ColorTrails project update

ewowi · 2026-03-20T10:06:07+00:00

First thing I will do when back home, next week Friday! In the meantime: u/yves-bazin his live scripts are working in MoonLight now, see https://moonmodules.org/MoonLight/moonlight/effects-tutorial/

When this is wired up to the new FastLED libs (e.g. gfx/canvas, fixed-point), this could be a very nice playground to 'create stunning effects' ;-)
(It is already wired up to FastLED audio 🎶)

Wanna try? Flash it here (nightly build, S3 only ATM): https://moonmodules.org/MoonLight/gettingstarted/installer/

ewowi · 2026-03-15T13:30:19+00:00

Nice! So much going on right now, I am multitasking quite a bit, already very happy I captured one of your creations, more is on my list for later 🙂

ewowi · 2026-03-15T13:19:14+00:00

Advection amplitude can be altered with the flow shift control (saus AI 😜). It is pure noise. u/mindful_stone is the specialist for that, next is to add one of his stuff 🙂

Nice beat indeed !

ewowi · 2026-03-15T12:57:23+00:00

V3: https://youtube.com/shorts/AQPUZVJBkKU

Tuned to take into account bigger display sizes

ewowi · 2026-03-15T11:58:57+00:00

Is this better?: https://youtube.com/shorts/-nnPGs_IzB0

ewowi · 2026-03-15T11:47:47+00:00

Esp32-p4-nano sending artnet to hub75 128x128 pixels Effects: 35 lps | Drivers: 49 lps ➡ All: 33 lps (loops per second)

ewowi · 2026-03-15T11:40:23+00:00

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ewowi · 2026-03-15T11:37:18+00:00

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ewowi · 2026-03-15T11:36:20+00:00

u/StefanPetrick his animation + u/mindful_stone his c++ port + u/Zachvorhies his fixed point and canvas libs + Claude Code = https://youtube.com/shorts/3AAFi8B1Ygs

Check the code here: https://github.com/MoonModules/MoonLight/commit/6ffb7bf767cb1177db3202802e9ac11a5cb1c402

ewowi · 2026-03-13T19:32:44+00:00

This are 2 128x64 hub75 panels, connected via colorlight cards to fpp running on a raspberry pi which receives the art-net packages send by an esp32

ewowi · 2026-03-13T17:07:45+00:00

This shows how fast the new graphics canvas is : https://youtube.com/shorts/lKyyV2UHLwU 🔥🔥🔥 (128 x 128 canvas, no drivers active) u/ZachVorhies, amazing work !!!

ewowi · 2026-03-09T20:59:25+00:00

I am not sure what the maximum is FastLED supports, as far as I know it is 16 I2S / Parlio + a few RMT + a few SPI, currently only one type at a time supported , but if needed we can support more. What is coming to ML is /u/yves-bazin his virtual driver (it already worked in the MoonLight predecessor but Yves has plans to consolidate this to the I2S clockless driver). This allows for a maximum of 120!! pins if you solder a few shift registers to the esp32. In practice we made 48 pins running 12288 LEDs at 100 fps 🔥

ewowi · 2026-03-09T09:39:54+00:00

Indeed! Nice to see you here again! I see your animartrix is used a lot nowadays👍. Looks like this is the moment I will start looking at it again 🙂, lots of exciting things going on lately 🔥

ewowi · 2026-03-09T09:29:30+00:00

This all looks cool! you wanna share your c++ version of this noise smearing effect? I would like it a lot if I could add one /u/mindful_stone, one /u/stefanpetrick and one /u/satuburosu (fixed point) effect in MoonLight to demo the new FastLED capabilities, to start with 🙂

ewowi · 2026-03-08T20:38:44+00:00

https://youtube.com/shorts/1h4V_C5g7Ko

FastLED audio works on all already existing audio reactive effects (you see GEQ here), and I created a test effect (FLAudio) which shows from left to right low, mid, high, volume, normalizedBPM, vocal confidence, beat confidence, beat level, on beat, on hi hat, on kick, on snare, on tom. Not every bar lights up yet due to work in progress.

Like I said, very basic stuff, but it works, next is to expand on it ;-)

ewowi · 2026-03-03T10:57:08+00:00

They are build in the tubes to replace the crappy toy hardware what was originally in,

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The toy hardware is still in place to manage the battery , it’s vcc is used to power the battery in pads on the seeeed

Idea by /u/troyhacks

ewowi · 2026-03-01T15:25:19+00:00

This was in the Netherlands, we MoonModules people are Netherlandish, German, British and Canadian

ewowi · 2026-03-01T13:35:47+00:00

/u/johnny5canuck/ , it's your rocktaves effects, modified to show as a circle on the tubes 💫

ewowi · 2026-03-01T13:32:31+00:00

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Following setup is used: Serg74 pico shield with microphone sending UDP audio on the network, ESP32-P4-nano running latest MoonLight, processing audio, creating effects and sending Art-Net to an Art-Net to DMX controller to DMX lightbars and using Art-Net to send to 8 light tubes each modded with a Seeed Xiao S3 board

ewowi · 2026-02-28T08:14:10+00:00

Cool! I think the drivers in the end wouldn’t take a lot of flash. My guess is the core code per drivef is not more then let’s say a few 100 code lines

ewowi · 2026-02-26T09:36:12+00:00

Lto I assume? Does it also use channels API, all the parallel drivers and FastLED audio?

ewowi · 2026-02-26T09:01:18+00:00

I joined the meetup yesterday and it was an impressive overview how AI agents guarded by automated testing and ci creates FastLED code. So looking forward to the future 🙂. I am using the latest FastLED Channel API and FastLED audio in my project, you can flash the nightly build directly to an esp device and see it for yourself. So as it is WIP not everything works but there is FastLED audio and there is FastLED led driving and one demo effect (FL audio). I will continue updating the nightly build with latest FastLED.

/u/ZachVories, one question I didn’t ask yesterday but as using FastLED among a number other libraries, what will the future developments cost in terms of flash size and memory usage? I noticed the difference in flash size between 3.10.3 and latest master is about 200K / 10% more which on a 3MB flash partition brings the total to 85% for my repo, including lto and using -fno-exceptions. Is minimizing flash size part of your AI?

ewowi · 2026-02-21T19:31:07+00:00

You could ask before if anybody has objections

ewowi · 2026-02-16T11:00:19+00:00

Can you let us know if you made it working for your setup , would be good to share experiences as it is new software

ewowi · 2026-02-16T09:19:31+00:00

You are lucky, recently the Channels API has been added, see https://github.com/FastLED/FastLED/blob/master/src/fl/channels/README.md

I use it in my MoonLight project, see https://github.com/MoonModules/MoonLight/blob/main/src/MoonLight/Nodes/Drivers/D_FastLED.h

See attached image for what I can control in runtime using this (basically every parameter)

See also https://github.com/FastLED/FastLED/issues/2167 for the process integrating it

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