How To Install WLED on a ESP32 Ultimate Beginners Guide 2023

good afternoon good morning hello wherever you are my British computer guy here uh welcome to another video um reason for this video real quick I'm just going to be going ahead and doing a quick flash of a esp32 chip um and I'm doing it a little bit differently than some of the other people have suggested because the ways some people suggest it has not worked for me and if you're finding that as an issue um then hopefully this video is is helpful to you so all this is this is a pure flash guide that's all we're going to be doing I'm not going to be going ahead and programming or connecting to Wi-Fi or hooking up to LEDs I just want to show you how to install the software okay so my previous videos I used the esp8266 uh this is uh which is a very similar chip it's um almost like almost identical this is the esp32 I bought this from Amazon they work at about three or four dollars a piece I buy them in three packs um but that's the chip and the main difference if you look at this chip is this has a rectangular chipset on there which means it's more than likely the esp32 if you look at the esp8266 it's a rectite more of a rectangular shaped chip on here okay so that's how to tell the difference so this is straight from the factory okay now the main issue that I was encountering and Counting encountering uh with these was when plugging it into the um wled software up here um when trying to flash it it wouldn't work uh it would just hang you you connect it with a USBC data not USBC sorry a USB a micro USB data cable um to your computer and you basically pull up this website and do the install but basically what would happen is it would just say installing and it would hang okay so I'm going to show you how to get around that all right so and this is different from what some of the other videos have shown just slightly all right I'm going to show you a hanging first of all so you can see what I mean and then I'm going to show you the workaround and it's not really a workaround it's just another method so USB data cable micro USB not a USBC it's just a regular micro USB data cable it's got an old old Android phone I'm going to plug that into the chip okay a little on the esp32 it's a red light on this particular this particular model okay and that's our link I'll leave links to the items into the description down below okay so we are connected I heard it connect so we're going to come over to the installer and it's install.wled.me and I'm going to do a sound this is going to be the sound reactive this is actually going to be used for a sound reactive project that I'm going to be working on which will be one of my next videos I'm going to show you how to create a sound reactive light lighting setup for your desk your gaming PC um but obviously that'll be my next video so we're going to come down here and install the sound reactive version of wled which at present is 0.13.4 okay this board does not have any ethernet and it's ready to go so this is the way that most people would think to do it okay the command click install select the com Port that it's on this this time this one is combot 3. if you do have some LED lights already set up that are connected to your system you might want to go ahead and unplug them if they're plugged into the combo and other USB ports because you'd like I wouldn't want you to go ahead and overwrite the uh the firmware on the other chips okay so this way I just got one chip plugged in and this is the one that's plugged into it's called com3 so click connect it'll then go ahead and connect to the chip in fact it's found on the chip so we want to go ahead and do install wled and the SR stands for sound reactive do you want to install yes we do and preparing installation okay so normally it says it'll take about two minutes um and it'll when it actually starts to install it will say this will now take two minutes however this is the issue I've been I pretty much encountered as well on any chip I've tried to flash with this method okay it'll just say preparing installation and it'll sit there and hang so I'm not going to bore you and leave it sitting there hanging because there's no point it would normally have started by now it probably it starts off by saying erasing um chip I believe but anyway I'm going to unplug quite safe to do that okay a few slides of course because we just basically unplug it we're going to go and refresh the website okay now this is where it differs okay from what most people tell you on the internet and there's a few other guys who are really good and really good of these chips who've done some really great how-to videos I'll put some links down to their channels in the description below as well because I've learned a lot from them um but this is what this is where in my opinion they've given a bit of Duff information a lot of people say okay so you plug it in as such and when you go to install you're supposed to hold the boot button down nope doesn't work or it didn't work for me at least and it may just be this particular chip but the way the method that works for me is by holding this this button down here the en button okay I