SmartThings Community

Addressable Led's

(Fernando Herrera) #1

I’m looking to do a set up with Addressable RGB and have them connected to ST. I want to control them thru the app and set up different programs… I been looking the best way to connect them to ST. Options I have found are Arduino and Raspberry Pi 3. Please help me with what I need please.

(Shanepcs) #2

I used the photon controller and it works well. I started with the code I found on here. Much cheaper and simple integration if you ask me.

(Fernando Herrera) #3

What hardware are you using?

(Allan) #4

I wrote a add on library to ST_Anything for RGB and RGBW color control. Its programmed to use analog strips but could be modified to use addressable, especially if using “NeoPixel” strips. Not sure how strong you are at programming but you can check it out.

If I had a set of NeoPixels I’d program it myself but all I have is analog strips (feel free to mail me a set. :slight_smile: ). That and from smart things your gonna be limited to what you can do with them since each “thing” you want to do will need a button to do it and there wouldn’t be any easy way to select certain leds although doing a entire strip the same color would be easy.

Edit: I guess technically you could use two “dimmer” controls as range selection sliders for your starting and ending LED addresses and set those to a color then change the sliders and set another color and so on. Would be a little clunky and not 100% positive it would work but it might be possible. The dimmers from everything I can tell work on a 0 - 100% scale so if you had 300 addressable leds and wanted 1 - 100 you’d have the first dimmer at 0 and the second at like 33. It would take some playing but it might be possible…

-Allan

(Fernando Herrera) #5

Are thingsheild still available?

(Allan) #6

No but a ESP8266 is really cheap and would work.

(Fernando Herrera) #7

Im new to creating my own hardware. Would that be all i need to connect to ST?

(Allan) #8

Hardware wise you’d only need the ESP8266 and a power supply capable of running the LED’s. I think a single diode also per the NeoPixel wiring diagrams.

But like I said to control addressable LED’s would need more work as the program currently doesn’t.

(Benji) #9
(Jake) #10

I think you guys may be thinking about this two complex…

I’ve not had a play with addressable LEDs yet, but have been watching many videos…

If you use the ESP8266/NodeMCU to control the lights, and store the sequences there for complex actions…

You’d then setup a http access, and associate different programs to different actions… Not sure if ST anything can do this, but I expect so? (I ordered my first NodeMCU yesterday)

The smart app then would only need to hit a URL and you could then have 1 URL to pass variables to control the whole strip…

(Allan) #11

The advantage of the ST_Anything framework , other then being easily customizable if you know what you’re doing, is there is no SmartApp to deal with; It’s just a composite device handler (which allows a parent to create child devices). What your proposing is to create a new SmartApp to push HTTP requests which is completely possible but you’re going to have to write both the SmartApp and Device Handler from scratch. Then you have to build the program on whatever device you are using to accept the requests and do something with it. Personally that seems way more complicated.

(Jake) #12

Sounds good, will be sure to check it out when it turns up, I don’t really understand how the two interact, but if ST anything takes care of the communication then that’s fine, you’d then just need the sketch to pick up the different inputs to trigger different lighting effects and variables

(Allan) #13

Look at the RGB or RGBW code I posted and you’ll see how I’m doing “analog” RGB/RGBW strips, sending a RGB or RGBW hex code from ST down to the controller which then takes it and sets the output pins accordingly to the color value. Same idea could be used for addressable although again there isn’t a good way to set the range of leds to address other then the dual slider idea I posted above.

I’ve had lots of ideas on how to do it, programming wise, but since I don’t own any I haven’t attempted it.

(Jake) #14

Ahh I see what you mean with the slider, what I was thinking is that you control the lights normally as you mention below for uniform colours, but then for effects you just add in extra buttons in the DTH to trigger specific scenes such as fade or police sirens for example, you’d just need a way to differentiate if a colour or a scene is then being passed.

Similar to what they are doing here with non addressable:

The main issue getting ST to try to emulate those and handle each bulb individually is you can’t just leave ST in a loop, it’ll exit after 20 seconds run time. But I do like the slider approach to at least set ranges of bulbs!

(Fernando Herrera) #15

thank you all for this info. I been busy with holidays, work and school. i bought a ESP8266 Nodemcu, arduino r3, and alitove WS2813 RGB String. I need to read up on all that you all have posted…

(Allan) #16

If you got a ESP8266 I don’t think you’ll need the Arduino at all.

(Fernando Herrera) #17

I Agree. How do I connect the ESP8266 to ST?

(Allan) #18

I would start by juat getting the example NeoPixel stuff working stand alone on the ESP8266. Oncr its working then you can start looking at ST_Anything but like i said there isnt a library for programmable LEDs…yet. Depending on your programming skill level you can create one but otherwise i planned on foguring it out after the holidays.

(The Viking AKA "Holy Crap You're a Giant!") #19

The WS2812FX library is capable of 53 discreet effects, and more are being added all the time.
This could be adapted to work within the ST_Anything code base by someone with some skills.

Then you can just make calls to the various effects with child devices…

(Allan) #20

If anyone wants to mail me a set of NeoPixels or other WS2812 / WS2813 LED’s I’ll totally try to get it working on ST_Anything. :slight_smile: