Project Busylight Part 3 - Final Thoughts

The final step to completing this project was to get it running on a Raspberry Pi. You may have noticed a few weeks ago I posted some instructions on getting Nodejs and Node-hid running on Raspberry Pi. Well, now you know the reason why :)

Busylight in action. Vader finally found an available conference room.

One of the settings you may need to adjust on your Webex Room Device is PeopleCountOutOfCall. If you wish to show presence of people in the room regardless if they are using your room systems this will need to be enabled. It is a sensitive setting though and if only one person is the room and the camera does not see a face front on it will report 0 people in the room. I have place some code for people presence detection but right now its not changing the color of the light. Some more experimenting is required to see if this works better than people count.

Webex Room Kit setting for People Count out of call:

Project files can be found here: https://github.com/voipnorm/CEbusyLightOmega

Final Thoughts

Another project done. This has been a fun one. The Busylight is a fun low cost project that can get you started with developing with Cisco Video Endpoints and it has potential for huddle spaces with Webex Room Kits. I also set a up Busylight Alpha which is a slightly different device but works with the code I developed with the Omega.

The BL Omega device is a great little light device. Very similar in a lot of ways a the Embrava device but I found the tech and developer support from Plenom a much higher standard. Seems to me Embrava have little interest in developers, which is a shame. This leads me to recommend the Busylight for custom development projects more so than the Embrava product.

The Busylight took next to no time to get up and running with some initial code on my MAC, using a Pi always takes a bit more time. Thanks to the libraries already available on Github it really is a simple project that you could integrate into all sorts of stuff. Don't believe me, then go check it out.

Next project, HDMI switch integration with a webex board. Should be fun.

VoIPNorm

Previous project posts:

Part 1
http://voipnorm.blogspot.com/2019/08/project-busylight-part-1-setup.html

Part 2
http://voipnorm.blogspot.com/2019/08/project-busylight-part-2-nodejs-code.html