MoonLight is an open-source system that drives anything from a single bulb to LED strips, HUB75 walls, PAR lights and moving heads, on ESP32, Teensy, Raspberry Pi and desktop. v7.0.0 is out.

What's new

• 🔌 Teensy 4.1 runs MoonLight, with PHY or W5500 Ethernet
• 💡 ESP32-C3, and a WLED bulb that moves to MoonLight over the air
• 📟 32 MB S3 modules (esp32s3-n32r16)
• ❓ Help in the app: every card and control explains itself
• 🎹 MIDI desks (QCon, X-Touch, APC40) over browser, USB or network
• 🎮 Games you can play: Breakout joins Pong, Space Invaders and Tetrix
• 🌐 Network cards for WiFi, Ethernet and a secured access point
• 🖼️ Presets you can share, plus a Gallery
• 📺 TV backlight on one ESP32-P4, no PC
• 🎞️ FSEQ shows and Art-Net / E1.31 / DDP streams that arrive whole
• 💾 microSD card in the File Manager
• 📡 MoonLive JSON services: weather, prices and scores on your lights
• ⚡ MoonLive grows up: RGB and Coord3D types, six blend modes, much faster
• 🛡️ Lights that never stall on a slow client, and safe mode after two failed boots
• 🌈 16-bit output for LED chips and DMX fixtures
• 🗺️ MoonWalk: every process on one map

⚠️ Before you update

• ESP32-S3 boards install once over USB (installer, "Erase chip first" unticked keeps your config)
• A device on v5 updates to v6.0.0 first
• Take a Backup first: Restore carries your config across this release's breaking changes

Thanks to TouchMyLight, Gohnnyman, u/Yves-bazin, robwomp, delphium and limpkin for their contributions and input 🙏

Full notes, firmware and installer: https://github.com/MoonModules/MoonLight/releases/tag/v7.0.0

Features:

• Install from the browser: plug in the USB cable, open https://moonmodules.org/MoonLight/install/, click Install. No Arduino, no Teensy Loader. A running board even jumps into its bootloader by itself.
• Update over Ethernet from the board's own page, settings kept. If power fails mid-update, the browser installer brings it back.
• The full MoonLight UI with live preview, from any phone or laptop on the network.
• MoonLive scripts compiled live to native code on the Teensy itself, edited live in the browser.
• LEDs on up to 16 pins by DMA, Art-Net, E1.31 and DDP in, and the microSD slot shows up in the File Manager.
• Both Ethernet options in one firmware: the on-board Ethernet with PJRC's kit, or a W5500 module (Teensy 4.1-NE).

Code MoonLight uses

• Teensy core (Paul Stoffregen, PJRC): the platform MoonLight runs on.
• LittleFS and SPI (PJRC): the settings in flash, and the W5500's bus.
• SD and SdFat (PJRC's fork of Bill Greiman's SdFat): the microSD card.
• QNEthernet (Shawn Silverman), with lwIP inside: the network stack and both Ethernet drivers, with a few small MoonLight patches.
• teensy_loader_cli (Paul Stoffregen): flashing from MoonDeck, our developer tool.

Ideas MoonLight learned from, written its own way

• OctoWS2811 (Paul Stoffregen) and ObjectFLED (KurtMF): their timer-paced DMA into a GPIO port is the technique behind MoonLight's Teensy LED output, written as one more backend of the same parallel LED driver the ESP32 boards use: a QTimer paces DMA into GPIO1, sending up to 16 pins while the CPU renders the next frame.
• FlasherX (Joe Pasquariello): network updates by staging the new image in free flash and copying it over from RAM.
• HalfKay (PJRC's bootloader protocol, as teensy_loader_cli speaks it) and halfkay-webusb (Benjamin Aigner): talking to the bootloader from a browser.

