Quiet on Set: Building an On-Air Sign with Open Source Technologies

While many of us have adapted to work from home life, one major problem remains: finding an easy way to keep folks in your home away from your workspace when you’re on an important call. Dust off your Raspberry Pi––let’s build a custom on-air sign with Apache Kafka®, Apache Flink®, and Apache Iceberg™!

We’ll begin by writing Python scripts to capture key events––such as when a Zoom meeting is running and when a camera is being used––and produce it into Kafka. The live data are then consumed by a Raspberry Pi script to drive the operation of a custom designed on-air sign. From there, you’ll be introduced to the ins and outs of FlinkSQL for stream processing as we wrangle the data into a better format for downstream use. And, finally, we’ll see Iceberg in action and learn how to use query engines to analyze meeting and recording trends.

By the end of the session, you’ll be well-acquainted with this powerful trio of open source technologies and know how you could use the same scaffolding and scale out a simple, at-home project to millions of users and simultaneous events.