At the beginning of our first year in Germany, we were informed Halloween was a big deal on the siedlung.
Being fools for Halloween ourselves we bust out the decorations, and I whipped up a little script to play sound effects with synchronized lighting.
A couple people even took pictures!
Some of my favorite scenes:
- ⚡️ Lightning Flashes with Rolling Thunder
- 🍯 Boiling Cauldron with Laughing Witch
- 🎪 Creepy Circus
- 🚨 Eerie Red Glow with Synths
- 🎃 And More!
WLED
WLED is an LED controller for ESP32/ESP8266. It has tons of built in effects and a good amount of customization. It provides a web UI for editing but also includes a JSON API!
These prebuilt ESP32 boards with WLED already flashed made setup a breeze. Only needed to update OTA, setup the attached light strips, connect to the network!
Networking
HalloWLED is a great starting point if you want to script some WLED instances via their API.
It can run on a network, where a hostname for a node is required. It will then grab all other node IPs via the WLED API.
I found updating each node directly to be more reliable then using WLED's built in sync, where occasionally a strip would not recieve the new effect.
Additionally it can also run in direct AP mode, where it connects the WLED instance's wireless access point. For Trunk or Treat decorations, I ran a WLED + 120 LED strip off a pocket battery pack, and could have stayed lit for probably ~6 hours.
Happy Halloween!
Its a basic project, but I did take some care and iterations to make it a good experience for viewers.
It doesn't repeat effects back to back to ensure variety, and it swaps to a background scene in between effects in order to prevent effect lighting for outlasting its welcome.
I'm glad my little weekend project went off without a hitch, and made some young folks Halloween even more fun!