Webcamera use indicator

My wife wanted to know if my web camera was on 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

Install pm2

yarn global add pm2

Start app in the background

pm2 start app.js --watch --max-memory-restart 100M

Start app after reboots

https://pm2.keymetrics.io/docs/usage/startup/

View memory / cpu usage

pm2 status

Note on performance

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.

Tutorial I followed to figure out the Philips Hue api

https://developers.meethue.com/develop/get-started-2/

Stackoverflow answer that helped me figure out how to detect if the camera is on or off

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60535678/macos-detect-when-camera-is-turned-on-off