{"id":2481,"date":"2020-04-28T22:51:25","date_gmt":"2020-04-28T22:51:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/funkboxing.com\/wordpress\/?p=2481"},"modified":"2021-01-03T17:54:34","modified_gmt":"2021-01-03T17:54:34","slug":"wled-the-once-and-future-king","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/funkboxing.com\/wordpress\/?p=2481","title":{"rendered":"WLED &#8211; The Once and Future King"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here&#8217;s a video of a few lights running WLED, but it doesn&#8217;t demonstrate a fraction of the control options or effects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"WLED Upgrades\" width=\"695\" height=\"391\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/cWT2JcYUmt8?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><figcaption>Trusty Old 8&#215;8 Matrix, &#8216;hextube&#8217; (SEVEN), and a balsa tube<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m still really digging the hextube configuration. I don&#8217;t really plan on making more of them because it&#8217;s kind of quirky and I don&#8217;t think many people would be into it, but I really dig it but I haven&#8217;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 &#8216;segments&#8217; 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 &#8216;wipe&#8217; running on the outer and area LEDs but with different timing and opposite directions, and &#8216;plasma&#8217; running on the inner tube LEDs. I think it looks pretty cool. I don&#8217;t even want to start parsing out how I would recreate this loop in an Arduino function, and now I don&#8217;t have to- and I might never again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The video also shows an 8&#215;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&#8243; acrylic were appropriate for this, but the thing is solid. It&#8217;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&#8217;ve learned you should do that for larger displays. The display is just running &#8216;plasma&#8217; on very low brightness to let the hextube shine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And there&#8217;s an obligatory balsa tube because it&#8217;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&#8217;s selectable and dimmable in the webUI. I&#8217;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&#8217;t work in the custom FX either. It&#8217;s not a huge deal but I&#8217;d like to get it straight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I would like to take this opportunity to give the hextube a more fitting moniker since I&#8217;ve called several tests and builds &#8216;hextube&#8217;. It&#8217;s become a bit of a &#8216;my grandfathers axe&#8217; situation with the parts but I think it&#8217;s going to stay what it is now. So I&#8217;m going to start calling this particular build SEVEN.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 <a href='http:\/\/funkboxing.com\/wordpress\/?p=2481' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[53,47],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/funkboxing.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2481"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/funkboxing.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/funkboxing.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/funkboxing.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/funkboxing.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2481"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/funkboxing.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2482,"href":"http:\/\/funkboxing.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2481\/revisions\/2482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/funkboxing.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/funkboxing.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/funkboxing.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}