Individually controllable LEDs with WLED

Configuration
1

Hello. I have a handful of WLED strips in my house, all work great. I have one other WS2812 behind my basement TV. I’m doing this through ESPHome/Neopixel so that I can manually control each LED. For this use case, I’m using the lights to display a light bar that goes around the screen a distance equal to the probability of my favorite sports teams will win. For example, when the team has a 40% chance of winning, the light goes 40% around the TV. This also works great.

What I would like to do, however, is use the same LED strip to be able to use the best of both worlds. Having all the effects and functionality of WLED with the ability to still control each LED individually. I’m not sure if there is a way to do this.

My first thought is to just have two ESP boards with one running WLED and the other with ESPHome with the data lines from both feeding the LED strip. I worry, however, if that would be problematic? Would it cause harm to the boards?

If that isn’t an option, does anyone have any other ideas? Is there maybe a way to control each bulb in WLED that I’m not aware of?

Thanks.

2

It was a long time ago since I did this but I remember adding segments with each having a number of LEDs.

3

You should not directly connect the two circuits. Use a multiplexer of sorts.

EDIT: I’m not familiar with WLED in particular, but do use some WS2812 strips. The answer below would be first prize.

4

WLED can address bulbs individually.

You would need to add each bulb as a segment then save the individual segments together as a preset

3 Likes
5

So if I’m understanding correctly, I would create 100 segments, one for each percent of lights that should be on, and then 100 presets to trigger turning on each segment?

6

Yes.
Unless you are satisfied with every five percent or so…

7

One of the WLED effects is called Percentage. It will do what you need.

8

Now that I think about it.
The presets is optional.
You can just make a template that outputs the lights up to the percentage as a list and have that in a light.turn_on

9

See: Is it possible to do a progress bar with WLED? - #17 by tom_l

2 Likes