Any word on esp8266 and this library.
I was using LUA code to work some WS2812b but I started hating programming in LUA (mainly because it was yet another language I needed to learn when I barely know C). So that proved to me the hardware worked - though I didn’t use it on a very long string of LEDs
The IDE seems to have settled down, so has anyone tried it?
Porting FastLED to the ESP8266 is going to be a major undertaking, and hasn’t even been started yet.
Ok. Well as far as experimenting works:
I did manage to use the same string of 10 neopixels (ws2812b) with the Adafruit neopixel library.
Hi @Raj_Refined_Reflecti I just connect a ESP8266 to my Teensy 3.1 to have a kind of remote control for the fridge LED-matrix light in our hackerspace. On Teensy all the FastLED stuff is doing, with animations, texts …
There I use a arduino-esp library to communicate with the ESP8266 over UART (Serial1)
There is also a MQTT running to get changes like “fridge/state = on”, “fridge/animaton/effect = plasma” or “fridge/ticker/text = here some text”
So you can send messages to MQTT over IRC, smartphone, website, …
I’m not finish yet with comments. But i think next week I will upload the complete source code on GitHub.
@Raj_Refined_Reflecti : glad to hear you have something that works. FastLED supports many many different LEDs and many different microcontroller architectures, AND we’re obsessed with performance; it takes us more time to do a real, fully native port that it takes for other smaller libraries.
That said, it’s all 100% open source, and we welcome high-quality contributions. If you have experience with the Xtensa machine architecture that the ESP8266 uses, we’d welcome your code contributions toward a port!
Beyond that, it’s going to be a while. @Daniel_Garcia and I both have pretty demanding day jobs, and while we’re definitely intrigued with the ESP8266, we haven’t even started the port yet.
Its no biggie. Just sounding out what the situation was as I saw a post by you previously (3 or 4 months old now). I didn’t expect much.
You are right about the esp8266 though. 80mhz 32bit risc with possiblyu 512k of ram to play with for A$4. Reflash with LUA interpret, AT command set or Native Arduino IDE!
I bought 15 (so far) .
The LUA interpretive script I used was quite smooth and nice with the 10LEds.
The problem comes when you try and get info on it.
Its fragmented and inconsistent. Some people are referencing the native AT command set, Some the LUA interpreter, and Others are talking about the Arduino IDE.
having gone down all paths and finally decided on the arduino IDE - its a bit flaky but it works. It a whole new world though to try and communicate over the internet. Something I am struggling with now.
It would be nice to have colour animations that react to the weather forecast and other myriad things that one can obtain off the internet.
I do applaud your decision to sacrifice quality over speed. A rare, but highly commendable decision, and thanks so much for your efforts so far. My son loves playing with the APA102’s that I bought him.
I would love to get some time to focus on dealing with it - there’s a list of things I still need to get done with the main library and platforms, first though. FastLED is pretty hard on the low level of devices (it’s part of how the Fast happens :).
I dunno - anyone want to pay my salary for a month so I can focus on this? (Of course, that would also involve convincing my current dayjob to take a leave to do it. Also insurance. Also, life… hmmm)
@Jurgen_Skrotzky
I would be very interested in your project. Are you using LUA or Arduino IDE on the esp8266? I had a lot of trouble with communicating with the 8266 with software serial as it kept dropping characters, and for interpreted code, that is a major flaw. It works fine with hardware serial but with the UNO, you lose the debugging serial port as it only has 1 hardware serial port.
I do have Due, MEGA and even teensy now: but with finished project I lose that chip to the project. I don’t want to lose my due or teensy unless the project is worth it to me.
@Daniel_Garcia after all of that we might as well be married. Though my wife would probably have a thing or 2 to say about that.