Despite the title… If you are a person who usually teleworks and you want to put a device that with different lights informs the rest of the family members of your status, for example red light if you are in a meeting or call, orange if you're composing an email, Free Green…

Well, is totally valid for the office or for whatever you feel like; In this post we will make a practical example, How a gecko or gecko (Hanging on the outside wall of my office) It changes color depending on the state of what we need, depending on the state of the PC, laptop or even mobile phone. That way everyone will know if they can bother me or better, They should wait a little bit…

And well, that instead of a gecko hanging on the wall you can put a cube on the table, A traffic light for the monitor… Other ideas, options… ¡Start! The first thing we will need is a 'something', that we will put LED strips or in garland format (More comfortable), That 'something’ it can be a cube or in my example a gecko or gecko, 3D printed. Once we have that 'something’ mounted, that is, with WLED (instructions HERE), We will need to send you our statements afterwards, for this, as an intermediate point we will have our Home Assistant. And, Who will send you the states?? Well, the Home Assistant agent that we will install on our PC and on our mobile device, With these agents we will obtain information from any sensor we can think of. Among the hundreds of sensors, We'll be interested if you're on the phone, or which active window you have on your PC…

If our computer is Windows, We have an agent called HASS Agent that we can download from its releases the installer or the portable. Once installed and configured the minimum, from the taskbar it will have left us a new icon, when you open it, we will be able to enable and configure the 'local sensors' among other things.

This will be where we add the sensors that we are interested in pursuing, Click on 'Add New',

And in this case I'll add a sensor of type 'Active Window'’ And I'll give it a name. This new sensor will then appear in Home Assistant (in my case OS_SUR_01_ventana_activa) and update the value every 15 Seconds.

And if we want to obtain the data from our mobile phone (Android or iOS), if we have the Home Assistant app installed, in 'Settings'’ > 'Complementary application’ > 'Manage Sensors’ > There we have a lot of sensors that will be able to take any data you need from the device.

A new entity with the name of each sensor will appear in Home Assistant, and as we see, in the Status it already indicates the title of the window that has active, we will be able to consult in the History the ones we need in the future.

And the next thing will be to create the automations we need, For example, that the Gecko or gecko turns red if any of the above States is fulfilled and 'A' is changed, (that the mobile phone is off the hook, or that Teams is open, or Zoom…).

As is obvious, We'll need to do other automations that turn it green or turn it off if the phone has hung up, we have left Teams, Zoom… in this case we will look at the change of the status when the 'From' changes, from that state to another.

Well, Well, this would be another idea in which Home Assistant can contribute a lot in smart homes or offices. Think about the number of sensors that a PC has, or a telephone, the things that could be done. And this is one more, a small device, let him inform of our condition to whom we wish, something easy to interpret.

As always hoping it will be helpful, A huge hug!