Automatically setting Slack status at Work & Home

When working from home it's helpful to tell people by use of our Slack Status, but it's always a pain to update it back and forth as I move about.

Here I'll show how to use the act of plugging my laptop into a USB Dock as a trigger to call the Slack API to set my status.

Step 1: choose an event engine

In almost any system like this you'll need an event engine. I looked at Microsoft Flow and IFTT, but neither could call Set Status on Slack as an option at a glance. Instead I settled on node-red.

node-red

Low-code programming for event-driven applications

npm

Step 2: Install Node-RED

npm install -g node-red
node-red

This should install node-red and then start it. It'll show some console output then should be accessible on 127.0.0.1:1880. Play around with it, then exit the engine by typing Ctrl-C in the console.

Step 2: Install Node-RED as a service

We're going to want to run node-red all the time as a background service, for this can we use pm2.

pm2

Production process manager for Node.JS applications with a built-in load balancer.

npm

pm2 is an service that'll run any node program in the background of your computer, required otherwise you'd have to keep a Console window open the whole time.

npm install -g pm2
npm install pm2-windows-startup -g
pm2-startup install

pm2 start (Join-Path -Path $env:USERPROFILE "AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\node-red\red.js")

pm2 save

Step 3: Detect USB's being plugged in.

There seems to be a node-red plugin called node-red-contrib-usb , the only issue is that it doesn't seem to support hot-loading.

I found a npm package called usb-detection which will raise events when a USB is plugged in or detached. I followed the guides here, and created a Node-RED package you can find here.

node-red-contrib-usb-watch

[](https://dev.azure.com/moritonal/node-red-contrib-usb-watch/_build/latest?definitionId=2&branchName=master…

npm

You can install the module by going into node-red's Manage Palate mode found here:

Then searching for usb-watch and installing it:

It might take a hot-second to install depending on whether it finds a binary for your OS or has to build it itself (due to USB being quite low-level relatively).

Step 4: Putting together the flow

With the package now in place, we can put together our flow. We start with a simple check that our usb watch node works correctly:

Then we add a filter for only the USB device we're interested in:

Confirm that it works:

Now we need to setup the JSON payload that we'll send to Slack using a template node:

Then add the http request node for calling Slack's API. We'll need a bearer authentication token to authenticate ourselves with Slack, which can be generated here.

Finally we Deploy and plug in our USB Dock and watch the magic:

Voila! We have a set our Status! All we have to do it again with different filter ID's and payloads at work and we'll have a working system.