Chromatron Wi-Fi Pixel Controller
chromatron.io
chromatron.io
I am running two such simple strips right now, and it works very well.
1) I already had an OS that ran on the AVR, and didn't want to spend the effort porting it entirely to the ESP8266. That being said, I've since mostly ported it over anyway. The ESP8266 is indeed wayyyy harder to use than an AVR. But, as it turns out, not harder than dealing with two extremely dissimilar CPUs.
2) The ESP8266 doesn't have great I/O. In particular, I wanted to run PWM LED strips and the AVR allowed me to do that (the LED driver circuit can run PWM or digital output on the same pins). However, I realized pretty quick after selling a few of them that nobody else cared about PWM and not long after that, neither did I. Only a handful of my projects still use the PWM circuit.
3) The AVR has a much, much better DMA than the ESP8266. There's a fast LED style dithering feature available for some LED strips, and the Xmega DMA is what made it possible to do that. Yet another feature than turned out to be less useful than I'd thought - most strips I use clock too slowly to dither anyway.
4) It also has more analog I/O, which I use in my own projects, but probably no one else does.
But the cottage industry around these addressable LED driver boards is getting pretty ridiculous. The PixelBlaze already does a great job of controlling them from an ESP8266. And the LEDs aren't that hard to use with generic hardware like Arduinos, even for people with zero prior experience.
There's no doubt about it, this world caters to the hucksters and the unrealistically optimistic.
I've had the same; sorting a big list of numbers or doing any action that takes a few seconds can make the WiFi unstable, disconnect, or not respond.
I'm curious though, there are some dual-core designs with ESP8266 compatibility out there, would that help?
1) Generally poor documentation. Non-existent at the register level - you are entirely at the mercy of the SDK and what other people have reverse engineered.
2) Crashes on unaligned pointer access. This is something that ARM generally handles with ease (though there are exceptions). Porting code from ARM or 8 bit machines to the ESP8266 can take a fair amount of effort in tracking down all of the unaligned access exceptions that come up. It's extremely frustrating.
3) To that point, the SPI flash access is also beholden to 32 bit alignment. That really complicates things if you port code that relied on a typical SPI flash's ability to access at a 1 byte granularity.
4) Poor compiler support. I think the latest GCC they support is 5.something. It requires a custom backend so it is vendor maintained. Contrast with ARM support in GCC which is generally outstanding.
5) No hardware debug support. You can run GDB over a serial port, but that's no where near as powerful as having an actual JTAG/SWD port.
6) The program memory architecture is complex and difficult to use (poor documentation is part of the issue here). There's no on-chip flash - code streams from a SPI flash into a RAM cache. Some code has to run out of RAM and must be placed by the linker as such.
All that being said - the chip works. The Wifi is excellent (I run dozens of these at a time, they are more reliable than my Unifi routers they connect to). For a $2 FCC certified module it's unbeatable. I have really come around to like this part in spite of its many flaws - it was built to do one thing very well at a price point no one else could touch - and by and large it succeeded.
One last question, platform.io? Pretty good ecosystem in general - and with the wide variety of assets to select from, a lot of your points become less painful ..
https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/latest/esp32/...
All you need is a NanoMCU / ESP8266, a power source and LED-strips of you choice... There even are iOS (and i think Android) apps to control the strips via Wifi, options to sync N strips etc. etc...
I'd totally be down for buying like 5 of these units to test with, provided they weren't unreasonably more expensive than what I'd expect to pay for an ESP8266 and related gear.
That said, I ended up abandoning the project I was going to use them for: permanently installed Christmas lights that doubled as just normal outside lighting when it wasn't a holiday. I ended up, just this weekend in fact, installing just a white LED strip light for that. Which I just did on a whim yesterday afternoon, after someone was prowling up the street looking for open cars that morning.
- Wasn't clear if Pixelblaze with it's add on board could drive multiple strips at high refresh rates, or I needed multiple pixelblaze. Then there are synchronization issues.
- If I'm gonna do that, I might as well go with one of those Falcon LED controllers that can do shows, for $200.
