remotebot

Distraction-free remote telepresence chatbot to let in-office folks know if the remote video feed has issues!

The Idea

• We have all-staff meetings in Ada, like Fireside Chat.
• Since remote folks aren't in the room, when their video feed goes down, their cries in Slack might be missed.
• Remotebot drives a physical lamp on the speaker's desk. This lamp is used to communicate remote feed status to people in the room:
  • Dark: Set by remotebot unknown; used to indicate "no meeting happening now".
  • Flashing Blue: Someone on-site ran remotebot blue to request a remote viewer to update the status.
    • Solid Green: Someone remote confirmed all-good with remotebot green
    • Flashing Red: Someone remote is signaling the feed is dead (bad audio, bad video, or similar) with remotebot red
    • Solid Yellow: Someone remote has a question. They want someone on-site to check the Slack feed in #serious-business and ask the question.

As that hints, most Remotebot usage happens in #serious-business, but there are also some remotebot-specific channels:

• #remotebot-dev
• #remotebot-status
• #remotebot-test

As a user, you don't need to join any of those, though!

Links

remotebot runs on Heroku as the app bnr-remotebot: https://dashboard.heroku.com/apps/bnr-remotebot

remotebot is integrated into Slack using a Custom Integration as a Bot user on Slack: https://bignerdranch.slack.com/services/B1ZR6A2PL

remotebot's bot source code lives on GitHub at: https://github.com/bignerdranch/remotebot/ (P.S. You're looking at it now.)

remotebot's hardware source code lives on GitHub at: https://github.com/bignerdranch/remotebot-hardware (It's a single .ino Arduino sketch, which you can build and flash using inotool.)

The bot and the hardware communicate over a WebSocket. The hardware connects to the bot using the "Big Nerd Ranch" WiFi network and waits for messages with a simple textual protocol: the bot sends the hardware the name of the color it should show.

Help, Remotebot Is Broken!

It probably just needs a restart. If you're logged in with Heroku on the BNR org, you can run:

heroku ps:restart --app bnr-remotebot

If you have a log-in but don't have the heroku tool installed:

brew install heroku
heroku login

It'll ask for your email, password, and 2FA code, and then you'll be good to go. 👍