I will be adding WS2813 RGB LEDs to my stairs. In order to find an easy way to change colours and light effects I would like to use ESPhome to drive them. The challenge is now that I want each stair to light up after the other to mimick the direction you are walking in (upstairs or downstairs).
The challenge I am having is how to achieve the segmentation part in Esphome. Esphome can easily address all the stairs (=segments), but how to achieve this on a stair by stair basis is unknown to me.
There does not appear to be a way to address the individual strips/LEDs using the ESPhome RGB LED components. You would have to wire each strip’s data line back to the ESP and create 16 individual lights.
Unless you wanted to develop your own ESPhome LED effect.
Found the solution! It’s a little bit hidden inside the esphome.io site, but Light Partition should do the trick (https://esphome.io/components/light/partition.html)
Now it’s time to see if I can create the needed scene without running out of memory…
I am running some small scale testst (1 ledstrip with 60 leds) and thus far I am very happy with the results! All animations are done in Homeassistant. Find below the draft code. Rationale: every stair (currently 10 leds) should have 1 color led on all the time (different color per stair) and when script is triggered the stairs should turn on 1 by 1 and off 1 by 1. In the below you should assume that “part” means “stair”.
TODO:
‘wipe’ effect for power on/off
Dimming according to time of day
Usage of sensors to determine moving direction upstairs/downstairs
Very impressive, thanks for sharing ! I just received my led strips and installed the nodemcu in the closet under the stairs.
Please share your whole conf when you are done, it will help a lot Thanks !
I am still planning… Currently my biggest doubts are around power supply (35 amps) and wiring (to solder or not to solder). Will post everything as soon as it is fitted
Hi, did it manage to get started? I myself consider the same principle on my staircase. If you made a video of how it works and how it involved, I would be grateful. Thanks for your work.
hey Frank,
did you continue this project? i’m about to start building a wordclock that I can trigger from ESPhome and where i can add other info as well (weather etc)