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Show HN: I built a "Do not disturb" Device for my home office
- Terretta 9mo agoThe way most of these devices get status seems check the conferencing apps directly: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Kuando/page/1128C3FD-9BE9-4AA2-8FC2-DB2D87D7805D https://www.amazon.com/stores/Kuando/page/1128C3FD-9BE9-4AA2... There are some nice neon sign options here as well: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=busy+light https://www.amazon.com/s?k=busy+light
- pavel_lishin 9mo agoI have an old, broken crosswalk sign that I keep meaning to set up as a "meeting indicator" - red hand meaning that I'm in a meeting, and the seconds countdown as an indicator of how many minutes are left until I'm out of meetings. But as it turns out, since my spouse & I both work from home, separated by an entire floor of a house, there ain't that much need for it, so it sits on my shelf.
- dripton 9mo agoI needed something like this for my basement home office. But I was lazy, so rather than actually building anything, I just bought some color-changing light bulbs ($7 on Amazon including remote) and installed them on the basement stairs. If I have a do-not-disturb meeting, I make the light red.
- CPLX 9mo agoI had a similar thought, so I bought this: https://onairwarning.com/pages/products https://onairwarning.com/pages/products It completely sucks and doesn't really work. So don't make my mistake.
- Liftyee 9mo agoI don't know why they decided to put the "warning!" text box on the actual thing - it would look much cleaner if it just said "ON AIR" . Inane copyright/trademark reasons?
- nimbius 9mo ago"a lot of times my mother asks me if she can come in the room for reasons I won't get into" You've appeared to engineer your way around an interpersonal relationship that you lack the emotional, social intelligence and maturity to deal with. Welcome to the front page of HN i guess. you're well on the way to becoming a founder.
- mhurron 9mo agoThe only one showing any lack of social intelligence is you. The author is choosing not to go into unnecessary personal details while giving a short back story as to why they did a thing. I've thought of doing basically something similar so my wife knows I'm in a position not to be disturbed. I can, and do, tell her when I have a scheduled call, but unscheduled calls do just happen. Something like this would let her know I can't be disturbed without her coming in, asking and then going 'oh shit, sorry.' In no way is it engineering a way out of dealing with my wife.
- venturecruelty 9mo agoThe nice thing about boundaries is you are not required to explain yourself. "Hey, please don't interrupt me between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM, unless it is an emergency. I need to get work done, and interruptions break my concentration. Thank you for understanding." You also don't need to build complicated devices.
- deathanatos 9mo ago… or there's just a lot of awkwardness for both parties in trying to communicate "are you on camera?" without the person who is potentially on camera revealing that communication to the stream. The person entering has to make sure they're not on camera — if the room's architecture even allows for that — the person answering has to somehow communicate to that person without people looking at their video feed noticing. I've gestured things to my fiancée while on air, and while they were pretty clearly intended for "someone off camera", still managed to confuse the meeting participants. Radio booths and other broadcasts have done this for ages with the "On Air" sign, which basically what TFA has made.
- deleted 9mo ago
- rlue 9mo agoLike all the other commenters here, I also devised my own solution—but AFAICT, it's the only other solution that's automated! Requirements: * macOS * Zoom * Home Assistant * A signal light/sign on a smart switch (like [0]) The Procedure: First, create a script that checks whether you're currently on a Zoom call, and then turns your signal light on or off accordingly. Remember to chmod +x! #!/bin/sh if [ $(lsof -i 4UDP | grep zoom 2>/dev/null | wc -l) -gt 1 ]; then curl \ -H "Authorization: Bearer ${HOME_ASSISTANT_ACCESS_TOKEN}" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{"entity_id": "${ENTITY_ID}"}' \ https://${HOME_ASSISTANT_DOMAIN}/api/services/switch/turn_on else curl \ -H "Authorization: Bearer ${HOME_ASSISTANT_ACCESS_TOKEN}" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{"entity_id": "${ENTITY_ID}"}' \ https://${HOME_ASSISTANT_DOMAIN}/api/services/switch/turn_off fi Then, create a LaunchAgent that monitors your Zoom Application Support directory for filesystem changes at ~/Library/LaunchAgents/local.${USER}.on-air.plist: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"> <plist version="1.0"> <dict> <key>Label</key> <string>local.${USER}.on-air</string> <key>ProgramArguments</key> <array> <string>${PATH_TO_SCRIPT}</string> </array> <key>WatchPaths</key> <array> <string>/Users/${USER}/Library/Application Support/zoom.us/data</string> </array> </dict> </plist> Finally, load 'er up: $ launchctl load ../Library/LaunchAgents/local.${USER}.on-air.plist [0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09NJ8ZCHF https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09NJ8ZCHF
- OhSoHumble 9mo agoI have something similar that I built a long while ago. It's a large Do Not Disturb sign. There is a raspberry pi mini that controls power going to it. There is a corresponding daemon running on a PC that checks Discord call status. In call? Power to sign. Not in call? No power to sign. The client/server daemons are in Golang and communicate over RPC.
