For the life of me i cannot figure out how to send UDP commands to an esp board with neopixel light. Theres very little info in the docs except to add
‘’'‘wled:
port:
‘’’
Once you enable it to receive UDP commands, how the F do you send them? How do you change colors/effects from HA. Its so much easier to just use a dedicated esp to run wled but im tired of using a second board because its easy. So again, how do you send a wled effect to an addressable led strip using esphome?
Its a light component because you specifically make it one using the light platform and you dont need the wled integration for that. That really wasnt even my question either. I specifically asked about sending UDP commands in order to use wled effects.
I missed that in your first post.
You can’t.
The data timing in WLED is too critical to be trusted to an asynchronous I/O of ESPHome or the Home Assistant API.
I am not sure what this exactly means
I assume it is what you are referring to.
I think on further reading that the wled effects allows something like Hyperion or prismatik to control your lights over a standard protocol called udp realtime control. So I think looking for ha to control the effect may be misguided.
My original question didnt elaborate that far out but that was what i was hoping. So what it sounds like is at best i could send commands for ambient lighting from third party apps to an esphome light?
Ya, i think im going to have to just use 2 boards for any light i want more than generic ambient lighting. The problem is i will typically use 1 board for many things. WlED has support for little things like toggling a relay or monitoring a button/gpio. For esp boards that do more than these basic tasks i guess im going to have to seperate the light out and use a second board for it.
Maybe if you tell us what you want to do with the lights someone here may have a solution. Since you can get WLED controllers for as low as $2 I don’t see why you wouldn’t just use a dedicated WLED controller and send commands to it from Home Assistant/ESPHome.
Like i said, i use my esp boards for several things at once and i already said, the goal was to get wled level effects without having to use a second esp board. This particular set of lights is already hooked up to an esp8266 that my garage door opener, sensors, wiegand26 keypad/rfid reader are controlled from. The lights arent the project, theyre a small part of it. Im not sure why people dont seem to understand the concept of using more than 1 gpio at a time. If i dont have to add a dedicated led controller for each place i have lights and jam up my network then obviously anyone would want to avoid that. Wled has a fearure to sync-send or sync-recieve with remote esp controllers. It didnt seem like it would be a huge stretch to use that feature if both are using the same protocol UDP, but apparently it is.
I think that is what this does.
Lol thats what im trying to figure out. Its just a box you can check though. There isnt really anything to configure. So select/check the sync-send box in wled and then what? Im kind of over it though, really. Its far easier to just keep using a second board or use neopixel. 95% of the time i only want solid cool/warm white light. I wanted some wled effects for Christmas lighting but this irritation is quickly bringing the Scrooge out of me lol
I must say I agree with the OP. I want to use the WLED integration with HomeAssistant, but it asks for an IP, and if I give it the IP of the ESPHome device, it does not work, even when HomeAssistant has turned on the device and set the effect to WLED.
I was asking pi.ai about this, and it said there is a WLED proxy for HA that allowed it to pretend to be a single WLED, and then WLED_SYNC: (instead of WLED:) is used to link the virtual to the real. …but I can’t find any of that, I think it was hallucinating. It also mentioned “HACS” (short for Home Assistant Community Store) and also https://github.com/dik990/WLED-Sim which doesn’t exist (anymore?)
If the UDP proxy thing exists, and I can point WLED (or home assistant WLED integration) to the HA IP and use liveview… that would be what I want.
How do people do all this? WLED Effect for ESPHome + WLED integration for HA should work a lot more seemlessly. I’m a bit lost.
Please don’t spread that AI crap here.
Have you got an esphome device configured?
At that point try controlling it with prismatic or ledfx.
Yeah, AI is weird.
Thanks for the tip. I will try out those apps, along with xLights using e1.31, and also a board with WLED instead of ESPHome. So much to explore.