How to Set Up WLED to Run with USB Power Only - ESP8266 Tutorial

foreign what's up everybody this is Carl from technical goodies and one thing I've been trying to get into is some DIY LED projects I'm not good at soldering I don't really know about all the electronics that go into it but what I found is that it's actually pretty simple to do so one of the things I wanted to walk you through today was basically using an LED strip a controller board and basically only having to plug it in through some sort of USB plug like a wall brick or into your computer now if you're going to have larger projects with longer strips of LEDs you'll have to look into some kind of power injection but for me in my projects that I want to do I'm looking at anywhere around 75 to 100 LEDs and that's perfectly fine when you're talking about just using like a 5 volt adapter with the wall in this video I'm basically going to hook up an LED strip use the controller install wled on it and run some effects through the LED strip again no soldering required this is really just to show you how to do it and show you how easy it is so on the desk here I've got a couple things I've got a strip of LEDs I've got a controller here which is the esp8266 development board and this basically comes as a blank controller board and for this project we're going to use the computer to basically Flash the card that's on here and add wled now it sounds a little bit scary but it's not it's super easy and I'll walk you step by step on the computer on how to do that so if we take a look here at this controller board you can see that it is a Wi-Fi enabled board it has a USB micro connection on the side that allows you to basically hook up a any old micro USB connector that you have at home and then on the bottom it actually has rails that are connected so it's ready for us to be able to connect small little breadboard wires without having to do any soldering so the first step that we want to do is take this and hook it up so I'm just simply just going to connect the connector here to the board now when you plug it in it will connect to your computer and it will try to install the drivers but I've found that a lot of times if you don't have the drivers installed you can go ahead and install those and that way it'll show up in the flashing software okay so we basically have to do three different things here on the computer we have to download the driver for the board we have to download the flash utility that basically sends the wled build to the controller board and we have to download the wled build so the first thing I'm going to do here and I'll leave all these links down below so you can grab them is I'm going to come to this vcp drivers page and I'm going to pick the one that is for my computer now I don't have to install these they're already installed on my computer so all you do is grab the windows drivers and install them and it's that simple so once that's done you can go ahead and grab the ESP home flasher what that does is it allows you to load the binary 4w LED which is just one single file and push it to the controller board so I'm going to go ahead and grab the 14 1.4.0 and come on here and I have Windows 64 so I'll go ahead and download that 64-bit windows and then I'll also go over to the wled releases I don't like to download the Beta release I'm going to go ahead down to the most stable release which is here because it's not marked as beta and you want to come down here to the assets section open this up in my case this is the esp8266 bin I'm going to go ahead and click that and download it so now I've got the Flasher and I have the binary ready to go so all I have to do is open up the Flasher and what will happen is if your controller is connected correctly and connected to USB you should be able to drop down the box here and see pretty much just one entry as a communication port and that's basically pointing directly at the board itself and then you have to tell it what firmware to put on we're going to go ahead and select the wled bin we just downloaded and click Flash so what this is doing is basically going through and dumping the whole wled instance onto the controller and what that does is it sets up basically like a web server so that you can connect with all your devices iPhone and Android have an app that you can use as well as do a web browser so once this is done it'll tell you done all right now that it's done you'll notice that there is a blue light that is now enabled on the device so that means it's pretty much ready to go and all you have to do is come over to your Wi-Fi pop it up and what you'll see is a wled Wi-Fi so you can go ahead and connect to this the default password for this is wled one two three four I already have it saved in here so I won't have to type it in but that's the default password as soon as you add it to the device so I'm going to hit connect and what should happen is once I connect it'll automatically pop me back into my browser it'll try to redirect and get to the wled software so I'm going to go ahead and wait for it to load and I mean and if that doesn't happen you can type in 4.3.2.1 into your browser as long as you're connected to that Wi-Fi for the controller then it will pull this up so the first thing we want to do is we want to set the Wi-Fi settings and the Wi-Fi settings allow the controller board when it's turned on it will automatically connect to your home Wi-Fi now this does not work with 5G it only works for the 2.4 gigahertz bandwidth so you're going to have to make sure to connect to that all of my devices are connected to the five gigahertz but this is going to be connected to the 2.4 gigahertz and what that means is that I won't be able to access it on my five gigahertz Network I'll just have to switch over the other one when I need to make changes to wled all right so what we want to do is go into Wi-Fi settings and you want to put in your network here mine is SCH 2.400 gigahertz 12 f8 which is such a creative ID I know so go ahead and add your password and then leave it as zero zero zero zero for DHCP it'll automatically get an IP address from your router and one other thing I like to do is come down here and change this easy access URL to something that I'll remember in this case I'm going to do an O lamp so I'll actually do lamp controller and make it a little bit more unique I do want to specify that I have had problems accessing on my particular network with this easy sort of URL I need to use the IP address now one of the things that I've had a hard time with is the fact that like I said the the easy URL doesn't work on my machine and then I don't know what the IP address is of the device once it connects to my whole network what I like to do is make sure that this instead of no connection after boot we always want to say always now what that does is it allows us to reconnect to the access point which is this controller if you leave it to no connection it'll reboot after you save the network settings and you can't connect back to the access point you can turn that off later once you write down the IP address and know everything or or if the easy URL works for you that's perfectly fine in this particular case I prefer to leave it as always all right I'm going to hit save and connect that should set everything up with the controller board and then you can connect back to your home network if it brings you to the screen that's good you can go in here to config Wi-Fi setup and down here you'll see your IP address so that's the IP address of the box you can go ahead and copy that I'm going to go ahead and connect back to my 2.4 gigahertz access point that's the one that wled is connected to so now if I go up