One energy-saving feature of Zoom Room is Zoom Rooms Operation Time. This feature allows the room administrator to schedule business hours for an organization, say 8am to 5pm. During regular hours, the Zoom Room display(s), control interface, and scheduling panel will operate as normal. But, when the business (or university in our case) is outside the operational hours, the control device (usually an iPad or Android device) and scheduling display will dim to conserve energy and expand device longevity. Also, the display(s) will turn off during this period. The one catch is that the computer and monitors must support CEC (Consumer Electronic Control), and not all do. In fact, Macs don’t support CEC control over HDMI.
So, what do you do when your computer connection doesn’t support CEC? Simple, you buy some dongles! Zoom details this process (with details regarding the hardware setup) on their website, but in essence, you’ll need to configure the display (or displays… as Zoom Room can accommodate up to 3 screens) as seen below using a USB – HDMI-CEC Adapter by Pulse-Eight and a Lindy HDMI CEC Less Adapter by Lindy.
While this does add to the overall cost of the hardware design, it will more than pay for itself over the life of the install.
