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Infolight - creating the Informative Workspace

Infolight displays computer generated information in an easily interpreted and non obtruisve way. Great for creating an Informative Workspace at YOUR office!

 

The Infolight

 

How the Infolight works

Infolight fits nicely on top of most office furnitures. Place it where it can be easily seen.

Simply plug a USB cable from a computer into the Infolight. No power cables needed. 

Once setup, the information source is periodically checked by your computer program and a decision is made to light the green, yellow or red light bulb.

Your program then sends a command to the Infolight and it directly displays the message. Be it a group of programmers that needs coordination with a common source code repository, project managers watching over the progress and quality in their project or an IT-department responsible for the electronic infrastructure of the company.

 

Size and visibility

The Infolight is about 50 cm tall and it can be placed almost anywhere in an office except for bright windows and near other similar strong light sources. It is easy to move and setup if you need it in another project or setup.

Price

299 Euro including 25%VAT for European Communiity citizens. ( €239 for VAT registered European companies and people outside the European Community. )

Ordering & availability

Contact sales@factorycode.com to inquire about availabilty, shipping cost (we ship worldwide through UPS - include complete adress in email) and secure payment (once we see the payment we ship the Infolight).

We accept the major credit cards and PayPal and process the payments through PayPals secure payment system that protects both buyers and sellers. (You do not need a PayPal account)

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Special requests?

Factorycode has experimented with several feedback devices and build those on customer requests to suit your need of communication (Short range license free radio, power lines, serial ports, USB, GSM networks, Bluetooth, Ethernet etc.) See example photos below.

Please contact us for prices and suggestions.

Example: Bluetooth controlled wall mounted traffic light. Can be placed upto 100 meters from the controlling computer.

 

Example: Radio controlled traffic light hanging from ceiling. 

 

   

Example: X10 powerline controlled lava lamps. Gives both a direct indication as well as a time estimate of how long time the error has been unfixed. It takes between 20 minutes to 1 hour for the lava bubbles to actually start moving. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Example: (no image) Rotating red lights. Very annoying and not recommended. Simply distracts too much as it usually takes some time to check in a corrected version of the software. When you need to have the information of the build status, you simply wish to look at a light. You do not want to have the information pushed at you in this annoying way.

Example:

The left Infolight, standing on a wall mounted book-shelf in the picture below, shows the result of a cross-compilation of the Infolight source code every time the source is updated in the version control system.

The middle Infolight shows testresults from a PID-controller with a simulated mechanical system. Compilation, simulation and documentation is done every time the source code is changed in the version control system. 

The right Infolight shows a fault in zipping and publishing of the code and script examples to this web-site. Zipping and publishing happen automatically every time there are changes made to the Infolight. Mistakes and misunderstandings do happen, we just need to discover and correct them as fast as possible to prevent loss of money and time.

 

Serial drivers

The Infolight contains  a USB-serial converter that needs a driver on the computer to show up as a serial com-port. On Silabs download page, drivers for Windows and Macintosh are available. For Linux the driver is included in the kernel sources as of 2.6.12 and has been reported to work directly under Ubuntu Linux, just plug it in! See the manual for installation guides on Windows as well as general serial ports settings.

 Silabs serial drivers  

 Linux serial drivers  

Documentation

The manual contains installation guides, commands to send to the Infolight and troubleshooting hints.

 Infolight manual

 Bluetooth controlled traffic light (discontinued)

Code and script examples

To change the state of the Infolight, you need to send a command character to a serial port.

Compressed into a single downloadable .zip file you find source code and pre-compiled executables in Java, Perl and Python as well as script examples for automated builds and continous integration using CruiseControl.

The Perl code sends a serial character out to the Infolight and can be called directly from build scripts or repository hooks. It has been compiled into a windows .exe file for those of you who don't have Perl installed. Great if you have the Infolight connected directly to your build machine.

The Python code runs a server that sends a serial character to the Infolight on remote requests. The server accepts standard http-requests from a web-browser or the wget program which is included for your conveniance. The server has been compiled as a windows .exe file for those of you who don't have Python installed. Great for displaying status on remote computers/sites.

  Infolight_apps.zip

 

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