2024 - How to Set Up And Control Addressable LEDs - The ULTIMATE Beginners Guide!

so there are a ton of amazing videos out there on how to set up addressable LEDs but if you're a beginner like I was a couple years ago many of those tutorials unfortunately went way over my head in this video I'm going to go over the complete steps on how to get up and running but try to present it in a way that's as simple stripped back and easy to follow as possible to get started you're going to need a micro USB cable that supports data transfer and a wall plug like you're seeing here now if you don't have something like this laying around at home I'll leave a link to everything I'm using in the description in case you wanted to follow along exactly next I'll be using something called an esp32 development board and fortunately these are not expensive and they're very easy to use but before we can control the lights we're going to install W LED on this module and if you're not familiar with W LED it's by far the most popular program out there which allows you to control addressable LEDs and the best part is it's completely free so to get that set up go ahead and plug the esp32 into one of your computer's USB slots using the micro USB cable now pull up a web browser and type in install wed. me and you should come to a page that looks like this it's going to default to have the most recent version of wld selected from the dropdown which is what we want so we can now hit install this white screen should automatically pop up and this is where I recommend you unplug and plug back in the esp32 a couple times since you should see something show up and disappear which lets you know the computer is recognizing the module however if nothing happens when you unplug it and plug it back in that means either a your micro USB cable doesn't support data or B your computer doesn't have the driver installed so if nothing is happening I first recommend trying to install the driver to do this exit out of the screen and click on no device found and for the esp32 that I'm using select cp2102 you'll automatically be redirected here go to downloads and assuming you're running Windows 10 or 11 select cp210x Universal Windows driver then you'll have to choose a place for the zip file to be downloaded once downloaded go to the folder right click on the zip file and extract all and choose where you want it extracted and finally go to the folder where you sent the file right click on s i l a b r.in NF and click install open wait a moment and you're all set so assuming your micro USB cable does support data transfer when you unplug and plug in the module you should now see something similar to this show up as an option to select click it and hit connect the device dashboard should appear where you're going to choose install wled and again install it'll probably take about a minute to go through the process and once complete go to next here you certainly can configure things to your home network but I'm going to hold off doing this now now since I want to go over this a little bit later on tied in with something else so for now I'm going to hit skip exit out and then unplug moving on let's go over what could very well be the most confusing part of the entire process if you're just getting started and that's choosing what LEDs to use now for almost every project I've done I've either gone with some ws2812b or sk6812 strips from BTF lighting and I've yet to have a bad experience and really the only difference between these two strips is that the SK 682s do have a separate dedicated white LED built in for a better quality white light than what the Ws 20182 B strips can achieve now another thing that could potentially lead to confusion with LED strips revolves around where exactly should you buy them from I personally get mine from Amazon since in the US it's usually one or two day free shipping and free returns but you do pay more compared to getting them on AliExpress I will leave links to both platforms but it's important to note that AliExpress unlike Amazon that allows me to link you directly to a specific product and variation AliExpress currently only lets me link you to a specific product and not the specific Vari of that product I'll quickly show you what to look for so you don't end up ordering the wrong thing if you go the AliExpress route so right now we're on the sk6812 product page on AliExpress and if you remember this is the version that has the separate LED for a better quality white light now this top part right here is asking if you want that separate led to be a cool white warm white or neutral white I personally like the warm or neutral the best and that is traditionally what I end up going with the next section is going to have you choose the length of the strip the number of LEDs that strip will have per meter and if you want it to have any water resistant coating or protection ip30 is not water resistant and looks like this and for anything inside not around water this is what I'd use ip65 has a silicone coating over the LEDs and is water resistant and something I would use in the bathroom or near sink IP67 is completely enclosed and considered waterproof in case you ever need something that calls for this level of protection and finally you can choose between a white or black strip depending on your personal preference so in a video if you hear me say I'm using a warm White sk6812 Strip that's 5 m long at 60 LEDs per meter