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On Air Sign controlled by Zoom, MS Teams, & Alexa

With all the virtual work meetings I do at home now, I needed a way to let the family know to put on some pants before walking into the room

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With all the virtual work meetings I do at home now, I needed a way to let the family know to put on some pants before walking into the room. I built this sign out of Walnut, Curly Maple, and RGB LEDs that will automatically turn on when I join a virtual meeting. I can also control it via Amazon Alexa.

I made the case out of Walnut. I cut the sign front out of Curly Maple on my CNC.  I then placed white acrylic behind it to defuse the RGB LEDs

I control the RGB LEDs via an ESP32 and three N-Channel MOSFETs. The ESP32 is running code to emulate a Philips Hue Bridge with an Extended Color Light. This allows Amazon Echo to discover and control the sign as if it was a Philips Extended Color Light with full support for colors and brightness. It also supports color temperature, but instead of having the sign show different shades of white, I chose to have the color temperature implement animation patterns. For example 'warm white' will cause the On Air Sign to play a rainbow pattern by cycling through all the colors.

What really makes this project awesome is how it automatically turns on when I join a virtual meeting. This magic happens because of the companion software I wrote in C# that runs on my PC to detect a Zoom, WebEx, Discord, and MicrosoftTeams Meeting by monitoring UDP traffic. This application automatically turns on the sign when I join a virtual meeting and turns the sign off when I leave the meeting. 

This sign provides a nice visual clue to my family that I am in a meeting WITH MY VIDEO CAMERA ON, so don't embarrass yourself.    

Below are all the videos that I have created to explain each part of this project in greater detail. 

How to Write an Application to Detect a Zoom Meeting to Automatically turn on Sign

Coding Alexa Support for ESP32 (Arduino)

Alexa Voice Control for ESP32 (Arduino) by Emulating Philips Hue Light

Woodworking | How to Build an On Air Sign case out of Walnut and Maple.

This video shows my full build process for making the sign.

Here is a playlist of all the videos:  My On Air Sign Project Playlist

  • 1 × ESP32 Microcontrol
  • 3 × N-Channel Power Mosfet TO-220
  • 1 × RGB 5050 LED strip

  • 1
    Source Code

    Here is the GitHub repo for the code that runs on the ESP32 (source code link)

    Here is the GitHub repo for the Windows app to monitor UDP to detect Zoom, WebEx, Discord and MS Teams meetings (source code link)

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Michael Hawkins wrote 03/19/2021 at 01:13 point

I finally figured out a way to automatically turn on my On Air sign when I join a Zoom, WebEx, Discord, or MS Teams meeting. I wrote a C# app to monitor the UPD traffic on my computer and turn on or off the sign when I start or stop a virtual meeting. I cover the details in this video I just posted.  https://youtu.be/sqYLpXk6cFc

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