Intro
While we all have our telephones, our PDAs, our laptops etc to jot down meetings, thoughts and scribbles, a decidedly low-tech device like a whiteboard has its place too. It's easy to use, it doesn't use power, you can easily take a look at it without first turning it on and wrestling through an UI, and it's intrinsically multi-user when hung in a room accessible to multiple people. There's a disadvantage common to such low-tech things as a whiteboard: it has no Ethernet-plug or anything so it isn't reachable online. That's a bit of a shame: especially when multiple people use the whiteboard, it can be useful to be able to go to a webbrowser and take a look at the whiteboard, and if needed, to leave a message for others to read.
How can we do that? Well, using the Internet to take a look at the whiteboard isn't that difficult: just take a webcam and point it at the board. Writing it will be a bit more difficult: there's something like a plotter needed for that. I'd like the solution to be lightweight: while a completely Borgified whiteboard has its charm too, I'd like to alter mine as little as possible. That's why I decided to use an idea I saw first at the 24C3: a way of hanging a pen using 2 rubber belts and two motors called a bipod. Problem was that I had no info of that device (I found the youtube-link while writing this article) so I had to work from memory.
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