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by sen 1614 days ago
I love WLED and have used it on over a dozen lighting projects with ESP32s and ESP8266s. It makes it so ridiculously easy, and has an incredible set of features with a great app to control it all and integrate with other services.

- Kids bedside lamps. Using the timed preset changes in WLED it goes from bright white/blue for reading time, then at bedtime it plays a rainbow animation and fades to a bright orange with pulses of similar colours, then throughout the next hour fades to a gentle animation of soft colours that stay on all night as their nightlights.

- Down-lighting on shelving, using strips of LEDs under each shelf lip. Gives a nice bright warm-white glow to everything on the shelves which shifts to a soft blue at night for mood lighting in the room.

- Ambient lighting throughout various rooms that is controlled via Home Assistant.

- LED strips on my 3D printers which are turned on via Octoprint when the printers start warming up, and stay on throughout the prints for timelapses then the lights all go green when the prints are finished.

... and many more. Every single one of those projects were simple 1-day affairs thanks to WLED. Stick the LEDs where you want them, wire them up to an ESP + a PSU (usually an old phone charger with a chopped USB cable to split out power), and flash the ESP and boot. Then the rest is done sitting down with your phone and playing with the sequence editor or choosing presets/timers.

4 comments

Can you link to what bedside lamp you're using? I'm happy to modify/retrofit an existing lamp but have yet to find something that would work well with LED strips.
If it doesn't have to be too bright you can use many lamps by wrapping a LED strip around a tube and placing that roughly where a bulb would go. Lanterns can also look cool that way if they have frosted sides.
> shifts to a soft blue at night for mood lighting

Blue at night might not be the best choice https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-ha...

> a great app to control it all and integrate with other services.

It even has Alexa support that's as easy as checking a box! Love WLED and how easy it is to use even for a non-hardware guy like me.

That first one is pretty neat. Plus, when your kids are an appropriate age, they'll be able to modify their lamp if they want!