I don’t have alexa in this house, but I do have home assistant. So this isn’t any more complicated.
I have the esp powered by a separate wall wart, and it controls a relay for the 12V PSU for the lights. So I can always reach the WLED service, and the 12V power to the lights is only on when the lights are turned on.
This would be essentially the same thing, but instead of the trigger being talking to Amazon’s servers, the NFC would tell HA to turn on the lights to a preset directly.
gotcha.
I have a home assistant server running too, but haven’t done too much beyond normal scheduling and some motion sensor stuff.
For those using FPP to run your sequences…
This took me way, way too long to figure out.
I wanted to setup a default sequence to run every single day. I then wanted my other sequences to overwrite it for holidays. At first I tried setting this up in the playlists section by having one sequence running all the time, then the other one set for only the days I wanted them to run.
This did not work. Any sequence scheduled on the same day would rotate with each other.
A bit more reading, and what I figured out is you can setup an Event to run every day ‘in the background’. This event can be a sequence file and you can set it to loop. Then, if another playlist is started by the scheduler, it will overwrite the event and the event will be paused until the scheduled event is done.
Or, at least I think this will do what I want. It’s too cold outside for me to go see what the front of my house looks like right now.
Get in the car and drive out there 
I saw a saying that was something like, “There is no bad weather, just bad clothes”. I think I have the right clothes for today, but I am not going out to check.
There’s still a 2500lb chunk of metal attached to the car. I don’t want to have to back it down the driveway again.
This year i opted to decorate the chimney with some LED tape (NDR Electric), i know it’s a bit mixing old fashioned with new style, but it give suuuuch a great ambiance, especially because i cannot make the fire burn every day so it matches great
The lights on the house are still going strong. I still haven’t added anything new to the display. I light them up for various events throughout the year.
Currently they’re providing a small lightening effect for Halloween.
So cool!
My friend is adding LEDs all over his restaurant, and I am trying to convince him to let me wire it up with individually addressable ones.
Now that I finally have my new house, I will be looking into this after the first of the year (hopefully there is still stock left over). I am still “moving” and still have to get the old house emptied and cleaned so we can list it. I will be revisiting this topic again and again and again and again and again…!!
There is constantly stock for these. They are useful year round…
Just checked and forkineye also has pixelstick v3 in stock.
I need to read up on espixelstick firmware, especially the gulp part… looks like a good way to use an 8266 for control.
I really like WLED. Free and open source.
Yes, the LEDs are always in stock…it was all the control devices that I was referring to. When I looked into it last year, they were all out of stock (this was Oct/Nov last year). I was going to wait until after Christmas to re-investigate, but then the wife and I decided we were going to look for a new house, so that got put on hold. Now I need to take measurements and figure it all out to know how much LEDs to get, and how many controllers I would need.
Can someone remind me if the espixelstick will run WLED? I still don’t have my main PC set up at the new house yet, and all my research links are saved there.
yes it will run wled.
I use wemosd1 or esp32 wemos without other parts to control 5v ws2812 leds. I use both espixelstick software when I want to control it by falcon player, or wled when i only use the built-in sequences.
Thanks!!
I swear I heard of WLED before… Jeff thanks for reminding me about it. I’m going to play with a wemos and 50x string this evening, and get a feel for making patterns on it.
I’ve also done 5V addressables with just a wallwart+resistor+m168 (a DIP package 168 using the built in oscillator… so just one cap for 5V no uno, promicro, etc). I never had issues even laying directly on wet grass with no protection (soldered magwire feeding individual LED’s). If I was doing a permanent install though, I’d use the buffers and fuses.
I have used two of the quinled boards, and they work pretty well. The “digi quad” is not that expensive and has pretty much any feature I could ask for. I have only used WLED for firmware though.
If you have a lot of lights, or more than one strand, the ESP32 works better. I have some esp8266’s though, and they work. My fish tank light has only a couple dozen LEDs and it is 8266. I have a triforce, and a printed cup with 8266s. But for permanent lights, I would only use an esp32.
OK thanks for the advice Jeff. I do have some 32’s laying around I’ll use when a permanent install comes along. For now I’m playing with just a small strip on a wemos d1. It took about 30min to go from googling wled to playing with patterns on through my LAN… that includes entering my ridiculously long and complex wpa2 pw a few times on my phone due to typos.
I’m also very impressed with how flexible it is… with all the options for grouping and transformation… I could get lost for days playing with it lol.
I wired a microphone to the esp32, now it’s sound reactive with the sound reactive wled fork
