Third Party Plugin Requirements

• Node-RED
• HACS
• Mosquitto

Zoom Plugin

I followed the Read Me from https://github.com/raman325/ha-zoom-automation#installation-single-account-monitoring and set up a Zoom Plugin for my account, that will detect if I am in a meeting or not.

Pi Zero

I have a tiny project Enclosure box that I dremeled a hole for the GPIO pins in the cover and I then sandwich the Blinkt onto the Pi Zero with another dremeled hole running to the micro usb power, and that's it for hardware.

For software, I installed the python packages for Pimoroni and Blinkt, which came with a lovely set of sample projects. I deleted everything except the mqtt.py file, which I then put my Mosquitto server settings.

I then added a new service in systemd to control the mqtt server

[Unit]
Description=Meeting Indicator

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/python2 /home/pi/mqtt.py
WorkingDirectory=/home/pi/Pimoroni/blinkt/examples
Restart=always
RestartSec=2

[Install]
WantedBy=sysinit.target

Pleased with the results, and testing by sending some messages over mqtt that changed the color, I then dove into Node-RED

Node-Red

This is my first project using Node-RED, so I'm sure I could optimize better, but I have two entry points, one is from running HomeAssistant app on my mac, which gets me sensor data for my webcam, and the other is the aforementioned Zoom Presence plugin I created. These are Events:State nodes.

When either of these are True, they call first my ceiling light to turn on, which next will then add a msg.payload of

rgb,0,255,0,0
rgb,1,255,0,0
rgb,2,255,0,0
rgb,3,255,0,0
rgb,4,255,0,0
rgb,5,255,0,0
rgb,6,255,0,0
rgb,7,255,0,0

as one string. This leads to a Split, which will in turn, emit a new MQTT message for each line (I split on \n) and turn on all 8 LEDs as red. This is inefficient because I am still using the sample code for the blinkt which requires you to address each LED …