipperSnapper if you live near the coast. The blaring air horn might confuse the pilots of passing ships.