For about 1 year we have been living in a world of online meetings. Zoom is a constant presence in many people's life.

Muting when you are not talking is part of the Zoom etiquette but Zoom does not make it very convenient.

If the window is not visible or just not active, keyboard shortcuts don't work. You'll have to find the meeting window, activate it and click the mute/unmute button as needed.

Not anymore.

With Zoomino you can just press a button on a physical device and no matter where the Zoom window is, no matter if it's active or not, you'll be able to to mute and unmute yourself extremely easily.

How Zoomino works

Zoomino is a combination of an Arduino-based board with a couple of push-buttons and colorful LEDs and an application that runs on your computer and communicates with the board with a simple serial protocol to receive commands and send the state to update the LEDs.

Open source

Zoomino is open source. In the Github repository you will find the Arduino sketch file and the Node.js code for the desktop application.

Update - March 21st 2021

After testing it during real zoom meeting for a week or so, I concluded that Zoomino is extremely useful, so I spent some more time on it.

Board design

To make it more compact and easier to move around, I moved away from using a big breadboard and switched to a prototyping board.

As I am not yet ready to buy soldering tools, I went with the small breadboard that came with the prototyping board and a few short cables. The result is pretty good.

macOS application

The application now is easier to use as it monitors the serial port to make sure there is an Arduino connected and detects when the Arduino has been plugged back in after being unplugged. This way I can leave it always connected to the USB on my external monitor and the application running in the background will take care of detecting when the device becomes available.

This part is not battle-tested yet but from some intial tests it seems to work well.