WLED & ESP32: The Dynamic Duo of DIY LED Projects

on today's Baker's mashup buy request setting up wled on an esp32 [Music] welcome makers so today is a viewer requested video and we're going to be installing wled on an esp82 and covering how you solder all of the connections together and get it set up I'll be using an electro cookie as a permanent breadboard uh we'll be soldering some headers on there so we can remove easily remove the esp32 and then we're going to be wiring it up and testing it out and I'll show you how to install wled on it and get it set up for a basic home network so with all that said let's get to work all right so we're going to solder this uh esp32 onto this Electro cookie and what this Electro cookie is and I really like these they are solder versions of breadboards so if you've ever had a breadboard like this one which is very old and aging uh the components on this one were on it for quite some time uh this electric cookie allows you to basically do the same thing and unlike other prototype boards this one does the connections for the pins just like a breadboard works so I really really like these electric cookies for a little project work like wled because you're able to take wled install the esp32 here and put this into an enclosure and I made some 3D printed models of an enclosure that fits us pretty well and you'll be able to hook up wled and have a control box and then you can just Mount that control box anyway you want all right so before I do any soldering at all first thing I usually do is prep the esp32 and I if you have these I was able to get these header pins but they always have one extra it seems the esp32 requires uh one one less pin than these headers so the way I like to do this is I mount these so you can't really screw it up so you can see they're kind of shifted off now I could absolutely clip this last pin off what what I usually do is is not clip the pin off but I take the pin out so with these I can just take this pin right out and on this side I'll take this one out and then you're almost guaranteed that you can't put this together without having it in the right spot uh it won't power up the the unit so this is really the first step in in getting that together and then I pick an appropriate spot on the board for it uh the middle usually works pretty good uh and then we're going to solder these up here now people that have followed the channel for some time know I am big on this blue tack for soldering you don't want to contact the solder or the soldering iron with the blue Tech but uh blue tack works really really well you can just tear this stuff apart it's like kind of like bubble gum or Silly Putty and it works exceptionally well for holding things in place temporarily now the other big secret that I like to use is a little bit of rosin here and it cleans up really easy with a little bit of alcohol so once you get this all set up now we're just going to solder this together so just heat that up a little bit and then it's just a matter of going down each one of these pins so once we have that done then you can take your sticky tack off and you'll see here the great thing about this is that I can pull this off reuse this if I decide I don't want this project anymore the other nice thing is I can solder right underneath here so we're going to install this row of header pins here another great tip for soldering things and making sure you keep your space involved these header pins tend to flop over so we're gonna put those pins in right there make sure it's lined up and then we're going to use our sticky tack again the stuff that's great for a little project Electronics really does make it a lot easier to get your soldering done all right so once we have all that in place you can pull your yellow header off here and there you go all right so once we've got this all set up in place we're going to wire in the voltage in and the ground and all I've got here is a small length of wire and we'll start with the rails here so one thing to note if you want to use the other side of the Rails here you have to solder Bridge these across so these rails can actually be independent voltages on this or you can solder them together and then your rails are on both sides so and we're just going to take our sticky tack again put that here and we'll drop a little bit of solder and then this is good to go so you can see these first two pins are going to be voltage in and ground so this makes our wiring pretty simple put these two wires in and then we're going to solder it from underneath again so now that we have our power running from the rail here to our esp32 we need to hook this up this is one of the connectors that go to the LED here I buy 20 packs of these so if I ever break up these LEDs I've got extra ones of these because most LED vendors are only going to include one of these so there's a link in the description to those if you want to do a lot of work so with LEDs so what we're going to do here is no we're going to hook this up to the gpio 16 pin which is six pins up from the bottom of the board now there are different esp32 kits out there this is the dev kit version so six pins up is going to be gpio 16. it's a little hard to read here on the board probably in the video but it's this rx2 pin and that is what we're going to be using for our data line so that's the first one I like to hook up the rest of these can be hooked up either on this side or this side all right so we have uh pin six wired up here on our breadboard and now we're going to wire up the positive and negative leads on this side over here all right so