I’m working on a shooting star for my home theater. I have the fiber optics in place and plan to drive them using an LED strip (WS2812B) that is controlled by a ESP32 board with WLED installed. I started by loading WLED into the ESP32 and creating some presets and a playlist to get the affect I wanted.
Using the Meteor theme and playing with the timing I came up with two presets: one to start the meteor running (Shooting Star) and another to stop it (Shooting Star Off). Once I had those I created a playlist called Trigger Shooting Star. With this arrangement and using the WLED app when I select the Trigger Shooting Star playlist, it outputs one and only one shooting star down the LED strip, just the way I want it. I read somewhere earlier that if you want to use WLED presets or playlists, it was best to create these prior to integrating the board with HA. After I had this working I thought it would be easy to integrate this into HA so I could automate the process. However, I’m not getting the expected results. This is what I can see in HA:
When I select the playlist I don’t see anything happen, all the LEDs stay dark. If I select the Shooting Star preset the Meteor scheme plays over and over, as expected, but I only want it one time, hence the need for the second preset to stop it. If I then select the Shooting Star Off present, all the LEDs go out, again as expected. Even though, as I mentioned previously, the playlist doesn’t seem to do anything when the LEDs are out, if I first use the Shooting Star preset (to get the meteor running) and then run the playlist, the LEDs will go out once the meteor gets near the end of the strip. I should mention that the Trigger Shooting Star playlist is configured to use the first preset (Shooting Star) and then after a time period (that only allows a little less than the time needed for the “meteor” to travel down the strip not quite one full trip) and then the second preset (Shooting Star Off). I’m running the most recent (as of last week) version of WLED. I’m not home right now so can’t provide the ver. number.
So, in a nutshell, the playlist will not initiate the first preset, (or doesn’t do it correctly) but will end the process, which is what the second preset does. Trying to sort out why the first preset isn’t activated via the playlist when in HA, but works fine from the WLED app.