Happy holidays, If you're reading this the odds are you received one of my um, holiday cards? and have scanned the QR code on the back. This is some documentation for how to use WLED specifically in the context of this board.
WLED Is an open source RGB Pixel LED controller made by smart people on the internet. Information about the WLED project can be found here: WLED Github Page I make no claims about the reliability or color accuracy of WLED, however I think it's a really neat project and saved me having to even think about the software for this project (no thoughts, head empty, just solder LED and exist). WLED has some neat features that make it great for making fun LED toys. In no particular order:
- Wifi Control with built in Web GUI
- Built in controls and effects
- Support for sACN (Referred to as E 1.31 for some reason)
- Automatic wifi setup
When the device boots, it attempts to connect to its last known wifi network. In most cases, when you first power up your board, it will not connect automatically. In this case, the board will create its own hotspot with the SSID WLED-FUSE
in order to connect to the onboard hotspot, you will need to enter the default WLED password, wled1234 you should then be automatically redirected to the WLED GUI which self hosts at 4.3.2.1 (which is a bit of a strange vanity IP, but I guess since they are the router they can do whatever they want)
You can use the device like this with its built in AP mode, but your phone may be weird about being connected to wifi that doesn't go anywhere, so you may want to connect the board to a real wifi network.
1. Click on the Config (gear) icon to edit your WLED module settings and choose 'Wifi Setup'.
2. For most home networks, simply enter your Wifi network's name and network password. You can also change the mDNS address for your WLED module here. By default, I've made it fuse.local so once your device is connected, you should just be able to enter that into your browser and you're off to the races. You can also 'Scan' for available networks and enter the password to any you find.
3. Click Save & Connect at the top of the page.
4. Reconnect your device to your home's Wifi network.
5. Check the device list in your router's user interface for the IP of the WLED device within your local network. Alternatively, the device will advertise itself with mDNS as fuse.local so in theory, just enter that in your address bar and it should take you to the GUI. Failing that, use the WLED app (free on the App Store, as it is able to discover WLED boards without knowing the IP! Have fun with the WLED software!
1 Whatever is saved into preset 1 will load on boot, making the board's power up preset / effect customizable.
2 A visual list of WLED's built in FX can be found here
3 Multiple WLED boards can be synchronized together
WLED is controllable using Artnet or Streaming ACN. Information on how to do that can be found in the WLED documentation Someone should make a DMX screen in d3 that implements its pixel map so it can be mapped from d3.
If you want to install WLED fresh, you can connect your board over USB-C to a computer and reinstall WLED from this website which uses 'Web Serial' (which is a real web API for communicating with locally plugged in serial devices) to reprogram the board. It's WILD how easy they made this process.
After flashing, only the 'F' will light up because WLED does not know about the other GPIO pins I used in my custom layout. As an exercise, I broke each letter out into its own 'pin' off the microcontroller (Schematic for those interested), so in the LED settings you'll need to set up the following LED outputs:
- Pin 16 - 10 LEDs - Type WS281X - GRB
- Pin 17 - 10 LEDs - Type WS281X - GRB
- Pin 18 - 10 LEDs - Type WS281X - GRB
- Pin 19 - 11 LEDs - Type WS281X - GRB
Here's a screenshot of some of the settings
Fun Fact: The 'e' in the fuse logo has the most squares by one, with the logo in total made up of 41 squares, 4 being small, 11 being medium sized, and the remainder being large
If you'd like to just reload my configuration file, you can find it linked here. You can upload a config file from the 'Security and Updates' tab at the bottom of the web GUI.
This board has a number of interesting features that were either complicated or expensive to implement, but were ultimately added in order to make the project more interesting
- 3 Sizes of LEDs: In order to accurately replicate the FUSE logo, 3 sizes of RGB pixel LED's were used. Care was taken to use LED's that were electrically identical and because they speak the same protocol could be included in the same string of LEDs. Additional care was taken to find LEDs with built in decoupling capacitors. Older generations of LED pixels would require a capacitor soldered onto the board for each LED, but newer generations include this inside the LED. Here is a link to a video of the factory of how these LEDs are made finding the right features of LED's involved uploading Chinese part spec sheets into google translate and seeing if additional components were not needed as per the data sheets. An early LED test board was made to prove that different size LEDs could exist on the same data chain.
- 4 Layer board with all components on one side: This makes the boards easier to hand assemble and solder with a hotplate. The process is straightforward: Solder paste is applied with a stencil, Components are placed on the board (by hand!), the board is then heated on a hot plate to 165*C for about a minute and the solder liquifies and flows onto the pads of the components. Afterwards, a bit of touch up with a normal soldering iron is sometimes required (Usually on the USB connector)
- USB C Connector: This complicated things quite a bit, but since USB C is the future I wanted to prove that I could make a board that works over USB C. The pitch of the contacts is incredibly fine so even with care applying solder paste, shorts usually occur and needed to be cleaned up by hand, but I got way better at soldering these the more I did so mission successful there. An early LED test board was made to prove I was able to reliably solder this connector.
- In circuit programming: The board plugs into USB C and can be programmed with the default Platform IO IDE or the online WebSerial installer for WLED. There are no confusing boot/reset buttons because a clever array of transistors manage the proper logic for placing the chip into programming mode when the correct DTR/RTS pins on the serial port are used. A more cost optimized version of this board would likely have an unpopulated header on the board that connects to an external programming device during flashing that is not included in the final product. An early LED test board was made to prove that I had this logic correct before committing to making boards with all the finished components.
The included 3d printed stand easily attatches to the bottom like in this fancy rendering!
