Zoom On Air Sign
Posted: Mon May 25, 2020 1:15 pm
So like many people I have been confined to my house doing remote working. My daily meetings have now all moved exclusively to Zoom. As my wife and daughter are also in the house they often come to my home office and interrupt those calls as they don't have any good ways of knowing if I am in a Zoom call or not. My computer is on a corner desk and the door is behind me so I don't see when they come in and they can't see my face to ask for a visual clue either. Looking at my screens is not a reliable indictor either as a lot of the times I am presenting something or I am watching a presentation so Zoom might not be in the foreground.
I thought I can automate something around this. Having researched whether I could programatically check if I am in a Zoom call I found that this was possible via a custom Zoom Marketplace App hooking into the Zoom API but my employer would never allow me to run such App in my Zoom account. I looked on the web and found a very reliable way of checking if Zoom is on a call using lsof and checking for UDP traffic on the Zoom process. Here is the bash script I wrote:
I then bought a LED Neon On Air light on eBay:
And I used a Fibaro Relay Switch to control it. I run the Bash script every 2 seconds with an Indigo Schedule triggering an Action Group (probably a bit too frequent but doesn't seem to impact CPU), update a variable with the script output which then triggers the change on the LED sign. Now my wife and daughter can clearly see when I am in Zoom call
I thought I can automate something around this. Having researched whether I could programatically check if I am in a Zoom call I found that this was possible via a custom Zoom Marketplace App hooking into the Zoom API but my employer would never allow me to run such App in my Zoom account. I looked on the web and found a very reliable way of checking if Zoom is on a call using lsof and checking for UDP traffic on the Zoom process. Here is the bash script I wrote:
- Code: Select all
#!/bin/bash
current_state=`/usr/sbin/lsof -i 4UDP | grep zoom.us | wc -l`
if [[ "$current_state" -eq "0" ]]; then
printf "false"
else
printf "true"
fi
I then bought a LED Neon On Air light on eBay:
And I used a Fibaro Relay Switch to control it. I run the Bash script every 2 seconds with an Indigo Schedule triggering an Action Group (probably a bit too frequent but doesn't seem to impact CPU), update a variable with the script output which then triggers the change on the LED sign. Now my wife and daughter can clearly see when I am in Zoom call