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Here's How Arduino Uses the GIGA R1 WiFi to Manage Meeting Room Availability

By connecting several of these Arduino Cloud-enabled units to Google Calendar, the Arduino team could quickly see and reserve meeting rooms.

Meeting room availability

At most offices, including Arduino's, meeting rooms are valuable real estate that see a constant influx and egress of people throughout the day. This can cause major headaches for those who were planning to use a particular room only to find it occupied when they arrive, which is why the Arduino team decided to build a simple room management system using the GIGA board and its accompanying GIGA Display Shield.

The screen, UI, and GIGA R1

For this project, the team selected the Arduino GIGA R1 Display Shield since its large size makes viewing room bookings easy, the screen has touch capabilities, and it all plugs into the Arduino GIGA R1 WiFi board securely as a single unit. The user interface runs on LVGL (the light and versatile visual library) that provides an array of buttons and menus for selecting and subsequently booking rooms. For example, every event will display information related to the subject, organizer, start/end times, and if it's an all-day booking. For those needing to use the room immediately, new events can be created directly on the device and sent to a web server with the GIGA R1 WiFi's built-in wireless module.

Google Calendar integrations

Every unit is represented in the Arduino Cloud as a Thing, as each one is associated with a room and a unique ID. Then on the Google Cloud side, there is an always-running service that gets notified upon Google Calendar changes through a webhook endpoint. Depending on the current meeting, next meeting, or the lack of one at all, the associated device will have its Arduino Cloud variables updated and quickly reflected on the screen.

To read more about this extremely useful project or delve deeper into the code, you can read the team's write-up here and visit their GitHub repository.

Evan Rust
IoT, web, and embedded systems enthusiast. Contact me for product reviews or custom project requests.
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