- Neywiny 9mo agoWhat does the pi do? Feels like something that could get replaced with an ESP32 if it needs to be remote or just an ftdi chip or some other usb to gpio if not
- kjkjadksj 9mo agoWould love a way to disable the Do Not Disturb button on my macbook without flipping the f keys. Any ideas? Tap it accidentally and you miss all calls and texts for the day on your iphone…
- dhosek 9mo agoThere is (was?) a utility that would flip individual F keys on the Mac, although it’s been years since I used it and who knows if it still works post Apple Silicon transition. TBH, I kind of miss the touch bar. Once they restored the esc key, it was often kind of useful while I tend not to use any of the keys in the F row (even those mapped by IntelliJ since the whole fn+F key thing is a kind of a pain and I seldom have call for the media buttons—actually I just realized I do occcasionally use the mute/unmute feature but that’s about it). Of course my preferences are normative and anyone who does otherwise is clearly abnormal ;-)
- Terretta 9mo agoThe Touch Bar was so useless* it's now selling like hotcakes as an accessory: “Trigger actions, launch apps, and control your entire setup—all from a hyper-customizable deck of vibrant LCD keys.” https://www.elgato.com/us/en/p/stream-deck https://www.elgato.com/us/en/p/stream-deck * Narrator: Not actually useless. Mine is setup for multi-screen chat/video/notes windows placement and app window sharing for video conferencing.
- manarth 9mo ago> "There is (was?) a utility that would flip individual F keys on the Mac" Function Flip: https://kevingessner.com/software/functionflip/ https://kevingessner.com/software/functionflip/
- Terretta 9mo agoWait — what button is this? Oh: [moon|F6] “If you are smugly thinking to yourself, “I knew that!”, Then, my question to you is, why didn’t you tell ME???” — https://www.podfeet.com/blog/2023/09/do-not-disturb-key/ https://www.podfeet.com/blog/2023/09/do-not-disturb-key/ It goes on to answer the next question: “But that got me to wondering how long the F6 has had a dedicated Do Not Disturb function. I did some research and it looks like it was introduced when Apple came out with the first Apple Silicon MacBook Air in 2020. The previous keyboard shortcuts had F4 key dedicated to Launchpad, and if you had a backlit keyboard, F5 and F6 were dedicated to up/down keyboard brightness keys.”
- JoeBOFH 9mo agoWe historically have used Blynclights for this exact thing. Used them in office then we all migrated to working from home a lot of us brought them with and use them. I have a wireless one that sits on a table just outside my office.
- teach 9mo ago> My router assigns dynamic IP addresses, meaning my server location kept changing. I've had a similar problem in the past. It turns out that most routers have a way to assign an IP address statically based on the MAC address of the requesting device without affecting the other DHCP devices on the network. I do this for my pi-hole, my NAS and my gaming PC.
- bartvk 9mo agoWhat's bizarre is that my previous TP-Link routers alawys had this ability, but when I upgraded two years ago, it was gone.
- galleywest200 9mo agoMy current TP-Link router hides this behind the "Advanced" settings toggle.
- bartvk 9mo agoI've got a TP-Link Archer C7, hardware version 5. No such toggle unfortunately, but thanks nevertheless. Perhaps I should try and flash it with OpenWRT.
- hunter2_ 9mo agoThe wording can vary quite a bit: I've seen names like static, fixed, DHCP reservation, etc. -- I tend to like DHCP reservation, because from the client's perspective, "static" means not using DHCP, but this does use DHCP (just not the pool).
