fangfufu / Physical-Mute-Button

A physical mute button for software such as Zoom and Microsoft Team.

Physical-Mute-Button

This is an Arduino sketch for a physical mute button suitable for Zoom and Microsoft Teams.

Hardware requirement

You need a M5Stack Atom Matrix. You can buy them from various places. I have listed a few below.

• https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/atom-matrix-esp32-development-kit
• https://thepihut.com/products/atom-matrix-esp32-development-kit
• https://www.adafruit.com/product/4497
• https://shop.m5stack.com/products/atom-matrix-esp32-development-kit?variant=39524837195948

M5Stack Atom Matrix contains a 5x5 RGB LED array with a physical button beneath. This means that you can press on the LED array, and trigger actions.

How does it work

This sketch configures M5Stack Atom Matrix into a Bluetooth Keyboard. After you pair it with your computer, pressing the Atom Matrix's button sends Ctrl + Shift + M to your computer, which is the keyboard shortcut for mute on Microsoft Teams. You can configure your Zoom to share the same mute keyboard shortcut as Microsoft Teams. (This is what I did)

Please note that the LED status of the button is NOT automatically synchronised with the Zoom or Microsoft Teams. This means that if you change the mute settings without using the button, the LED of the button will not change automatically.

How to set it up

Flashing the M5Stack Atom Matrix

1. Clone this repository
2. Follow the guide here to set up Arduino IDE. Note that you need both the M5Stack-Atom board manager and the M5Atom library.
3. Install the ESP32 BLE Keyboard library
4. Open this sketch, and flash it onto your M5Stack Atom Matrix.

Software configuration

1. On your operating system, search for Bluetooth Device, and pair with Mute Button.
2. To use this button with Zoom, change Zoom's shortcut for "Mute/unmute my audio" from Alt + A to Ctrl + Shift + M. I decided to set the key presses to Microsoft Teams's mute shortcut, because you cannot change Microsoft Teams's keyboard shortcuts, whereas you can change Zoom's.

If you want the mute button to work when Zoom window is not in focus, you need to set Zoom's keyboard shortcut as "global" in the shortcut settings. However please note that if you do so, it might interfere with Microsoft Team.

Before successful pairing, the mute button flashes blue. After successful pairing, the mute button goes dark. Afte pressing it, it turns red.

Why

I was issued a Plantronics C3200 headset, which contains a mute button that synchronises with Microsoft Teams and Zoom. However the LED is not big or bright enough. I saw various tutorials on the Internet on setting up Zoom mute buttons. I find those setups a bit clunky - some of them do not have LED indication, some of them require breadboard which is not very neat.

Possible improvements

Both Zoom and Microsoft Teams have APIs to query the state of the call. You can use those APIs to mute the call directly. This would be better than issuing a keyboard shortcut. However these require more efforts than I am willing to give.

License

This repository is licensed under GPLv3.

Physical Mute Button
Copyright (C) 2021  Fufu Fang

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.