“About a year ago I made soundlights with Raspberry Pi. But RPI is a bit of an overkill for this simple task and it’s quite big, doesn’t have WiFi out of the box and practically can’t be used without a power adapter.
So I decided to port soundlights to ESP8266. The main idea was to reuse as much as possible from the previous implementation, so the parts with patched audio visualizer and colors generation are the same. In a few words, I’ve patched cava to print numbers instead of showing pretty bars in a terminal. And I’ve generated colors with a code found on Quora.
And in current implementation I decided to make it very simple to use, the only requirement is to have a machine with cava and ESP8266 on the same WiFi network. So I chose UDP broadcasting as a way to send data to ESP8266. And because there’s just 60 LEDs and color of a LED is three values from 0 to 255, colors for all strip is just 180 bytes. So it fits in one UDP packet.”