with with an ip30 rating this is the one you'd order if you wanted to buy the same thing now there is a specific reason why I almost always go with a strip that has 60 LEDs per meter which I will cover later on in this video now before moving on I want to thank the sponsor of today's video Aura so this is me signing up for their free 14-day trial and during the setup process one of the many things they do is scan the internet for data Brokers that have your personal information these data Brokers then make a fortune selling your information to spammers scammers and other entities that want to know more about you now Ora was able to find 30 such instances of my personal information being in the hands of these companies then with one click Ora sends out a notice to have my information removed from their systems which they are legally required to do when asked their all-in-one platform offers anti virus protection credit monitoring credit lock financial transaction alerts secure VPN identity protection parental controls 24/7 us-based customer service and much much more I'll leave a link in the description for you to start your own free 14-day trial so please make sure to check them out thank you all so much and now back to the video moving on it's time to get our esp32 device that now has W LED installed on it connected to our LED strip there's a lot of different ways you could go about doing this but what I feel is the quickest and easiest is to use something called breadboard jumper wires these are going to allow us to get everything set up without having to do any cutting stripping or soldering now the color of these wires don't actually make any difference but to make things easier to follow I'll be using red to represent voltage green for our data line and white for the ground I'll first take the esp32 and insert the female end of the red jumper wire into the VIN pin of the module like I'm doing here I'll then take my white wire and connect it to the g& D pin of the ESP right next to our red one and finally I'll use the green cable and attach it to the D2 pin on the module now that we have that set up let's turn our attention back to the LEDs this is a 5 m roll of ws2812b lights that have 60 LEDs per meter and an ip30 rating and every new strip you get is going to look like this at at the beginning right here is What's called the jst connector that has the same red green and white color scheme as the jumper cables we Ed for the esp32 and then you have additional red and white wires hanging loose that I'll touch on later but for now we're only going to focus on the jst connector part now since we color coordinated our wires this is very easy to follow the red jumper wire connected to the VIN pin on our esp32 device will get plugged into the slot on the jst connector going to the red wire on the LED strip like I'm doing now then we can finish out by doing green to green and finally white to white at this point we can now go ahead and fire up the esp32 using our micro USB cable and charger once plugged in and powered on open up your Wi-Fi menu and look for the W leed-ap Network and connect if it asks for a password type in all lowercase w led12 3 4 and then hit to the controls next go to configure and then into LED preferences now since we're powering these lights directly from the micro USB B Port these boards aren't designed to handle a lot of current so make sure to set your brightness limiter to 1,000 milliamps or below further down you can select the type of Lights we have since I'm using some ws2812b I can keep it at the Ws 281 X but if we're using some SK 682s like I mentioned earlier this is where you could select those then input the number of LEDs that you have I know I have 5 m at 60 LEDs per meter so I would take 5 multiplied by 60 which gives me a total of 300 LEDs on this strip and since we use the D2 pin on the module for our data I have to enter two in the gpio field right here hit save at the top and all the lights should now be on and ready to be controlled all while never having to connect it to a separate home Wi-Fi network this means it's a perfect solution if you're ever wanted to add some color at a cabin a festival your bike a car or anywhere else that doesn't have available Wi-Fi but if you are at home and want to get these set up to your home network go to configure and Wi-Fi setup you can scan or enter in your home network and then put in your password and hit save and connect next make sure your phone or tablet gets reconnected back to your home internet and download and install the wled app at the top click the plus icon and then discover lights it should find the es device we just added so now you can hit the check mark click on the results and you should be taken to the main screen it looks like they have a nice Christmas background automatically applied but if it is a little too noisy go into configure user interface scroll down to background opacity and change it to zero and hit save so I will go over some of my favorite animations and effects later on with the studio lights turned off so you can see better but for now let's move on next I want to show you how you can quickly modify this setup if you wanted to add a little bit more power and run these brighter than the 1,000 milliamp brightness limiter I currently have it set to go ahead and unplug the micro USB cable then I'm going to take the LEDs and if you remember there are those two separate red and white