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Pixelblaze V2 – An advanced LED pattern development engine and controller
- StavrosK 8y agoGreat project! The hardware looks pretty simple, but the software side looks like a lot of work was put in, and it shows. Fantastic job.
- StavrosK 8y agoOh, I just noticed it's closed source. Too bad :/
- solarkraft 8y agoFollowed the same path as you. Of course the hardware is ridiculously expensive, as it happens when you spin your own stuff (needlessly). Will have look into rendering the patterns & streaming over sACN (a DMX-derived, seemingly standard protocol mentioned in another comment).
- StavrosK 8y agoWhich do you mean is expensive? The hardware costs around $5.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- solarkraft 8y agoThe Pixelblaze guy wants 30$ for his ESP8266 board (I get mine for 2,7€/piece). A lot of that money probably doesn't go into the development of the software, but manufacturing and shipping. I just installed an Open Pixel Control [0] server [1] (receiver) on a Wemos D1 mini and can now stream pixel values to it using python [2]. This comes with all the downsides, of course, but does add a lot of flexibility. Pixelblaze is probably very well written and has some great features (and infrastructure, I'm considering writing a parser for the patterns). However I don't want to pay a gigantic markup for a weird ESP8266 board and have to wait for it to ship to me, supporting (while sinking a large part of the money into stupid overhead) the development of software that isn't even open source. [0]: http://openpixelcontrol.org/ http://openpixelcontrol.org/ [1]: https://github.com/ppelleti/esp-opc-server https://github.com/ppelleti/esp-opc-server [2]: https://github.com/zestyping/openpixelcontrol/tree/master/python https://github.com/zestyping/openpixelcontrol/tree/master/py...
- StavrosK 8y agoAh, that's what you meant. Yes, I definitely agree.
- simap 8y agoHi, Pixelblaze guy here :) I totally get where you are coming from. It would be nice if you could drop this on any old board and be up and running. Hopefully I can share some of my perspective. Pixelblaze is a commercial venture for me, and I have to figure out how to make some $ from it to pay for my time so that I can keep making it better. I can't afford to spend the amount of time that I do on a hobby, and I don't have a sponsor. If I figure out a way to open source it and have financial incentive to keep working on it, I'll do that. I've been carving out bits and pieces to open source that I think are useful utilities. The hardware itself solves a few problems, such as level shifting, that I haven't see embedded on other esp8266 boards. It also provides a platform for more interesting hardware such as the (fully OSS+OSH) sensor expansion board. On the pricing side of things, the hardware isn't a majority of the cost. OTOH I'm never going to compete with the $3 boards w/ free shipping. I don't have the volume where I can drop the per unit 'software overhead' to a level where I'm competitive with the low end Chinese markets. The price of the product as a whole is very competitive in this market. There are cheap no-feature (completely closed) LED controllers for not much less, and high-end controllers start in the hundreds of dollars. --------- If you want to replicate something like the language in Pixelblaze, it's not so bad. Its syntactically ES6, though without many of the dynamic features of JavaScript. Michael Leibman (@michaelleibman) put together this codepen that emulates Pixelblaze compatibility here: https://codepen.io/mleibman/pen/WMVbVq?editors=0010 https://codepen.io/mleibman/pen/WMVbVq?editors=0010 You could use that as a starting point for some kind of RPi nodejs app that pushes pixel data to your ESPs, or perhaps port the functions (they aren't rocket science) to Python. I toyed with the idea, but realized I have too many hobbies already :)
- hobzcalvin 8y agoI'm working on a project, definitely less far along, that's open-source and uses the ESP32 for additional Bluetooth functionality. There's an open-source cross-platform app for control. https://github.com/hobzcalvin/blume https://github.com/hobzcalvin/blume
- andrewkirk 8y agoGreat work, such a useful hardware and software package. A few months too late for our project, will use for next year.
