I don’t really want the complicated patters. I’d be happy if they all lit up or if I could have them light one at a time. They don’t need to light as someone steps on it. . . .I doubt that I’d want to have ST near this.
I haven’t worked with IC LEDs. I see that there is a FastLED library for Arduino. And there are some programmable controllers on Amazon.
I’m just looking for some very general direction for what to start researching. Any help would be appreciated.
If you look on the quick browse lists in the community – created wiki in the project report section for lighting, there’s at least one stairstep project there.
However, this kind of project is not a good match for Z wave or zigbee as they just don’t respond quickly enough to pick up each step. You will find in one of the threads that talks about a stairstep A discussion of using Wi-Fi or hardwired instead.
So it can probably be done, but not very easily if you’re hoping to integrate it with SmartThings. But see the existing thread.
Thanks. I have no plans of trying to do the real work with ST. I might want to trigger it from some ST event, but even that’s unnecessary. I just want to figure out how to do it. I’ll check out that thread.
Anything like this you are going to have to use individually addressable LEDs (neopixels), just in case you didn’t already know the difference between analog and digital LED strips. There isn’t a great neopixel implementation with ST that I’ve been able to find. People are actively working on them though since the strips have come down so much in price. There are a bunch of controllers out there for Home Assistant and I’ve been looking to try and get the HA/ST MQTT bridge working but haven’t done that yet. But if you already have that done there are some great neopixel implementations there.
There are a couple folks that have gotten things to work in ST but they are a totally seamless integration.