Physical build · bench-proven, enclosure in progress
Hue Mood Console
Six mechanical keys, one knob, no phone. Press a scene and the room follows: Bright, Concentrate, Dimmed, Red, Tokyo, Pandemonium.
scene: Tokyo · the page follows, the way the room does
It already works
Phase one ran end to end on real hardware: a button press travels ESP32 → Wi-Fi → Hue Bridge → bulbs, and the six scenes fire from physical switches while the knob dims the actual room live. The bridge is local and the protocol is plain HTTP against the v1 API; no cloud, no app, no account between a keypress and the lights.
Firmware details are where the feel lives: 40 ms debounce per key, encoder ticks throttled to one bridge call every 200 ms with a final settle write, and per-scene backlight tints at a 12 percent idle glow so the console reads in a dark room without lighting it.
Plastic argues back
The top plate’s first revision hid a 0.8 mm inward overhang in a relief cut that only the slicer noticed. It sagged mid-print, invisibly, and every switch dragged on the way in. The fix deleted the relief and thinned the plate from 4.0 to 3.5 mm; the reprint came out clean with zero supports, and a pair of cheap test coupons locked the switch-web thickness at 1.5 mm for a firm MX snap before the expensive part ever printed again.
The current printed plate holds all six switches dry-fit, and the 2×3 layout passed its feel gate in hand. Next: one WS2812B bench test under a real switch, then the full wedge body gets modeled around the results.