As I’m sure many people appreciate, working from home can cause problems with interruptions from other members of the household, not just children. I’m often getting shouted upon because I am not speaking, but am in a meeting where someone else is.
So I decided to put HA to use and have a light controlled outside my office door so people knew when I was in a meeting.
I had a spare Tapo L430C bulb liying around and and set about figuring our how to achieve what I wanted. I initially was thinking different colours for different “states” in a meeting (i.e. webcam on, screensharing etc.) but have just gone for a simple on-off scenario for now with the light red.
Being a macOS user I found Teams Connex for Home Assistant with a nice guide on how to set it up, so it wasn’t long before I was up and running. A lamp borrowed from a bedroom sat on the floor ourside my office door and worked perfectly. On occasion I heard people call my name and then utter “oh, he’s in a meeting”. The number of interruptions went down drastically.
My only issue was the lamp sitting on the floor wasn’t ideal. I looked into lamps I could wall mount, but they were all a bit too fancy for the purpose being served or just wouldn’t work.
Anyway, I stumbled upon someone using a light strip around the inside of the door frame and thought that would be perfect. So I bought a Tapo L900. Now my problem (apologies for the long intro!).
I decided to have both lights working at the same time, with the L900 still curled up on my desk whilst I make sure it is working. Its not.
Adding to the Tapo app and then into HA was easy, but I am unable to get the L900 to work as successfully as the L430C. Here is my original automation:
alias: Teams Meeting - Hall Light
description: >-
Turn on the Teams Status Light and set it to a colour when I join a meeting.
Turn off when I leave the meeting.
triggers:
- trigger: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.teams_meeting
to: "on"
- trigger: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.teams_meeting
to: "off"
conditions:
- condition: time
after: "08:00:00"
before: "21:00:00"
actions:
- choose:
- conditions:
- condition: template
value_template: "{{ trigger.to_state.state == 'on' }}"
sequence:
- action: light.turn_on
target:
entity_id: light.teams_status_light
data:
color_name: red
brightness_pct: 100
default:
- action: light.turn_off
target:
entity_id: light.teams_status_light
mode: single
The binary_sensor’s are created with the Teams Connex app I used above to determine when I am in a meeting. There are others for webcam, screensharing etc., but I don’t currently use those.
This works perfectly. I’ve never had an issue where the light doesn’t turn on (unless it is during an HA restart etc.).
So I dupicated it and changed the entities in use, but it didn’t work. I’ve been trying various things to make it work, such as using RGB colours rather than colour names, HS and even turning the light on with whatever settings the light had when turned off, delaying a second or 2 and then setting the colour to red. Initially some of them seem to work, but then the next day they don’t. In fact I was just in my first meeting of the day and when I joined the meeting the hall light came on, the strip light did not. I shared my screen no change. When my colleague took my screenshare to share their screen instead, the light strip came on. The light will now function mostly for the day, but not always and may not work tomorrow.
Here is what I currently have, any glaring issues that might cause this?:
alias: Teams Meeting - Office Indicator light
description: >-
Turn on the Teams Status Light and set it to a colour when I join a meeting.
Turn off when I leave the meeting.
triggers:
- trigger: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.teams_meeting
to: "on"
- trigger: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.teams_meeting
to: "off"
conditions:
- condition: time
after: "08:00:00"
before: "21:00:00"
actions:
- choose:
- conditions:
- condition: template
value_template: "{{ trigger.to_state.state == 'on' }}"
sequence:
- action: light.turn_on
target:
entity_id: light.office_indicator
data:
rgb_color:
- 255
- 0
- 0
brightness_pct: 100
- action: light.turn_on
target:
entity_id: light.office_indicator
data:
rgb_color:
- 255
- 0
- 0
brightness_pct: 100
default:
- action: light.turn_off
target:
entity_id: light.office_indicator
mode: restart
