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LED ringlight to signal countdown

Add animated lights to your photobooth powered by WLED. WLED is a fast and feature-rich implementation of an ESP8266/ESP32 webserver to control NeoPixel (WS2812B, WS2811, SK6812) LEDs.

WLED integration for LED signaling, see yourself:

Hardware

BOM

  • ESP board, for example Wemos D1 mini.
  • 3d printed mount for wemos d1 mini
  • ring light for 3d printed photobooth or whatever led stripe you want
  • some cables

Wiring

The ring light needs 5V, GND and a signal line to control the colors.

Use IO not connected internally

On the D1 mini board, the GPIO2 labelled D4 is closest to 5V/GND so it would be convenient to use. But it is connected to a builtin led. Since the LED is not needed, and might shine through the 3d printed case, it is recommended to use a different IO.

wiring overview

Setup WLED

WLED documentation

Head over to the WLED project documentation for more detailed installation instructions and hardware setup.

In short, follow these steps

  • Connect the ESP board via USB to the computer running the photobooth-app.
  • Install WLED using the webinstaller
  • Connect the WLED device to your WiFi. The webinstaller asks for the credentials and configures the ESP accordingly.
  • Visit the WLED website on the ESP and configure.
  • If you use exact the same items listed in the BOM, you can start using following
  • In the photobooth-app enable the WLED integration and add the serial port to the ESP device in the admin config.

For more detailed instructions on the WLED device itself see the WLED website see

Define your own presets

When the photobooth-app starts a countdown, takes a picture or captures a video, it will send commands via serial interface to the WLED module. The presets are identified by the IDs as follows:

  • ID 1: standby (usually LEDs off)
  • ID 2: countdown (animates countdown)
  • ID 3: shoot (imitate a flash)
  • ID 4: recording (imitate a red light to visualize ongoing record)

Define the presets on your own in WLED webfrontend or use the presets/config from above. Once added, in the photobooth-app enable the WLED integration and file the serial port of the WLED module in the photobooth-app's config. Check the logs on startup whether the module is detected correctly.