MoonModules

MoonLight @ Concert

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

MoonLight was used to drive all lights on a small festival in early September across 2 stages. See YouTube / MoonModules - FF25. All lights (LED bars, moving heads, rings) were driven by MoonLight v0.5.9. This was the ultimate test to prepare for the v0.6.0 release.

What started as ‘we will implement DMX control in a future tool called moonDMX’ has evolved into DMX support in MoonLight. Until then, only RGB (3 channels) and RGBW (4 channels) were supported. To support DMX control, channels per light and channel offsets were added. Then setPixelColor became setRGB and new functions setWhite, setPan, setTilt, setGobo etc. were added. This allowed us to define effects that support these functions. ‘Classic’ effects mainly use setRGB, but effects can also use setPan, setTilt etc. Currently, a few ‘move’ effects have been defined which can be combined with light effects. For example, combine a classic effect like Noise2D with a move effect like ambient move and it will display beautifully on moving heads, see YouTube video 4:43. Art-Net was used to send DMX data to Art-Net / DMX controllers using XLR cables to control individual lights.

The main difference compared to classic DMX light controller desks is that we currently support only identical types of lights per device, e.g. an array of moving heads or an array of light bars. Each starting DMX address is a multiple of channels per light. For example, a moving head with 32 channels will have start addresses of 1, 33, 65 etc. This is the current compromise between driving LEDs and DMX lights: MoonLight is optimized for large numbers of identical lights in a daisy chain, so driving big LED setups will still be done with the same efficiency as before.

In addition to DMX output, classic direct wiring to ESP32 microcontrollers was also used on the rings display using 16 parallel outputs, enabling the rings to run at 500 FPS.

The effects used in this gig are pretty simple and straightforward, mainly because MoonLight has a limited number of effects (but growing) and DMX support is relatively new. The main goal of using MoonLight here was to test whether MoonLight has the potential for running shows. There were no crashes, no downtime, and no complaints from the audience, so goal accomplished! We learned many lessons (see below), and next time we will do even better!

This post has been written to document the current state of MoonLight, the lessons learned from using it at a show, and the next steps. We also hope this encourages other people to create similar setups using MoonLight.

Hardware used

Both setups

Product	Image	Shop
M5Stack AtomS3R		Shop
Pknight Art-Net DMX 512		Shop

Atom S3R: This is the board recommended for MoonLight. The boards listed in the installer (except P4) will work fine in v0.6.0. Currently ESP32-S3 in general and the AtomS3R in particular is the board of choice, because of the extra memory (PSRAM) and the form factor allowing plug and play solutions. In this show setups, LED data is sent over the network using the Art-Net driver in MoonLight.
Pknight Art-Net DMX 512: Receiver of the Art-Net data, sends DMX over XLR cables to the moving heads and to the light bars

Live stage

Product	Image	Shop
18 LED Bars		Shop
GL.iNet GL-AXT1800 router		Shop
WLED-MM Mic sound injector		Tindie shop

WLED-MM Mic sound injector: using the ESP32 WLED pico board with onboard mic from Serg74.

Dance stage

Product	Image	Shop
19x15W Zoom Wash Lights RGBW Beam Moving Head		Shop
GL.iNet AR300M16 router		Shop
WLED-MM Line in sound injector		Link
SE16		Not for sale yet
16 x 24 LED Ring		Shop

Lab

These items were tested but didn’t make it to the show.

Product	Image	Shop
Art-Net LED controller		Shop
Atom S3R Shield board

Art-Net LED controller: used to drive LEDs over the network, see Youtube video
Shield Board: This is a design in progress for a board to plug the Atom S3R into. The board has a level shifter which drives 4 LED outputs. In the YouTube video above, it drives the 4 panels. It uses pins 5, 6, 7, and 8 of the Atom S3R for the 4 level shifted data lines of the LED outputs

Lessons learned

Lesson	Next step
The main challenge for the light bar stage was providing adequate front lighting. This was accomplished by adding a fixed rectangle effect on top of the back light effects (started with rainbow, some bands didn’t want back light, later switched to paintbrush effect). To avoid only colored light, alternating white has been added as a control option to the fixed rectangle effect	add layers in v0.7.0, each layer has a start position and a size. Preferably also brightness per layer. Display solid (or a special front light effect) on a separate layer
Effects on small numbers of lights. Although the Paintbrush effect showed nice patterns, it is not optimized for small displays	need to think of nice patterns for small displays (including moving heads)
We want crazy stuff, audience and (some) bands want ambient lighting	allow for both using presets / playlists
The shows had to be run as unsupervised as possible.	Preset loops were added with a start and end preset.
The tiny M5Stack Atom S3R is up to the task of running MoonLight. When using in Art-Net mode, just connect to USB (power) and go!

Want to Help?

We’re especially looking for contributors in the areas of FastLED and UI tuning. If you’re familiar with these technologies or just want to help improve MoonLight, your contributions are very welcome. Stay tuned—and come build with us!

If you like MoonLight, give it a star, fork it or open an issue or pull request. It helps the project grow, improve and get noticed.

MoonLight v0.5.7 to v0.5.8

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

MoonLight v0.5.7 to v0.5.8

MoonLight v0.5.7 is out! Check out the release notes: we’ve upgraded to the latest of the latest in our software stack: ESP-IDF 5, FastLED 3.10.1, Svelte 5, DaisyUI 5, and Tailwind 4.So don’t expect everything to be perfectly smooth just yet, but from here, things only get better!

FastLED:

FastLED is our main LED driver and, in most cases, it works! For ESP32-S3 boards (like the Stephan Electronics board shown above), we’ve found the best results using I2S, which allows us to drive up to 16 pins in parallel. For non-S3 boards, we’re using RMT 5. That said, we’re still exploring whether these are really the best default configurations.

Our current I2S implementation on the ESP32-S3 is based on I2SClockLessLedDriveresp32s3, integrated into FastLED. However, in the upcoming MoonLight v0.5.8, we’ll decouple this from FastLED and run it as a standalone driver in MoonLight. That means FastLED will no longer use I2S on the S3 by default. Most likely, FastLED for the S3 will switch to RMT(5) as well. This will reduce the number of supported pins (to 4–8), but simplify the setup.

Selecting different LEDs drivers in MoonLight:

Note: FastLED’s I2S implementation currently only supports WS2812 color ordering, other color formats are ignored due to hardcoded settings. See FastLED issue #1966.

I2S Clockless LED Drivers Repos

These drivers already proved themselves in our StarLight project, running up to 12,288 LEDs at 50–100 FPS! We will also bring them to MoonLight. These are the current clockless driver repositories:

I2SClocklessLedDriver: ESP32 only
I2SClockLessLedDriveresp32s3: Not yet standalone, but integrated into FastLED since v3.9.9 (16-way parallel S3 support), and used with FastLED.addLeds(…) since v3.9.11
I2SClocklessVirtualLedDriver: Combined ESP32 + ESP32-S3
I2SClockLessLedVirtualDriveresp32s3: Obsolete; merged into the previous repo

We’re now collaborating with hpwit to consolidate above repo’s into one single repository, so we can integrate them cleanly into MoonLight without name conflicts, enabling one firmware per board to support all drivers. See ESP32-LedsDriver

Also, we won’t use FastLED.addLeds(…) style for the Physical and Virtual drivers (only the FastLED driver will do), since pin, chip set and color order are template parameters in FastLED, which require pre-compilation. In MoonLight, we want these to be configurable at runtime. That’s another reason to unify all drivers into one runtime-flexible system. This also prepares us for future boards, like the ESP32-P4.

What’s Next

UI improvements

So far, most UI components were taken from the upstream ESP32-SvelteKit repo. But there’s room to improve:

Dark mode toggle
Multi-row layouts
WebGL monitor previews
… and more.

Main Loop stability

There’s still an issue where the main application loop gets blocked iIn v0.5.7 due to ESP32 - browser interaction. We improved the following:

Promoted the main loop to a high-priority system task
Added delays to other tasks to avoid starvation
Introduced a basic task manager to monitor system activity
But more optimization is still needed.
see LEDs are updating very slowly

Coming Soon

Pin Manager
Node separation between Physical and Virtual layers
More end-user-friendly documentation
New layouts, effects, and modifiers
FastLED 2D Visual Enhancements see 3.9.16

Want to Help?

