Kuando Busylight for LoRaWAN: your custom signalling light system

Although the famous incident in which a dad was interrupted by his children during a BBC news interview occurred back in 2017, most are familiar with the situation nowadays. During COVID-19, the usual day-to-day business and work were accompanied by constant interruptions from either parents, kids, or spouses. The pandemic showed that working at home has benefits but revealed that setting boundaries is easier said than done. During those times, I believe most of us would have been happy to have a signaling system in place, indicating when a room is in use and when not to disturb.

The Kuando Busylight is a great tool that can help manage these situations at home and in the workplace. It is a smart light based on LoRaWAN connectivity that can be programmed through downlink messages. The device can display any color and be used as a visual notifier, indicating the occurrence of a specific event, status, or any other visual cue. As an alert and notification tool in a broader IoT solution, the Kuando Busylight can be combined with a large network of sensors.

Examples of use cases are:

• Occupancy monitoring of meeting rooms or desks

• Status indicator in test or production lines

• Temperature/humidity/CO2 measurements indicator

The office use case

In the office, this light can signal unavailability due to calls or focus time. With a color code or company guidelines in place, it can help the team identify whether it is a good time to approach someone or not. Additionally, it can automatically change color according to the status of in-call applications or calendar events. It can be used as an intelligent ringer, which can help identify when a call or a notification comes in.

The home office use case

The use of the Kuando Busylight can help employees balance and harmonize their work obligations with home responsibilities. Parents, especially, have difficulty working from home while keeping their kids occupied. Switching between work and children can be exhausting and unproductive in both departments: business & parenting.

The Kuando Busylight with akenza

You can easily connect the Kuando Busylight to akenza using LoRaWAN connectivity. Thanks to akenza’s low-code data flow, it is easy to select the light from the open-source Device Type Library (with many pre-integrated devices), including payload encoder/decoder for up-/downlinks. The most popular off-the-shelf IoT devices are already integrated, and new devices are continuously added to our open-source device library.

Low-code functionalities can facilitate the implementation of business logic into the IoT project. With the Rule Engine of akenza, you can analyze and process data of multiple devices simultaneously and trigger actions when needed. Actions include sending SMS or email notifications, sending downlinks or aggregating your data. In the current case, the Rule Engine can be used to send downlink commands to the Kuando Busylight based on specific readings from other sensors or data inputs.

To demonstrate the use of the Busylight, we implemented our own smart case in our office. Check out the video below and discover how we used the light to visualize the occupancy of our meetings rooms: