Like a lot of people, I found myself “indefinitely” working from home starting 13 March 2020, and subsequently in nearly constant virtual meetings. Navigating the “new normal” of “knock if my door is closed, and if I don’t answer I’m not available” was a little difficult for my wife and daughter. They would knock. Then knock louder. Then crack the door open and peek in… It was a bit difficult.
I only recently discovered Home Assistant. Having purchased the necessary hardware from Adafruit to run an HA instance, I became intrigued by their other offerings. Inspired by similar tinkerers who have created some way to alert their family members to their unavailability, I purchased the Adafruit “Adabox” containing a 64x32 LED Matrix and MatrixPortal M4 control board and got to tinkering. After some trial and error, I finally got it to do what I wanted - to display a message and a “caution tape” inspired top and bottom border. Well, mostly - at first I wanted it to display “In a Meeting” but that text was too long for the matrix and there doesn’t seem to be any way to scale it down, so I reduced it to “On a Call” (which is basically the same thing). For now, it only displays that one border and message, but the code is written in such a way that the message can vary, and with a little more tinkering the border could as well.
Here’s a video of it in action (click the image):
And you can check out the source code and HA configurations on GitHub
One thing I would like to do in the future is integrate it with a door sensor and possibly connect it to my Microsoft Teams status (the platform my company uses for virtual meetings).