If you like MoonLight, give it a star, fork it or open an issue or pull request. It helps the project grow, improve and get noticed.

MoonBase-Modules

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

MoonBase v0.5.4 is released! See Star-Mod-Base-Light-Moon-Svelte-Live: MoonBase is using latest ESP32-SvelteKit using Svelte 5 and started as a test setup for ESPLiveScript.

As a side effect MoonBase-Modules is implemented. What started as WLED usermods was further developed in StarBase but got an unexpected powerful re-implementation here using a lot of goodies from ESP32-SvelteKit: automatic setup of http rest apis, websockets, data persistence and automatic creation of the UI. All done by a JSON definition document.

A simple module called ModuleAnimations has been added to MoonBase, which controls brightness and multiple effects in parallel. Currently only 3 effects are added plus de possibility to run multiple live scripts.

It has never been easier to build your own custom functionality with a super sexy UI. Give it a try using the getting started instructions.

This will be the basis to build a flexible system where multiple effects are mixed up with other building blocks like fixture definitions, mappings and projections. Ultimately done in a ‘nodes and noodles’ setup where each building block can be connected to others. Each building block can run pre-compiled code or run ultra fast live scripts - which can be created and edited without flashing new firmware.

I know I talked a lot about this and progress is slow but with ESP32-SvelteKit and ESPLiveScript we are on the right track to make things possible never done before.

By ewowi (Discord/@ewowi)

Star-Mod-Base-Light-Moon-Svelte-Live

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Started in 2023 we are developing a new product based on our experience working with WLED. We took the module concept of WLED and took that further by making everything a module, this was called StarMod. This then allowed us to split LED and non-LED functionality and StarBase and StarLight was born. StarBase containing generic functionality and StarLight to add lighting functionality on top of that. As StarBase is generic and can be used to develop any ESP32 based application. StarLight key features are 3D support, support for any fixture, projections, up to 16432 LEDs, live coding of fixture definitions, effects and projections, Art-Net, and DMX support.

See StarBase and StarLight v0.6.0 2024 wrap-up

I used the christmas holiday to reflect on where we are with StarLight and the challenge I have with getting the UI right and I tried something new, which looks very promising: I did a POC using ESP SvelteKit and the result is that I will go ahead with this framework to further develop StarLight (-as-a-service). The result is called MoonLight and can be found in MoonLight repo and work in progress in the kanban.

So we started with StarMod, then renamed to StarBase and StarLight and with the introduction of Svelte it became MoonLight. There is no separate MoonBase (yet) as ESP32-Sveltekit is the base now, although we will create non LED features like a files manager and an instance manager (supersync 2.0). Confusing isn’t it 😉

To make things even worse, we recently created another repo called MoonBase (ewowi/MoonBase). Because the Sveltekit updated from Svelte 3 to Svelte 5 which changes the syntax of the UI components. And also because we wanted to create a minimal version to add hpwit/ESPLiveScript and optimize it in a clean environment. This will also be a playground to test a new effects and projections model where multiple effects and multiple projections can be combined (e.g. using nodes and noodles).

Below is an overview of the repos:

So currently most activity is on the MoonBase repo, moving back to the MoonLight repo later on. The StarBase repo will not be updated for the time being and the StarLight repo has a branch called star-as-a-service which is used as a library in MoonLight. Depending on the outcome of what is happening in MoonBase, the StarLight repo might also become obsolete and MoonLight will be a fork of MoonBase.

I hope this helps a bit explaining what is going on.

Want to play: MoonLight getting started

Want to help: more help is absolulely appreciated! Especially in the area of UI design and development, but also in testing, documenting and developing new functionalities. Contact us on our channels.

By ewowi (Discord/@ewowi)

MoonHub75 PCB

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We designed a passive adapter board to connect a Lilygo T7-S3 to a HUB75 Panel. WLED MoonModules has a build which can be flashed onto this board. The board has multiple audio connections and an INMP441 can be soldered onto this board. All files needed for production (Gerber, BOM, CPL) are included, as this is just a PCB, components need to be soldered onto it, it’s fairly cheap to order them at an online PCB manufacturer.

