I work from home and I’m looking for a presence indicator light that I can integrate with home assistant somehow. I’ve already got the meeting status logic worked out in home assistant
What I’d like to achieve is something like this:
Red light - In a video conference
Yellow light - Phone call
Green - Work laptop online but not otherwise in a call or video conference
I was looking at the Blink(1) dongle and the python library offered but as I’d like several of these dotted around my house I’m not entirely sure how best to achieve that.
I’m relatively happy rolling my own hardware if there are instructions to follow.
I would just use an input_select and have the three options available. Then, have a RGB light (ESPHome or WLED would be fantastic for this) react when you change the state of that select. That’s the easiest way that I can think of.
Programatically, if you’re on Windows, you can try something like IoTLink (https://iotlink.gitlab.io/) and perhaps write a custom addon for that. If you’re comfortable in Python, you could probably do the same thing and use something like psutil to monitor for certain processes (video conference software running, Skype, etc), and then publish to MQTT topics to have HA change the state of the LED(s).
For phone calls… How are you making and receiving them? VoIP (via PC)? Android? iPhone?
Already got meeting detection and display set up in home assistant. As you say, IoTlink for connection to laptop, and Tasker detects if the phone call for meeting audio is from WebE on my phonex or from a company number/contact.
Just looking for the light component, and if I have to make it, how. Secondary school electronics was a while ago and I have forgotten all of it
Ohhhh, the actual hardware part of it? I’d recommend RGB smart bulbs… But, for something smaller, you could do something with an ESP8266 board (something small like a ESP-12 maybe?) and ESPHome. It would require some soldering and probably 3D printing a case, but it could be done and then replicated. For soldering, you’re looking at basicly going with the power pi going to 3v out, ground to ground and data to pin D4 on the board.
The nice part about this is that you can build as many as you want and place them pretty much anywhere and using ESPHome, communicate with them via WiFi from HA.
To follow this up and close the question of hardware used in case it’s useful to others, I ended up going with an ESP8266 (specifically a Wemos D1 Mini) and wiring a WS2812B LED strip directly to it as detailed in this guide:
Note the guide uses a NodeMCU - you can use this too but it’s bigger than the D1 Mini and there are some differences in how to connect the wires. The NodeMCU flasher can be used on a Wemos D1 Mini without issue.
The wiring portion was something missing from most guides, and it was nice to see someone explicitly call it out.
Wire - Summary - D1 Mini pin
Red - 5V power - 5V
Black - Ground - GND
Green - Digital signal - D4
Inspect your LED strip to confirm which wires do what as the colours may be different. The PCB of the strip should have them labelled:
On the Wemos D1 Mini these pins are all next to each other on the right hand side.
Flash the WLED software as detailed in the guide and add the WLED integration in Home Assistant. After that it’s just a case of working out the automations that suit your use case!
Overall it was quite painless, a lot of my uncertainty came with “do I need a controller” and “do I need external power”. The D1 Mini can power about 100 LED’s itself off of the 5V pin according to WLED, and the D1 Mini’s software acts as the controller in this case.
Total time for setup was about 30 minutes and much, much cheaper than a Hue strip.