- ChickeNES 8y agoReading the article reminded me that APA has been threatening vendors of the WS2812, claiming that it infringes one of their patents: https://hackaday.com/2018/07/31/are-patent-claims-coming-for-your-ws2812/ https://hackaday.com/2018/07/31/are-patent-claims-coming-for...
- jacquesm 8y agoAnother disgusting example of patent abuse.
- kken 8y agoFunny how people always jump to conclusions when it comes down to people enforcing their patents. My understanding of this drama is, that APA is a small taiwanese startup that was actually the first company with a RGB LED with integrated driver. There are a bunch of chinese companies that are more or less copying their products and are pushing them on the market at much lower price and more agressive marketing. It surely looks to me as if they are using patents in their originally intended way. The downside is that they are hitting vendors with a C&D instead of going to the source. But that could rooted in the difficulties surrounding the ability of a taiwanese company to sue a china mainland one...
- jacquesm 8y agoExplain to me which parts of what you quoted deserve a patent.
- etaioinshrdlu 8y agoRandom question: has anyone seen a neopixel-compatible interface LED in a tinier package, like 2mm square? Would be great for some applications.
- cuoverhere 8y agoThe SK6812/APA102s come in a 2020 package now, but I haven't seen them on a strip. @wow_elec_tron on instagram has been working on his own flex pcbs for them. I think he may do a kickstarter to get some in production.
- kbob 8y agoYou can get WS2811, which is the driver chip without an LED. You can hook that up to any RGB LED in any form factor. It's more expensive and requires more PCB space, but you get flexibility in LED placement.
- Cynddl 8y agoHow does this compare to FastLED [1] on the same ESP8266 (and ESP32) platform? FastLED is free and open source, and support almost all LED drivers out there. Writing animations with FastLED might not be as easy as with Pixelblaze, but similarly only requires a few lines of code. [1] https://github.com/FastLED/FastLED https://github.com/FastLED/FastLED
- xtf 8y agoThis is a nice project made with FastLED: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zQ8qC1KQgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zQ8qC1KQgU Next step: Warp Core
- Nursie 8y agoOh god, I think I'm in love with a lighting setup...
- hellweaver666 8y agoOne is a hardware solution with a built in hosted software library, the other is pure software so I don't think you can really compare.
- StavrosK 8y agoTo use the software one you just need a $3 board and to connect three cables. Hardly rocket science.
- simap 8y agoAuthor of Pixelblaze here :) FastLED is an awesome LED driver library with colorspace and fast math functions. I highly recommend it. Pixelblaze is that plus a web interface, compiler, IDE, and pattern library all over WiFi. You can reprogram your work remotely without cables, and all real-time, or even on a phone. I found that quickly iterating I could get a better intuitive sense of the changes I was making and get the look I was going for with less hassle. For apa102/sk9822 LEDs, the 32-bit math engine in Pixelblaze along with the HDR driver (5 + 8 bits) lets you get better color control at lower brightness levels and smoother transitions than what's currently in FastLED. I have a number of desk and/or nightlight projects that look just as good at 2% brightness, where with 8-bit per channel color you start to get extreme posterization and color mixes start failing. Another slight advantage is that Pixelblaze uses a pipelined driver where pixel data doesn't usually need to be buffered before being send out to the LEDs. WS2812 are particularly sensitive, so there is a buffered mode for them, but for other chipsets Pixelblaze renders the pixel data just in time and doesn't require a framebuffer.
- h4b4n3r0 8y agoI’ve been using plain Arduino and FastLED to drive 300 individually addressable LEDs as a Christmas ornament for the past 3 years. Super simple, and my kid can write his own patterns in C. Nowhere near this level of effort though.
- SethTro 8y agoI'm working on several medium sized LED projects and am curious if anyone has a guide or links to buying WS2812 or similar strands. I've bought a ~10 of these https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ZHB9M6A/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ZHB9M6A/ref=oh_aui_sear... but I would love to find a slightly cheaper source. Alibaba seems to sell them at half the cost but product titles, photos, and descriptions don't ever seem to match
- nicoburns 8y agoEbay is worth considering for these too.