to the top here paste and go to dot 188 it brings up the wled software just perfectly okay so we have don't the wled file onto the controller board and now we've set it up so that you can access it through your own Wi-Fi okay next thing we need to do is connect the LEDs to the controller board so that you can actually start to see some cool lights so that's easy enough to do so let's go for it so now we're back at the table here I'm going to go ahead and disconnect the controller so we don't have any electrical issues and what we want to do is go ahead and hook up these LEDs okay so they basically come with this little extra piece on here if you get the ones that I get I'll go ahead and take this off because what is good about this is that you can go ahead and hook these small connectors and you can see here the breadboard has a female side and a male side so that you can go ahead and hook this directly into that connector and to the board so first thing we want to do is take a look at this okay there's two wires hanging off here this is for power injection we're not going to use this right now we're only going to use these three you have power which is red ground which is white and data which is green and that allows basically the wled software to go ahead and send changes to the LED lights based on what you select okay so it's as simple as basically taking these three breadboard wires right here and hook them up to the correct places on this board okay on this particular board we want to start with power and power is the Vol the Vol is right here go to the micro USB connector and it's the first one here on the side we're going to want to slide this cord right on there until it pops in and then we're going to want to take the ground and put it right next to it that's the ground connector so now we have the ground and the power connected we need to connect the data okay so data is going to be over here on the D4 pin you'll have to look at your board and see exactly where the D4 pin is here but it's the fifth one down because it starts at zero so zero one two three four toss it on there and we should be pretty much good to go what I'm going to do now is hook it to the LED strip okay so you want to hook up white and I use these colors to make sure that they were all matching hook white to white just plug it right in there hook data to data and hook power to power all right now this isn't the most secure type of connection you know soldering is always better but for this demonstration you know it should work in fact it should work for any sort of small projects that you're not going to move around a lot but if these get disconnected everything will stop working okay so now I'm going to plug the controller back into the computer this is going to be the power now it's not going to be a connection it's just power so this could be plugged into like a wall brick I happen to be at the computer so I'll plug it in here and now you see we actually have lights for the LED strip so now I'm back in wled and you're going to want to reload the page to make sure we're connected and if I change this to Pink the LED is changed to Pink so now we have Simply Connected the LED strip to this small controller and we have complete control over these addressable LEDs okay so what I'm going to do is going to go ahead and show you just real quick a couple of different effects so if I jump into the effects and I want to do Android you can see that it's doing basically the Android effect okay so one thing you will notice is that it does kind of stop at about 30 LEDs in which is one of these smaller strips the reason for that is NW LED you can go in here and configure your LED preferences and there's a thing here that says total LEDs of 30 and we want to change that now I plan to take this and put it into a lamp and I might use I don't know 50 LEDs I might use 49 LEDs depending on wherever I cut it and wherever it fits so I want to go ahead and tell WL LED exactly what I have as far as my setup I'll just go ahead and toss in 75. for now now hit save so now you'll notice that it's all lighting up I don't know hopefully you can see it you can see it around the edge here as it goes so now there's there's 75 LEDs that are lighting up now you can go as high as you want based on the power that you're putting in here I'm going to make a very generic statement which is on the simple five volt power from a brick from your wall you may get anywhere from 75 to 100 LEDs before you start to see you know that diminishing power and what that means is as as it gets further down the row you'll see dimmer and dimmer LEDs in this case like I said I really want to have kind of a small project so I'm not worried about power injection at this time so if we go back over to the wled software go into the effects again I'm going to go down here to one that I particularly like which is wipe random which basically takes and wipes through the LEDs and changes the colors you can kind of see it going there one thing you can do also is you can create segments in this particular case the default segment is 0 to 75 which is what we set up I'm going to go ahead and change the group into three okay and apply what that does is it makes it gradient in groups of three so it's a little bit more of a smooth gradient there's tons of settings and effects that you can mess around with but at this point in time we're good to go we have a controller we have LEDs everything's hooked up all I have to do is plug it into a wall brick or into my computer and you're good to go one other thing that I want to make sure that you know that if you're going to shut down the wled controller you need to set up an automatic preset for it to load when it comes back on so in this particular case I have kind of what I want I'm gonna go ahead over to presets I'm going to create a preset and I'm going to make this the main preset and this ID is set to one uses all the different states and I'm going to save preset and then what I want to do is go over to config under LED preferences and at the bottom here you're going to see apply preset okay I'm going to go ahead and change it to one if you leave it at zero it'll just use whatever is set by default in wled I'm going to change it to one and I'm going to hit save that way when I shut this down or shut down my computer and this loses power I want to boot back up everything comes back up the same so I'm going to show you that I'm going to go ahead and disconnect this from Power and you can see all the LEDs are off and I'm going to turn it back on [Music] and it's still doing the exact same thing that I wanted it to do which is the same effect that my preset that's in there already but yeah it's that simple like I said I looked around forever to see if there was any way to do this without power injection I think people thought it was just obvious but to a beginner like me it wasn't so now I all I have to do is have the controller board plug it into a wall brick and I'm good to go so hopefully this helped you I know it was a little bit long and a little bit more detailed than some people might want but if this helped you at all go ahead and hit like for me it really does help hit subscribe I'd really appreciate it but for now this is Carl from technical goodies and I'm out

Channel: TechfulGoodies

Views: 3,441

Keywords: wled esp8266, wled controller, wled led strips, wled to esp8266, esp8266 led control, wled tutorial, diy led strip, how to use wled, configure wled, wled on esp8266, getting started wled, esp8266 led strip control, easy wled install, wled usb only, wled no power injection

Id: 9joXmoGoIgI

Length: 16min 23sec (983 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 20 2023