ambi-mesh

Ambi-mesh is your new local network mesh for self-made ambient lights. It runs on ESP microcontrollers that are equipped with single-wire-based LED strips (such as the WS2812) and is able to scale with multiple instances inside your network. This enables more flexible usage by different clients. Currently, a Python client is available, which makes it possible to replicate screen colors from a personal computer to the network.

Setup

Prerequisites

• Python 3.12 (tested; earlier Python versions should also work)
• Arduino IDE

ESP

Follow these steps to run the mesh software on your ESPs (e.g., on a NodeMCU):

1. Connect your data pin of the LED strip to pin 3 of the ESP (use the GPIO3 pin; do specific research for your board)
2. Set up your Arduino IDE to upload the script to the boards
   • Install the esp8266 package in the board manager (add http://arduino.esp8266.com/stable/package_esp8266com_index.json to additional board manager URLs in preferences)
   • Install the following libraries:
     • Adafruit NeoPixel (Adafruit)
     • ArduinoJson (Benoit Blanchon)
     • UUID (Rob Tillaart)
3. Open src/esp/esp.ino in your Arduino IDE
4. Select your board and upload the script
5. Repeat with other ESPs you might have

Client

This project uses tkinter to provide a basic UI for mesh network interactions. Make sure that tkinter works in your Python environment by executing python -m tkinter. It should open a window that shows the current tcl/tk version. If you are on Mac and use pyenv to manage Python environments, you can install a new version of tcl/tk via homebrew: brew install tcl-tk. After that, you can reinstall your Python version to make sure that the homebrew version of tcl/tk is used.

After you make sure that tkinter works, you can follow these steps to run the local Python client:

cd src/client
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
python app.py

Usage

The usage, along with some screenshots of the client, is described in the following wiki page.