Preview
Recorded in real time!
Note
This is not a turn-key solution, but it should get the grey matter thinking about your own meeting presence solution!
What?
With the whole WFH climate, I simply wanted to detect when I was in a Zoom meeting so I could push a notification and an LED change
Why?
To let family know I wasn’t available to speak or so they can reduce noise.
Also, to wear pants when entering the office …
Setup
Computer/OS: MacBook Pro/Catalina
Languages: Python, Bash
Applications: Zoom, BitBar, MQTT
How?
I did a random probe on ps in the terminal and discovered that the zoom process creates a child which declares the meeting ID (silly idea) only when you are in a meeting, so running filter for:
ps x | grep -E "\-key [0-9]{10,10}"
returns:
your.user 53663 0.0 0.1 4454492 12204 ?? S 12:20pm 0:00.08 /Applications/zoom.us.app/Contents/Frameworks/cpthost.app/Contents/MacOS/CptHost -pid xxx -evtname CptHostxxx-key 0000000000
When there is no meeting, you simply get (on ps x):
your.user 67658 0.0 0.1 4465672 14048 ?? S 11:01am 0:00.26 /Applications/zoom.us.app/Contents/Frameworks/caphost.app/Contents/MacOS/caphost -pid xxx -evtname caphostxxx -key rpc
Python Script
With this info, I wrote a quick Python application to monitor for this case and publish out to MQTT:
import subprocess
import paho.mqtt.client as mqtt
#import time
mqttBroker ="xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx"
client = mqtt.Client("Zoom_Meetings")
client.connect(mqttBroker)
# Keep 'while True' and 'time.sleep()' if this script needs to loop
#while True:
p1 = subprocess.Popen(['ps', 'x'], stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
p2 = subprocess.Popen(["grep", "-E", "\-key [0-9]{10,10}"], stdin=p1.stdout, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
p1.stdout.close()
output = p2.communicate()[0]
if output:
code = output.split()[-1].decode()
print("Meeting ID:", str(code))
client.publish("home/person/xxx/meeting_status", "ON")
else:
print("Avail.")
client.publish("home/person/xxx/meeting_status", "OFF")
# time.sleep(5)
BitBar Integration
In my case, I have BitBar which allows me to put anything I can script into my status bar, so I leveraged that to poll every 5 seconds.
But this could easily be replaced with allowing the Python script above loop to check.
In case anyone else wants to replicate this on BitBar:
#!/bin/bash
# <bitbar.title>Zoom Meeting Status</bitbar.title>
# <bitbar.version>v1.0</bitbar.version>
# <bitbar.author>fanuch</bitbar.author>
# <bitbar.author.github>fanuch</bitbar.author.github>
# <bitbar.desc>Simply run a Python script to detect an active meeting</bitbar.desc>
pythonenv="/Users/your.user/Documents/Code/Python/ZoomMonitor"
script="main.py"
$pythonenv/venv/bin/python $pythonenv/$script
Not that is is needed, but I get a nice little status with BitBar
Comments, questions, criticisms welcome.
Just note that I whipped this up in 30 minutes and it serves its intended purpose.
