Automate Lighting for Zoom Calls

Working from home has its challenges, but also its benefits. One benefit that I’ve found is the ability to completely customize my working environment. Yet my ideal environment for coding isn’t as ideal for being on a Zoom call. So several times a day I found myself adjusting my lights, volume, etc. This got me wondering, is there a way to automate all of this?

I am a software engineer, you don’t have to be to follow this guide, but I’m writing from that perspective and presuming that my audience has at least a basic knowledge of coding. The solution here is written in Python, but could easily be adapted to any other language of your choosing.

This guide is also regarding how to accomplish this on a Mac, I’m sure there’s a way to do it on a PC as well but that wasn’t my need so that’s something others will need to tackle.

First, and I assume obviously, if you want to automate your lighting you’ll need smart lighting of some sort, I have a combination of a variety of types, and you’ll also need a controller of some sort. I use Amazon’s Alexa as my home automation controller.

The code is pretty basic, essentially poll the process list every second (this could be adjusted as needed, but I don’t find any impact polling every second so it works for me) and check to see if the “zoom.us” process has a child process called “CptHost” which is the actual Zoom meeting window. If it does then run the automation for setting my office to “Zoom Mode” and if it doesn’t then run the automation for setting my office to “Work Mode”. The only other piece we need to be concerned with is keeping track of the state, whether we are currently “in zoom” or not, because we don’t want to call the automation every second, we only want to call it when we change state.

Once you’ve got your Python environment setup and written (or copied) the above code then you just need to run it with:

If you want to have it run automatically at startup there are a variety of ways to do this, this thread has a good overview:

Then sit back and enjoy your lights, and whatever else you may want to add to your routine, adjust to whatever you find to be ideal for your working environment and enjoy one of the great benefits of working from home!

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