When was the last time you thought you are on mute but actually everyone can hear you snore?
I spend a lot of time in conference calls. This mute thing happens to me a lot.
PTT stands for Push To Talk like we used in walkie-talkies. The computer mic would be normally muted and as long as I press the PTT button, it will unmute the mic.
I couldn't find any such off the shelf device, so I decided to create one on my own.
To do so I had to integrate few components. Here is the flow of things:
When I press a button on my special device, it will send the key combination of "PrintScreen+F11". Then a special program called AutoHotKey will intercept that key combination and execute an application I wrote that controls the computer mic.
The PTT button
I am using an Arduino like microcontroller called Teensy LC. I value my time and my money, and there is nothing better than the Teensy line of microcontrollers which are very powerful, Arduino IDE based, excellent support and superb software quality.
I decided to use two buttons, as sometimes I am the star of the meeting and I don't want to keep pressing the PTT button all the time. The "toggle button" will flip the default mic state.
I also added a LED to show red when unmuted and green when muted.
AutoHotKey
AutoHotKey is a program that can run macros when a key is pressed. I use it to capture the keyboard signals from the button device and run the MuteMe.exe program.
Here is the code:
MuteMe.exe
I don't know how to write a program to mute, but Computer Cabal knows, and I shamelessly used his code.
I had to do some modifications:
- I found no need to mute and unmute before actually muting or unmuting. each and every time I run the program. I think he/she had a specific problem with their setup. It works on my laptop without.
- I added a method to detect what the current mic status is.
- I change the main program to accept a parameter. If its "0" then mute, if it is "1" then unmute.
Here is the code
CoreAudioMicMute.cs:
WindowsMicMute.cs:
MuteMe.cs:
