Hi, I have been controlling several strands of WS2801 (4-wire SPI) LEDs from an UNO R3 very happily. I have distance sensors set up so that two or three people can interact to directly change the values for R, G and B by moving closer or farther away to the sensors. I'd like to add Wi-Fi so I can send commands remotely, make the sensors mobile, and hide them. (I sense an Elf-On-The-Shelf game of hide and seek coming up...the lights are orange so you are getting warmer!)
I tried a Huzzah and a NodeMCU but was unable to get the Adafruit 2801 library or FastLED working on them for the WS2801.
The native Lua firmware looks like it might do the trick but I don't know any Lua and have already flashed both chips to Arduino. Since I'm trying to do this in a classroom full of 3rd to 5th graders who are using Arduino I'd like to not introduce another platform.
I looked for tutorials to get the ESP8266 devices to talk to the UNO over serial. Most of what I've found takes the approach "why bother to waste the ESP8266 as a simple serial bridge when you can use it as the primary MCU?" The ones I did find pre-dated the Arduino IDE availability and mostly talk about level conversion. Apparently if you can do that, the serial comms are a breeze and need little to no docs.
I tried using the native SPI libraries for the ESP8266 Arduino IDE but don't have the chops to climb that technical mountain before Christmas. I waded through the WS2801 spec sheet and sent the required frames inside of begin/end transaction, and tried as Mode0 and Mode2. Nada. Not even a flicker.
I can continue using what I have now and wait to see if the 2801 libraries are ported to the ESP hardware but before I call it a day I wanted to ask - anyone doing this successfully? And by "this" I mean "driving WS2801 connected over WiFi using some combination of UNO, Huzzah, and/or NodeMCU"? If so, can I ask what the approach was?
Thanks in advance.
-- T.Rob