Project: Door Iris Porthole is the Perfect Fix for Detroit Hackerspace via Evan's Techie-Blog

Here is a cool project for your private or public makerspace/hackerspace. This porthole was originally designed to solve a specific problem, but it would look cool almost anywhere. Motion sensors detect when someone approaches the door and opens the porthole, then close it again when the person has passed.

While the porthole is cool, you can probably think of a hundred other shapes, uses, and designs that would be just as cool -- or even cooler!

Door Iris Porthole is the Perfect Fix for Detroit Hackerspace via Evan's Techie-Blog
At i3Detroit we had a door (as seen it the scrolling, scaling web 2.0 bliss that is i3’s main page [just go to the wiki for important stuff]) that frequently got opened into groups of people standing by the front door. The groups stand there because despite this door always having existed someone decided that a good bottleneck for people is right there, in the way. Other hackerspaces have paperwork filled out elsewhere in their space, places where you can sit down even, but not us. I chose not to solve the problem of people congregating because it didn’t seem interesting. Instead, the problem to be solved was that the door was a bit too opaque. We could, of course, put a window in the door. The issue was that the door worked fine most of the time as its old opaque self, and we really only needed a window then there were people on the other side of the door. An on-demand window. A mechanical iris for the door of course.
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Click through to watch a video of the porthole in operation

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