ESP8266 vs ESP32 with WLED

hi today i'm going to talk about the differences between an esp8266 and an esp32 specifically when used with wled and the sound reactive version of wled so hang around [Music] hi welcome to resin chem tech today's video is inspired by a comment from one of my subscribers wled has supported the esp32 for a while now but most of my videos i'm always using the wemos d1 mini which is an 8266 chip you wanted to know about the comparison between these two chips and whether one would be more advantageous over the other so today we're going to take a look at these side by side and do comparisons of features and performance let's get started so before we get into the differences in features and performance between the esp82 and the esp32 i want to take a brief moment to talk about physical size differences if you've watched most of my other projects you know i love to use these little electro cookie solderable prototype boards the nice thing is it's much like a breadboard and you and you've already got connections between your columns by having to do solder bridges and my go-to board for most of my wled projects is the wemos d1 mini the 8266 but i like it because it's small enough that it just fits on to this small size electro cookie with just enough room for the logic level shifter and allows me to make a very small controller if we move up to the equivalent esp32 version of the d1 mini the first thing you'll notice is it has additional pins because it has two rows of pins on each side so first of all it's going to fill up all the way to the side to side of this small board leaving no pins on the outside for connecting your wiring to in addition since these are two rows of pins here and here and your columns are joined back here you would only be able to use either the inner or outer row of pins on each side because otherwise you'd be connecting these pins side by side together with the breadboard so the other option is we move up to what's called the node mcu style which is going to give us a lot more pins in both cases and in the case the esp-32 they're not stacked in double rows but we will have to move up to a larger prototype board again if we look at the esp esp3266 you'll notice that i can get it turned around here with the light when it's mounted on here there's still one row of available pins on each side for you to connect your wiring to the pins if we move up to the esp32 you'll notice it is actually one row wider so while there are pins available or holes available on this side for the pins there's nothing on this side so what we're going to do is i'm actually going to put these on pin headers so i have the ability to remove this and do my wiring actually underneath the board on each side so i just wanted to explain a little bit about the size differences because it could impact your project i'm going to go and get some pin headers set up on these and we'll move on from there so i now have both of my boards built uh the esp8266 here on the left the esp32 here on the right i'm not going to go into full details on how to build these controllers i do have a separate video on building your own led controller if you're interested but i did want to cover a couple of things here as it relates to the testing we're going to be doing first and foremost both boards were built as identically as possible they use the same gauge wire the same length of wire and the same same process in both cases i followed the recommendations on either the official wled website or the sound reactive wled website in terms of use of pins now with the latest version of wled 12.0 i believe the esp-32 sorry the esp8266 now supports a maximum output of three channels although the use of only one is recommended that's one of the things we're going to test the esp32 will support a maximum output of 10 different channels although a maximum of four is recommended but because the limitation of three i've built both these boards to have three different uh channel outputs um pull these off here just just so you can see underneath here the three channels for each in both cases all three channels are running through a logic level shifter so we should be shifting our voltage up to five volts for both of these and when it comes to the the sound testing again i use the recommendation off the sound reactive wled website and i'm using a max 9814 microphone with the gain set to 40 db which is what is recommended and we'll be using that on again on both controller boards okay let's take a quick look at the test board that i've set up on this board i've installed independent 100 pixel ws2812b led strips each 100 pixel strip is connected to a different output channel of our controller the esp8266 on the left the esp3200 on the right each set of strips and controller are powered by separate but identical 5 volt 30 amp power supplies which ought to be more than enough power to power all the strips on both sides but just to be sure that we're not seeing any voltage drop i'm also doing five volt voltage injection at the top of each strip as well as the five volt input at the bottom of the strip okay here we go so we've got both strips powered on and by default the first 30 pixels of the first channel light up in orange which is true just so you can see here i am running the latest release version which at the time of this recording is 0.12.0 and you can see this is the esp8266 and these the sp-32 version so the first thing we need to do is we need to go in here and configure these for the right number of leds so in our first strip we have a hundred we'll go ahead and save that and we can immediately see our strip lit up with all 100 pixels we'll do the same thing over here and we need 100 there okay so functionally there isn't any real difference that that i can see we both have this the same effects available again this is the standard version not the sound reactor version we're going to to get to that next both version support segments like i said the big difference is the number of pixels and the number of channels that the esp32 supports over the esp8266 so honestly i don't expect to see any difference here with a single 100 pixel strip but we will run it through the paces here we'll just set this on both of them on full white take the brightness up