Build Yourself a Physical Mute Button for Your Zoom Meetings

As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, there is a good chance you’re working from home and find yourself in the occasional Zoom meeting with your colleagues. It probably didn’t take many meetings for you to realize that it gets really annoying when people don’t mute their microphones when they’re not speaking. All of that background noise from several mics simultaneously can make it difficult to hear the person who is actually speaking. You want to lead by example and ensure you’re muting your mic, and the best way to do that is to follow elliotmade's guide and create a physical mute button for Zoom meetings.

The benefit of a physical mute button is pretty obvious: you don’t have to hunt for the virtual mute button in your Zoom window every time you’re done speaking or about to start speaking. That’s even more true if that Zoom window is open in the background while you work in other windows. This button will immediately bring the Zoom window into focus and then send the shortcut to mute your microphone. It’s also quite affordable to build, so you don’t have to pour a lot of money into the project.

The two primary electronic components in this project are a Digispark ATtiny85 board and a simple arcade button. The Digispark board can be programmed through the Arduino IDE, and the code simply monitors that button. If you give the button a short press, it will send CTRL + ALT + SHIFT as a keyboard command to pull the Zoom window into focus and then ALT + A to toggle mute. A long press will pull the Zoom window into focus and then send ALT + Q to completely exit the meeting. Elliot built an enclosure from a piece of steel tube with laser-cut front and rear covers, but you could easily 3D print an enclosure or use a simple premade case.