A mute button for conference calls at your fingertips

Problem Statement

During the pandemic, multi-tasking video conference attendees often struggled to find their mute button when called on. This resulted in a myriad of unfortunate experiences for everyone on the call as they fumbled through endless tabs and windows to find their call.

Objectives & Goals

Portable
Obvious / Intuitive
Pressure tested

Output

During the pandemic I was on a TON of video calls (we all were). On what felt like every call, I would hear something like "Sorry! Didn't realize I was on mute!" OR "Sorry! I couldn't find my mute button" or in the worst case scenario, "Oh MY! I thought I was muted!!!"

I like to program microcontrollers for around the home automation and figured I could pretty easily create a device the sat on my desk that could control my computer's microphone via bluetooth. Give it a bright light that clearly indicated state, a button to switch states and viola! The birth of MOOT.

I paired with a friend of mine to codevelop the experience. I focused on the hardware aspect of it, writing the firmware, working with electric engineers to create the hardware and using my 3D printer and off the shelf devices to create multiple prototypes.