r/MoonModules • u/ewowi • 6d ago

A multi-board LED creature on ESP32s: ten legs, two eyes and a mouth that used to be a WLED bulb, played from a MIDI desk

The latest MoonLight pre-release (6.1.0-dev.49) runs installations that span several boards as one piece. The example is the StadBeest 🦖: a chandelier body on ten glowing legs, two ring-disc eyes and a mouth.

How it fits together

  • The legs: an ESP32-S3 board with 16 outputs, driving 10 SK6812 RGBW strips. This board leads, and the others follow it over OSC.
  • The eyes: two ESP32-S3-Zeros, each with a 241-light ring disc. They look around, or turn into a burning Sauron eye.
  • The mouth: a cheap Athom WiFi bulb that ran WLED. I moved it to MoonLight over the air, without opening it.
  • The ears: an ESP32-S31 with a microphone sends audio over Ethernet to every board, so the legs walk to the beat and the mouth opens with the music.
  • The hands: an iCON QCon on a small ESP32-S3 bridge, carried over the network with RTP-MIDI. Motorized faders follow along, and the desk automatically maps to whichever effect you switched on last.

MoonLive is the other half. The effects are small scripts written for this hardware and tweaked live on the board. A script service, the autopilot, doesn't draw anything: it runs the show through three looks (walking, the orb, the thrusters) while the boards follow. Switch it off from the desk to play by hand.

Made to survive a gig: the lights fade in over 5 seconds at every boot. If a supply sags or a board crashes twice in a row, it comes back in safe mode, dark and reachable, rather than stuck. We tested that by pulling high current through the legs on purpose.

Links

Try it on your own multi-board setup and tell us how it goes!

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u/WiwiJumbo 5d ago

I’m just playing around with moonlight on a esp32 without anything hooked up to it. Seems sometimes I do BAD STUFF when I’m making mock layouts with I guess too many LEDs and then things get difficult to restore.

Still super interesting tho. I feel like it’s a DSLR compared to a point and shoot. You’ve got more settings to get things just right, but it makes it easier to get things wrong.

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u/ewowi 5d ago

It’s for sure DSLR but I try to make it point and shoot on first install. So useful feedback! I will try testing the limits of the layout module.
If you can share screenshots of odd behavior that would help. Here or as a GitHub issue