By Sören (Discord/@lost.hope)

Affiliate links

Universal Control Box

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We make software and we deploy it on esp32 devices. We also do projects with it and one piece missing is to put electronics in an enclosure so it can be used in projects savely. I tried finding a good reusable enclosure but was not successful so decided to make our own. Main requirement is flexibility as we experiment a lot with hardware used. Next requirement is we would like to have our gear be part of professional setups so it at least should look professional to be accepted by the pros. So I designed a box which looks good and has a modular approach: the sides can be replaced to fit specific needs for switches, lights and connectors. The perforated sides allow for some fresh air inside and allows for screw terminals to be screwed through the holes.

3 models have now been published and are available as 3D-printable model directly to a Bambu Labs printer or via STL-files. They differ in size and the side plates available. Click on the links to go to Makerworld to print them.

8.5x4x2 cm fitting the new Olimex ESP32-P4
8x8x3 cm fitting the Serg Universal shield
12x12x5 cm fitting the 10x10cm prototype PCB.

This Box also support a number of other devices:

The sizes of the side plates are provided so you can easily develop your own.

See PCB Shopping list for a complete list of components used to build multi pin fixture setups.

See Multi pin fixtures for how to build them.

You are more then welcome to send your designs to us so it can be added for reuse.

By Ewowi (Discord/@ewowi)

Affiliate links

Portable Audio Rack for WLED with Audio, Lighting, and Network

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hey, TroyHacks here.

This is a portable rolling rack setup I cobbled together to bring all the tech I need for running light shows (and audio features) into a single portable unit with one easy power hookup:

On the front I have a power conditioner with a master switch with 8 outlets on the back and a convenience outlet on the front. There’s a nice long power cable for plugging it all into house power.

Next is a DriveRack PA2 loudspeaker manager. This is a DSP that takes in balanced stereo and outputs three balanced stereo pairs for speakers. This allows for full sound system tuning (crossover, EQ, level, compressor/limiter, delay compensation, etc) control from a tablet over the onboard WiFi from the dance floor. This isn’t explicitly needed for WLED in any way, but rather as a good way to balance speakers in a given environment.

Then a basic 3U rack mount mixer. This also has Bluetooth input for times when DJs aren’t playing, for testing, etc. There’s also a channel with a USB-C DAC fitted for direct hookup to my phone. This isn’t explicitly needed for most of what I do, but it solves a lot of audio routing and connectivity issues, mixing balanced and unbalanced audio connections, etc. This is also where WLED is taking its line-in sound source, from the “Record” RCA jacks - which are pretty standard on a lot of smaller mixers. At home, I use a Wiim Pro device connected into the mixer for integration with AirPlay, Google Cast, Bluetooth, and various other inputs and outputs. This may be added to the rack permanently in future revisions.

On the back I have a 10-port full-PoE managed switch. This gives me enough ports for all the gear and also at least 5 ports spare in case someone wants to do a 4-deck+mixer link for Pioneer CDJ kit - DJs always seem to forget their Ethernet switches. I chose a managed switch (which was just lying around) so I can partition the ports in case of broadcast Art-Net data overwhelming certain ports.

This is paired with a battle-tested GL.iNet GL-MT6000 “Flint 2” router with MIMO and native OpenWrt out-of-the-box for wireless control of various WLED instances, like my LED Sticks project. MIMO seems needed for reliably addressing the ~36 rechargeable WLED sticks I use at events. OpenWrt also seems the most compatible for all the things we do with WLED and allows things like multicast to work across both WiFi and Ethernet. The router is secured with a flat bungee cord for travel, but also has enough slack to be moved to sit on top of the box for better reception if needed.

There are also two WLED instances installed. The first one is using an ESP32 Puca DSP board connected to the mixer for line-in UDP audio sync (connected over WiFi at the moment) which is the master sync and audio sync node for the LED sticks, using AutoPlaylist and AutoChange. The other is a Waveshare ESP32-P4 Nano connected via Ethernet for driving massive Art-Net installations (via something like the H807SA Art-Net controllers) for installations like my Big Freaking Cube with 8000 physical pixels. The ESP32-P4 is powered via PoE from the switch, minimizing cabling.

