Student's Microphone Mutes Itself When Someone Opens the Door

Amid a time of Zoom classes, Meet calls, and Discord group meetings, many of us have seen our share of lovely cameos by pets to downright embarrassing, and in some cases illegal moments over these groupings. A farseeing student decided to take matters into his own hands after it became apparent that this semester would also be filled with online classes thanks to the pandemic.

While he has his own room, he wasn't able to escape a few accidents where someone in the house barged in just to ask whether he wanted some pie or whatever. In order to save himself from possible future embarrassments, he got his microphone to mute itself whenever someone opens his room's door.

The project is relatively easy

In a YouTube video, TheStaticTurtle explains how he used a magnet and sensor, which glued to the door and frame, to sense the door opening, first reported by Hackaday. He wrote on his blog that it isn't exactly easy on the eye "but works well enough."

Afterward, he ran a cable to his desk and connected to an ATTiny 85 with a DigiSpark boot-loader. He also used audio routing software VoiceMeeter Potato to route the audio, and chose the functions that are to be executed when he wanted the program to mute or unmute him.

SEE ALSO: NEW EXOSUIT PROJECT TO ASSIST THOSE WITH MOBILITY CHALLENGES

He says that, after a lot of coding, he was able to get the thing to work as he wanted to work. 

While he says that he could have "just used an ESP8266 to send the UDP packet to VoiceMeeter"; however, he didn't since he likes using wires. You can watch the demo here:

If you're also fed up with those who come barging in your door during those long online meetings, you might want to give this project a try. Luckily, TheStaticTurtle has the source code published on his GitHub.