WLED Arduino WiFi LED Controller
github.comI love WLED and have used it on over a dozen lighting projects with ESP32s and ESP8266s. It makes it so ridiculously easy, and has an incredible set of features with a great app to control it all and integrate with other services.
- Kids bedside lamps. Using the timed preset changes in WLED it goes from bright white/blue for reading time, then at bedtime it plays a rainbow animation and fades to a bright orange with pulses of similar colours, then throughout the next hour fades to a gentle animation of soft colours that stay on all night as their nightlights.
- Down-lighting on shelving, using strips of LEDs under each shelf lip. Gives a nice bright warm-white glow to everything on the shelves which shifts to a soft blue at night for mood lighting in the room.
- Ambient lighting throughout various rooms that is controlled via Home Assistant.
- LED strips on my 3D printers which are turned on via Octoprint when the printers start warming up, and stay on throughout the prints for timelapses then the lights all go green when the prints are finished.
... and many more. Every single one of those projects were simple 1-day affairs thanks to WLED. Stick the LEDs where you want them, wire them up to an ESP + a PSU (usually an old phone charger with a chopped USB cable to split out power), and flash the ESP and boot. Then the rest is done sitting down with your phone and playing with the sequence editor or choosing presets/timers.
Can you link to what bedside lamp you're using? I'm happy to modify/retrofit an existing lamp but have yet to find something that would work well with LED strips.
If it doesn't have to be too bright you can use many lamps by wrapping a LED strip around a tube and placing that roughly where a bulb would go. Lanterns can also look cool that way if they have frosted sides.
> shifts to a soft blue at night for mood lighting
Blue at night might not be the best choice https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-ha...
> a great app to control it all and integrate with other services.
It even has Alexa support that's as easy as checking a box! Love WLED and how easy it is to use even for a non-hardware guy like me.
That first one is pretty neat. Plus, when your kids are an appropriate age, they'll be able to modify their lamp if they want!
I'm a huge fan of WLED. It tends to work flawlessly after some minor tweaking of settings, at least on my ESP8266 board with WS2815 LED strips. The built-in effects are likely sufficient for most uses and can easily be programmatically controlled by something like Home Assistant [1].
If you consider building a setup, I would only recommend ensuring your wiring is correct and the power supplies are sufficient for the LEDs you're using, unless the board's built-in power output (probably with a level shifter to 5V) is enough.
This project is great, I've used it in a number of 3d printed lamps (I did not design, just printed and assembled): Hex wall feature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k58HUUgFhOw Fiber lamp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGlQDPNpxps Canister lamp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdRT6GtUGSo
The community is great too. Their Discord is filled with all kinds of cool project ideas, helpful folks, and discussions of upcoming features.
one of the things I really do like about this, is that you can connect sensors and buttons to the arduino and send/ receive the i/o via wifi.
Huge fan of WLED here.
- I wanted a semi-permanent lighting fixture for Christmas, but something that would work for other holidays as well. I took a bunch of bullet-style leds and inserted them into holes I drilled on a piece of material that matched the gutters. Mounted them just underneath the gutter, you don't even see them unless you're looking for them. "Hanging" my xmas lights outdoors means I hit one IOT button that turns on the power supply, then I can navigate to the private IP attached to the strand. The interface is easy enough that the kids/missus change the lights whenever they feel like it.
- Two years in a row now for Halloween, I used WLED for my pumpkin carving. Carve out the inside, then drill evenly-spaced holes around the pumpkin and insert the same bullet-style LEDs into each hole facing the outside. Wifi-enabled pumpkin. The neighborhood kids call us "the house with the UFO pumpkin that gives out full-sized candybars".
Could you clarify what bullet-style LEDs are and how do they look?
I think probably something like these: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01AG923GI?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2_dt_b_...
I know a lot of people use them punched through maps, for live METARS displays
Does anyone know of a compatible ESP32 development board with a built-in microphone and frequency analyser e.g. an MSGEQ7 (for sound-reactive projects)?
Here's their list of compatible hardware: https://github.com/Aircoookie/WLED/wiki/Compatible-hardware
It's not just for Arduinos. You can plug in an ESP32 and have a HTTP API to control your lights with any UI you like.
Looks like there are even controllers you can buy that have WLED pre-installed: https://kno.wled.ge/basics/compatible-hardware/#controllers-... That's starting to move out of DIY territory and into the realm of a niche consumer product.
How does WLED compare to PixelBlaze?
WLED: Open-Source, software only you can flash on various boards. Doesn't have the scripting/live-coding part that Pixelblaze has (i.e. you need to write your own effects in c++ and compile them in). Doesn't support 2D/3D mappings natively. Has a few more APIs.
Pixelblaze is really nice and in many ways the more advanced option, but for most things I go for a <$5 board with WLED or FastLED over $35 (+shipping +tax) for a PixelBlaze.
I've used both quite a bit for various things.
The biggest differentiator is that Pixelblaze is built around the user being able to define their own patterns, while WLED is more built around getting a turn-key setup as easily as possible. One of the downsides to the Pixelblaze, for me, has been in instances where I just want a simple thing like a specific color, or a simple fade or pattern. While you can do that on the Pixelblaze it can take more time to tweak the PB code vs. just moving a couple of sliders in the WLED interface.
WLED has many really cool advanced features like support for segmentation of one led strip into multiple ones, Synchronization with other instances, Alexa/Google Home support, Phillips Hue Emulation, HTTP API, Controlable over DMX with E1.31 or ArtNet.
There exists even a sound reactive fork. Which analyzes(volume and FFT based) the audio directly on the ESP32.