I was batting around the idea of building an “on air” sign that we could put up near our office doors with a couple coworkers, and one of them pulled a Wemo out of a drawer and some Applescript out of his butt and made it so.
What’s the minimum viable version of this project? ESP or PartyCat running from a Lipo with USB charger? 3D printed or laser cut enclosure? 
You want it web enabled with 5v output to RGB LEDs? Party Cat for sure.
I don’t care so much about RGB for this use case but it would be unarguably better to have the “ON AIR” be rainbow coloured
Totally - I’m inclined to think that rainbow lighting is essential. Could also go analog and use one giant common cathode/anode RGB LED and a few components on a bread board. That’s pretty barbaric though. 
Do we have any inventory of PartyCats?
if you can go 3.3v and 500ma; you could solve all your battery issues with a Bikeshed Board.
probably will run 5v leds okay…if not can always use a level shifter.
Just wanted to bikeshed the bikeshed board.
The old version of the partycats could potentially be easier. But if you’re doing a simple one, you could also just model it after “Major Tom”, the node that’s responsible for the Open sign out front. Major Tom is just a simple ESP8266 with an SSR (on 3.3v). With the old partycats, you’d have the advantage of being able to use the mosfet at 5V.
A really simple version could be made with a regular (lower power) LED bulb, an SSR, an ESP, a sheet of (red) acrylic, and a laser cut box with ON AIR cut out. Or you could skip the SSR and the ESP and just plug it in whenever you need it
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