Self Clearing Desk (an IoT Joke)

This started as a late night idea at London Hackspace that I made the mistake of actually building just before everything closed (it was 2020…)

To create this, I welded some metal plates to the legs of a desk, then used these to attach a couple of linear actuators to lift the surface up. I then programmed an ESP32 module to turn the motors on when it got a message on a specific MQTT topic. I also built a website in Go to send the MQTT messages on command.

This is basically a sort of parody MQTT device, and is more of a piece of art than anything useful. That said, it does exist, can can be seen at London Hackspace. Though it’s usually broken.

I made a website for this project which has some more photos: https://selfclearingdesk.com/