Elgato Key Camera Bind

This is an experimental script to make Elgato's Key Light Air turn on and off according to your webcam's current state.

The main idea here is to automate the task of turning it on/off for people that always use it on video calls.

The script tries to detect camera activity from system logs and change the Key Light status accordingly, by making HTTP requests to the device.

How to run it

You can try the script by cloning this repository and then running:

./camera-bind/camera-bind.sh

With the script running, try to make some application use your webcam (i.e. https://meet.google.com). It should turn Elgato Key Light on and off whenever you enable/disable your webcam.

Only Linux and MacOS (Monterey) are supported.

How to make it run automatically

Linux

In order to make the script run automatically on startup in Linux, you can create a systemctl daemon. To do so, create the file /etc/systemd/system/elgato-cam-bind.service with the following content:

[Unit]
Description=Elgato Key Camera Bind

[Service]
Type=simple
User=root
ExecStart=PATH_WHERE_YOU_CLONED_THIS_REPO/elgatokey-cam-bind/camera-bind/camera-bind.sh
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Then enable and start the service:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now elgato-cam-bind.service

MacOS

In Mac, you can make the script run as a launch agent. In order to do that, you have to create the file ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.my.elgato-cam-bind.plist with the following content:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
	<dict>
		<key>Label</key>
		<string>com.my.elgato-cam-bind</string>
		<key>Program</key>
		<string>PATH_WHERE_YOU_CLONED_THIS_REPO/elgatokey-cam-bind/camera-bind/camera-bind.sh</string>
		<key>RunAtLoad</key>
		<true/>
		<key>KeepAlive</key>
		<true/>
	</dict>
</plist>

And then run the following command:

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.my.elgato-cam-bind.plist