During the Microsoft Build keynote last week - that you can watch free online here - we snuck in a LOT of detail and easter eggs. We planned the whole thing out like a live stage play (I have a background in theatre) and one of the things that mattered to me was lighting.
If you're going to watch something you for an extended time you'll need a little visual interest. Ya gotta mix it up! So I partnered with LIFX and Isaac Levin to accomplish two things:
- Can we change room lighting to match Teams/Skype/Slack/Whatever presence status?
- Red for busy, green for available, etc. I've been exploring "busy lights" for over 10 years. This is a fun DIY project.
- Can we change room lighting to match the Windows Theme/Background accent color?
- If I'm not mirroring my pretense status, pull the accent color out and change the light.
Here's what it looked like in the keynote:
The PresenceLight app is open source and up on Github by Isaac Levin and you can get it on the Windows Store free or in Chocolatey, WinGet, or download a nightly build.
So what's needed? We need an API to pull presence from and an API to push our chosen color to. So that's the Microsoft Graph that includes presence APIs. On the lighting side, using LIFX as an example, they have a great clean LIFX HTTP API.
RANDOM: If you're looking for my wallpapers from the BUILD keynote, I've put them up here.
Here's what the app looks like. You can auth against Phillips Hue, Yeelight or LIFX. The code for LIFX, as an example, is very clean.
Check out Isaacs detailed blog post about PresenceLight with code samples and explanations! The LIFX folks also set up a 10% off coupon "BUILD" for use on their online store. I'm sure they'll sell out, but the LIFX Beam that I have is $99 refurbished.
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