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Christmas Lights as Things

PostPosted: Sun Nov 19, 2017 12:01 am
by perigalacticon
I am endeavoring to make a Christmas led light show utilizing my experience with programming addressable LED strips using Arduino IDE. I am new to ESP8266 but have tinkered with a few boards and ESP32.

My idea thus far is to have several ESP8266 stations controlling LEDs physically distributed within ~30ft and connected via WIFI to a central ESP8266 . The central ESP8266 would send serial commands 'simultaneously' to the ESP8266 stations that control leds such as a start command; and then all stations would start their programs simultaneously and all would be synchronous due to the accuracy of the clocks (?). Does this sound feasible or possible?

Re: Christmas Lights as Things

PostPosted: Sun Nov 19, 2017 5:44 am
by Barnabybear
Hi, yes it has been done in various forms. I would recommend going along a recognised route as this becomes quite additive.
To create the sequences: https://xlights.org/
To play the sequences: xLights or better still http://falconchristmas.com/forum/index.php?board=8.0
To control the pixels: https://www.amazon.com/ESPixelStick-Wir ... B072XT1V77
http://forkineye.com/wp-content/uploads ... -Usage.pdf
https://github.com/forkineye/ESPixelStick

You can make your own pixelstick – I use the Wemos mini D1.
Lots of videos about (to many infact).

Re: Christmas Lights as Things

PostPosted: Sun Nov 19, 2017 1:17 pm
by Luc Volders
As Barnabybear's idea will undoubtedly work (I haven't tried it hough)

However I think you should not make things overly complicated.
Just use ESP-Basic and have one ESP send messages using UDP to the other ESP's

Can easily be done and the distance is 30 ft as you said so that would be no problem.

No cloud service needed and can be controlled by your own computer or smartphone (using msg branch).

Look in this forum to ESP-Basic boards and there are plenty examples to achive this.

Luc

Re: Christmas Lights as Things

PostPosted: Sun Nov 19, 2017 9:56 pm
by perigalacticon
Thanks. Luc what did you mean precisely by ESP-Basic? I searched for that but didn't find anything, I don't see a forum topic for it. Did you mean just search for basic related posts?