If you want to blink a ton of WS2812-alike LED pixels over WiFi, the hardware side of things is easy enough: an LED strip, and ESP8266 unit, and a beefy enough power supply to feed them. But the software side — that’s where it can be a bit of a pain.
Enter Mc Lighting. It makes the software side of things idiot-proof. Flash the firmware onto the ESP8266, and you’ve got your choice of REST, WebSockets, or MQTT to get the data in. This means that it’ll work with Homekit, NodeRed, or an ESP-hosted web interface that you can pull up from any smartphone.
The web interface is particularly swell, and has a bunch of animations built in. (Check out the video below.) This means that you can solder some wires, flash an ESP, and your least computer-savvy relatives can be controlling the system in no time. And speaking of videos, Mc Lighting’s author [Tobias] has compiled a playlist of projects that use the library, also just below. The docs on GitHub are great, and also check out the wiki.
So what are you waiting for? Do you or your loved ones need some blink in your life? And while you’re ordering LED strips, get two. You’re going to want to build TWANG! as well.
I absolutely love these, next step I need to do is get them to run on a timer :D Voilá, Christmas tree lights!