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Just a week or two into the quarantine it happened. On an important Microsoft Teams® meeting, presenting to a relatively large group of people, my daughter started playing her trumpet in the next room. I couldn’t blame her. As a fourth grader she is doing what she is supposed to; home learning and taking her classes, as usual, except via the Google Meet™ service.  She was not used to me working from home yet.
We probably all have similar stories, and some many times worse, especially when the video camera is on. I remember one in particular that even made the BBC news when the anchor’s children wandered into the frame and started playing, while he was on air.


All good here, nothing a quick acting wife couldn’t solve by moving my daughter to a room further away and tapping the mic mute button.  

Instead of solving the issue in the normal way, i.e. by setting up some rules around when and where trumpet is to be played, as a product manager, I wanted to solve it with technology!  

Over on the enterprise side, Crestron offers room status indicators that mount from the ceiling or on the wall outside of meeting rooms:



Obviously, no one wants their home to look like a corporate office. But I knew there was an angle here.  Something we could borrow from the corporate world but modified for the home.

Here is the actual hallway leading to my home office/guest room:


My goal was to create a solution that would be completely invisible after work hours. So, I was going for subtle, ideally invisible. In other words, not something like this:



After staring at the door for what seemed like a half hour trying to figure out where to put a status sign, I had that “aha!” moment that product managers absolutely live for: there is no status sign! Hide the LED strip above the door molding, so from eye level you can’t see anything. But when in “do not disturb” mode, the entire area above the door frame glows red for occupied.



Note: After taking this photo, I did tweak the light level down a little so that the point of light emitted from each LED was no longer visible. About 80% made for a nice even fade, yet still made it easily visible from far away. In the Crestron Home™ software setup app, it’s easy to tweak the color and brightness and then save the scene.
 
When my status changes to “Available,” the light turns green. In my house, Available means I’m still working but between meetings. If my little girls need help with their math homework, it means come on in, I would love to help.



When off, the light completely disappears, and it goes back to a normal looking hallway:



There’s no such thing as new ideas. Everything is a mashup of what’s come before. For example, Crestron integrators install LED strip lights all the time in coves and other architectural elements. For example, the cove lights in the ceiling of our Crestron Experience Center theater:



Like any great superhero, there’s always a great origin story. I’m not saying I’m a superhero at all, except my wife does call me “Captain Obvious.” So, I do have that superpower.

The origin story picks up right after the trumpet story above. I did not go directly to the “hidden above door molding” design. Just like we do in Crestron Home Engineering department, where we use agile methodologies to get updates out quickly, the first agile “sprint” was to quickly solve the problem, and then iterate and refine to make it better over time. 

So, the next morning, I grabbed the necessary pieces and in less than an hour had it wired AND fully configured through Crestron Home.

It wasn’t pretty, but it turned red/green, depending on my status. Since my kids were on lockdown, they also had a temporary activity table set up in the room outside of my office. Since Crestron has a nice little wireless LED controller, I was able to plug in a temporary power supply and have it running quickly.  I then was able to hide it inside of Hogwarts. That’s right, a Lego® version of Harry Potter’s school. The kids were passing the time by building Legos after their schoolwork was done. (It makes an engineer, product manager, and father proud seeing them build things.) So here was the result of sprint #1:







It was literally the LED controller and some RGB LEDs sitting on the table behind the Legos as the rough prototype. But it worked, and everyone knew when I was busy working or available.



 


 

The user experience

The room I use for my home office also doubles as a guest bedroom. So, in that room there is already audio, video, lighting, and shading control, all from either a touch screen (TSW-760) by the door or a handheld remote (TSR-310). Plus, Crestron Home is running on everyone’s phone and tablet. There’s also a Crestron dimmer by the door with customizable buttons to easily set the mode after closing the door, or quickly turning this off when leaving the room.

From either the touch screen or iPad® tablet it appears as shown below. (On the phone it is a similar and responsive design, so it flows into portrait / landscape there.)



And on the iPhone® or Android™ operating system device:



When you tap Busy, a Crestron Home Quick Action does all the work:



Now, it was looking professional on the touch screens and working well operationally, but way too low budget looking with it in the Harry Potter Castle. 
 
Go to Online Help article here for equipment list and installation details.
 

Enhancements for the future

As with product management of any product at Crestron, when we ship it’s a great milestone. However, with platforms such as Crestron Home, even after it ships it must continue to evolve over time.
Some things I may do to improve the design:

1.  Put a smaller LED strip on the inside of the door, so I can confirm which mode it’s in with just a glance.
2.  Research the Microsoft Teams API, so I can use the built-in “Busy” state. So, for scheduled meetings, the indicator will automatically turn red without a Quick Action button press.
 

Final thoughts

Technology should be unobtrusive and solve real world problems.
This is just one example of why I love product management. Crestron Home was not just designed to be a comprehensive home automation platform to turn on the TV, control lights, and so on, but also to provide fundamental building blocks to enable people to create their own experiences, too.