ChristmasLights

Intro

My oldest son was saying he loves christmas lights. We've never put up christmas lights before, so I figured if I was going to put up any kind of lights, I should probably put up lights that I can control dynamically, so that I can light up for any season.

Implementation

This code runs on multiple Adafruit HUZZAH esp8266 breakout boards. Each board controls one or more strips in my installation.

It is:

Field upgradable
Dynamically changeable via JSON POST
A labor of love

How to use it

Clone this repo
Create an auth.h file in the directory with the .ino file, that contains #define statements for ssid and password for your wifi.
Upload the code to your esp8266 board.
Plug your strip into the board. You need a led strip that is compatible with FastLED -- changing this code for your strip is beyond the scope of this readme. My WS2812b strip I plugged the signal line into port 5.
Power the strip and the esp8266. The HUZZAH support up to 6V on V+, so I power the HUZZAH and the LED lights via the same +5V, 60A power supply I use for central distribution.
Send JSON payloads to http://boardip/lights to control the different modes.

Configurations available

mode:

1: Red, Green, Orange, Blue random pulsing
2: icicle mode
3: confetti mode
4: rainbow (solid)
5: rainbow (beats by bpm)
6: Red-White-Blue Chase (for 4th of july?)
10: red pulse
11: constant red
20: green pulse
21: constant green
30: blue pulse
31: constant blue
40: orange pulse
41: constant orange
50: swipe (red and green)
51: swipe (red and blue)
52: swipe (blue and green)
99: Gradient Mode

bpm:

numeric value that defines how many beats per minute the animation should use. Keep in mind that this value is not capped at a high value, it is possible to annoy the watchdog timer in an esp8266 microcontroller by setting this really high.

brightness:

numeric value between 0 and 255. 255 is very bright, 0 is off. Middle value is a combination of those two states.

icicle_new_min, icicle_new_max:

These two values are the times, in milliseconds, that the program should use as the lower and upper bound of random generation of time. New icicles will drip every new_min to new_max milliseconds.

icicle_wait_min, icicle_wait_max:

currently not implemented, but I plan to have the drip of water occasionally pause, as I've seen on some commercial icicle strips.

sync_start:

Send a unixtime value in this payload and the esp8266 will fade-to-black the strip, and at the appointed unixtime, the selected pattern will start. Might be useful for synchronizing light shows.

Example

curl -XPOST -d'{"mode":5,"bpm":8,"brightness":4}' http://yourip/lights