3 ms·

> one is acting as an “on air” indicator to let folks know when a microphone is hot in the room (typically working-from-home zoom meetings). How did you achiev

> one is acting as an “on air” indicator to let folks know when a microphone is hot in the room (typically working-from-home zoom meetings). How did you achieve this? I'd be very interested in setting something like this up for myself... Thanks.

mewse 6y ago
This was a little bit of a cheat. It just so happens that the computer being used for the Zoom calls is a Mac, so I just wrote a program that runs in the background on the Mac and asks the OS about whether any microphone devices are in use by any programs, and then sends a message to the Pi, which really is only turning a hat of LEDs on/off based on UDP packets it receives. It could be turning the indicator on/off for anything that somebody else told it to do it for. (Originally, I was using an Arduino Nano and a USB serial interface for communication, but my flatmate rewrote it to go over UDP to a Pi Zero W, as he wanted to use a particular RPi hat as the indicator lights) Detecting the microphone on/off status on OS X was shamelessly ripped off from the answer to this StackExchange question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37470201/how-can-i-tell-if-the-camera-is-in-use-by-another-process https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37470201/how-can-i-tell-.... I don’t know if there’s a similar approach that would work for Windows or other OSes.
- thedanbob 6y ago
  Eh, I wouldn’t call that a cheat. Most of my home brew IoT devices are controlled by Home Assistant via MQTT which pretty much falls in the same category.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  On Linux it should be possible to see if something is recording through PulseAudio using its command line tools, and ALSA/OSS use could be detected with lsof.
- darkarmani 6y ago
  Awesome! That's exactly what I've wanted for the last 5 years.
- dTal 6y ago
  Isn't a Pi Zero stupendous overkill for something like that? You could build that whole thing for under 10 dollars with an ESP8266.
raman325 6y ago
Not OP but if you are willing to run HomeAssistant, I built a zoom integration [0] that uses web hook events from Zoom to tell HA when you are “busy”. This triggers anytime my calendar shows I’m supposed to be in a meeting, whether I am or not. But the HA Mac app also provides sensors for your mic and video so you could combine the three sources however it made sense to achieve this [0]: https://github.com/raman325/ha-zoom-automation https://github.com/raman325/ha-zoom-automation

mewse 6y ago

This was a little bit of a cheat. It just so happens that the computer being used for the Zoom calls is a Mac, so I just wrote a program that runs in the background on the Mac and asks the OS about whether any microphone devices are in use by any programs, and then sends a message to the Pi, which really is only turning a hat of LEDs on/off based on UDP packets it receives. It could be turning the indicator on/off for anything that somebody else told it to do it for. (Originally, I was using an Arduino Nano and a USB serial interface for communication, but my flatmate rewrote it to go over UDP to a Pi Zero W, as he wanted to use a particular RPi hat as the indicator lights) Detecting the microphone on/off status on OS X was shamelessly ripped off from the answer to this StackExchange question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37470201/how-can-i-tell-if-the-camera-is-in-use-by-another-process https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37470201/how-can-i-tell-.... I don’t know if there’s a similar approach that would work for Windows or other OSes.

thedanbob 6y ago
Eh, I wouldn’t call that a cheat. Most of my home brew IoT devices are controlled by Home Assistant via MQTT which pretty much falls in the same category.
nitrogen 6y ago
On Linux it should be possible to see if something is recording through PulseAudio using its command line tools, and ALSA/OSS use could be detected with lsof.
darkarmani 6y ago
Awesome! That's exactly what I've wanted for the last 5 years.
dTal 6y ago
Isn't a Pi Zero stupendous overkill for something like that? You could build that whole thing for under 10 dollars with an ESP8266.

raman325 6y ago

Not OP but if you are willing to run HomeAssistant, I built a zoom integration [0] that uses web hook events from Zoom to tell HA when you are “busy”. This triggers anytime my calendar shows I’m supposed to be in a meeting, whether I am or not. But the HA Mac app also provides sensors for your mic and video so you could combine the three sources however it made sense to achieve this [0]: https://github.com/raman325/ha-zoom-automation https://github.com/raman325/ha-zoom-automation