ashlight – air quality monitor gadget

We have had a PurpleAir PA-II on our back porch for years. It works fine. The problem is that checking it requires going online to look at a map to find ours. What I wanted was a small device that is green when the air is fine and turns other colors when it’s worse. Here in LA between smog, wildfires, structure fires, and fireworks, the air quality is all over the place. No specific numbers needed, just a color that gives us a good sense of what’s in the air. So I built one. I called it Ashlight. The details The device is about as simple as it gets, a 16-LED WS2812B ring driven by an ESP32-C3 SuperMini, running ESPHome. It polls the PurpleAir over the home network every few minutes, computes the AQI, and shows the result as a color. Nothing leaves the house. No cloud service, no API key. The PurpleAir has a local JSON endpoint that’s simple to query. If the internet goes down, the light keeps working, good for a device whose job is to tell you about a wildfire. Building it seemed…