Ask HN: How would you implement an IoT sales bell?

1 pointsnickmyersdt3y ago3 comments

One of the things our business lost in the move from office based to home working, was the celebratory moment when one of our sales people closed a new deal.

In the office, the sales person would walk up to a service bell, "ding", and applause would arise from everyone in the office.

In a remote works, CRM systems are updated, graphs and spreadsheets are updated but no applause or appreciation.

I had a couple of ideas, however I'm not sure where to start on hardware or if there's a better solution.

One idea was to get IoT buttons, that when pressed would ring a physical bell (everyone would have both a button and a bell) and push a message to our "everyone" chat system.

I don't know enough about hardware (perhaps Raspberry Pi or Arduino?) to figure out how to physically strike a bell - any ideas?

Somehow I'd also need to know who the user of the button was, so that the message could attribute the moment to them.

The other idea is to rig up a webhook from our CRM, that would do the same thing. This would mean the data in the chat message would be richer.

I could simply rig the webhook to a chat messag, however I really feel that the joy of a single bell "ding" bringing immediate applause is the thing I want to reproduce (to some extent).

What do you think? How would you do this? Do you have another even better idea?

Thanks HN

3 comments

mbanzi3y ago

it's very easy to do with an Arduino. Get a nano 33 IoT it's enough and inexpensive. the buttons are simple to interface. to strike the bell you have two options 1 use a servomotor, it's less elegant but very easy to interface 2 use a solenoid , it will strike the bell very nicely (you'll need a MOSFET or similar to drive the solenoid from Arduino) from a software perspective you could use the Arduino cloud : in about 15 minutes you'll have it up and running. then you can use the API to control the bell . you can also use a generic mqtt server , there are tons of examples but you have to write a lot more code yourself. feel free to ask any questions

nickmyersdtOP3y ago

Awesome, thank you, I'll take a look at the things you've mentioned.

nickmyersdtOP3y ago

Knew I'd forget something. One other idea was instead of a physical bell, play the sound of a bell from a speaker (assuming a raspberry pi with a speaker or similar).

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse