How to install WLED on ESP8266 and connect to WS2812B strip lights

the first thing we need to do is download our esp home flasher software and i'll leave links in the description to these websites so you can quickly access it once you're here you want to go down and find the operating system that you're using i'm using windows 64. click on that and it will download it here in the corner next i need to download the actual wled software and again i'll leave the link in the description now you can certainly download the beta versions here it looks like they have those listed at the top but i'm going to scroll down until i see the most current complete full version which i believe is 12 and i'm going to download that one since i know it does work there's no hiccups that i've experienced so far so again you can download any one that you want but i'm going to for this tutorial just download the the newest version 12. they're going to have a few different file types that you can choose from and we're going to want to download the one that said esp8266.bin now that we have both files just click on the esp home flasher download and once you click on that it should open up a program that looks like this before we can go any further we need to plug the actual device into our computer so i'm using an old micro usb phone charger so plug that into the device and then the other end just plug into any usb port on your pc once it's plugged into the computer you should now see a blue power light on the module so let's go back to our home flasher software and under serial port you push the down arrow and now that our device is plugged in you should be able to select whatever comes up from that drop down menu on my computer it says com6 but yours might say something different now if the device is plugged in and the blue light is on but nothing's showing up into the serial port you might need to install some drivers and i'll leave a link in the description to where you can do that next just click on the browse button and you're going to find the wled software that we just downloaded click that and select open and lastly just press the flash esp button and the home flasher software will begin to install the wled program onto the esp8266 board once it says done flashing is complete you can close out of that and now we need to connect this device to our home wi-fi network so you're going to go over and pull up your wi-fi connections now you should notice a new access point called wled ad you're going to click on that the default password for this is all lower case wled 1234 and click connect from here it should automatically take you to the wled home page but if it doesn't for some reason you can open up a new browser and type in 4.3.2.1 and hit enter and that should take you to the same spot now we can just click on the wi-fi settings and what we're going to do here at the top is we're going to put our own home network's name and you want to put it in exactly as it appears so for me i'm going to be typing in jesus loves you and that's a capital j capital l and a capital y so let's go back to the wi-fi page and input that in exactly as it appears right underneath that you're going to put in your password for your home internet and finally under the address section put something that you can remember this by i'm going to just use bedroom lights for this example once you've done that scroll down and click save and connect from here we're going to close out the web pages we're going to press the rst button which is to the left of the charging cable and this is going to make sure that all the changes we just made take effect and then also make sure that you reconnect back to your home network next we can begin to connect the led lights that we're going to be using to the wi-fi board all right so for this example i'm going to be using some ws2812b led strip lights these are 5 volt you're going to see the beginning of these led lights look like this and you have the two power injection cords wires that if you want to insert power externally you can do that but this is the main thing we're going to be focusing on uh is how to get this quickly connected to our module um to control with wled so you have the red wire the green wire the white one that's our power middle is going to be our data and the white one is going to be our ground and we want to get this connected to our esp8266 board a lot of different ways you could do this but for simplicity sake i'm just going to be using some jumper wires i think they're called jumper wires breadboard wires i'm not exactly sure the technical term but you can see one end is the male one ends the female and all i'm going to be doing is the red one which is the power so you can see it coincides with the voltage on the top red one and i want to make sure i kind of keep these straight so i'm plugging the male into the spot that connects with the red wire and then this one since it's the voltage wire i want to make sure i'm connecting it to the pin that says v i n you can see it's at the top left here so all i'm doing is plugging this in to the v i n right now the next one we're going to take i'll just use this next one and the same thing so we're going to be doing the middle which is going to be the data so again just plug that right into the spot there and now this is going to be plugged into the spot on the board that's the d4 pin so d4 right there so the data goes to the d4 pin i want to make sure i have that right all right so plug it in and lastly we are going to have the ground wire so ground the white one you can see it coincides with the ground so we're going to plug this into the last slot now on the wi-fi board here this is going to go into the gnd pin and that's going to be right next to the voltage the vin so i'm just going to take that plug it right in next to it and that is all you need to do there's many different ways you can connect these wires to the wi-fi board we're going to do it this way so we can get things up and running and you can start experimenting so now this i obviously have cut down and cut some leds off of the end you know generally going to have the rest of the spool there i'm going to connect it to a few other led lights so that when we kind of test things out you can get a little bit better feel than just two lights going on and off and i'm just using this little connector piece and these things work all right um you know i could easily solder these together for a little bit more secure stronger connection but for this example i'm just going to connect it you want to make sure that the arrows are going in the correct direction so if this second piece the arrows were going this way that would not work also we want to make sure that the arrows are going this way away from the esp8266 board so that's important we don't want to have the arrows going this way going towards it they want to make sure they're going away all right so now that we have this all hooked up i'm just going to secure this here and we'll start testing things out so to begin testing these out we need to provide some power and this is where there's again a lot of different ways in routes you go about this but for just a few lights that we have here i'm just going to plug this in using a usb phone charger that's going to provide enough power to light these up and you can use quite a few of these led lights with just that that regular phone charger but i would say once you get past a certain point you know if they start to look dim the colors are all off you're going to probably want to get more power and that's for a different video we'll go over that later but this just get things up and running with this amount of lights we can just use a us micro usb phone charger and all i have this plugged into right now is is my computer so i have it the computer's usb port now you could plug this into a wall outlet a usb wall outlet and that would work just fine as well but not providing a lot of power here but enough to power these led lights so we can test them out now once you plug this in as long as all the wiring is correct it should default to turn on to a soft yellow all right now that we have our lights hooked up to the esp8266 board that has wled installed on it let's go back and load up our bedroom lights dot local and now it takes us to the main screen so a couple things to get you started here that i recommend doing is first going into configure and go to led preferences make sure you have the total number of leds on the strip entered here so that your animations are going to be accurate and correct hit save or go back to the main screen quick settings you can control the brightness on the right hand side power on and off as on the left and then another thing you're going to want to do is making sure that when you hit green that the correct colors are accurately showing up if they're not you can go into configure again led preferences scroll down to the color order and you can play around with choosing different ones until you get the right color combination and lastly under led preferences a nice feature of wled is that they have this automatic brightness limiter built in especially since we're using those thin breadboard wires i would recommend keeping this turned on and max current maybe at around this 850 milliamp if you do end up using some larger power sources you know you can definitely up this to i believe it goes up to six or seven thousand or you can just turn this off but it's a nice little safety feature to make sure that it's not pushing too much current into the leds now for a very brief overview of some of the features here let's go into effects and we have a lot of different preset animations you can choose from and we're going to choose android here first you can see what it does to the lights on the strip now let's go back and let's change it to a different color you can see it's going to change that up but now let's say we want to add a color if i click on 2 and let's do a purplish so now we're cycling through those two colors let's go back to effects and maybe let's do bouncing balls you can see how that changes things up so there's a lot of different customizable options you can do using this program and i'm going to leave a link in the description i believe it's a wikipedia page that has a detailed breakdown of what all the animations are kind of what their features are what they use because some of them can take three colors some of them take two some of them take one so if you click on something it doesn't necessarily do exactly what you thought it would be doing that wikipedia page is helpful to understand exactly what the animations are trying to accomplish you can click this peak button here and it's going to give you a little preview of what the led light strip should be doing so you can get a pretty good idea of that now they do have an app for this wled that you can put on your phone and that app works great it's pretty much identical to what you see here so there's not much of a learning curve i won't even go into detail as far as the app goes because like i said it's the exact same thing pretty much but let me know if you have any questions i'm more than happy to try answering them for you

Channel: Chris Maher

Views: 258,530

Keywords: wled, esp8266, ws2812b, how to, esphome flasher, getting started wled, getting started esp8266, wled led strips, connecting leds to esp8266, wled on esp8266, wled esp8266, esp8266 led strip control, neopixel, programing led, programing led strips, connecting led lights to esp8266, flash wled to esp8266, esp32, esp32 led strip control, esp8266 led control, esp, wled controller, wled to esp8266, wled to esp32, ws2812b led strip lights, how to control led strips, control led lights

Id: l8OMi7SMpqs

Length: 12min 9sec (729 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 29 2021