It’s always great to see people who haven’t had the opportunity to work with hardware like the Raspberry Pi before come up with a great project and have fun putting it together.  [Katja]’s company has a two-day hackfest where employees can work on some cool non-work-related projects. [Katja]’s team decided to use a Raspberry Pi and some buttons and LEDs to create a ‘happiness tracker‘ for the company.

The resulting project is mounted near the entrance to the office and when they come in or leave, an employee can push one of four buttons to indicate their mood at the time, ‘bad,’ ‘not so good,’ ‘good’ or ‘super.’ The result is tracked and an overall impression of the office’s happiness is the result.

The project consists of the aforementioned Raspberry Pi, four push buttons, five LEDs that animate when a button is pressed and another LED that shows the system is currently up and working. When a user presses a button, the five LEDs animate in the shape of a check mark to show that the button press was successful. A Python script running at startup on the Pi takes care of detecting button pressing, lighting LEDs and sending a message to the server which monitors the level of happiness.

It’s a simple project, but that’s exactly what you need when you start with hardware you haven’t worked with before. It seems like [Katja]’s team had fun building the project and they hope that this can help gauge the overall wellbeing of the office. [Katja]’s blog post has an embedded video of the project in action. In the meantime, check out this bit of facial recognition software that determines how happy you are based on your smile, or this project that lets you know how happy your plant is.