now we have that all together so one more thing that I like to do with these so the wled guide suggests that you use a resistor like a 62 Ohm resistor for the data line I have found with using most of these uh China produced LEDs that it's not necessary uh if you run into problems with signal and the lights act not the way you want you'll definitely want to put a resistor there and then you can just run that resistor over to one of these pins here and wire it or over to those pins there but a resistor should easily bridge the gap on the side the only other piece that you've got to do and this is important to note is that a capacitor across the power lines here before it gets out to the LEDs is a great recommendation that will prevent any sort of voltage spikes from your power supply now I generally don't have this problem at all and I've installed plenty of these without the capacitor but this is the one piece that I definitely recommend that you do install out of the optional equipment it only takes an extra second and these are a thousand microfarad same as the spec for W LED and then they're easy enough to install here we're just going to drop that down in there just make sure that you hook up the positive to the positive double check you can see here the negative line is going there if you install these correct incorrectly they will explode there's a pretty good chance of it now it's not something that could really injure you but there is a little bit of shrapnel that comes out of them if you don't believe me you can take a look on the internet and there are plenty of videos one of the things I learned way back in high school Electronics was that capacitors could be reverse Polaris reverse the polarity on these and they will explode so I've known that since I was in high school and you can ask how I knew that and it was largely because that's what we did in lab class before the teacher arrived so blew up many a capacitors in my day all right so once we've got this done we're almost complete we're going to drop the esp32 back in here there's one more piece that we have to do and that is going to be the mains power coming into here now what I use for my Mains power on shorter runs not longer runs are one of these so on a shorter run these work really really well and what these are just cheap uh three amp 5 volt power supplies so if you don't have a a very very long run this is the way to go if you have a longer run then you're going to want to inject power along the lines not just on the board but you're going to want to inject it like Midstream because what happens is you don't get enough current to the LEDs that are further out and there's a lot of current draw and things can start to get hot especially these wires here I've uh run into cases where this gets extremely hot don't push these over about three amps I've purchased different ones of these hoping that was the case where I've gotten 5 amp power supplies it's really sketchy on whether or not this plastic part will actually handle 5 amps they don't really sell these in metal if you want something in complete metal first off you should probably just wire it directly to a higher class power supply and not use this at all but I did find some metal connectors that you could plug it into but they don't work really well because at the end of the day this is really not designed for that level of current so this is great for smaller projects but if you have a large number of LEDs you're going to need a proper power supply and you will have to inject power along the length of your LED strings so just a couple of small things here I only solder one end this end here that we've got longer leads on this is going to get these feral connectors and they work much better for these you don't have to use these you can certainly just put bare wire in here but it does work a lot better and reduces some of the chance of this stranded wire having something like one of the leads or phrase accidentally hitting the other one and causing a short so that's one of the reasons why I like these ferrule connectors so we're going to start with those and if you've never used these before they're super simple you just get your wire in there which sometimes is a little a little difficult and then these are crimpers purpose built for the sort of task and you just put that in there clamp it down and there you are you've got a nice solid connection that will fit right in there nicely and if you find you've got a little bit of extra wire because you made these a little bit long you can just cut these off and that works really really well so a secret for titting these wires that I've used for some time that works exceedingly well is using just a a little bit of rosin on these and then what I find is the solder Wicks so much better into the stranded wire and you get a really really good result now you don't even have to tap three hands here so I'll show you super quick it's just a matter of touching some solder and then just drag it nicely across and you can see both sides very good solder joint or very good solder connections or tinning tinning that's what I'm looking for wow it's like I've never done this before so with the tinning in place all you have to do then is trim this off a little bit and this will fit right into our board here all right so check all your polarities before we put the next piece in there we've got our positive and negative positive negative we know our positive is down on this side here we've made sure that our negative of the capacitor is on the negative side and the positive on the positive side are LED wires are wired up for the positive and negative and our data line goes to the six pin up which is rx2 or gpio16 I don't know if you can see this in the video but this is marked positive and negative make sure if you buy third-party ones of these that you put a multimeter on here and test these uh not that the positive and negative are wrong but sometimes the tip or the sleeve on the connector is different so you should always verify that with a multimeter before you hook it up to power or you might have some problems so these are M3 six millimeter screws and they just thread directly into the plastic and that will hold your board in place once you've got this in there with those two screws this is just a press fit connection here and it's a little tight in the box but it should all fit you'll want to make sure that you rotate these wires underneath the esp32 and then confirm everything fits so as you can see I needed to make this just a hair bigger and after I had that problem where the wire connections wouldn't fit underneath the esp32 making it bigger Works in a lot of different ways it allows me to use more of the surface area of the electric cookie for other things as well now you're probably wondering why I soldered header pins on there and we haven't used them yet so this is really just an optional step and this is for the sound reactive module if you want to get one of these Max 466 these are really easy to add on afterwards and there's no soldering required you're just going to get three of these wires here you'll hook your voltage in and the ground and then you can hook it to any one of the pins on the side over here and you'll end up with a sound reactive version now this comes with a lid like this and I've also got one for the sound reactor module which allows you to put the sound reactive module right on top and the only real call out is that you have to orient it this way so that way it doesn't hit your esp32 but other than that put that in there and you've got a sound reactive version so now that we have this all wired up I'm going to take this esp32 out and we're going to go and program it so to program this it's pretty simple I've got just a micro USB some of these have USBC the newer ones have USBC this is an older one here you're just going to plug this into your PC and you heard Windows there kick on and say that something new is plugged into the USB port so if you have trouble with this connecting to your Windows machine you probably need to download the Silicon Labs drivers and I always recommend downloading that right from the vendor website and I'll have a link in the description for the esp32 there's also an esp8266 so I'll have a page that links to those drivers if your Windows machine doesn't have it Linux should be able to automatically identify these Mac being either driver as well all right so here we are at the wled installer page and we're going to use this to program our esp32 it's about the easiest way to install it through the web installer if you want to use the max 40 466 and have the sound reactor version you can install that from here as well for the sake of this video I'm just going to use the regular version and then all you have to do is Click install and you'll see that there are various com ports available here the cp2102 that's the driver you may need if it's installed it should come right up here and say that it's paired the only thing you need to do then is Click connect and it should connect to the esp32 automatically if you click install wled it will erase everything on that esp32 and install wled all right if everything goes successful you should get a message like this that indicates the installation is complete now you can configure your Wi-Fi from here and if you do then it's a little bit easier to configure it once it's back into the enclosure once you've got this information in Just click connect and it should connect to your Wi-Fi now remember that the esp32 will only connect to 2.4 gigahertz networks once you've got everything set up then just click visit device and you'll go right to the device itself now you can see here it's already provisioned the IP address of 0.69 so what I'm going to do since we know the IP address is I'll unplug this and we're going to put it back in the enclosure and then we'll wrap everything up with a few call outs in wled so here we have the esp32 I've reinstalled it in the enclosure and we've hooked up a strip of 56 LEDs and we're going to power this on now you may find that the LEDs do not light up I'm going to show you how to configure that in wled okay so here we are inside wled and you're going to go to the configuration at the top and select LED preferences in the LED configuration one of the things I like about wled is it computes the approximate number of amps that you're going to need for this and then it tells you what you're going to have for most effects now the automatic brightness limiter is really handy for not overpowering your unit but if you know how many LEDs you have and the maximum current and it doesn't exceed your power supply I suggest turning this off now the reason why I turn that off is because you'll be able to get a much brighter intensity wled is a bit conservative here and and what I found is turning that off allows you to get the LEDs to the full brightness but it is important that you make sure that you find out what the maximum current of your LED strip is before you turn this option off so just another thing to look out for when you're setting up wled now it does allow you to say how many milliamps in here for each individual pixel so if you check the data sheet on your LED strip it should tell you this and if there's not a default value you can set one if it doesn't fit one of these five bolt values and we did a five volt installation you can do a 12 volt but the 5 volt is far more common for smaller runs from there you're going to want to set this to what we installed now which was gpio16 and then we're also going to want to configure how long our LED strip is we have 56 LEDs so we'll set that there go up to the top and save it all right so you can see I've got all the LEDs lit up now and we're able to start using wled so now that we have wled working you can see we can start changing colors we can go over to the effects and select any number of different effects inside wled now you can also use the access point there is one that is inside of wled and you can set that up and access it with your phone directly you don't need to hook it to your local network that's super convenient if you're using this outside of a home environment maybe something that you've created for uh props or maybe something else that you have Outdoors where you don't want it hooked to your network so I want to cover a few things inside wled that you will want to take a look at so under the LED preferences another thing that you'll want to check is to make sure that you do not have white balance correction enabled if you're going to be using this with something like ESP home this option for whatever reason is not compatible with it and you may find that you enabled this because you want white balance correction and then after that you come back later on trying to hook it to home assistant and you'll find that it won't work just untick this option in there and you'll be in great shape so that's a real good gotcha that you'll have once you want to set this up for something like home automation the other really cool thing that you can do with wled as well is let's say you've got a monitor or a couple of monitors and you want to control the effects independently you can create another LED strip in here and it becomes a virtual LED strip so you can start at a specific location and then end it at another location and have multiple LED strips with independent effects or independent colors so inside the Wi-Fi setup you're going to want to change a couple of things while we have a client ID here you may want to address this with a specific name so it's really good if you want to do something like wled TV so it's memorable and then you know how to get to that on your local network another thing that's super helpful as well is If instead of wled AP you may want to call the this wled TV as well so if I wanted to access this without being on the local network I would be able to then access this access point and I'm then able to control wled from there as well one thing that you really should disable is Wi-Fi sleep that does help with a lot of connectivity issues now last thing I want to show in wled because I think it is very helpful to understand this functionality as a first time user is that you can save presets so to create a preset all you'll want to do is enter the preset name we'll call this blue and say preset and now you can switch to any of the presets that you have and they'll also show up in home assistant the thing I like about having to set the presets is that if you have home assistant with multiple users you can control how crazy someone gets with wled without having a greater level of access so just a helpful hint there so now that we have everything set up all we'll have to do is screw in the top case and RW LED installation is ready to go this project is pretty easy to put together it does take some soldering but with a little bit of practice you can get really good at soldering and it opens up a whole new world of projects for you now I also wanted to cover real quick these are larger power supplies that you can get so if you have a longer run or need to inject it across multiple points in your uh LED string you can do that with something like this these are fairly inexpensive but they will cost you more than one of those wall warts which is what I used in the video today now if you've used other types of power supplies with your LED runs let me know down in the comments love to hear about it and I would also love to hear about your project on whether or not you were successful in getting this project up and running so with that is going to be the end of today's video if you liked it make sure you mash that like button and don't forget to share and subscribe so you don't miss any of the upcoming videos and if you want to help support the channel consider visiting my patreon page or a channel membership most of the content is about behind the scenes so you get to see a lot of these projects and use things like these enclosures before they're released to everyone else so with that I want to say thanks again for watching and we'll see you next time [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Makers Mashup

Views: 127,338

Keywords: 3D printing, 3d printed, 3d printing, 3d printing ideas, DIY, ESP32, LED lighting, WLED, custom, diy led strip, easy, easy wled effects, easy wled install, electronics, enclosure, esp32 leds, esphome, home assistant led strip, home automation, homeassistant led strip controller, how to make leds, how-to, installation, leds esp32, makers mashup, makersmashup, project ideas, setup guide, step-by-step, tutorial, wireless led, wireless led lighting, wled light show, wled sound reactive

Id: _wZEJPShvmI

Length: 26min 23sec (1583 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 26 2023