- luastoned 8y agoI've ordered here without any problems: https://btf-lighting.aliexpress.com/store/1051119 https://btf-lighting.aliexpress.com/store/1051119
- StavrosK 8y agoThey have 5m spools of 60 LED/meter strips for $25 here: https://www.ebay.com/itm/WS2812B-Strip-LED-Lights-5050-RGB-30-60-144-LED-M-IC-Individual-Addressable-DC5V/262452005540?epid=1561134077&hash=item3d1b5bcaa4%3Am%3AmkMwXOyKYoE3TxVrA-ee05w&var=561255461869 https://www.ebay.com/itm/WS2812B-Strip-LED-Lights-5050-RGB-3...
- zaarn 8y agoWS2812 LED Strips on AliExpress/Alibaba/BangGood are sorta okay. I've got a few of them at home, some of them have LED's shortcircuited after they failed. To some extend you get what you pay for but they're good enough for most purposes (and if they go too much kaputt you can replace them with another one for the same low price) and fairly bright too (about 0.25A of LED per meter and 30LED/m density)
- pixelface 8y agoray wu on aliexpress/ebay(I think?) has a good reputation and is widely used
- mhroth 8y agoI've spent the last four years learning the art and craft of LED art. I suppose I wouldn't change the way that I do things, but if I were starting out again I'd definitely use this. I can very much appreciate all of the work that this system takes off of my hands. The auto-recompile low-iteration-time is key. Very impressive!
- solarkraft 8y agoHow do you do things?
- harryf 8y agoOff topic but I like that his website puts the menu where your thumb on mobile can actually reach it
- jve 8y agoI wonder why on earth mobile phones usually have controls on top of the screen, but not on the bottom. Phone call app has search bar on top. Call activity tab on top. The default sort behavior, when searching, is to put more relevant results from top to bottom. Why not bottom to top? This design decision is especially annoying on larger screen devices. At least invoking keypad is lower-right corner.
- ino 8y agoBecause on iOS Safari any touch on the lower area reveals the autohidden bottom toolbar, so now the button has moved up, and now you have to click on it again for it to work.
- karanlyons 8y agoCan you network multiple boards together to drive larger LED arrays in sync?
- simap 8y agohttps://github.com/simap/Firestorm https://github.com/simap/Firestorm It's new, I haven't had a chance to update website/videos. Syncs animation timebases and lets you push sticky commands to multiple Pixelblaze on a network.
- anujdeshpande 8y agoSince this runs on ESP8266, could be done easily I think
- jarmitage 8y ago> Pixelblaze was designed for APA102 LEDs (aka DotStar). These LEDs are state-of-the-art and provide rock solid updates, faster refresh cycles, and the possibility of a dynamic range well beyond 0-255 Are these still the state-of-the-art in their category?
- shriram2 8y agoWs28xx LEDs based projects are worth doing . Here is one of my project Alexa + Ws2812b https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mSTAEfD8b7A https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mSTAEfD8b7A Audio Reactive lights - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LXyipKAUpEs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LXyipKAUpEs
- lozaning 8y agoWow this is awesome! Can you share more about how you've set this up? I'd love to read a write up if you've got one. I've got something similar going on right now with my phillips hue strips and their new realtime api, but every strip is all the same color.
- chrisparton1991 8y agoNice to see you on Hacker News Ben! This is Chris a.k.a. ChrisLights, I spoke to you about Sparkled on one of your videos a while back. It's awesome to see you getting some recognition for your excellent work on Pixelblaze, keep it up!
- simap 8y agoThanks! I'd love bring these together in some way. With the sequencer in https://github.com/sparkled/sparkled https://github.com/sparkled/sparkled and the network sync stuff in https://github.com/simap/Firestorm https://github.com/simap/Firestorm we could have a really nice sequencer setup!
