I started this project because I've been working from home for the past 2 months and there really is no end in sight with the pandemic happening. I'm working in my basement and the rest of my family can't always tell when I'm on a Zoom call. I wanted a way to let them know when I am on a call or just working and I had a Raspberry Pi with a Unicorn HAT HD from an earlier project.
The display is updated by a script that subscribes to an MQTT topic. The MQTT messages can be triggered in various ways. I have a script below which detects when you are in a Zoom call. There's also a menu driven client.
ticker.py - a headless service that subscribes to an MQTT topic and displays messages on a Unicorn HAT HD.
ticker-client.py - a client application that sends messages to an MQTT topic which are then displayed by the ticker service.
zoom-detector.py - script to detect when a zoom meeting is in progress. It looks for a CptHost process and sets the
ticker message accordingly.
settings.yml - used by the scripts above. Add your MQTT server address.
This service requires an MQTT server like Mosquitto. You can run it on the Raspberry Pi itself or on another computer you have on your network.
There are various ways to make the ticker.py script run when the Pi boots up. Systemd, Docker, auto-login and run the script in the .bashrc.
My preference is to use Docker. I've added a Makefile with build and deploy rules. You'll need to set an environment variable named TICKER_HOST
that will be used to ssh to the Raspberry Pi you've already setup with Docker.