all the way which is probably going to overwhelm the camera a bit but again even if you can't see it on the screen sitting here staring at him i see zero difference between the two let's turn that brightness back down because that's really just a function of the the current and the power so let's just try a couple of effects here i don't know which ones might be good here try to do the same on both let's again turn up the speed and the intensity on both and again i see no real effect let's try and again i'm seeing which you can probably tell on the video but i'm definitely seeing no no difference between the two two strips at this point okay so let's go ahead now and add the second strip to both controllers and to do that we have to go back into our wi-fi config led preferences and we're going to need to add right here again this one in this case for the esp8266 we're going to use pin one we're going to start at 100 on our pixel count and go to 200 and again the total led account here is now 200 so that should be that let's save that okay we now see we've got the two strips lit so let's go ahead and do that over here on the esp32 as well once again we're going to add an output in this case the esp32 the second is pin 18. let's start again at 100 for a count of 100 which also changes our led count to 200 and we will save that now you'll notice that both strips currently are doing the same thing if we want to be able to have each output channel do something different we need to add something called segments so right now this first segment is set for both strips together a total of 200. we want to add a segment and we're going to stop this segment at 100 and we're going to start this one at 100 and go to 200. okay so now let's do the same thing over here with esp32 whoops segments add a segment let's swing 100 start this one at 100 200. so now we have different control of each so okay so there are two different output channels two different segments again i'm seeing no real difference between the esp32 and the esp8260 so at this point let's move on to adding the third channel okay so now i've gone ahead and i've added the third strip and i've also set up that third segment i won't take you through that again and waste the time one thing i do want you to notice in here here on the esp8266 notice our led memory usage compared to the same setup with the esp32 again we're only running a total of 300 pixels so in a small installation in your house um you know around a pool table under cabinets something like that probably not going to see a performance problem i'm not seeing here but my guess is it's not going to take long before you start adding more and more pixels before you are going to start seeing a performance hit you know especially if you're going to like put these outside on your house for christmas decorations or something like that you're quickly going to run into problems here but at least in this case with standard wled uh i'm unable to get any performance difference right now between the esp8266 and the esp32 so i'm going to take a quick break i'm going to flash the sound reactive version onto both chips and then we'll come back and test the sound reactive version to see if we see any difference there okay i'm back i've flashed both the esp8266 and the esp32 with the respective versions of sound reactive wwled i've attached the max 9814 mics to both control boards and i've set up a little bluetooth speaker that's going to act as our as our sound for these two versions during our test okay i've gone ahead and and set up the three different output pins on both of these i've not done segments yet but it's done in exactly the same way as with standard wled however for the first time we're going to see some functional differences between the esp8266 and the esp32 right off the get-go you'll notice you've got some additional sliders when it comes to effects on the esp32 these are where you can fine-tune frequency settings i won't go into a lot of details but it's something that's available on the esp32 that you don't find available on the esp8266 also you'll notice that if we go in to our led preferences on both of these you'll notice another difference notice the esp32 has support for a matrix layout so a 2d matrix where you could have effects go across rows and columns that is not available in the esp8266 so when it comes to sound reactive wled there are some functional differences available to you on the esp32 okay you'll notice that you have basically all the same types of color palettes and color selection in the sound reactive that you have in the non-sound reactive or standard version of wled if we take a look at the effects though you'll notice on the esp32 have some additional 2d effects both sound reactive and non-sound reactive that aren't available in the esp3266 again those refer to that matrix setup that's not available with the esp8266 so let's fire up some music and take a look at at how these react first off i'm going to apologize for apologize for the music selection but with copyright strikes and all that kind of stuff i had to select some music that was available in the public domain so here we go okay so right off the get-go let's just select a simple uh maybe mid-noise here [Music] and look at the two comparisons now right off the get-go at least i can see i don't know how it's coming across in the video but the esp32 is definitely reacting and using much quicker than the esp8266 esp8266 seems to have a little bit of lag and isn't quite as much in sync with the music let's take a look at a different effect that was a little little intense it's a little bit hard to tell there as well let's try a different way to see if we can see differences [Music] okay and there's a slight bit of difference because of the gain level with the microphones it's hard to get them to match exactly but i think here you can definitely see the lag with the esp8266 and again this is just using a single segment at this point although we are using all three pins take a look at maybe one more here [Music] so again i'm seeing much more reactive effects to the music with the esp32 so i'm gonna go ahead and break these up into uh three different segments each with their own noise effect and we'll come back and see how they perform there [Music] okay i went ahead and divided each of the 100 pixel strips into three separate segments each tied to a different input pin uh i went through and set the effects the same on both you'll see a little bit of twinkling going on right now that's because there's some background noise from a refrigerator running i could remove that out with uh with some squelch on on the settings but we're going to go ahead and roll with this and see how much difference we can see between the two different processors here we go okay just like before i'm definitely seeing esp8266 is lagging behind syncing with the music compared to the esp32 although i will admit i'm seeing a little bit of lag with the esp32 in terms of staying in sync with the music especially that that red on the far left but across the board definitely seeing the esp32 is still much more sound reactive with a lot less lag we're now using three different output pins and three different segments [Music] so i think what i'm going to try next and i don't know if this is going to work but i'm going to go ahead and hook up all 600 pixels together and then try to look at maybe some of the matrix effects and also just to see how the uh esp8266 does with sound reactions that we're looking at possibly up to 600 pixel pixels so okay so real quick i've reconfigured this board so instead of having three output signals coming from the microcontroller where the esp8266 the esp32 into each individual strips there's now a single output signal coming into the first strip and traveling serpentine style through all 600 pixels that did require some additional power injection to make sure we're not seeing any voltage drop issues so besides the start and the end of the strip we also have power injection at two points mid-strip probably overkill for 600 pixels but i wanted to make sure that we weren't seeing any problems due to voltage drops on the led strips okay so let's fire up the esp8266 and there we are with all 600 pixels lit and just to give you an idea again i talked about the the way that the signal runs you can easily see it here with this wipe effect the signal is basically serpentine back and forth uh not seeing any any problems there with uh either flickr or any kind of performance problems let's try a couple of other things here just to make sure we're not seeing any issues again i'm seeing no performance issues there so 600 pixels with a single channel on esp8266 isn't a problem so let's move over to the sound reactive and give that a shot okay once again sorry about the the same music but here we go [Music] and once again we'll try some different effects here [Music] it needs to be okay there does seem to be lagging at certain points and i've definitely found this different effects can benefit from different uh game levels [Music] obviously you've got a lot less options here try adding a second column to that you know it doesn't doesn't seem to be a problem [Music] again i'm not really seeing any lag but it's kind of hard to know when you can't compare it to the esp32 side by side so it does work with 600 pixels again we don't have those matrix properties that we're going to have we're going to play with next with the esp32 so let me tear down connect the esp-32 and we'll come back and try it again [Music] okay now we've got the esp32 hooked up everything's exactly the same with one small change under the led preferences remember we had that option for a matrix so what i've done in this case i've told it my matrix is basically six rows and a hundred columns and it's running serpentine so that's that's the only difference uh between the esp8266 and the esp32 so the one thing we've got now is we do have those additional uh matrix non-sound reactive to be honest i've not seen these before so some of these are brand new to me but these options again are only set up with a matrix and only available in the esp32 so there's some different options there but of course what we care about is the sound reactive version so let's give that a shot now now the one thing i'm noticing with having this matrix i'm getting things duplicated on on both halves which before was really just one um with the esp8266 so kind of having that matrix is kind of a nice option here you get more of the 600 pixels lit at the same time let's take a look at a couple of these 2d versions they're only available on the esp32 [Music] so again i'm seeing no performance issues it does just seem to be staying pretty well in sync with the music [Music] now some of these frequency things i i think could be tweaked by some of these frequency settings up here but i haven't messed with those and this video is already too long so we're not going to take a look at that but so there's the esp32 with 600 pixels in a matrix configuration running sound reactive wled so what are the results of my very scientific test um well in again my opinion is that if you're going to be using standard wled on anything of about a thousand pixels or less you're probably fine using the esp8266 however if you're going to use the sound reactive version of wled i would recommend that you go with the esp32 you're going to get much better performance better synchronization with your music more effects and more options and overall just better performance out of the esp32 if you are interested in building your own wled controller i'll leave a link down below to another video i've got that talks about building your own wled controller for about six dollars now that is using the esp8266 i'll also leave links down below to all the parts that i used in terms of the logic level shifters the actual boards themselves the led strips i'll leave links down below to all those parts as well if you found anything in this video useful or that you liked please hit that like button that lets both me and youtube know that you'd like to see more videos like this if you'd like to see more of my videos please hit that subscribe button and ding that little bell icon and you'll be notified every time i release a new video as always thanks for watching and i hope to see you soon [Music]

Channel: ResinChem Tech

Views: 189,089

Keywords: ESP8266, ESP32, WLED, Sound Reactive WLED, DIY LEDs

Id: q1ghNUND6gk

Length: 24min 1sec (1441 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 14 2021