The ESP32-P4 Nano also has an onboard mic for WLED audio sync just in case everything else fails. The Puca DSP will likely be replaced with a second ESP32-P4 with an I2S line-in ADC which will give me I2S line-in with Ethernet on a single package - this works now, I just didn’t have the time to mount the gangly mess of wires neatly for the show I was running off to - and the Puca DSP already had all my presets for driving the sticks, etc.

Finally there’s a Pknight Art-Net to dual-DMX512 bridge which allows me to communicate with DMX lighting. I use this commonly with RGB wall wash lights that can behave like a high-output RGB strip when connected in a chain via WLED-MM. It could also be used with a laptop and QLC+ for DMX lighting control of moving heads and other fancy fixtures for up to 1024 channels across two DMX chains. This is also PoE powered, making the wiring nice and clean.

Rounding it out, there’s a nice GaN 100w USB-C PD charger (not shown in the photos) for laptops/phones or the Pixel Tablet that’s used for wirelessly controlling the setup, along with a USB LTE modem (not shown) that’s compatible with the router to give me Internet connectivity if I can’t plug into the house network. The LTE modem mostly keeps me connected to chat apps when running shows so my wireless network isn’t a “dead end” with no Internet when I’m connected to it with my phone or tablet.

Future plans would be a USB-C docking station to allow a laptop full power and Ethernet connectivity, but this may also be a permanently installed mini PC with a USB-C travel monitor depending on some performance testing I need to do with a few apps I’d like to use at shows. Art-Net gives you flexibility to swap out WLED for things like Madrix or Resolume Arena if you’d like. WLED on the ESP32-P4 is my standard now for driving shows with many thousands of pixels with the new WLED Art-Net driver I’ve created - and in fact the P4 only works with Art-Net (and likely other network pixel protocols) at the moment.

The Sound Town rolling 6U rack has a retractable handle (5U usable, as the handle takes up almost 1U) and can be fully enclosed for travel. It includes a nice zipper pouch on one of the covers for storing my tablet and all my random adapters and spare cords, etc.

Discuss on Reddit

StarBase and StarLight v0.6.0 2024 wrap-up

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

StarBase and StarLight v0.6.0 have been released, release info and bins here:

StarBase and StarLight are 2 spin-off products from WLED and WLED MoonModules. They are software components which run on ESP32 microcontrollers. We use the ESP32 microcontroller as it is very low cost and very high performant.

StarBase is everything but lights and StarLights is StarBase plus lights. StarBase can be used for any ESP32 based project. Both systems can be seen as library superglue. StarBase uses libraries like AsyncWebServer, ArduinoJson and ESPLiveScript. StarLight uses FastLED, Physical LED driver and Virtual LED Driver. By this they are standalone products which can be deployed and run directly on an ESP32. StarBase can be seen as what Windows was for MSDos, it’s currently Windows 95 🙂.

Both products have seen the light in 2024. Aim is to publish a new release about every month. Starting with 0.1.0 we are now at 0.6.0. WLED is now at version 0.15.0 so this gives also an indication of maturity of Star: they are still early life products. But we are catching up with WLED 🙂.

So why start a big project like this? The reason is we need a very efficient and maintainable system to further develop the ideas we had and were very hard to implement in WLED. Examples are 3D light fixtures, syncing lots of devices, extending the UI, unspaghetti the code to understand it, old stuff (like the esp8266) which gotten in the way and so on. So we took the usermod / module concept and grouped everything in modules, added a variable model to it and used Object Oriented programming concepts to communicate between variables, modules, the web based user interface, the ESP32 and its file system. This makes adding a new module as straightforward as possible.

