Meeting Room Display

This is a side project we built at Aerolab to show which meeting rooms are currently available (and for how long), as well as giving you the ability to anonymously book them for 30' with a single tap. This is all based on Google Calendar in a typical Google Apps for Business package.

The motivation behind this is that most meeting room software is needlessly complicated (and expensive!), so we built exactly what we needed as a Web App, which is then deployed to a bunch of cheap Fire HD 8 tablets using a headless web browser. It's simple, it works well to let people know that they shouldn't use a specific meeting room, and it looks kind of cool.

Setup & Config

This is a standard Node.js project, so you just need to run npm ci to install the dependencies and npm run dev to start development mode with live reload. Run npm run build and then npm start to run the app in production mode.

This is the most complicated step, as you are going to need to add two JSON files to make things work: A Google Credentials File, and a list of Meeting Rooms (also known as Resources in Google Calendar).

Google Credentials

Go to the Google Developer Console and create a new Project. After that's done, you need to do a few more things:

• From the Library menu, you need to Enable the Google Calendar API (use the search if it's not in the popular list)
• From the Credentials menu, Create a Service Account, and select JSON as the key type. Save this file as you'll need it in a while.
• Take note of the Service Account ID as well (it looks like accountname@(...).iam.gserviceaccount.com)
• Rename the JSON key file to rooms-client.json and place it in the root of the project.

Configure the supported Meeting Rooms

Go to Google Calendar and click edit on each meeting room calendar. For each one of them do the following:

• On the Calendar Details tab, Take note of the Calendar ID (it looks like [email protected]).
• Under the Share this Calendar, Share it with the Service Account ID (add accountname@(...).iam.gserviceaccount.com to the calendar and give it full access)

After you've done that, you need to Create a rooms.json file in the root of the project detailing all the enabled rooms, their names and Calendar IDs, using a slug as the key. It should look like this:

{
    "lounge": {"name": "Lounge", "slug": "lounge", "position": "right", "id": "[email protected]"},
    "super-room": {"name": "Super Room", "slug": "super-room", "position": "left", "id": "[email protected]"},
}

The position just shows where the room is located relative to the display. The only options are left or right.

Using the app

Open a browser on http://localhost:3000/room-slug (not literally, replace room-slug with the proper room key, like lounge or super-room). You should be able to see the current status of the room and book it.

Deploying

We provide a Dockerfile, which you can easily use on Now, or any other service you prefer. We are not using any sort of authentication or env variables as this is a quick internal project, but you're free to add some sort of auth if you want.

License

MIT, of course.