When I'm not going to be at work due to either being at a customer site or working from home I'd like to leave some indicator at my desk to let my colleagues know it will be free for them to use for the day. This will avoid the awkwardness of me arriving to find someone sitting there and politely (silently) waiting for them to move.
The Desk Buddy is an ESP8266 based device with two LEDs (Red and Green) and an 4-line LCD that will be permanently sit at my desk. A connected app will allow me to remotely set Desk Buddy to light up Green when my desk is free for people to use or Red when I plan on coming into work. The LCD will display an associated text message when the status is changed to help those not familiar with this scheme.
Throughout the day Desk Buddy will display useful information on the LCD such as current weather, expected travel time to home and stock price. It will also briefly pop up bad dad jokes and my tweets.
DeskBuddy Mobile App is available under the Apache License version 2.0. See the LICENSE file for more info.