think it says en it's difficult for me to see my eyesight it's terrible but it's not the boot Button um on the esp8266 chip it's actually called the flash button okay you've got two little buttons Boot and Flash or in this case e I think it is yeah Ian okay not too sure what it stands for but that's the button that we're going to be holding down so to do this what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and reselect the sound reactive version of the software I'm going to go ahead and before I click the install button I'm going to hold it down I'm going to keep it held down I'm not going to let go just yet so go ahead and hold that button down now all right click the install it's on com3 we only know that's how click connect found it install wled install and I'm going to hold it for about three seconds after I hit this button okay so one two two and a half three then I go okay so now it says erasing it'll take about two minutes and it should fingers crossed just go ahead and install the software um it takes about 60 seconds so I may I may skip forward if there are no issues um but yeah it takes about 60 seconds to install it once that's installed um you'll actually have a little a second little LED I believe on that it'll start flashing I think it's blue okay so for some reason it looks like this one was hung at 26 percent uh the last time I tried to flash one with this method is exactly the same thing it hung back it hung up like 31 so what I'm going to do it's quite safe to do this is you can just go ahead and unplug it normally that that meter showing the percentage progress goes up pretty quick so I'm going to go ahead and just unplug yeah I know okay and it comes it's just a little bit it can be a little bit finicky there are other ways to install this but this is usually the easiest way plug it back in again okay I'm gonna hold that en button down here select the software first of all it's like sound reactive hold the button down click install country and connect stall stall One Mississippi two Mississippi three Mississippi okay let go super gas if we get lucky on the second time because yeah the last time I did this uh it failed at about 31 and the second time I did it worked fine not too sure why I couldn't tell you it just did all right so we passed the 26 Mark which is great so while that's installing let me tell you about some of the other projects I've got coming up um uh if you looked at my last my last project it showed you kind of how to do this on the esp8266 chip um what I'm going to do I'm actually going to create a a desktop lamp setup with sound reactive uh lighting um it's kind of going to be going to be cool I'm going to be using some different LEDs instead of using the BTS um WS 2812s I'm going to be using um a slightly higher density variant of those those LEDs and I'll show you here real quick you can see this 144 LEDs per meter and this is about I think I'm not too sure what is in feet but as well meters but it's about 3.2 feet long so there's 100 and it's got 144 LEDs on there so that's what I'm going to be using a bit higher definition than the previous one that I was using okay okay so uh installation complete there we go and if you can see there you can kind of barely see it but there's a little blue LED flashing on there now as well so the sound reactive software is complete and it does give you the option now to go ahead and install also I connect it to your Wi-Fi I say I'm not going to do that right now um if I wanted to I'll just go ahead and put in my network name so my the name of my router and the password that I would normally use to log onto my router and then basically what you can do is you can actually plug in the default IP address which is this 1.2.3.4 and the password which is lowercase w LED and that'll actually take you into the settings for the um for the application for the wrld software but that'll be covered in that was covered in my last video so anyway thanks for watching I appreciate it I hope this has helped you out if it has please do hit that like button it really helps um subscribe if you want to see more videos like this and some of my other projects and uh yeah don't forget to hit that Bell icon so you get notified when I drop them but uh thanks for watching I appreciate it you guys have a great day and as always the links are in the description down below and also check out my friends links uh so I've got some really cool friends out there who do some really good gaming stuff um you won't be disappointed thanks guys appreciate it yeah have a good day bye

Channel: mybritishcomputerguy

Views: 9,562

Keywords: wled for beginners, beginner, easy wled install, getting started with the esp32 on arduino ide, esp32 beginners, beginners, how to install leds, arduino projects for beginners, wled on esp8266, wled install, method to install wled, best led strips on amazon, best light strips on amazon, guide, wled guide, setup guide, installation, led installation, led strip installation, multi-channel led controller, getting started esp32, understand, connecting leds to esp32

Id: mrVr4hIB94g

Length: 10min 34sec (634 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 29 2023