DIY Microsoft Teams presence led

Since the outbreak of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) I’ve been working from home. I have a little daughter (age 5) who also had to stay home from school, so more than once I had the same situation as Professor Robert Kelly during a BBC interview:

Since I recently bought and build a 3D printer (Prusa i3 MK3S) and watched Scott Hanselman change his lights during his talk on Microsoft Build 2020, I put 1 and 1 together and decided to try and create something for myself/daughter. My goal was to create a led-light, that I can put on the wall besides my office door, that changes color following my Microsoft Teams presence status (since that’s the tool I use for meetings/video-calls all day).

The end result after 3 nights of tinkering looks like this:

The hardware side is made from:

The filament is used to print a custom designed case, which consists of 2 pieces that hold the ESP32 and the RGB-led-ring. They slide nicely over each other and lock together at the USB opening. The case can be viewed/downloaded at Autodesk Fusion 360 - Team Presence Light or Thingiverse - Teams Presence Led.

The software on the ESP32 is ESPHome and configured with a relatively easy script:

esphome:
  name: teams_presence_led
  platform: ESP32
  board: esp32doit-devkit-v1
  on_boot:
    then:
      - light.turn_off: xringid

wifi:
  ssid: !secret wifi_ssid
  password: !secret wifi_password

  ap:
    ssid: "Teams Presence Led"
    password: !secret wifi_hotspot_password

captive_portal:

logger:

api:

ota:

web_server:
  port: 80

light:
  - platform: neopixelbus
    type: RGB
    pin: GPIO26 #D26
    num_leds: 12
    variant: WS2812
    method: ESP32_I2S_1
    name: "xringname"    
    id: "xringid"

The script is also available on my GitHub repo for this project.

The above hardware isn’t able to determine the Microsoft Teams presence by itself, it needs a companion app running on a Windows machine. I’ve created an very minimalistic Windows application using C# and WPF which polls the Microsoft Graph API every 15 seconds for the presence of the signed in user. Based on the presence it will sent a message to the ESPHome API to change the color of the leds.

The app also has the ability to publish your Microsoft Teams status to MQTT. I haven’t extensively tested this feature, but I’m going to use it in the future with Home Assistant to also light up the led at night, as a night-light for my daughter.

If you want to re-create this project, head on over to my GitHub repo MicrosoftTeamsPresenceLed. There you can find all source-code, stl-files and the configuration script I used.

Future plans/possible improvements:

• make the case smaller/less high (less printing/less weight)
• try to downgrade the processor to an ESP8266 (cheaper)
• use less leds, maybe one (?), and test how long this can run on a battery
• add motion sensor to only light up when movement is detected
• reprint shell with different filament/settings to create a diffuser style shell
• improve UI of companion app
• make color configurable from companion app
• and more…

Special thanks go out to:

• Scott Hanselman for sparking the initial idea and his blogpost
• Isaac Levin for creating a very similar UWP app using off the shelve smart lightbulbs (LIFX and Philips Hue).
• ESPHome for their super easy and powerfull ESP software.
• EzGif.com for creating the nice animated gif used in this blog.