This is what we did in 2024:

v0.1.0 - Lucky Star (June 9)

StarBase: StarLink (Sync groups, dashboard, time sync), HA
StarLight: Effects: Noisemeter, noise2D. Fixture generator (Curtain, Glorb), Preview, ESP32-S3, sharedData

v0.2.0 - Stairway to heaven (July 20)

StarBase: Gyro, var events, loop20ms, Live Scripts, file edit, new ui (WIP)
StarLight: Effects; Rubik’s cube, Game of life, Flow, LaserGEQ. Mapping, Projections, Physical LED driver

v0.3.0 - Running up that hill (August 19)

StarBase: HTML Live Server in VSCode
StarLight: Effects: StarField, Mario. Projections: Scrolling, Acceleration, Checkerboard, Rotation, Blending, Layers

v0.4.0 - The night comes down (October 14)

StarBase: Class Variable, variable pointers, Ethernet, var.onLoop1s
StarLight: Effects: Praxis. ArtNet

v0.5.0 - StarLight (November 5)

StarBase: Multiple Live Scripts, Live Scripts list in UI
StarLight. Effects: paintBrush, VU-meter. Projections: Mirror. Support up to 16384 pixels!!, 1-byte preview, Live Fixtures, Virtual LED Driver

v0.6.0 - Out of control (December 19)

StarBase: Presets, Stack 16K, cpu performance, safe mode
StarLight: Effects: Fire. Projections: rippleYZ. Live Fixture / Virtual LED Driver setup

Contributors are NetMindz, TroyHacks, Softhack, LostHope, Brandon502/WildCats08, FlavourDynamics / Monsoono, HPWit, AaronAverill and lots of people especially on discord helped. Worth mentioning is the cooperation with HPWit. He made 2 tremendous products:

ESPLiveScripts: compile and run scripts directly without rebooting or updating firmware.
I2SClocklessLedDriver (Physical LED driver) and I2SClocklessVirtualLedDriver (virtual LED driver). Alternative to FastLED LED driver allowing for multiple data connections to LED displays and very high frame rates.

Live Scripts are in StarBase (see the blink example). Live Effects, Live Fixtures, Physical LED drivers and Virtual LED Drivers are in StarLight.

Above list is by no means complete and by no means are they finished functionalities. There is a lot to talk about, a lot to document (StarDocs) and a lot to further develop. So that’s for 2025 🙂.

A few other topics for 2025:

New user interface: planned for a long time, slow progress although this is needed for wider acceptance of StarBase and StarLight.
Live effects and projections. Live effects ready for the masses since 0.6.0. Will be used for 3D effects on Cube202020. Projections are going to be chained. Also Live Projections planned.

Cube202020:
Live fixtures, Physical LED driver and Virtual LED Driver. Needed for large and very large installations, allows for much higher frame rates.
Art installations and Semi professional DIY
- Art-Net, DMX and Midi controllers. Allow Star to be part of theater / DJ / VJ and lighting software setups. Unity to art-net partner project started for GPU intense/ shader effects, Kinect etc
- Best buying guide: share hardware we use and that works to make it easier to build working setups
- MoonModules PCB and Control box: standard components to build safe and reliable hardware accepted in professional setups
Proof of concepts for MM PCB and Control box:

So for sure 2025 will be absolutely amazing !!

You are more than welcome to join the project. We need developers (C++ and web), effect builders, documenters, testers, and users. Contact us on Discord/StarLight.

Happy holidays 🎄🥂🎇💫!, Ewoud

Bike leds

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Working together with Bicyclus, a local bike repair shop to decorate a classic Mikael Pedersen bike to be displayed in the shop during the winter season.

As I look for opportunities to display what we make to a wider audience, I contacted a bike shop around the corner. It turned out he had a magnificent bike in the shop: a classic Mikael Pedersen bike. This bike has very straight lines which makes it very suitable to mount LED-strips to.

I am very happy with the results, so is the shop owner, who uses the WLED-native app frequently to change the effects. It’s quite an eye-catcher in the street ;-)

See MoonModules art for details

See insta for video

(Post written by ewowi)

Multi pin fixtures

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

With the recent developments in supporting lots of LEDs thanks to the use of PSRAM on the ESP32-S3 and P4 and the use of Virtual LED Driver or Art-Net controllers we are now able to support massive fixtures up to 16384 (and even more) pixels.

