Summary
When people say the key to a happy, long-lasting marriage is communication, they generally mean the verbal kind: talking things out with your spouse, sharing your feelings, and all that lot. [Rich] AKA [Thumblegudget] took it another way, and built a engine-room telegraph for intramarital communication. Now, this is less crazy than it sounds. Like the ship’s telegraph, which matched the position of an indicator on the bridge and in the engine room, [Rich]’ telegraph pairs an indicator in his office with one in the living areas of the house. He sets himself to “busy” and the arrow on the matching unit in the basement moves to that position. This naturally goes both ways, which allows his wife to point the needle to remind [Rich] that it may be time for hugs, dinner, or — most essentially for a brit — tea. In operation each unit has a gimbal motor paired to a rotation sensor and an ESP32-S3 driving it. Thanks to that rotation sensor, the gimbal motor is programmed to lock itself into the positions on the wheel when you poke it, and the ESP32 wirelessly synchronizes the two units. A moving arrow might not be enough to get [Rich] to come down to dinner, so just like the ship’s telegraph you may remember from Titanic, [Rich]’s comes equipped with a bell to draw attention to itself. Given [Rich]’s wife participated in the video and isn’t filing for divorce, it seems he may be onto something. Perhaps good communication doesn’t need to involve cumbersome human speech at all; maybe all a marriage needs is a telegraph like this and some paddles to send more complicated messages via Morse code. Silly and cute, and I hope it works well for them. I’ve considered a similar thing when working from home using an industrial indicator light stack. Red being critically busy, yellow being okay to talk but still busy, and green being I am open for a break if I’m needed. In my office, there are three planners that have their bluetooth headset on their head all the time, calling with drivers, and I never know whether they are on a call or not. I thought about adding those stack lights to know whether I could talk to them or not, haven’t come to it. There are usb headsets for Microsoft Teams with busy lights when there is a call in progress, but for reasons unknown to mankind, Microsoft is very secretive about the USB protocols that make that possible (only divulged to OEM partners).