ESP8266 Community Forum

Hello,

I am thinking of a project where I would need to light up 20 leds depending on data adquired from an external api with an ESP8266-01.
How could I manage to control 20 leds individually ? ( I can not use a LED lcd or so, as, in my project, each led will be far away from the others and in "odd" positions).

Thanks .

With an ESP-01 you only option is to use I2C I/O expanders such as the MCP23017 or PCF8575 (or PCA9685 if you need PWM dimming).

With ESP modules that have more GPIOs, there are more options like:
- charlieplexing basically comes for free, you can drive 20 LEDs using 5 GPIOs, but addressing the LEDs is a bit complicated. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlieplexing
- using 74HC595 shift registers. These are really cheap, easy to interface and can be driven at high speed using the SPI port.

Hi, if you can use WS2812 LEDs it's easy.
https://www.adafruit.com/category/168
https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_NeoPixel

Barnabybear wrote:Hi, if you can use WS2812 LEDs it's easy.
https://www.adafruit.com/category/168
https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_NeoPixel

Thanks,

As a matter of fact I ordered a bunch of independent Neo pixels a while ago, just to test things out. I am getting them tomorrow. But, with independent ones, would I be able to do this? Note that they are not chained one to another. For what I want to do (put leds in different places in a very big frame... maybe it's not an option no? (I am a complete newbie in electronics, so maybe I missed something).