The Story

For a few months last year, I lived around the block from work. I would sometimes stop in on the weekends and pick up stuff I forgot at my desk. One day the power went out at my apartment and I figure I would check in at work and see if there were any problems. I messaged our Lab Safety Manager on slack to say "hey the power went out, and I am at the office. Is there anything you'd like me to check?". He said he hadn't even gotten the alarm email/pages yet, so if I would check out in the lab and send him a picture of the CO2 tanks to make sure that nothing with the power outage compromised those. Once I had procured access to the BL2 lab on my building badge, I made my way out back and took a lovely picture of the tanks, everything was fine.

The following week, in my one on one meeting with my manager, I mentioned what happened and she and I discussed the event. It clearly isn't sustainable sending someone in any time there was a power outage if we didn't need to, but the lab equipment doesn't have any monitoring ports.

Operation Lab Cam was born. I decided to put together a prototype of a Raspberry Pi 3 with a camera module and play around with getting a way to monitor the display on the tanks. After a few months of not touching the project, I dug into it in a downtime day again. The result is now we have an automated camera box that will take a picture once a minute and display it on an auto refreshing web page. There are many professional products out there that do exactly this, but I wanted something that has the ability to be upgraded in the future.