WLED Tools Website

WLED

The WLED project was created by Christian Schwinne, to make individually addressible LED strips WiFi-enabled with a webserver to control the current effects. It is a great project, and brings about for many new creative ways for people to decorate using light.

The Problem

I love the WLED project, but one of the major pain points has always been the set up, and the local web server takes a long time to load from the small ESP32/ESP8266. Additionally, when I wanted to share a cool effect I made with others, it just wasn't practical to copy every setting over manually. When I wanted to share LED strips powered by WLED with my non-technical family, they had trouble connecting and finding the local IP address to the website, and the server would often crash or become unresponsive.

The Solution

I created the WLED tools website to share with the WLED community, to make sharing and creating effects much easier. The setup involved behind the website, registering a domain, hosting using Cloudflare pages, etc. could be a post of its own. In fact, much of this portfolio website goes into the specifics of some of the engineering problems I have had to go through in the creation of this site.

Eye Candy / User Experience

I learned a ton about user experience, making sure buttons feel intuitive and keeping the most relevant information central. The lessons I've learned could be an entire post on their own.
Here's an example of improving the user experience: a computer display barely distinguishes between pitch black and 1% brightness, while in real life it would be pretty obvious when the LEDs are on. Therefore I added some post-processing to the simulator output in the form of a gamma correction table, to make the colors appear brighter, as they do to the human eye when looking at one of the LEDs. It has transformed all of the effects to look much prettier than they would otherwise.