The world needs more blinky lights, and [Bertus Kruger] has created a neat way to make lights blink wirelessly. He has a footprint in the middle of the board for soldering the castellated ESP8266 module, and an LED ring around it to create the WiFi Pixel. It’s an LED ring that can be controlled over a WiFi connection. His design is based on a combination of the ubiquitous ESP8266 WiFi chip and a NeoPixel ring from AdaFruit, so there are already great examples of how to code and control the hardware. The project is still in progress, but he has released all of the details, including the Gerber files for the board and the Arduino code that the ESP8266 is running.
It’s a great start: add in battery support and you could have an awesome way to have portable LED blinky light rings. For those who want to try it out without building your own circuit boards, [Bertus] says that it could be built with an ESP8266 dev board and an Adafruit NeoPixel ring. Currently, he is running the device from USB, but there is no reason why it couldn’t be powered from a battery for some portable USB blinkiness.
A 3d printed disc shaped enclosure would allow for a large battery and a solar cell as well!
Neat!
Very nice, want to post this on my blog? http://www.esp8266.com, we have a blog section, or at least talk about it under Users Projects! AWESOME!
you know what would be awesome? if you SPOTTED SPAMMING this same message over and over
No its a 100% attempt to make our ESP8266 Community truly a community and get people to participate, so **ONLY** ESP related HAD articles have these messages, I have a passion and am trying to share it…..
Its spam sure, but its related and a very decent resource for people who want to look into the esp8266
And here I thought that we aren’t suppose to put any conductor within few centimeter radius around the antenna except for the module itself to ensure good signal strength. Would the signal range still good with those LEDs and possibly ground pour on the carrier PCB?
Please enlighten me.
It seems to work very well, my work bench is more than 10meters away from my router and there are about 3 interior walls(non-solid) in between. . These ESP-12 units are pretty awesome to work with. I did find that they are pretty power hungry and that with the Wifi and LED’s running they could give a laptop USB a good work-out.
With regards to the code I am currently working on a feature where you can create/save animations. Animations are basically multiple frames with the state of each LED and how long it should stay in that state. The You tube video included is basically a 96 frame animation. :)
I saw these on ebay yesterday.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/LED-RingPixels-WIFI-WifiPixels-16-x-WS2812B-RGB-LEDs-ESP8266-/281786638390?hash=item419bcae036
Comparing the eBay username with the github user indicates it’s the same person.
At work we hooked one up to our Contentious Interrogations system(Jenkins). So every time we have a broken build it goes crazy. I considered adding a little buzzer but that would have driven us crazy… :)
It works very well with MQTT and we have used Node-red(http://nodered.org/) to mange the workflow for it.