Festival of Lights… A ‘USB Stick’ Sparkle Motion WLED driver
To wrap up this year, we’re doing 8 days (maybe!) of light-filled designs. We started with the Sparkle Motion Mini which can drive thousands of shimmering RGB LEDs. Next, we were going through some of our NeoPixel samples today and found some “LED Christmas light kit” with star LEDs, its basically these stars with a little USB plug that has IR, a crummy mic, a tactile switch to cycle modes manually, and a tiny microcontroller that turns the LED selections to different patterns – kinda like this.
The idea is cute – but the implementation could be improved with a lil sparkle motion! we made a PCB that would fit into the same plastic enclosure but with an ESP32 instead. it’s got an IR receiver, ICS-43434 I2S digital microphone, gpio 0 button in the ‘right’ place, 5V 2A fuse, USB-serial converter for uploading/debugging, and two level-shifted outputs. We can probably get the case in quantity or have this be a ‘DIY replacement’ that folks can use to make their existing setups WLED/xLights friendly.
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