- chrisparton1991 8y agoI'm definitely keen to collaborate once my core features are a bit more stable! I'm working hard on a stage editor at the moment, I'll send you a video sometime soon :)
- simap 8y agoIf you want to get a feel for what you can make, you can browse published patterns here: https://electromage.com/patterns/ https://electromage.com/patterns/ I was interviewed by embedded.fm about Pixelblaze and some other projects https://www.embedded.fm/episodes/220 https://www.embedded.fm/episodes/220 Might be interesting to other folks wanting to do something similar, we cover some of the meta around making and selling a DIY thing and learning things along the way. Highly recommend the podcast as well.
- justwalt 8y agoWhat are your plans with respect to open source? I’d love to contribute to the effort!
- solarkraft 8y agohttps://github.com/simap/pixelblaze https://github.com/simap/pixelblaze: > Pixelblaze itself isn't open source (yet)
- simap 8y agoIt's something I've considered. I've released many of the components as well as the entire expansion board project https://github.com/simap/pixelblaze_sensor_board https://github.com/simap/pixelblaze_sensor_board And the network sync and control app https://github.com/simap/Firestorm https://github.com/simap/Firestorm I'm still figuring out how to make that work commercially so that I can afford to continue development on it - ideas welcome!
- jacquesm 8y agoIf you want an interesting side project: spin a string of these addressable LEDs to make a circular display, or sweep a plane of them for a display volume.
- gm-conspiracy 8y agopersistence of vision?
- solarkraft 8y agoyes.
- StavrosK 8y agoI did just that, and it's fantastic: https://www.makerfol.io/project/Z5XFwxh-lighttracer-a-photography-experiment/build-log/ https://www.makerfol.io/project/Z5XFwxh-lighttracer-a-photog... Latest, gamma-corrected version: https://i.imgur.com/3o1jzh3.jpg https://i.imgur.com/3o1jzh3.jpg Colors: https://www.instagram.com/p/BmJ5w_nA6ey/?taken-by=eltthoughts https://www.instagram.com/p/BmJ5w_nA6ey/?taken-by=eltthought... All I need now is to take one good photo with it so I can write the post.
- jacquesm 8y agoHah cool :) This one was on one of my idea dump lists a couple of years ago, it's super nice to see it in real life, beautiful work! I really like the tree sitting outside, it's like a hologram from a sf movie.
- StavrosK 8y agoThank you! Yes, I love the tree too, I need to shoot it again after the color correction (and experience not over exposing the image). I'll release the code soon if you want to try it out, it's pretty much just an ESP8266 connected to a LED strip.
- rubatuga 8y agoThis is exactly what I imagined a great LED pattern management system would be, except executed 10 times better than anything I could have built.
- exabrial 8y agoCurious if it can accept DMX in any form? (Though iirc DMX only goes to 16bit color)
- FraKtus 8y agoThere are DMX led strips, but they are more expensive and more fragile because they have more components on the strip.
- anfractuosity 8y agoThis looks a very interesting project! One thing I couldn't tell though, could you 'stream' LED pixel values over wifi instead of generating them on the hardware? Using the ws2812b Lights and the: https://github.com/jgarff/rpi_ws281x https://github.com/jgarff/rpi_ws281x library, I made my LEDs pulse out an ID, which I read with a webcam, then used it to make a simple webapp, to 'paint' my Christmas tree's lights. https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/painting-a-christmas-tree/ https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/painting-a-christmas-... This year I'm planning on buying some APA102 lights though, and taking it outdoors :) (So i'm looking at the IP68 versions). Ideally I want to create a 3D map of the LEDs this year, but I need to do a lot of reading on that!
- tlrobinson 8y agoYou can send it patterns in the form of code, but the hardware generates them, so I don't think you need to use WiFi once you've uploaded them.
- anfractuosity 8y agoGotcha cheers, I guess I was thinking about patterns which may be too big to fit in the ESP's memory.