So I build a 12288 LEDs-screen of 48 panels (16x16 = 256 LEDs each), a 3840 LEDS-screen of 15 panels and I am about to build a 20x20x20 LED cube using LED curtains. They are controlled by StarLight using ESP Live Scripts and the Virtual LED driver which uses shift registers to multiply the number of pins available.

This brings new challenges in the wiring and powering of all of this. Where a single LED strip mostly has a 3 wire cable, now we need lots of wires. On the big-screen, I made a lot of 3 wire JST connector cables but for the cube (and possible a next screen) I will do it differently. I will show my new wiring plan further on.

Also powering a lot of panels needs some thought. The original big screen by hpwit/tekwit (Drive 12288 ws2812b with one esp32), has one big 600 W / 24 V / 25A power supply with power rails and buck converters to bring the power back to 5 V. 24 V is used to have less A so smaller wires can be used. As the price per Watt of a power supply is more or less linear, I decided to go with 6 smaller power supplies of 100 W / 5V / 20A each, for the big screen. In both cases each panel gets 12.5 W / 5V / 2.5 A. For the little-screen, I only used one 100 W power supply so each panel only gets 6.6 W / 1.2 A which turnouts to be enough.

Next is actually connecting all these wires to the power supplies and the controller. In case of the Virtual LED Driver, a controller board with shift registers is used where each panel has its own data line, resulting in 48 connections to be made. If you use an artnet-controller (see what we use on our hardware page) a few panels are daisy chained and one data line for each group of panels is connected to the controller using screw terminals. For the Virtual LED Driver shift register board, I used screw terminals for the big-screen and I soldered it for the little-screen.

The end result looks like this:

And everything works fine. Well… mostly. See Github issue 17 for challenges how to make it work. You can see there most of the issues where resolved except for one and that is in some cases flickering of some panels on the big screen while the baby-screen is running very smoothly. To deal with the flickering I played with capacitors, with thicker wires, with pull down registers, separating the data line from the ground line. Nothing changed until I changed the resistor of the data line which was 100 Ohm to 249 Ohm because I read this article QuinLed Data signal cable conditioning This made the flickering go away! Thanks Quindor! Although tested for a limited number of panels as I ran out of resistors.

So after this long intro now back to the cabling. Deciding to follow the 249 Ohm resistor and separate data line advice of Quindor and the next cube build project in mind I made the following design:

As the cube consists of 20 LED curtains, I need to transfer 20 data lines. A ribbon cable like used in a HUB75 panel looks perfect for this.

For the power I need at least awg18 wires and each curtain needs power so I found the T-splitters.

As the cube will be moved to different places, I wanted the cable to be fully removable so I used 3 pin connectors.

~~3 meter 20P ribbon cable~~
~~20 pin PCB - connector~~
~~T-Connector~~
LED curtains
Power supples 100W
3 pin connectors
ESP32-S3
240R resistors
PCB: Custom build. If there is enough interest we consider design and manufacturing a batch, let us know if you want one on discord , reddit or GitHub.

This is the cube build in progress: 5 of the 20 curtains are hanging:

So what do you think? I ordered the cabling and build will be done the coming weeks. I posted this article because I hope more people will build large LED setups and we can share experiences. I also hope we use more or less standard components, so you don’t have to spent a long time searching for the right components but can reuse designs made before.

You can find the list of used hardware on our Hardware page

Update: build the ribbon cable solution but this didn’t work:

The ribbon cable ruins the data and the leds show partly or random / flickering colors.

So back to the system used in the big screen: each display (each curtain) gets its own 3-pin cable and all lines are connected at a central point.

Update December 14: 3-pin cable central “hub” (6 of 20 curtains connected):

Update December 20: Das Board

1 ESP32-Wrover, 4 level shifters each serving 4 pins, 16 outputs for 16 curtains (okay assumed that 4 chips will serve 20 curtains so I will hack another level shifter to drive 20 curtains later).

Currently driven by FastLed, but is slow for 16 pins, will move to Physical LED driver as soon as curtains are supported there.

To be continued! (resistors, capacitors, level shifters / shift registers), see PCB Shopping list for a complete list of components used.

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(Post written by ewowi)