Stoplight for SAM

Background

When brainstorming about cool ideas for SAM we thought it would be great to have a physical stoplight mounted in the office. This would do one of two thing: 1. it would bring some attention to the System Administration office which generally doesn't garner a lot of attention (at least it shouldn't if you are doing things correctly ;) and 2. it would bring a sense of importance to the very important topic of security.

High level overview

Not being very good with electrical stuff I can currently only give a very high level overview of how we are accomplishing the actual creation of the stoplight and the interface to SAM. Hopefully, we can have some more detailed schematics of how this was done at a later date. In a nutshell, we took an off-the-shelf desktop size stoplight and created a custom circuit which listens for sounds. Generally, the higher the volume, the higher the light. In other words, in lower volume the stoplight will be green. Increase the volume and it goes yellow and so on and so forth. An interface written in Director is used to play the sounds. The director application is controlled by SAM through a text file which SAM modifies to change the lights. Fairly simple really.

Screenshots

Check out the screenshots.