wires at the beginning that I'm going to strip back like I'm doing now I picked up this 5volt 10 amp power block and pretty much all these come with this Barrel plug adapter that has screw terminals for our positive and negative wires I'll insert the red wire from the LED strip into the plus terminal and then the white wire from the LED strip into the negative terminal and make sure to screw them down nice and tight plug it in and with these type of connectors they're generally rated for around 5 amps so I'll change the limiter to 4,000 mamps to keep it just a little bit below this is going to allow our lights to run brighter compared to our previous example where we only use the micro USB charger and for the last power example I'll show you what you can do to run these even brighter remove the red and white wires from the barrel plug and I'm going to strip them back a little bit more then to make things easy I'll connect a waggo to each wire next take the power supply that we just used and cut off the barrel connector piece right around here once you strip back the outer black wire you should see two smaller red and white wires that you can also strip back to look something like this then connect the red voltage wire to our red injection wire on the strip and then the same with the white ground wires now when powering things this way I'll generally bump up my brightness to 7,000 milliamps and I've never had any issues now if everything I just went over still seems extremely complex that's okay thankfully there's some awesome products that you can get that turn this entire process into a plug-in playay solution since they ship with wled pre-installed so that all you need to do is plug in your lights connected to power and you're ready to go and I already made a full length video going over this particular controller that you can check out if interested but before moving on I'm going to go back and reconnect our micro USB charger so make sure to change the limiter back down to 1,000 milliamps and keep the waggle connectors on the injection wires since otherwise they'd be exposed so next I want to bring up how to best diffuse LEDs since very few applications call for you to be looking directly at the lights now this goes back to what I mentioned before as to why I generally use strips that have 60 LEDs per meter the reason is because strips that only have 30 LEDs per meter are nearly impossible to perfectly diffuse since the lights are too far spaced out leaving you with what's commonly referred to as hotpots and for Led strips that have 100 or more dials per meter while they do look awesome they require too much power especially if you're considering doing a big install so 60 is the Sweet Spot while it's still not common there are two diffuser channels I found that'll perfectly diffuse an LED strip that has 60 pixels per meter the first one I have here is my favorite because you can get them in one or 2 meter long sections making it easier for larger installs plus they come in different colors now these are what I've used in many of my projects including my gaming room that I recently built and I did make a video of that entire process that I'll leave a link for in the description that you can check out if interested and second is a corner profile that comes in 1 or 2 m long sections I use this to make a couple Corner floor lamps but it would also be great for putting around the perimeter of your ceiling next I want to show you how these LEDs look using only the micro USB power option in one of these diffuser channels now you could use the clips that they come with but I'll be using some 3M sticky pads and I would probably use something bigger than the ones I'm using here but this is all I had at the moment and I always put these at a slight angle like you're seeing here because if I ever want to take them down I can pull on the little exposed tab to easily remove them without ripping the paint off my wall next I'm going to go ahead and attach these profiles right above my baseboard underneath my gaming setup and once it's up I can stick my ws2812b LEDs in the profile then snap on the diffuser cover now I did end up using about 250 of the 300 LED so I went in and updated the LED field and once that's done I can get everything fired up and from here I'll go through just a couple of my favorite animations but if you're wanting a more complete breakdown of the W LED program I made a video going over some of the best effects and settings that I highly recommend checking out if you're curious to learn a little bit more so that about does it for this one but I hope after watching the video you realize that a it doesn't look that difficult to do and B you'll have the confidence to try doing it yourself thank you all for watching and as always I hope you have a blessed [Music] day you

Channel: Chris Maher

Views: 123,317

Keywords: wled, ledstrip, strip lights, govee, ws2812, ws2812b, rgb, athom, wled for beginners, wled tutorial, how to use wled, wled setup, wled esp8266, wled controller, wled to esp8266, wled to esp32, getting started wled, wled led strips, esp8266 led strip control, wled esp32, esp32 led strip control, easy wled, wled easy setup, ws2812b controller, wled on esp8266, connecting leds to esp32, led controller, method to install wled, diy led strip, easy wled install, addressable led strip

Id: exAWzMfmwQ8

Length: 13min 33sec (813 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 29 2023