#Miniatures Addressable RGB Lighting

4 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

pure cape
#

One of my christmas presents was a kit for building this miniature Japanese street, and I decided to customize it with some addressable RGB lighting controlled by an ESP32.

Before investing a lot of time building out and debugging lighting effects in C++, I decided to build myself a little live visualizer on my computer and send the individual color values over HTTP requests. It's definitely a simple and silly project, but I thought I'd share.

quiet remnant
#

Wow... you should share more about it...

  • What are you using? (e.g. what kind of LEDs)
  • How did you build that UI?
  • Are you planning to opensource any of it?

I have a model train project, with all the train stuff figured out (mostly, I need to re-do some PCB designs from scratch to solve some major flaws, but I know what to do)... but I don't have the decoration stuff figured out yet.

pure cape
#
  • I'm using these "fairy light"-style WS2812 LED strips https://www.aliexpress.com/item/3256801864424973.html I was hoping to find some in an even smaller form factor, but these ended up working well enough.
  • The UI is built in an obscure design tool called Origami, although the same technique can be done elsewhere. I'll probably build a web-based version of it that's more shareable. At a high level, I took pictures of the miniature with the lights off, and with each light on individually. That let me generate images representing how much each light affects the scene, and I can then use blend modes to multiply each of those by their correct color, then add them to the base image with the "screen" blend mode.
  • On the ESP side, it's a pretty simple lambda effect that reads a text sensor as an array of hex values and sets the lights accordingly. I posted the lambda and a simple web UI for controlling it here. Happy to share the Origami UI file as well, but it only runs on macOS. 🙃
quiet remnant
#

It looks awesome. In a previous iteration of my model (not using any ESP), I used icon representations, and it works pretty well, but I had just two on-off lights. I really liked the way your representation looks, and I think that kind of approach would make a great interface on a tablet (or phone, but that's likely too small) for "visitors" to play with the lights in parallel with the actual running of the model. I don't even know if ESPHome would be the right approach there, but yeah, it looks like a nice possibility.
Have you considered partitions, for a more ESPHome-native experience/configuration?