Hordes of Kinder descending on our pavilion

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:

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!

Prebuilt WLED ESP32 controller
Prebuilt WLED ESP32 controller

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!

HalloWLED running on my machine
HalloWLED can run from a laptop or a Pi.

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.

HalloWLED running in the car for Trunk or Treat
HalloWLED running in direct AP mode for Trunk or Treat

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.

Alien halloween costume
My wife being out of this world 👽

I'm glad my little weekend project went off without a hitch, and made some young folks Halloween even more fun!

View the "HalloWLED" repo on Github here