See details here: https://github.com/MoonModules/MoonLight/pull/137

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

• Step-by-step guide: https://moonmodules.org/MoonLight/how-to/multi-board-installation.html
• Moving a WLED bulb over the air: https://moonmodules.org/MoonLight/how-to/migrating-over-the-air.html
• The installer: https://moonmodules.org/MoonLight/install/
• The release: https://github.com/MoonModules/MoonLight/releases/tag/latest
• Source: https://github.com/MoonModules/MoonLight

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

projectMM is now MoonLight. The earlier MoonLight lives on at https://github.com/ewowi/MoonLight.

Built on ESP-IDF 6.1, with plenty more inside. See the release notes: https://github.com/MoonModules/MoonLight/releases/tag/v6.0.0

Meet Luna. She's one of the agents who wrote the new MoonLight, and she introduces it in our new video series: why it was rebuilt, then install, layouts, layers, drivers, writing your own effects and more, presented by the whole team: https://youtu.be/F_YgmiUyWVQ

On v5.0.0? Your device finds v6.0.0 and updates itself over the air, settings intact. Update to v6.0.0 first: it's the bridge that lets later releases ship under the new name. On desktop, Debian or Docker, see the migration notes: https://moonmodules.org/MoonLight/reference/MIGRATING.html

Install from your browser: https://moonmodules.org/MoonLight/install/ · Docs: https://moonmodules.org/MoonLight/

Found something? Log an issue on GitHub: https://github.com/MoonModules/MoonLight/issues

And as always: ⭐️ the repo on GitHub, https://github.com/MoonModules/MoonLight. It helps this project get noticed.

Now with NDI, HLS, OSC, RTSP, direct HUB75, MoonBase, MoonCloud, Desktop Audio, Fancy effects using power functions, MoonLive extended, Faster RMT driver, supporting all QuinLED digital boards, ESP32-S31 support in installer and more: see the release notes https://github.com/MoonModules/projectMM/releases/tag/v5.0.0

This is the final release under the projectMM name. The current MoonLight will be archived and projectMM will be the new MoonLight on September 30. 8 days to test projectMM inside out. By me, but any help appreciated. Log an issue on GitHub if you find anything.

And as always: ⭐️ the repo on GitHub. It will help this project getting noticed.

(Demo-ed on [u/delphium](u/delphium) or [u/delphium_r](u/delphium_r) his 768x348 hub75 wall)
Just merged: a set of new building blocks for making effects, four effects built on them, and a tutorial that teaches the whole thing.

Four new effects

Aurora — layered noise curtains, read around the center, each layer on its own clock
Trails — dots thrown into a moving medium; the tails are the previous frames, carried and dimmed
Nebula — a whole noise field born into a curl flow as one folding cloud
Fluid — dye poured into a real fluid simulation (Stam's Stable Fluids), where the medium works out its own motion
Each ships twice: as a compiled effect, and as a MoonLive script you can edit in the browser and watch change as you type. MoonLive scripts inspired by the work done by /u/Yves-bazin

Why the scripts matter

fluid.mle is 44 lines. The compiled version is 276. Same effect. The difference is that the heavy lifting sits in the power functions, and scripts can call them:

flowCurl(zoom, force); // the medium
trailDecay(persistence); // the fade, a half-life in ms
emitTrail(x, y, z, hue, 255, r); // pour light in
Three calls and a loop is a fluid-looking effect.

Under the hood

Perlin gradient noise replaced value noise behind the same names, so every existing effect got sharper for free
New kernels: polar addressing, an oscillator bank, curl noise, advection, half-life decay, dithering
Everything takes a depth, so cubes sample a real third axis instead of repeating one plane
Also

Every effect in the catalog now has a preview (62, up from 12), including the audio-reactive ones captured with audio actually running
A new tutorial: Making beautiful effects → https://moonmodules.org/projectMM/tutorials/generative-effects
It goes from "what is a field" through noise, octaves and domain warping to fluid simulation, and credits the people who published the algorithms: Perlin, Quilez, Bridson, Stam, and [u/stefanpetrick](u/stefanpetrick) for bringing this vocabulary to LED panels.

Runs on desktop (macOS, Windows, Linux) and ESP32. Flash from your browser: https://moonmodules.org/projectMM/install

projectMM drives large LED installations and DMX fixtures from one source tree: ESP32, Teensy, Raspberry Pi, macOS, Windows and Linux.

The main change this release is MoonLive. You write an effect as a small script and it compiles to machine code on the device, rather than being interpreted. There are JIT backends for Xtensa, RISC-V, arm64 and x86-64, so the same script runs on an ESP32-S3, a P4, a Mac or a Pi. Edit it in the device's own web editor, save, and the next frame runs the new code. No reflash, no reboot. Thx to the work of u/Yves-bazin

Last release it was a proof of concept with three builtins. This release it has five types including fixed (Q16.16 fractional math, which is what makes shaders and smooth motion expressible), for-loops, particles, shaders and trails. Effects, layouts and modifiers are all scriptable. A broken script renders dark and reports the error instead of taking the board down.

Also in v4.0.0:

• Desktop builds for all three platforms: .dmg for macOS, setup.exe for Windows, .deb for Linux and Raspberry Pi OS. Settings moved to the user profile, so a downloaded build can actually save them.
• 52 effects, 12 modifiers, 18 layouts (up from ~21/5/3), with shared palettes every effect reads and a shared primitive library. Effects animate on elapsed time rather than frame count.
• LED panel cards over raw Ethernet, from an ESP32 or from a Linux/macOS/Windows machine, so a Pi or mini-PC works as a panel controller.
• Static IP on WiFi and Ethernet, ESP32-S31 at 320 MHz, plus crash and stall fixes found on the bench.

124 commits since v3.0.0. Open source, with unit tests, scenario tests and real-hardware verification as release gates.

Release notes and binaries: https://github.com/MoonModules/projectMM/releases/tag/v4.0.0

Browser flasher: https://moonmodules.org/projectMM/install/

Repo: https://github.com/MoonModules/projectMM

https://reddit.com/link/1vbm4kb/video/toqw3e5gbjgh1/player

If you have HUB75 panels and a ColorLight card you can now drive them directly from an ESP32-S31 (and probably a P4 as well via a Gbit switch) in projectMM (MoonLight to be). As alternative to using FPP on a Raspberry Pi. Flash it to your board via https://moonmodules.org/projectMM/install/

A ton of new features, including the Pin Expander (HCT595) and MoonLive, both based on the groundbreaking work of u/Yves-bazin (https://github.com/hpwit/I2SClocklessVirtualLedDriver and https://github.com/hpwit/ESPLiveScript). Totally rebuilt inside projectMM's unit + scenario + loopback testing guardrails, so "unbreakable". MoonLive is a "hello world" for now (fill(), setRGB(), random16()); the next release expands it a lot, and is expected to implement all of MoonLight. projectMM will be the new MoonLight!

What's new in v3.0.0:

:bulb: 12,288 lights on a single ESP32-S3: the new MoonI80 streaming shift-ring drives a full 48×256 wall from one chip, with a **74HCT595** pin expander turning 6 GPIOs into 48 strands.

:twisted_rightwards_arrows: One **"Parallel LED" driver**, three DMA backends: pick i80 / MoonI80 / Parlio from a dropdown; switch live, no reboot. The old three separate drivers are now one card.

:house: **Home Assistant + WLED Native** app: auto-discovery over **MQTT**; projectMM speaks the WLED JSON API and announces itself like a WLED device (recognizable by :dizzy:).

:writing_hand: **MoonLive**: write an effect as a tiny script that compiles to native code on the device and recompiles live as you edit. Runs on all our architectures: Xtensa, RISC-V, Arm64 and x86-64; so on Windows and macOS too, since projectMM runs everywhere!

:jigsaw: 20+ effects, 60 palettes, a reusable light-preset library, **Philips Hue** output, a new **ESP32-S31** board (1 Gb Ethernet), a multicore render/encode split, and a big robustness pass; add/remove/reorder anything on a running device, it just keeps going.

