DIY Remote Presence?

7 points by basicallydan ↗ HN
Hey there

I'm currently working in a distributed team. 1-3 (out of 4) of us are in the office at any one team, and 1-3 of us are working remotely, on any given day.

I'd like to put a camera at the end of the desk in the office so that anybody working remotely can get a quick view of who is in and at their desks, and just generally know that there's some life on the other side of Slack.

What I'm looking for is some examples of ways other teams have done this, ideally fairly cheaply and DIY. Did you use an iPad? Netbook? Mac mini? Raspberry Pi?

Thanks!

6 comments

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http://danielodio.com/project-stargate-always-on-skype-video... is the first popular article I can recall about this.

http://danielodio.com/remote-always-on-connecting-our-office... is a followup that mentions that the always-on connections would have problems.

Perch is a startup that's mentioned a lot in the comments, and I trialled it and it was pretty nice, but it just shut down last month: https://perch.co/blog/goodbye-perch/

If you have a couple of Macs to spare, https://papercutsoftware.github.io/teleportme/ looks interesting, but I haven't tried it myself.

Skype?
Skype could do for the software, but I'm currently more interested in the hardware element. Thanks for the suggestion though :)
I've made one for less than 100$. Vist my blog for details.
I havr made one for less than 100$. Please check my blog for details.