MeetingIndicator
My parents love to run into my room and start talking (mostly for telling me that or when warm food is available so it's for a good cause). Due to the current COVID situation I have a lot of meetings or online lectures. So this situation can get embarassing when I'm not muted. The goal of this project was to indicate whether I'm in a meeting or not.
Research
I suspected that someone already created a solution for that so I found Am I in (a) meeting AIIM. But setting up Apache and running flask on a Pi seemed a bit overkill and I wanted to try my first project with MQTT.
Setup
So I use a ESP8266 as MQTT broker and controller for the LEDs. For this I adapted the uMQTTBroker example and added some basic LED commands with the FastLED library. LEDs are off if your computer is not connected to the ESP8266, green when you're not in a meeting and red when you're in a meeting.
On the meeting computer a python script is running which checks the tasklist every second. Zoom meetings are detected perfectly. Teams is a bit more tricky, see here for an explanation.
Furthermore I added two things to the ESP for convenience. First,
mDNS so
I can ping/connect to the ESP with the name meeting (sometimes it's meeting.local) instead of the IP.
Second the ESP8266 is able to be
updated over the air. As this needs a running
web server you can also see the meeting status on http://meeting/ in your local network.
Updating and developing is much easier as I don't need physical access to the device anymore.
Case
I 3d printed this case and glued the LEDs to it.
Conclusion
I really like my MeetingIndicator and it helps to avoid some embarassing situations. Make your own or contribute to the project