Journal from Kotnik

I work fully remote and so does my wife. We share our home office which means at any moment one of us can be on a call. This is how we share that information.

I purchased cheap On-air light and glued it on the top of our printer which is conveniently located between our desks.

Of course, I control it via Home Assistant. It has On/Off switch which I positioned in permanent On and plugged it into Sonoff power socket controlled via Zigbee protocol. And then I created an automation with Aqara switch to toggle the power socket state.

Finally, to make things a bit easier for me, I wrote this short program and mapped it to Start+m (m for meeting) keyboard shortcut.

#!/usr/bin/env python
import os

from requests import post


if __name__ == '__main__':
    url = 'http://HA/api/services/switch/toggle'
    token = os.getenv('HA_TOKEN', '')
    data = {'entity_id': 'switch.on_air_switch_switch'}

    headers = {
        "Authorization": "Bearer {}".format(token),
        "content-type": "application/json",
    }
    response = post(url, headers=headers, json=data)
    print(response.text)

Of course, it's possible to further automate this to turn on time of meetings based on calendar, or when webcam is turned on, etc. As with every rabbit hole, it's up to you to decide how deep you want to go.