My recent experience with WLED has made me think all these years coding out FX loops were a monumental waste of time. I should have just waited for WLED to exist. Not really, I learned a lot, but WLED is seriously the benevolent overlord of LED control code, and of course it includes the godfather of LED code- FastLED. I know I can gush over awesome open source projects, but WLED is a transcendental gift to reality. I have been looking for and vaguely pretending to plan to code something like this since I started playing with LEDs, but this is far beyond my abilities as a coder, or a human being. Anyway- WLED is the alpha and the omega for LED projects. So I’ve been smartening up a couple of dumb lights with it and smiling and clapping at some for the first time in a long while.
Here’s a video of a few lights running WLED, but it doesn’t demonstrate a fraction of the control options or effects.
I’m still really digging the hextube configuration. I don’t really plan on making more of them because it’s kind of quirky and I don’t think many people would be into it, but I really dig it but I haven’t been able to figure out a good FX loop for it, so I gave it an ESP8266 brain and took it to WLED university. Now I can control it with QLC+ via E1.31, but the onboard WLED FX are pretty wicked too. WLED lets me define different sections of the strip to do different FX, so I defined ‘segments’ for the outer tube LEDs, the area LEDs, and the inner tube LEDs and set them all to slightly different loops and pallettes. The video shows ‘wipe’ running on the outer and area LEDs but with different timing and opposite directions, and ‘plasma’ running on the inner tube LEDs. I think it looks pretty cool. I don’t even want to start parsing out how I would recreate this loop in an Arduino function, and now I don’t have to- and I might never again.
The video also shows an 8×8 LED matrix I built a while back using WS2812B strips, the bluetooth breakout board, and about 20 lbs of acrylic. I have no idea why I thought 3 sheets of 1/2″ acrylic were appropriate for this, but the thing is solid. It’s been running the fire effect 24/7 for at least the past 5 years. It was pretty trivial to swap out the Nano board for an ESP01. I also added a capacitor across the +/- just because I’ve learned you should do that for larger displays. The display is just running ‘plasma’ on very low brightness to let the hextube shine.
And there’s an obligatory balsa tube because it’s running WLED too and balsa tubes are just my jam now. I modified the WLED source to add the little crossfade effect loop for the balsa tubes so it starts up running that and it’s selectable and dimmable in the webUI. I’m having a little trouble figuring out how to handle the WS2811 PCB LEDs with WLED. I want them to stay off for regular onboard FX and only use them in the custom FX, but if I put them in a different segment they don’t work in the custom FX either. It’s not a huge deal but I’d like to get it straight.
I would like to take this opportunity to give the hextube a more fitting moniker since I’ve called several tests and builds ‘hextube’. It’s become a bit of a ‘my grandfathers axe’ situation with the parts but I think it’s going to stay what it is now. So I’m going to start calling this particular build SEVEN.