I recently found Bitfocus Companion and it has done nothing but provide inspiration for new ideas for buttons to control things which normally I’d have to faff with a mouse to control.
Google Meet is our video platform of choice at work, and I was fed up with loosing the window and not being able to unmute myself quickly when someone asked a question in the middle of my presentation or meeting.
So a button on the Stream Deck XL is required to alleviate this dreer.
Overview:
- Stream deck provides the buttons.
- A Raspberry Pi (see earlier post) provides a host for Bitfocus Companion
- Better Touch Tool provides the automation and triggering listener for Companion to interface with.
I’ve used Better Touch Tool for ages to provide an interface for controlling my mac from a phone or tablet when projecting films on the wall, and used its screen snapping features for years to arrange program windows quickly in multi screen workflows.
But now it was the turn of BTT to provide the tooling to programme a series of actions that would find a google meet window running the video call, switch to it, and send the ‘mute’ toggle keyboard shortcut. There is a preset you can download at the end of this post for a named trigger.
No matter which of your browser windows is hiding the Google Meet window amongst a million other tabs, we’ll find it and bring it front and focussed… and unmuted.
Working back up the signal chain… BTT comes with a webserver which can be enabled to listen to triggers on an HTTP port. You can copy the HTTP request for each trigger in the BTT admin, and you’ll paste that in the Companion config.
Companion has a generic HTTP plugin which can trigger BTT on the target machine. Simply paste your trigger URL in a new button using the http instance on the key down, and jobs a goodun.