WLED

I heard a lot about “if you want to control LEDs, use WLED“. I never had a need to control LEDs (the strip type), but today I had some spare time and I tested it with a spare ESP8266 and a single WS2812B LED. WLED is not really made for single LEDs, but as a proof-of-concept it’ll have to do.

Can’t say much here though: the install went as expected, connecting to the access point it created was straightforward, setting up my WiFi credentials worked, and controlling the single LED via web interface or Android app was as easy as it can get. This was one of the easiest installs of any IoT thing I ever had.

Now I do have to get me some LED strips to play a bit more with it…

Update: Ok, got myself a 60 LED WS2812B strip. And WLED effects look much better for obvious reasons. And you can split the 60 LEDs into segments and set their respective colors via curl easily:

❯ curl -s -X POST http://192.168.21.138/json -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{seg:[{},{},{col:[[0,0,100]]}]}' | jq .
{
  "success": true
}

Above sets the color of the 3rd segment to blue (assuming the effect is “Solid”). That’s way better and easier than any other API I’ve seen for WiFi connected lights.

Advertisement