A Home Office Status Light

I'm a proud member of the post-covid work from home crew. I love working from home because of two main aspects: first, I have an office with a door that closes, a large desk with three monitors, and the peace and quiet I need to do focus work. Second, it gives me enormous flexibility to choose my working hours, interleaving them with things like walking the dog, meeting with a contractor, picking up the kids from school, etc. And of course, it allows me choose where I live without having to worry about wasting time commuting.

The entrance to my office is a pair of french doors with glass panels so you can peek in at what I'm doing. But my monitors face an opposite wall, so you can't see what's on my screens. Because of that, there wasn't an easy way for my wife and kids to know if I'm in a meeting where I don't want to be interrupted. They'd knock or wave at me through the window until I responded with a thumbs up or thumbs down.

Here's my solution! A small light on my desk that turns red when I'm in a meeting, green when I'm not, and turns off when I leave my desk.

To do this, I leveraged my favorite home automation platform, Home Assistant. I split up the project into two parts: the detection sensors and the signaling. The signaling part was easy: I connected a Sengled Zigbee RGBW A19 bulb to my network and named it "Jeff's Office Status".

The detection part was more difficult. The easiest approach I could find would be installing System Bridge. However, I had some security concerns with installing it, and I had a tough time even trying to run it. Eventually, I realized it doesn't support getting the camera status on Linux anyway.

I decided to write my own little script to do the sensor detection and send the results using the Home Assistant REST API. I did some research on how to detect if the camera is turned on in Linux. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any event-driven way to do it, so the best approach I came up with was to poll the sysfs file /sys/module/uvcvideo/refcnt. The contents of the file changes from 0 to 1 when the camera is turned on.

I similarly didn't find an event-driven way to detect if my monitor is on, so I went with a polling approach by running the xset command with the -q parameter. It spits out a bunch of human readable text, which includes the string "Monitor is On" if the monitor is on.

I wrapped it up in a Python script that polls both the camera and screen every 5 seconds, posting to Home Assistant whenever the value changes from off to on or vice versa. I added the script to run under systemd so it's always running on my work machine.

Lastly, I created a Home Assistant automation that links up the two binary sensors with the color bulb. You can view both my Python script and the Home Assistant automation yaml file at my Office Light GitHub repo.