Thanks for all of the help over the years: now I want to share a project I just finished. I wanted to have a “busy light” on the outside of my office door, so my partner could see if it was ok to interrupt me. (I have ADHD, and “just a quick question” switching costs are very high for me.)
Plenty of USB busy lights on the market, but the door is far enough from my desk, or any source of power (old house), that I wanted to have it battery powered and remote controllable.
I used some WS2812 LEDs controlled by an ESP32 set up with ESPHome, so it appears as a single RGB light to Home Assistant, powered by a USB battery pack, and in a 3D printed enclosure that hooks over the top of the door. (The enclosure is super bulky, and I need to miniaturize the circuit — it’s held together with breadboard jumper cables at the moment.)
To control it, none of the existing macOS apps seemed to be quite what I wanted, so I made my own: it’s a menu bar item that allows you to make a custom list of Home Assistant scenes, with custom name, emoji, and keyboard shortcuts, with automatic triggers for camera and mic use so it activates a scene when you get on or off a work call.
The bonus of going through HA is that the app can activate any scene in HA, not just the busy light, so you can toss whatever you want into a scene, it doesn’t even have to be a light.
Open source, and I’m an Apple developer, so there is a signed and notarized release build if you want to download it and give it a try.
Note: This app started out as an experiment for me to use Claude Code as a tool, but I am also a real human developer (hobbyist since I was a kid, and professionally for 20+ years), so you can believe that I made Claude fix its shit. It’s quite polished now!
Edit: realized the original post was too PR-speak, and I’m sorry. Completely re-written post.