Hi there. I’m trying to set up a meter long overhead light that uses an extruded piece of aluminum. The light contains 2x UV strips that would be controlled by a single light dimmer. 2x RGB strips that would be controlled by a single light RGB controller. 5 different “white” strips. One that does 6500k and 3500k in one strip, then three strips of 2000k, two of which have filters making them 1500k and 1000k. Ideally I would like to control all the white strips with a single cool to warm slider, but I would be happy with controlling each strip individually with a dimmer since I can combine lights into groups and I tend to control my lights with scenes anyway. So it would take a while of setup but in the end would work perfectly.
All of this ideally would be controlled by a single ESP32, all running at 25khz (so that it doesn’t flicker on video). 100hz also gives me a headache.
The problem is that I cannot figure out how to get multiple lights to run off of a single ESP. I’ve found many threads asking the same question with no responses. Could you, the reader, at least respond and tell me that you don’t think it’s possible? My fallback method is to use two ESP32s per lamp and have them be rgbw lights. The first one would be normal rgbww, but the second one would be r=2000k, g=1500k, b=1000k and the white color would be the UV lights. Obviously this costs quite a bit more to use twice as many ESP units, but as far as I can tell that’s the only way to do it. Any pointers towards other threads (though I spent hours searching) or any suggestions would be very much appreciated. The yaml “language” makes zero sense to me and I have decent experience with other programming languages.
I realize that I am maybe asking the wrong questions. Is there another software similar to ESPHome that has a more fully realized feature set? Is there any way to program the ESP32 like an Arduino? I know how to do everything I want to do on an Arduino except for the interfacing with a home management solution like Home Assistant.
Does anyone have a recommendation that I could use in place of ESPHome because I’m fairly certain that it cannot do what I am attempting without using a separate ESP32 for every separate “light”, which completely defeats the point of having so many inputs and outputs.
Actually many programmers have there troubles with it. Kind of too simple and no programming language
Best would be just read the getting started guide and then just directly head over to the cookbook examples because the esphome site features tons of useful information (just little tricky to navigate with that amount of information).
Also lot’s of sites that have yaml tutorials which should get you onto a basic level in couple of minutes really (yes it’s actually very simple ones it makes “click” )
If you find that one please don’t hesitate to tell us
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