- simap 8y agoYep, the trick here is that Pixelblaze doesn't store or stream pixel data, the patterns are small fast programs that generate pixel data on the fly. One benefit of this approach is that Wifi can drop or be unreliable without impacting animations. This also lets them react to inputs e.g. using some of the IO or ADC, or using the sensor expansion board for audio, light, or movement (accelerometer). Each pattern is typically 5-15K (this includes compressed source, compiled, and preview animation), and there's plenty of flash to store hundreds of different patterns.
- NikolaeVarius 8y agoNice. After defcon I've been thinking about putting together some LED screens for shits and giggles. I'm normally not big on LEDs but some of those patterns were pretty mind bending
- th0br0 8y agoThere's the ElectroDragon ESP LED Board, which does pretty much all of what the Pixelblaze does (sans FW) for much less - although the footprint is larger... https://www.electrodragon.com/product/esp-led-strip-board/ https://www.electrodragon.com/product/esp-led-strip-board/
- snops 8y agoThe electrodragon board is for cheaper single colour strips (hence the large MOSFETs on the PCB) while this is for individually addressable LEDs.
- bshep 8y agoA couple of other controllers: - Falcon PiHat - connect to a Pi and is able to manage 2 string of ~800 LEDs each - EsPixelStick uses an ESP to run pixels - Can be bought on Amazon both use a standard Ethernet protocol for sending pixel data. I use xlights to control them but there are various controllers out there. https://www.pixelcontroller.com/store/index.php https://www.pixelcontroller.com/store/index.php
- solarkraft 8y agoThanks!
- tibbon 8y agoThis is pretty great. For my larger LED projects (3000+ lights) I'm slowly moving over to something like TouchDesigner for animations and mapping, but for medium and smaller projects this is fantastic. Will be buying some!
- sdwisely 8y agowe've had really great results with TD tops into madmapper (via syphon/spout) on some installs 6000+ too.
- tibbon 8y agoYea, some combination of that for projection mapping, and perhaps sending directly out to Artnet/sACN for LEDs, servos and lasers? Still trying to piece it together as things get bigger and bigger. My contact information is in my profile. Can you reach out? I'd love to see some of the stuff you're doing and ask a question or two.
- pixelface 8y agoon jobs we use pixlite controllers for controlling lots of addressables and send it artnet out of touchdesigner. no need to involve madmapper as touchdesigner handles all the mapping you could possibly want without adding the latency of piping out to madmapper. if you're just doing hobby projects you can stream serial out of touch via USB to a teensy 3.2 and control (in my experience) around 4000 LEDs at ~60fps. for lasers you should check out the etherdream, simple and works well. servo control you'll need a board but generating the software side in touchdesigner is simple.
- tibbon 8y agoI've got a Pixelpusher laying around that in theory drive servos, but I haven't tried it yet. Thanks for the advice!!!
- tlrobinson 8y agoThis looks great. Just in time for that thing in the desert... The pattern editing workflow seems nice. Editing C code and waiting for it to upload to an Arduino was never very fun. Being able to see a preview and quickly send to the controller over WiFi is a game changer. One thing I like about those cheap WS2812B controllers (https://www.amazon.com/s/field-keywords=ws2812b+rf https://www.amazon.com/s/field-keywords=ws2812b+rf) is the RF remote. An add-on for the Pixelblaze would be neat. Just on/off, changing the brightness, switching patterns, and switching to auto cycling between patterns would be sufficient. One more suggestion: support for 2D patterns (I guess it's just the previews that need support since you can do simple math to turn a 2D pattern into a 1D strip) Also: open source, please :)
- solarkraft 8y agoThis is great. I have been planning to install some LED strips for a while now, but software has been holding me back. This submission comes in just as some others are planning to order strips in bulk. Thanks!
- solarkraft 8y agoWelp, never mind, I don't see where I can download it.
- ben174 8y agoJust in time for Burning Man, working on my bikes today - and I've got a TON of WS2812's - definitely gonna give this a shot.
- gonesilent 8y agoSee also pixelpusher http://www.heroicrobotics.com/products/pixelpusher http://www.heroicrobotics.com/products/pixelpusher
- ateesdalejr 8y agough... blocking fonts makes the content invisible.