Goal

My Wife works as a Psych NP and meets with clients in her office. I have had the tendency of walking in and asking odd questions in weird accents. Everyone finds it funny but its very inappropriate so there had to be a way to alert everyone that she cant be disturbed. We got a nice little RGB lamp outside of her office that's key'd to a button through home assistant and it works perfectly. Only problem is she cant see what color it is so shell leave it on RED all day.

Solution

I thought having a small cube of light on her desk that's the same as the lamp outside would be a perfect solution. I found nothing and anything that was even remotely close was very expensive and still very large. I figured it cant be that hard to make what i want. I got to jerry rigging and came up with an esp32 (what i had on hand) and a RGB led diode and a button. wrote a circuit python script that would use the exact same functions as the button in Home Assistant.

requirements

• ESP32 Board
• Push Button connected to GPIO 0 (or any preferred GPIO)
  • I used the button attached to the other switch
• RGB LED connected to GPIOs 2, 3, and 4 (or any preferred GPIOs)
• CircutPython Firmware Installed

GPIO pinout

• Single Press - Blue LED (D4)
• Long Press (800ms+) - Green LED (D3)
• Double Tap (within 500ms) - Red LED (D2)

After I breadboarded the controller and LED, i started to think about form factor. At fist i thought i would just use a button and have it wedged in-between the HA button and the ESP32, then i figured "the HA button as a button in it, why not just steal that signal". After soldering a line and checking polarity, i figured id go one step farther and also just steal the battery (at this point i wondered if i should actually just make the ESP32 board itself be the button for both as it could support Matter and Zigbee. project for another day), this......worked......but not really.

In this image, I wired the postive and negative incorrect

the 3V the battery was outputting wasn't enough to support everything. the ESP32 would work but couldn't pass enough to actually light the LED like i wanted.

So i attached the 3v, GND, and D0 to the board of the HA button. verified everything worked, stuck it back together and now i have a functional button that also shows the color of the lamp at her desk. Its not perfect but for spending about 2-3 hours between soldering, programming, and testing, id consider it a success! I will (maybe/hopefully) return to this to make a more professional version with a light diffuser and just have the entire object