ESP-8266/MQTT Controlled LED Data Visualization Sculpture
The idea is to have a device that displays relevant information with a pleasant led array animation. In my case, I 3D printed a translucent "mountain range" and the LEDs illustrate real-time and cumulative power and energy offset from the solar panels on my house.
The project is built using platformIO using an "nodeMCU ESP-8266" board using the Arduino framework. These are super cheap ($4) wifi enabled MCUs that can be programmed with Arduino framework C++ code.
The runtime API is through MQTT. More details coming soon, but here's a general idea:
- lampscape announces itself on boot and waits for commands
- lampascape can receive...
- animation pattern to display
- a pallette of available colors
- parameters relevant to the animation
- lampscape announces all changes in state via MQTT
In my setup I use nodered to collect data and send commands to lampscape.
This is a very WIP project for my own amusement. There is unfinished, deprecated and generally junky code in here.