I built a "Do not disturb" Device for my home office
Details
- External ID
- 46477961
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I built a "Do not disturb" Device for my home office
- Website domain
- apoorv.page
- Launched
- Jan. 3, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 99
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8965744400527009
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Enrichment
- Theme
- sleep, wake, and clock utilities
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Hardware & robotics
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- do not disturb device for home office
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial The status website and desktop agent script are simple, but it depends on physical ESP32 hardware, display wiring, micro-controller firmware, and reverse-engineering OS-level camera status events.
What it would actually take: The solution requires an ESP32 microcontroller running C++/Arduino firmware that drives an e-ink or OLED display, paired with a native macOS daemon monitoring private CoreMedia/AVFoundation log events via `log stream`. The tricky part is reliably detecting OS-level camera and mic usage without public APIs across macOS versions and maintaining power-efficient, resilient Wi-Fi communication between the host and microcontroller.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: ESP32 for remote functionality, FTDI chip or USB to GPIO, Home Assistant with Apple Calendar or Google Calendar automation, OpenWRT router firmware
Concerns raised: Overcomplicated solution to what is actually a communication/boundaries issue, More transistors cannot solve underlying family enmeshment problems, Raspberry Pi may be overkill compared to simpler alternatives
Feature requests: Discord call status integration for automatic DND sign activation, Support for multiple calendar integrations without requiring scripts
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 177 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #12 of 178 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 64 days after the earliest competitor.
- The bedtime · hn · 2026-01-05 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- I Built a MTA Subway Display So I'd Stop Checking My Phone · hn · 2026-03-20 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- I built a task manager in the MacBook notch for my ADHD brain · hn · 2026-02-03 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- I made a little voice note recorder · hn · 2026-03-03 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- HASSConnect · github · 2026-09-17 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- I built an international calling platform for the past 6 months · hn · 2026-01-03 · 38 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- App that shows your screen-free hours every time you look at your phone · hn · 2026-06-04 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- I made an app that blurs my screen when I slouch · hn · 2026-01-24 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.43
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a hardware & robotics tool for Fintech yet.