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troyhacks/WLED — monthly activity digest

What landed on troyhacks/WLED's mdev branch, month by month. External-context reference — a factual log of a friend repo's activity, not projectMM's own history or roadmap. Newest month on top. The reusable prompt that generates these lives in README.md.

This is a personal fork of MoonModules/WLED-MM (the mdev branch), so much of the mdev traffic is merges from and alignments with the MM and upstream WLED lines; the bullets below pick out what a user of this fork would notice. Summarised via the GitHub commits API (all commits on mdev, not first-parent merges), filtering out build-number bumps, merge commits, typo/comment churn, and pure refactors. No versioned release is cut from this branch (it tracks mdev and ships nightly mdev builds), so months are kept whole.

Branch note — the experiments live off mdev. troyhacks branches heavily: mdev is the merge/alignment stream, but the distinctive work happens in named experimental branches (HDMI output, ESP32-P4, W5500 Ethernet, hardware-panel ports, voice control, a pure-IDFv5 port, a new settings subsystem). Those are experiments, not necessarily destined for mdev, so each month below carries a separate Experimental branches line for what moved on them — the frontier of what this fork is probing.

June 2026

No user-facing activity: no commits were merged to mdev in June 2026 (the branch's most recent commit is dated 2026-05-20), and no versioned release was published. The repository's issue tracker is disabled, so no issues were opened or closed.

Checked: merged commits on mdev for author-date 2026-06-01..2026-06-30 (0 commits); releases published in June 2026 (none); issue search repo:troyhacks/WLED is:issue created:2026-06-01..2026-06-30 and closed:2026-06-01..2026-06-30 (0 results — issues disabled on this fork).

May 2026

~18 commits on mdev, 2026-05-01 … 2026-05-31.

  • Quieter month on mdev — alignment with upstream/MM, smaller effect and build-flag fixes; the heavy lifting was in the Nov–Jan window.
  • Experimental branches: P4_experimental (ESP32-P4) and M5Stack_Core_S3_Display both saw work — the two most-recently-touched branches in the repo.

April 2026

~53 commits on mdev, 2026-04-01 … 2026-04-30.

  • Continued PixelForge (image + scrolling-text interface) refinements and effect/UI fixes.
  • Ongoing alignment with upstream WLED and WLED-MM busmanager / segment paths.
  • Experimental branches: Olimex_HDMI_Output (HDMI video output on Olimex hardware) and T-Display-P4_Experimental (ESP32-P4 board bring-up).

March 2026

~46 commits on mdev, 2026-03-01 … 2026-03-31.

  • Effect and 2D-matrix fixes; build-target and partition adjustments.
  • More upstream-compatibility alignment in the segment / bus drawing code.
  • Experimental branches: Pure_IDFv5_Port (a from-scratch ESP-IDF v5 port — no Arduino) and New-Settings-Subsystem (settings rework with usermod auto-detection) both started.

February 2026

~59 commits on mdev, 2026-02-01 … 2026-02-28.

  • Audio-reactive receive path hardening continued (sequence checks, packet handling).
  • Effect tuning and PixelForge follow-ups.
  • Experimental branches: mdev+W5500 (W5500 SPI-Ethernet support layered onto mdev).

January 2026

~138 commits on mdev, 2026-01-01 … 2026-01-31.

New

  • PixelForge image/GIF tooling gained image rotation; WLED-MM-specific adjustments.
  • RMTHI (high-speed RMT LED output) now works on ESP32-S2 and S3; new 16 MB ESP32-with-Ethernet build target.
  • Random colours via the JSON API ("col":["r","r","r"]); Animartrix optional gamma correction + math-optimization speedups.
  • Nightly-build automation: automatic version stamping, cleaner release notes, "Nightly mdev Build" titling.

Fixed

  • DMX output rate-limiting to prevent a watchdog reset; ESPDMX and Philips Hue robustness improvements.
  • Audio-reactive UDP: automatic packet drop + improved format/sequence detection; user option to purge the audio queue.
  • Always allow the serial console on S3/C3/C6; fix Hub75 removal breaking Hub75 builds.

Experimental branches

  • W5500_Support (W5500 SPI-Ethernet, S3 Ethernet range moved up) and DF2301Q_Voice_Control (on-device voice control with hot-plug retry) both active.

December 2025

~97 commits on mdev, 2025-12-01 … 2025-12-31.

New

  • WLEDPixelForge — a new image and scrolling-text interface (pxmagic), with 1D GIF support, blur option, and version-14.x adaptations.
  • Effect math sped up (up to ~3× faster); inlined hot-path colour/segment functions; more segment/effect data allowed on PSRAM boards.
  • DDP-over-websockets / DDP-over-WS stability; E1.31 kill switch; dnrgbw realtime mode.

Fixed / hardened

  • Large preset/ledmap robustness pass: fixed presets.json corruption (mutex protection on the write path), ledmap-parser robustness, reduced UI freeze when updating presets.
  • Extensive mutex / critical-section redesign across segment and bus.show paths — fixes for semaphore leaks, "giving a semaphore never taken", and realtime-lock race conditions.

November 2025

~166 commits on mdev, 2025-11-01 … 2025-11-30.

New

  • Full Codepage-437 / high-ASCII text support (UTF-8→UTF-16 decoder) for scrolling text and GIFs.
  • Improved 1D GIF support (blur option, bugfixes); WLEDMM_FASTPATH enabled for all ESP32 builds; device-ID + version-reporting features.
  • WLED-MM branding for the update message box; various Help/README link updates.

Fixed / hardened

  • HUB75 speedups and DMA-cleanup ordering; 2D drawPixel optimizations; JMap use-after-free fixes.
  • USB-mode handling reworked for CDC-on-boot boards (fixes serial breakage and stale-UI-after-update issues).
  • ESP8266: dropped the GIF player (too much RAM), reverted to a known-good async webserver.

Experimental branches

  • A burst of hardware-panel and video-output branches: ESP32-P4-86-Panel-ETH-2RO (P4 86-size panel with Ethernet), HDMI-Experiment (HDMI output + "maybe faster Art-Net"), and WaveShare_10.1_Panel (WaveShare 10.1″ panel).

October 2025

~32 commits on mdev, 2025-10-01 … 2025-10-31.

  • DDP-over-websockets added; HUB75 skips colour-temperature correction for performance.
  • setPixelColor / getPixelColor hot-path optimizations (cached-bus path, colorKtoRGB fix, IRAM placement); particle-FX framebuffer memory-calc fix.
  • Bugfixes: preset-corruption prevention, IR-JSON buffer-overrun, low-brightness gradient smoothness.

September 2025

~15 commits on mdev, 2025-09-01 … 2025-09-30.

  • New Shimmer effect; reverse-checkmark option for Twinklecat.
  • Build process learns to extract the GitHub repo/version into the firmware; 2D-matrix-generator preview fix; AutoPlaylist race-condition fix.