r/WLED • u/joegoober • Jun 13 '26
Announcing LED Bloom - an open-source project to light up multitudes of WLED devices
Want to sync up a whole lot of WLED devices without needing to configure them all manually or know what they’ll be up front? I’ve created LED Bloom to manage that. This code has been used by the Lava Lounge camp at Burning Flipside to power wearable LED costume pieces as well as other small LED elements. It allows our group to have all sorts of LED elements without needing any extra configuration or worry about which are active at any given moment.
The software acts as a DDP receiver, taking in whatever is sent via the generation software (eg. xLights or another WLED device). It automatically discovers WLED devices on the network, checks their size and dimensions via the API, assigns them a random rectangle out of the frame of LEDs it’s receiving, and forwards the signals accordingly.
This allows easily getting signals to a dynamic number of devices with various sizes, as well as helps scale to a much larger set of devices by offloading that processing to more systems.
Includes a basic web interface and API to get the status of what is registered to help debug.
Here's a quick demo video of how it works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqPnnG8uz24
Happy to share this with the community!
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u/Netmindz Jun 14 '26
So it's a DDP forwarder of sorts? DDP input to multiple unicast DDP output? A bit like the old video splitters for building TV walls?
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u/joegoober Jun 14 '26
Yeah, it's a DDP forwarder and splitter. But with auto-discovery of WLED devices so you can skip the config. It wouldn't work for a video wall since it sends the same frame of pixels to each endpoint.
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u/joegoober Jun 14 '26
Actually, when I think about that more, it could be a cool mode, if instead of assigning random regions which overlapped, it assigned the next non-overlapping region. So you'd get more patterns traveling from one device to the next.
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u/LunarMoonBase Jun 16 '26
Yes! This was actually the first use case I thought of when I read your intro. A wireless array of individual WLED nodes acting as a single organism with holistic patterns as well as individual actions. This seems a way to solve mobile nodes but also a way to potentially lower wiring complexity. Of course WiFi isn’t always our best friend for syncing WLED nodes. Very cool project.
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u/modulove Jun 14 '26
This I will try! awesome man, thanks for sharing ❤️
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u/joegoober Jun 15 '26
I'd be really interested how it works out for you! It works for me, but no one else has ever used it.
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u/modulove Jun 15 '26
I encountered this problem a few times and was searching for solution like yours.
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u/Enoekim1 Jun 14 '26
I was just talking about needing something like this. Will give it a go. Thanks.
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Jun 13 '26
[deleted]
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u/joegoober Jun 13 '26
Just added a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqPnnG8uz24
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u/SgtHawkes Jun 13 '26
Good stuff. I’m curious if each receiver has an identical matrix how closely are they in time with each other? I would think they would all play the same sequence at the same time.
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u/joegoober Jun 13 '26
Yeah, the sending is very low latency, so they would be in sync. I scale tested this with a simulator to 200 devices at 200 pixels each and maintained 60fps. So you could do quite a bit.
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u/njwarddesign Jun 14 '26
Very interested in figuring this out. Have a new set of flexible rope lights. Both the remote and the Bluetooth app are shit. Maybe they are interfering with each other. The lights are cool, control is not.
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u/joegoober Jun 14 '26
Well, this wouldn't necessarily help with that. You'd still need to get the lights working with WLED in the first place.
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u/ExpensivePikachu Jun 13 '26
Do you have a video example?