- I have power in the garage at one end of the house, but need to branch off the middle of the house. But to get acceptable voltage drop, I'd probably need to run 12/2, but I need to figure out DC code, or I need to find a place to stow the power supply.
- I'd like to use some or all of them as a "porch light", but just switching off/on had some issue. I don't recall, it either took a long time to get to the point where the lights were on, or required also poking the control port or something.
- And it was maybe 6 weeks from Christmas with a lot of building to do to get there.
If I end up deciding to do it, I might install a dual track with white non-addressable strip AND the color addressable AND go with the Falcon controller. Maybe running conduit from the center of the house into the closet, where I put the power supply and Falcon. I recently ran a receptacle into it to drive the LED light strip that is in there, because that closet was a dark pit that you couldn't find anything in, so that makes it a bit easier than it was last holidays.
In my case I was trying to integrate with a DMX-driven show, which is tricky and required more time than I had to invest in the project, but as standalone pixel controllers they are quite good. You can also use a separate package called firestorm to tie them together, also pretty useful.
If you plan on actually using it as a lighting source, I'd recommend you buy some LED strips with a dedicated white source since the RGB only white often looks weird on video. Also, if you want a longer strip, get one with 12V instead of 5V.
My long term goal for this year is to get a port running on some stock ESP8266 boards (such as NodeMCU and the Adafruit Feather Huzzah). My original hardware design was too complex to build in a cost effective way, but I'd really like to get the software in the hands of those who are interested.
It looks interesting, and if it were the right price I might actually want one.
As far as I can tell there's only the signup for more info (no, thanks) - or some links to github and some social media.
That being said, I am actively working on a port for some stock ESP8266 boards (Adafruit Feather, NodeMCU, etc). I don't really want to sell hardware, but I'd love to see someone else using the software.
Modularity was actually a design consideration I really struggled with, but at the end of the day, I realized I didn't want to do just another Arduino clone where you put the whole thing together yourself. I designed Chromatron under the assumption that you'd eventually end up with a lot of them, in which case the Wifi and live coding are really useful features - I wanted and all-in-one solution. But for most people who only need 1 or 2 projects, it's overkill. I think that's part of the reason it didn't sell that well.
It was designed for smaller, but highly dynamic, projects. I figured large scale installations were already well served in the DMX/pixel mapping space.
Its an open source, portable battery powered pocketable light synthesiser with multiple built-in programs for doing a variety of different things - from Persistence of Vision effects (very popular), to accelerometer-based level meters, vibration visualisers, and disco/strobe effects.
I added MIDI to it - meaning the whole thing can be sync'ed over rtpMIDI (MIDI over Wifi is awesome and supported out of the box by most operating systems), and I also built an Arpeggiator for it too - meaning you can have your dancers wired up with shifters on their bodies, an Arpeggiator on stage with you on your synth stacks, and MagicShifters all over the place synchronised to your drum machine. ;)
We (Phillip, the hardware inventor, and myself the software guy) also designed the latest-gen MS3000 PCB to be easily useful for longer LED strip experiments, and included both 5v and 3.3v onboard, with a UART breakout, for extra hacking purposes - wire it up to a console and use it as a build indicator, or just use plain old Wifi too. We have a light strip with 200 LED's wired up to a single MagicShifter and used it to create a wall clock. Pins for wiring up longer strips are exposed on one end of the board, and you can solder the strips directly without requiring further driver hardware - just change the constants in the MS3KOS to tell it how many LED's you're driving ..
EDIT: Have a look at the PCB here:
https://magicshifter.github.io/magicshifter.net/img/new/ms30...
You can see the UART breakout as well as the 4 contact points for longer LED strips...
It includes a REST-based interface for changing the LED effects modes, as well as presenting a web-based Pixel Editor to create your own POV images.
Sources here (100% open source) for anyone who might glean some use out of our project:
https://github.com/magicshifter
Some other nice demo videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xoYjA06XkQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syP8_lccIQA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Shac_DN2ZrU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcGrRuRuhYU
EDIT: you can get an MS3000 from http://hackerspaceshop.com ..