Google has offices distributed around the world, and links these offices with meeting rooms containing video conferencing hardware. This makes scheduling meetings which include more than one office easy. For many years the schedule for each meeting room has been displayed on a sheet of paper near the door to the meeting room. This is an inefficient use of resources, as someone needs to walk around replacing those sheets of paper daily. A group of system admins in Seattle, Washington therefore set out to produce an automated replacement for those sheets of paper.

The outcome is a low power inexpensive display called "Radish". These displays download schedule information over an 802.15.4 wireless connection from a nearby computer, and require no physical connection to either the Google network, or the power grid. They are powered by solar panels which charge the device from the light already available in the office space. The power budget is further improved by using a low power display which draws no power until the contents of the display are changed.

This talk will discuss the hardware design, as well as the software written to send updates to the radishes. Both the hardware design and software will be open sourced by the time of the conference.

Matthew Wilson
Matthew is a systems administrator on the sysops team at Google. He is also a member of the team that developed the Radish low-power electronic sign. Prior to joining Google, Matthew was a systems administrator for several companies, including Real Networks, Silicon Mechanics, Danga Interactive (livejournal.com) and Six Apart. He has a bachelor's degree in technical management from the University of Washington.