jonfuller/holiday-lights-participant

Participant flavor of the SEP Makes Holiday Display Challenge

SEP Makes Holiday Light Display Challenge

This is the technical companion for the SEP Makes Holiday Light Display Challenge.

Technical Details

The system is built using an ESP32 and some WS2812 RGB light strips.

Specifically...

Hardware Setup

• ESP32 - AdaFruit Huzzah 32 Feather (https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-huzzah32-esp32-feather)
• LED Strip - (https://a.co/d/iEG4w1d)
• Jumper wires - (https://a.co/d/8bPsRG8)
• 18" Christmas tree

Software Setup

• Arduino IDE - https://www.arduino.cc/en/software
• ESP32 board
  • In Preferences, add this as a board manager url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/espressif/arduino-esp32/gh-pages/package_esp32_dev_index.json
  • In Tools > Board Manager search for ESP32, install.
  • The board we're using is the Adafruit ESP32 Feather.
• Libraries
  • FastLED
  • Adafruit_GFX_Library
  • FrameBuffer_GFX
  • FastLED_NeoMatrix

Creating Your Light Display

It's as easy as writing a single function!

Here's what you need to do:

1. Write a parameterless function with return type void.
2. Modify the contents of 3 arrays: leds1, leds2, leds3
   • Each array is NUM_LEDS long. NUM_LEDS is 300.
   • Each array element is a CRGB structure...a hex color code in the form 0xRRGGBB
3. Prefix your function and all helper methods with your initials (e.g. JCF).
4. Think of a title for your creation. Ideally something that is 16 characters or less.
5. Test it on the rig by Jon's desk.
6. Please! No delays or crashing.

Note:

• Your function will get called repeatedly in a loop.
• The driver loop will take care of sending the data to the LED strips.
• Take a look at the FastLED docs: https://fastled.io/docs/3.1/

Some More Details

There are a couple pieces of state that do change during the program. You are encouraged to take advantage of them to make your display more dynamic:

• gLoopCounter - Starting at 0, increments each time through the loop.
• gHue - increments roughly every 20ms

Need Help or Inspiration?

The repo comes with a few samples to get you started:

• straightYesChaser
• rainbow
• confetti
• sinelon