Ambi-mesh is your new local network mesh for self-made ambient lights. It runs on ESP microcontrollers that are equipped with single-wire-based LED strips (such as the WS2812) and is able to scale with multiple instances inside your network. This enables more flexible usage by different clients. Currently, a Python client is available, which makes it possible to replicate screen colors from a personal computer to the network.
- Python 3.12 (tested; earlier Python versions should also work)
- Arduino IDE
Follow these steps to run the mesh software on your ESPs (e.g., on a NodeMCU):
- Connect your data pin of the LED strip to pin 3 of the ESP (use the GPIO3 pin; do specific research for your board)
- Set up your Arduino IDE to upload the script to the boards
- Install the esp8266 package in the board manager (add http://arduino.esp8266.com/stable/package_esp8266com_index.json to additional board manager URLs in preferences)
- Install the following libraries:
- Adafruit NeoPixel (Adafruit)
- ArduinoJson (Benoit Blanchon)
- UUID (Rob Tillaart)
- Open src/esp/esp.ino in your Arduino IDE
- Select your board and upload the script
- Repeat with other ESPs you might have
This project uses tkinter to provide a basic UI for mesh network interactions. Make sure that tkinter works in
your Python environment by executing python -m tkinter. It should open a window that shows the current tcl/tk
version. If you are on Mac and use pyenv to manage Python environments, you can install a new version of tcl/tk via
homebrew: brew install tcl-tk. After that, you can reinstall your Python version to make sure that the homebrew
version of tcl/tk is used.
After you make sure that tkinter works, you can follow these steps to run the local Python client:
cd src/client
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
python app.pyThe usage, along with some screenshots of the client, is described in the following wiki page.