Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

I’ve been reading about neat ideas people are trying with the AT protocol, the tech behind Bluesky.

For a bit of clarity, AT Protocol is the set of rules for how identities, repos, and records work. The ATmosphere is what people call the ecosystem on top of it. Bluesky is one app on the ATmosphere, and there are many others.

ATmosphere is not a blockchain. There’s no ledger. It’s more like a GitHub repo that you can control and move. In fact, on the ATmosphere, your data is referred to as your Repo. The funky DID string is your identity on the ATmosphere, which can point to your personal repo of data. The key idea behind this is that you can move your data around without having to ask any permission of anyone.

With that context in mind, in the past I’ve seen posts with View Publication on them and wondered what it was all about and if links to my weblog posts could appear this way.

I looked into the existing WordPress -> Bluesky plug-ins, but they are all focused on auto-magically posting to Bluesky when you Publish a WordPress post. Good for a news or newsletter site, but not what I want at all. Typically I publish first, and then post on social media later with the blurb and link at a time I choose.

The View Publication badging works on Bluesky by using standard.site.

standard.site is a protocol for an AT record you can publish about your site and about individual documents on your site. Kinda like registering a book with the Library of Congress.

There are a few hoops to jump through to get this working. First is making a site.standard.publication record that allows you to prove you control your domain. Second is creating a site.standard.document record of the weblog post to your repo.

Since nothing I could find did what I wanted, I worked with Claude to build a WordPress plug-in to do the setup and make it so when I posted a link to my weblog on Bluesky, it would display with the View Publication framing.

I call the plug-in Controlled Atmosphere.

The plug-in setup is fairly simple, the most difficult aspect is getting an App Password for the plug-in to use. Currently you can set one up under Settings -> Privacy and Security -> App passwords.

There are a few changes the plug-in makes, adding two verification files to allow Bluesky to verify you control your site using /.well-known/. This shouldn’t be an issue for most, but if you run into an issue, consult your favorite LLM to get some help.

Once the plug-in is running, when you publish a new post, a record of the post is created auto-magically, so that Bluesky can match it up and display the View Publication framing. Your post will have a tag that points to the ATmosphere record.

This plug-in is for people who DON’T want WordPress auto-posting to Bluesky. If that’s what you are looking for, Automattic’s Atmosphere plug-in is what you want.

Code is on GitHub at https://github.com/cruftbox/controlled-atmosphere

Even with a simple project like this, I learned a tremendous amount about how Bluesky and the wider ATmosphere ecosystem works. The details can be complex, but the concepts aren’t once you pull back the curtain.

This post is for people on Bluesky, if you’re not on Bluesky, keep scrolling.

I built an app that sends you a daily DM with final scores and today’s game schedule for teams you follow.

Looks like this:

MLB, NBA, WNBA, NFL, NHL, MLS, NWSL, Premier League, and tournaments.

Silence on days your teams don’t play.

No login, no app to install. Text only.

DM @sportscrawl.app on Bluesky to start.

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 pretty straightforward: Get parts, write a little code, test it, make an enclosure.

The parts are crazy cheap. The ESP32 was ~$4 and the LED ring was ~$5. A capacitor and resistor for the minimum of circuit board protection.

My soldering is an abomination, mainly because I didn’t want to build it on a breadboard. The resistor and capacitor are just kind of floating in the air.

I leaned on Claude for the coding. After flashing the ESP32 with ESPHome, Home Assistant was able to see it easily.

We made the color a gradient, shifting into the next color as the AQI increased instead of six distinct steps: green -> yellow -> orange -> red -> purple -> maroon. I set it to shift to lowest brightness at night to avoid lighting up the room.

I did learn that the PurpleAir sensor is also running a tiny processor and doesn’t always respond to the HTTP request for JSON. Evidently, when it’s uploading every two minutes to the PurpleAir map, it ignores everything else. The code is set to be OK with this and retry as needed.

After getting it up and running, I found that the ESP32-C3 SuperMini’s onboard wifi antenna is bad. Not marginally bad, bad bad.

The signal strength was so bad the device was unusable when in the dining room.

I was pretty frustrated, but found Peter Neufeld’s blog on adding a small antenna.

The fix is a sweet hack: solder a 31 mm piece of wire to the existing antenna endpoints. 31 mm is a quarter wavelength of the 2.4 GHz wifi signal.

I tinned a wire, bent it into shape, and soldered it onto the ESP32.

Amazingly, it worked with the Ashlight residing in the dining room.

If I were doing this over, I’d get an ESP32 with the U.FL connector for an external antenna and a small flexible patch antenna. Lesson learned.

For the enclosure, I couldn’t find something online that fit the bill, so I built something in Tinkercad.

I wanted to use a translucent PLA, but the closest I had on hand was some glow-in-the-dark PLA. A little more finicky to print with, but it ended up working out. It’s a super simple enclosure with a hole for the USB-C cable to bring in power. Here are the STLs I designed.

The lid is just a friction fit, but holds together nicely.

Ashlight is in the dining room, glowing a pale yellow-green. In the morning, Michele and I read the paper and drink coffee there, so it tells us what to expect at a glance.

Here’s a short video about the process.

Code is on GitHub at github.com/cruftbox/ashlight.

The README has the full wiring, AQI math, and considerably more detail than anyone needs but that Claude feels is essential.