Kai wanted to know if my camera was on (for work meetings or other random things) without having to walk around and look for the light on my camera so I setup this process up.
It looks for the camera on / off events in the mac log and uses the Philips Hue API to toggle a light bulb when the camera is in use.
I tested this work the built in mac webcam and an external one and both work. From what I can see the process uses very little memory and you can start it in the background with pm2.
Check out the demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Jm9hPuIvmo
Check out an overview video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o04y7HQaj4&t=9s
yarn global add pm2
pm2 start app.js --watch --max-memory-restart 100M
https://pm2.keymetrics.io/docs/usage/startup/
pm2 status
At first I thought this solution would be pretty bad in terms of performance because it's doing string comparison on a log but is seems to only use about 34.1mb of memory and 0% cpu so it might be ok actually.
https://developers.meethue.com/develop/get-started-2/
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60535678/macos-detect-when-camera-is-turned-on-off