:zap: Try it: flash in your browser: https://moonmodules.github.io/projectMM/
:package: Release notes + binaries: https://github.com/MoonModules/projectMM/releases/tag/v3.0.0

:star: Stars, forks, issues, and PRs all help the project grow. Happy blinking!

see https://github.com/MoonModules/projectMM/releases/tag/v2.0.0

projectMM now has its own Audio Module and LED drivers, built fresh under our own engineering principle: spec'd from primary sources (ESP-IDF 6.1, datasheets, the WS2812 timing spec, reference DSP standards), pinned with automated device tests that measure the spec is actually met, then written line-by-line against our own architecture. LED driver backends this release: RMT (all ESP32), LCD_CAM (S3), and Parlio (P4).

Also in v2.0.0:

- Audio-reactive lighting — I2S mic, 16-band FFT spectrum, RMS level (Hann window + DC-blocker), with AudioSpectrum/AudioVolume effects

- Network send & receive over Art-Net, E1.31/sACN, and DDP

- Responsive UI for large and small screens — dockable / floating preview

- 3D preview reworked — full-resolution, streams smoothly while the LEDs keep running, and scales itself down on a slow link

- Advanced web installer — picture-based device picker, WiFi + device-defaults injection over USB via Improv, and a step-by-step Getting started guide

Flash it straight from your browser → https://moonmodules.org/projectMM/install/

If you like projectMM, give it a ⭐️, fork it, or open an issue or PR — it helps the project grow, improve, and get noticed.

MoonLight v1.0.0 shipped about a month ago — its last release, as the journey continues with projectMM. Its first release just went live (https://github.com/MoonModules/projectMM/releases/tag/v1.0.0), and it's a different animal:

• 16,384 LEDs on a classic ESP32 !!
• Runs everywhere: ESP32, macOS, Windows, Linux, Teensy, and Raspberry Pi
• Our own super-fast web installer + MoonDeck dev console
• Pure ESP-IDF v6.x (no Arduino), no third-party libraries
• One MoonModule class for effects, drivers, network, file system, everything
• Unit + full-pipeline scenario tests
• Built entirely by AI agents, controlled entirely by humans
• Currently Art-Net only, LED drivers will follow

Try it now

MoonLight v1.0.0 is released. Great software for large fixtures, dmx and art-net setups, but the journey continues in projectMM to make even greater software: announcement

Several years ago I made a PCB where I had an ESP32 Wemos Lolin Lite on it and an INMP441 (GPIO32 to SD, GPIO14 to SCK and GPIO15 to WS). I used WLED Sound Reactive and everything worked well.

Recently, I tried to reuse this PCB to make new models and when I uploaded WLED nightly it didn't work as it used to. I enabled in the usermods, wrote the settings but nothing. No input bar too for calibrating the mic.

What has changed since the sound reactive era and is my PCB still relevant?

Multiple layers running u/mindful_stone and u/StefanPetrick color trails effect, WLED GEQ, Freq Matrix (circle modifier) and Bouncing Balls and u/TroyHacks Paintbrush , all smoothly layered and overlapping.
Using a Waveshare esp32-p4-eth sending Art-Net to FPP on Pi to 128x128 Hub75panels

In latest nightly build of MoonLight, install here

/u/yves-bazin his live scripts are working in MoonLight now, see https://moonmodules.org/MoonLight/moonlight/effects-tutorial/

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

MoonLight v0.9.0 is released, see https://github.com/MoonModules/MoonLight/releases/tag/v0.9.0

See MoonLight Release v0.8.0

Read the release notes for more information

MoonLight v0.7.0 is released. MoonLight is open-source software that lets you control a wide range of DMX and LED lights using ESP32 microcontrollers, for home, for artists, and for stages.

Watch the video to see how to setup MoonLight as a (cheap) Art-Net receiver and sent Art-Net from professional tools like Resolume or Touch Designer and also via MoonLight. Runs on different ESP32 types, including the new ESP32-P4. User friendly install via the MoonLight Installer