I made a 3’x3’ light box full of WS2812 strips and white LED strips to be used as a SAD Alarm Clock. It hangs on our bedroom wall and at 6am it begins a sunrise colour sequence lasting about 20 minutes and ultimately shines brite white light until we get out of bed. I’ll post more about this project eventually (firmware on github). I need to take some better photos and video of it.
The controller is a board I designed which combines an ESP8266 with the necessary bits for this project, but I think I made it suitable for pretty much any project that needs colourful lights and wifi for under tenbucks.
- Level-shifted GPIO pins, including one for a WS2812 strip
- A footprint that lets you solder the end of the strip right to the board
- WS2812 is on the I2S port, so it can use DMA using this hack (or the Arduino-compatible version)
- an auxiliary high-current PWM channel with a power MOSFET (I use this for white LED strips to make brighter white than the WS2812s can do on their own)
- Programming using a standard 6-pin FTDI cable (no onboard USB you wuss)
I got 3 boards, used one for my project, and made kits for @Rob_MacKenzie and @Jarrett since they expressed interest in this board. If there is enough interest I can make more. Comments and feedback for improvement welcome!