Nine Raspberry Pis power this entire office
Monterail decided they needed a bigger office, and they wanted that office to be smarter, so they turned to Raspberry Pi to make it happen.
It was a real leap of faith because the team couldn’t find a similar Raspberry Pi project quite this big, so they didn’t have much to go on. Spoiler: their courage paid off.
What does Raspberry Pi power in the office?
The team had a long list of tasks they wanted to transfer over to the control of Raspberry Pi:
- lighting
- signals to show meeting room occupancy
- security access codes for the main doors
- wireless music streaming
- content selection on five TVs
- special colour-changing LED lamps in the kitchen
Kitchen lighting… 
…so colourful… 
…so Raspberry Pi-powered
They wanted to be able to control everything via a web app that would work on desktop and mobile phone, as well as via panels mounted on the walls.
Where are the Raspberry Pis?
One lead Raspberry Pi controls all the low-level hardware (door access, lighting, etc) from the custom-made distribution board pictured below. This computer also runs the web server with a web app that allows people to control all of the features.
Five more units are connected to the five individual TVs. Two Raspberry Pis are connected to a broadcasting amplifier which runs several speakers dotted all over the office space. And a special separate unit lives in the bathroom, controlling speakers that play ambient radio for users to enjoy their bathroom time to.
How does everything work?
Kamil Górski’s blog about the fit-out goes into lots of nerdy technical details, if you’d like to know about the lighting circuits and whatnot. Here’s an abridged look at how a few office features work.
TV content
Each TV has its own Raspberry Pi running Chrome in kiosk mode, and the lead Raspberry Pi controls each of them. The TVs can all display different things or, using HDMI switches and splitters, they can all display whatever is showing on the projector during keynote presentations.
Audio
All of the office speakers are divided into sections and connected to a broadcasting amplifier, which has two Raspberry Pis running DLNA and AirPlay servers connected to it. The aforementioned bathroom Raspberry Pi has its music choices managed by a Slack channel, an excellent idea with which nothing could possibly go wrong.
Meeting room occupancy
Android tablets mounted to the wall outside meeting rooms run the web app controlled by the lead Raspberry Pi. They display the meeting room occupancy calendar so everyone can see the availability of that room at a glance.
One year on and everything still seems to be running well on Raspberry Pi. Excellent innovation, Monterail! We’re getting a few ideas for Pi Towers.
31 comments
Paul
Pi’s are for development use only! Not for end product use like this. STOP IT!! 🤣
Joseph chrzempiec
Aww does this mean I have to stop all my end product use as well? :(
Technical John
IKR?! The don’t have nearly enough “Enterprise Grade” equipment! At least 1 Windows box should be forced in… I mean, how will the technical team earn their keep with this setup?! Madness! 🤣🤣
Mike h.
Windows is to much memory Hog.to much resource time ……
Rango
Why Paul, I don’t agree with you – rpi is a very much finished product and not just a development kit.
The only other option for them would be to go for making a custom carrier board for cm3 or cm4 – but I don’t see a good enough reason for something like that.
What’s more, working with the CM3 is sometimes unnecessarily complicated and longer than with the Raspberry pi, especially with custom board’s.
Adam
Right. Have a problem. Change sd with new one with image on it. Still have issues. Swap the pi out. Dead simple. Sure could be smaller. Why?
Kate P.
I think he’s being sarcastic, hence the 🤣.
Kevin Parlee
Any why is that? What would the cost of their downtime be for this “critical” infrastructure. Do they not have a physical bypass key available for the lock? You’re comment is useless
Tim
You should recommend something instead of just recommending against the Pi. Also explaining the reasoning would be helpful too.
Nick
At my workplace, we have some machines that use Extol NanoStake for plastic staking solutions. Believe it or not, the prepackaged industrial solution runs on Raspberry Pi boards.
António Sousa
Only for development???
With 30 or 31 million sold and a lot of professional solutions in the market.
Even industrial ones…
Raspberry Pi Staff Liz Upton
Well over 40m sold, actually – and more than half of those have gone into industrial applications.
AL
Indeed: we have a growing collection of Pi 4s, all going into industrial applications across our grid-balancing power sites. So far, they’ve proved to be a very reliable component of our ever more complex network infrastructure, although the real-time controllers do still run on bespoke ruggedised hardware.
Grazza
remember that the computers that got the U.S. to the moon had a fraction of the power of a Raspberry Pi and perhaps this will make it seem more reasonable to you.
McGee William
Not true at all. Companies use them to send reports to main offices to Hollywood production and film to security and home automation.
Kerem
Paul wake up it is already the 4th gen of Pis and there are lots of raspberry pi powered commercial and enterprise products around.
Robert Oliver
Once again people don’t get your jokey comment and go into technical defence mode.
Peter
i have 120 Rasp Pi 3B installed all around my country for video playback since 9 years working 16h/d and i had absolutly zero problem with them! So yes, you can use Pi for end product!
Petter Nordgren
Ehhh, I think the smiley face after Paul’s comment MAY have been an indication that his post was meant as tongue-in-cheek?
So please, don’t pounce on him for introducing a touch of levity.
Robert Oliver
Indeed
Ian
Some of the replies seem to have understood the OP’s (British?) humour! Like Petter said, the laughing emoticon was a pretty good indication! 🙄😉
Dave Lowe
Incredible. I have an RP4 running Docker that handles all my home media needs. I have an RP4 gathering dust right now, I’ll find a use for it. And finally, a Banana Pi Pro that is running on my network but currently not doing anything. I need to find a purpose for that little guy, too.
Bob nmeet
I have Home Assistant running on an rp3 with sad. I also have an unused rp4. Where do you find solutions software pkgs for the rpi?
Mikeyh
This is awesome, what software are you using for the meeting room?
Jeffrey Tackett
I would like to see this turned into a PCBs with 2, 3 or 4 sockets for CM4 (with GPIO headers for each) and that would be a drop in solution for many applications like this and should make the bandwidth available between them fast while costing less.
Karl
Looking forward to the day when a Pi news article about Raspberry Pis powering an entire office is one in which the employees are using them to run (and print from) LibreOffice apps, email with Claws, and/or (and this is the toughest one) browse the internet on them.
Andrew Jones
Why do people have Raspberry Pi’s sitting doing nothing? If you can’t find a use for one, just such ntp on it and make it the network time server, there’s always something an unused Pi could be doing 😉
Sam
9 raspberry for this kind of job? So called embedded world is insane nowadays. Previously some low end microcontroller would have done the most of these tasks. Only thing were Raspberry is useful is the content selection and music streaming and even there one Pi might be sufficient.
Karl K
I have run a TVHat with headend on a Pi3 for a couple of years now.
It has sat in my loft for two years without any intervention streaming live TV. Absolutely reliable :-)
James H.
the problem is not having a rpi sit around doing nothing, that its an extra one just in case I come across a neat project like this I don’t have to rip apart a different project or buy a new pi. In fact I’m gonna try this at work next.
John
Incredible. I have an RP4 running Docker that handles all my home media needs.
the problem is not having a rpi sit around doing nothing, that its an extra one just in case I come across a neat project like this I don’t have to rip apart a different project or buy a new pi.
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