- lostlogin 9mo ago> Dynamic IPs I thought that step one of geekdom was assigning a few static IPs. Ruining the home network while ‘optimising’ has happened a few too many times.
- Neywiny 9mo agoAs long as that's on the router's side. I guess I did that on my phone for some reason so when I upgraded and migrated they had the same address. I'm surprised it worked at all. It was just painfully slow.
- lam0x86 9mo agoNice. I built something similar using a Rust-based daemon running on my Mac. It listens to the microphone state (not the camera) via a Core Audio property listener (AudioObjectPropertyListenerProc), rather than log monitoring or polling, so it works even when the camera is turned off. When the mic status changes, the daemon toggles a light by sending a simple message via zigbee2mqtt. I also installed a fire alarm plate above my door, powered by a cheap Zigbee socket, similar to this one: https://ampac.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/4210-0131-Warning-Sign-%E2%80%98Fire-Alarm-%E2%80%93-Do-Not-Enter.png.webp https://ampac.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/4210-0131-Warni...
- apparent 9mo ago> One does not simply get the camera status on a MacBook. What you need is a sensor right near the green dot that detects whether it's turned on or not. Could use a full-blown camera, but probably a simpler sensor would work too. Only half-kidding.
- NitpickLawyer 9mo ago> One does not simply get the camera status on a MacBook. ? OverSight [1] seems to work just fine. It pops up whenever something uses the mic or camera (the usage for this tool is to "monitor" for unwanted access from rogue apps). Since it's open source it should be possible to check how they get the status? - https://github.com/objective-see/OverSight https://github.com/objective-see/OverSight
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- dhosek 9mo agoSkimming the code, I think it also monitors log events.
- shermantanktop 9mo agoThat's what I use. Oversight runs scripts on events, which is great. However! now you have the problem of rapid events with overlapping scripts ending up with inconsistent state. I solved that with a lock file, but still get stuck states sometimes.
- telesilla 9mo agoNext trick - hook up a Recording sign when your DAW is in playback or you are live on the air.
- jcynix 9mo agoA simple, almost analog, solution is some nightlight which can be manually turned on or off, e.g. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FSL3Q7PW https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FSL3Q7PW
- rnoorda 9mo agoI made a simple ON AIR sign with LEDs inside that I change to reflect what I was doing. Red means I am in a meeting or totally focused, blue means I'm working, but someone can interrupt me if needed. Green means I'm not working, come on in! The only issue with my setup- I work from home. My wife does not. No one is there to care if they can come in or not. It was building something fun to solve a problem I never had. Would do again.
- Uptrenda 9mo agowhy does the site keep upvoting trivial projects especially derivative projects of what people seem to reinvent every few months. No offence to OP. I don't really get the site. Like, you have posts where someone runs doom or an OS in a PDF file that get 1000 upvotes which I think is valid. Then we get something like "I made an echo server" which is like someone copypasted code from an asyncio documentation page and put it on Github and that will make it to the front page. Again, just feels like it doesn't belong on the front page. It's not news worthy or interesting in any way.
- asacrowflies 9mo agoMany people at different parts of their technology journey . I like seeing these "redone" projects because it shows new generations of hackers following the path.
- patatino 9mo agoMy solution is simple: noise canceling headphones, which I only have on for meetings. If the wife sees them, she knows
- cuu508 9mo agoHere's my low tech do-not-disturb device ;-) https://i.imgur.com/rnwEGIZ.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/rnwEGIZ.jpeg
- 3eb7988a1663 9mo agoI like to imagine you spent more effort right-sizing the wood vs installing a door knob with a lock.
- cuu508 9mo agoI happened to have a piece of scrap wood of the right length already. Making the hole with a hand drill took maybe 2 minutes. Don't think sourcing and installing a lock mechanism would be quicker :-)
- unangst 9mo ago1. Turn handle down, realizing door is locked. 2. Turn handle up to unlock door. 3. Profit.
- poolnoodle 9mo agoDoor locks exist
- ThrowawayTestr 9mo agoWhere's the fun in that?
- worldsavior 9mo agoSock on the handle fixes everything
- brandon272 9mo agoAnytime I see something like this my mind immediately thinks of the 'Full House' episode where Uncle Jesse keeps getting interrupted in his basement recording studio so he installs a red light at the top of the stairs. Red light = DND.