LightBrain

Overview

The initial motivation was to develop a compact and relatively versatile light control device. Communicating with colleagues interested in electronics, I made a few design decisions so that the functionality would meet a number of requests: wide power supply voltages, protection, buttons, DMX support, shifted ouputs.

  • ESP32-WROOM module
  • four level shifted outputs
  • 6-30V protected power input
  • RS485 chip (DMX Support)
  • Convinent buttons and user LED
  • Very handy WAGO spring terminals

pcb schematic

Usage

Designed mostly for the usage with WLED firmware by Aircookie

There is no USB=>UART bridge in design. This was done to make the design smaller and cheaper. In the future, a firmware device with pogopin will be made, but most likely there will be a revision of the entire design. WLED has OTA functionality which can be used in case of update the firmware.

The board comes with a few examples that I wrote to test the functionality of the board. I really like micropython, which works fine on these boards. Very handy for prototyping, the buttons and custom LED makes it interactive. Unfortunately, I never got around to running DMX with python. Then I wrote an example using the SparkFunDMX library, which works like a charm.

Appearance and Examples

pcb board pcb board pcb board

Illustration of working WLED:

Demo1.mp4
Demo2.mp4
Demo3.mp4

Illustration of working DMX:

DMX.Demo.mp4