ESPHome desk control board

A six-key panel with a PIR sensor, buzzer and OLED, mounted under the desk. Custom PCB, printed keycaps, wired into Home Assistant.

ongoing2025-02

Keys: 6, each with an RGB LED
Sensing: PIR presence
Output: OLED · buzzer
Board: Custom PCB

Home Assistant is excellent until the moment you want to do one specific thing and have to find a phone, unlock it, open an app and locate a toggle. Physical buttons don’t have that problem. This one lives under the edge of the desk, where a hand can reach it without looking.

A grey printed enclosure mounted under the edge of a desk, with six white keycaps, a PIR sensor dome, a buzzer, and a small OLED showing the time, air pressure and light level. — Mounted under the desk edge. The OLED reads the time alongside pressure and light level.

Rather than wire tactile switches to a dev board, it’s a custom PCB: six switch positions each with an RGB LED behind it, a buzzer, and a header for the display.

A bare green PCB with six labelled switch footprints, each with a small RGB LED beside it, plus a buzzer footprint and a pin header. — The bare board. Six switch positions, an addressable LED per key, buzzer and header.

The keycaps are printed in translucent filament so the per-key LED shows through — the button can report state rather than just accept input.

A second one, with a bigger button

A small laser-cut plywood box with finger-jointed corners, a large red latching mushroom button on top, two switches on the front face and a knurled thumbscrew on the side. — The same idea with a latching mushroom button, in laser-cut ply rather than a print.

Same principle, different vocabulary. A latching mushroom button says something a keycap can’t: this is deliberate, and it stays where you put it.

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