WiFi "ON AIR" sign

This is a small tinker project: an illuminated "ON AIR" sign that connects to WiFi and can be turned on/off over the network.

The basic idea was to be able to let people around me know that I am on a video call so they don't disturb me. I wanted something that is easily noticed, so an illuminated sign is great for that and I thought the famous radio "ON AIR" message would be a good fun (ha ha). I also wanted to be able to control it programmatically, so I can automate it to illuminate when I have a zoom call active on my laptop.

Hence I have created this 3D printed sign, with an ESP8266 controller, as that's the cheapest chip I know that has WiFi. The controller runs a simple program with mDNS responder, so I can access it using a hostname rather than an IP that can change, and a simple HTTP API, so I can send the ON and OFF commands to it over the network.

See the GitHub repo for details: https://github.com/tomas-mazak/onair