After spending a few years writing and sharing animations with the FastLED display library for addressable LED strips, I incorporated sound reactivity to WLED. This included both volume reactive routines as well as frequency reactive routines using various Fast Fourier Transform libraries.
My YouTube account has several animations:
https://www.youtube.com/user/atuline/videos
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I have over 50 animated lanterns, which were made using tissue paper and various frames such as:
They have been on exhibition at the following venues:
Click on images in the article to see an animated version. The animations are customizable via Wi-Fi.
Continue Reading →In using the Arduino FFT library for our ESP32 based project, we select the following sampling information:
SAMPLE_RATE = 10240
SAMPLES = 512
The reason we don’t go higher is that we just don’t need to. Mathematics says that this gives us frequency analysis up to 5120 Khz, and that’s a very high frequency to listen to.
Continue Reading →There are several commercial and non-commercial options available to control LED displays. These range from small portable displays running on a dedicated microcontroller to large commercial ones that are controlled by custom applications running on a dedicated computer and multiple controllers. WLED is a non-comercial (open source) program and is the probably the best available for portable displays as it supports a wide variety of animations/colour palettes and can be controlled by your cell phone over WiFi. In order to make your own WLED displays, you will need a laptop/desktop and:
Continue Reading →WLED is a relatively new platform for communicating with and animating LED’s without requiring a PC to drive them. As a FastLED afficionado, I’ve been developing my own code to communicate with several displays. The summer of 2019 was spent implementing an MQTT infrastructure that would support my FastLED sketches and after MUCH trial and error, I got it to work as shown here:
As a result of the challenges I faced, this effort took several months and I still didn’t accomplish my goal at the end.
Continue Reading →These links provide a rough pricing guideline for sourcing addressable LED electronic components for an animated lantern from Amazon. Locally would cost more:
Cost of purchasing electronic components is approximately: $55 plus tax & shipping
Lantern consumables include:
Project:
To implement 30+ controlled portable lighting displays in an area where not all displays can communicate with each other, or a central router.
Continue Reading →My goal:
To be able to control multiple lanterns at the same time in order to create a coordinated display.
The Reality:
The MQTT client library I use for Arduinos (pubsubclient) is ‘blocking’ in that if your connectivity to the server is not reliable, then the display sometimes stutters and possibly stops. I’ve tried some non-blocking workarounds, but it’s not 100% reliable.
In addition, although I can control these lanterns in a lab environment, the message often doesn’t make it through to one of the 10 Arduinos I’m testing with and has to be resent. Therefore, a command for them to simultaneously reboot works maybe 1 in 5 attempts across those 10 lanterns.
As a result, I think that while controlling lanterns via wifi and MQTT is pretty good, controlling them for coordinated displays is not that reliable.
This is the IoT MQTT Panel Pro layout I use for my FastLED based ‘mesh’ sketch. I’ve also got a physical control panel consisting of:
