31–40 of 80 posts
If you want an interesting side project: spin a string of these addressable LEDs to make a circular display, or sweep a plane of them for a display volume.
https://www.makerfol.io/project/Z5XFwxh-lighttracer-a-photog...
Latest, gamma-corrected version: https://i.imgur.com/3o1jzh3.jpg
Colors: https://www.instagram.com/p/BmJ5w_nA6ey/?taken-by=eltthought...
All I need now is to take one good photo with it so I can write the post.
Nice to see you on Hacker News Ben! This is Chris a.k.a. ChrisLights, I spoke to you about Sparkled on one of your videos a while back. It's awesome to see you getting some recognition for your excellent work on Pixelblaze, keep it up!
I'm working on several medium sized LED projects and am curious if anyone has a guide or links to buying WS2812 or similar strands. I've bought a ~10 of these https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ZHB9M6A/ref=oh_aui_sear... but I would love to find a slightly cheaper source. Alibaba seems to sell them at half the cost but product titles, photos, and descriptions don't ever seem to match
https://www.ebay.com/itm/WS2812B-Strip-LED-Lights-5050-RGB-3...
Nice to see you on Hacker News Ben! This is Chris a.k.a. ChrisLights, I spoke to you about Sparkled on one of your videos a while back. It's awesome to see you getting some recognition for your excellent work on Pixelblaze, keep it up!
Thanks! I'd love bring these together in some way. With the sequencer in https://github.com/sparkled/sparkled and the network sync stuff in https://github.com/simap/Firestorm we could have a really nice sequencer setup!
I'm working hard on a stage editor at the moment, I'll send you a video sometime soon :)
I'm normally not big on LEDs but some of those patterns were pretty mind bending
- Falcon PiHat - connect to a Pi and is able to manage 2 string of ~800 LEDs each
- EsPixelStick uses an ESP to run pixels - Can be bought on Amazon
both use a standard Ethernet protocol for sending pixel data.
I use xlights to control them but there are various controllers out there.
How does this compare to FastLED [1] on the same ESP8266 (and ESP32) platform? FastLED is free and open source, and support almost all LED drivers out there. Writing animations with FastLED might not be as easy as with Pixelblaze, but similarly only requires a few lines of code. [1] https://github.com/FastLED/FastLED
Pixelblaze is that plus a web interface, compiler, IDE, and pattern library all over WiFi. You can reprogram your work remotely without cables, and all real-time, or even on a phone. I found that quickly iterating I could get a better intuitive sense of the changes I was making and get the look I was going for with less hassle.
For apa102/sk9822 LEDs, the 32-bit math engine in Pixelblaze along with the HDR driver (5 + 8 bits) lets you get better color control at lower brightness levels and smoother transitions than what's currently in FastLED. I have a number of desk and/or nightlight projects that look just as good at 2% brightness, where with 8-bit per channel color you start to get extreme posterization and color mixes start failing.
Another slight advantage is that Pixelblaze uses a pipelined driver where pixel data doesn't usually need to be buffered before being send out to the LEDs. WS2812 are particularly sensitive, so there is a buffered mode for them, but for other chipsets Pixelblaze renders the pixel data just in time and doesn't require a framebuffer.
If you want an interesting side project: spin a string of these addressable LEDs to make a circular display, or sweep a plane of them for a display volume.
I did just that, and it's fantastic: https://www.makerfol.io/project/Z5XFwxh-lighttracer-a-photog... Latest, gamma-corrected version: https://i.imgur.com/3o1jzh3.jpg Colors: https://www.instagram.com/p/BmJ5w_nA6ey/?taken-by=eltthought... All I need now is to take one good photo with it so I can write the post.
I really like the tree sitting outside, it's like a hologram from a sf movie.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did just that, and it's fantastic: https://www.makerfol.io/project/Z5XFwxh-lighttracer-a-photog... Latest, gamma-corrected version: https://i.imgur.com/3o1jzh3.jpg Colors: https://www.instagram.com/p/BmJ5w_nA6ey/?taken-by=eltthought... All I need now is to take one good photo with it so I can write the post.
Hah cool :) This one was on one of my idea dump lists a couple of years ago, it's super nice to see it in real life, beautiful work! I really like the tree sitting outside, it's like a hologram from a sf movie.
I'll release the code soon if you want to try it out, it's pretty much just an ESP8266 connected to a LED strip.
