I have a Neewer ring light that I use to light my face properly when I’m on work video calls, but the physical switch is annoying to flip on and off whenever I start a call, and it’s kind of blinding to have it on all the time.
Let’s solve this with Home Assistant! Note: These instructions will only work if your video call machine is running OSX. If someone wants to remix this solution for Windows please do!
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Plug studio light into a smart switch
I use a pretty basic Innr switch which connects to HA over Zigbee and offers only on/off, no power measurement or anything like that. But that’s OK. -
Add switch to HA
I use zigbee2mqtt to do this. I actually recently moved from ZHA and find Z2MQTT running on separate dedicated hardware (an old RPi 1B) to be really great. -
Set up mosquitto and MQTT on HA
Add the Mosquitto app in Supervisor, and enable the MQTT integration in HA config. Obviously I’ve already done this because I’m using zigbee2mqtt, but if you’re using some other way to talk to your switch, you might need to add MQTT to your mix. When setting up mosquitto, it’s a good idea to make a dedicated user account for pushing camera events. I called mineon-air-monitor. -
Make a shell script to detect your camera events
OK, so this is the key bit. Paste this into a file calledon-air-monitor.shin your computer’s home directory. Change the IP address, username and password in the mosquitto_pub commands to match the IP address of your HA server and the username and password you set up in the previous step. This script depends onmosquitto_pubwhich can be installed using Homebrew withbrew install mosquitto.#!/bin/sh args=("$@") # capture them here so we can use them if --sync's not passed async=true source ./config.sh while [ $# -gt 0 ] do case "$1" in --sync) async=false ;; # other options esac shift done for pid in $(pgrep -f on-air-monitor.sh); do if [ $pid != $$ ]; then echo "[$(date)] : on-air-monitor.sh : Process is already running with PID $pid" exit 1 else echo "Running with PID $pid" fi done # if --sync isn't passed, rerun the script as a background task if [ "$async" = true ]; then echo "Starting on air monitor in the background" nohup "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" --sync "${args[@]}" 0<&- &> /dev/null & exit 1 fi echo "Monitoring camera events for $mqtt_topic" log stream | grep --line-buffered "Post event kCameraStream" | while read -r line; do if [[ $line == *"StreamStart"* ]]; then echo "Video start" SECONDS=0 mosquitto_pub -h 192.168.X.X -u on-air-monitor -P your_password -t on-air-monitor/state -m 'on' else echo "Video off after $SECONDS sec" mosquitto_pub -h 192.168.X.X -u on-air-monitor -P your_password -t on-air-monitor/state -m 'off' fi done -
Launch the script
$ chmod +x on-air-monitor.sh $ ./on-air-monitor.sh -
Set up an automation to turn your switch on and off
When the MQTT server publishes a change to theon-air-monitor/statetopic. I use Node-RED to do this:
Works great and the response time is easily fast enough that by the time my colleague sees my video in their VC client, my light is on. One other thing to note is that my light can be turned on and off just by giving it power. Many fill lights don’t remember their state when power is removed and require a physical button press to turn them on after power is restored. Don’t buy one of those 
