Automated Home Library

The Idea

Tonight Jenn and I were talking about what we should do with the spare bedroom. We just moved our two-year-old out of the crib and into a twin, sharing a room with her older sister. We could buy another bed and turn it back into a guest bedroom. We could turn it into extra storage space, or expand our office and scrap-booking space. I've always liked the idea of a library or reading room where the kids could sit and read. But it's only the idea that's nice. In practice the kids pull all the books off the shelves and onto the floor. So talked about different ways to store the books or limit access to keep things somewhat controlled so we can avoid the hassle of getting them to clean-up everyday. I mean, if there's something we DON'T need it's another room to clean.

I'm a process engineer with training in lean manufacturing. I spend a great deal of time at work cleaning up messes, self-induced or otherwise. To avoid future methods we use a method called poka-yoke, which is Japanese for mistake-proofing (literally yokeru=avoid poka="inadvertent error").

So we thought, maybe we keep the books in boxes, but label the boxes so we can easily find the books. Then we can control access and avoid the mess. But the problem becomes awareness. We forget which books we have, and if the kids can't see them, then the kids won't ask to read them. We could catalog the books and have a list. Even better if there were pictures too. Maybe in a computer so it could be easily searched or sorted. Yeah, now we're literally building a library.

So I thought, how cool would it literally build a library. I don't want to staff it...maybe I could have a robot do all the work. Let's take the room and turn it into a Redbox-style machine with a computer interface. The books would all be stored in custom shelving - horizontal slots with barcodes. The kids could pick a book from the catalog and the robot would go get the book and send it through a slot in the door. The robot would run on a track and get instructions from the computer on where to get and store each book. Then I could limit access to two books per child. They gotta return a book before they can get any more. Redbox style...just put it in the slot and the computer / robot puts it away.

Progress

I really like this idea, but I don't want to totally dedicate that room. It would be a cool "look what I can do" project, but I don't know that I'll ever pull the trigger. Sometimes it's just fun to know that I could actually do that.