So I’m going to have a large Flying Spaghetti Monster hanging over my house for the holiday season. It will probably have between 200 and 500 P9813 pixels on it run off three pins using a quality 5v 60A power supply. I have a variety of microcontrollers at my disposal.
I’d like to be able to sit in my driveway, in a lawn chair, with a beer, and test out various programs wirelessly until I have an epiphany or reach Epiphany. I don’t necessarily need a web interface or the ability to control variables remotely.
Is the ESP the easiest way for me to accomplish these modest goals? It’s taken me a whole lot of time to figure out how to use and modify the examples with the IDE and traditional plug in serial. My brain has a block jumping to another level involving SPIFFS, MQTT, SPOOFS, SNARKS, SPARKS, ETC.
I’ve read through everything I could find in this helpful community about the ESP and I’m still confused as hell. Should I dig deeper or is there an easy way for me to wirelessly send signals to my roof to make my blinky thing blink differently?
Ha! What an incredible plan! I really want to make a Krampus eating some string light reindeer but my husband says after Halloween I have to make our yard a place that doesn’t terrify my children. I’ve just started using the esp8266 boards and its been a lot easier than it seemed when i read through the documentation. I’m working on @Jason_Coon 's christmas tree example at the moment which does have a web interface, but i’ve seen tutorials on how to wirelessly update it from Arduino IDE OTA. I would just try it. They’re cheap and after the initial installation of a few libraries its all pretty much the same (in my extremely limited experience).
The ESP or the Photon are the best choices (MHO). The Photon makes it easy to update, but it’s hard to get it to build with FastLED. The ESP is wonderful, but is more complicated to get up and running.
Both would be a good choice for this though.
The ESP arduino setup has become extremely easy now, you can simply download it using the board manager and treat it like a super charged arduino.
I haven’t dabbled with OTA updates yet for my ESP boards but I do use an application called Blynk to remotely control most of my projects and find it to be very useful. You can have virtual buttons and sliders to control any aspect of your project. @Jason_Coon 's web server for ESP8266 is also very nice if you know how to develop web applications and don’t want to deal with installing another app on your phone.