> Mc Lighting (the multi-client lighting gadget) is a very cheap internet-controllable lighting solution based on the famous ESP8266 microcontroller and WS2811/2812 led strips. It features a self-hosted responsive web-interface, a REST-API and a websocket connector.
> Because of it's open architecture and APIs it's easy to build new clients for different platforms (iOS, Android, Windows Universal Apps, Siri/Cortana integration, ...).
After a long time I was able to work a bit on McLighting v2 and it's finally out now. The main difference, among minor improvements and library updates, is the usage of the great WS2812FX library for color animations. It brings a lot (almost 50!) of new animations.
The API changed a little bit, because the speed can now be set as a value from 0 to 255, not the delay anymore. So the web inferface had to change accordingly. The new animation mode have to be set also by their number, instead of a dedicated url. The list of all animation modes can also be received by the API. All existing API endpoints are kept for downward compatibility. So you should be able to use the new version without big changes. The original version is kept as branch "mclighting_legacy". Documentation will be updated soon.
Now, there are two forks of McLighting (using the famous FastLED library). I did not notice it first, because I currently do not receive notification e-mails by Github (I have no idea why). Maybe you want to give them also a try, I will definitely do so as soon as I find time.
https://github.com/russp81/LEDLAMP_FASTLEDs
And this one was also forked: https://github.com/jake-b/Griswold-LED-Controller
There is now a [gitter.im](https://gitter.im/mclighting/Lobby?utm_source=share-link&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=share-link) chat room for this project.
Today I presented the project at [Pi and More 9](https://piandmore.de/) and got some good feedback, even though my presentation was not perfect and time was too short to present everything I prepared. So I uploaded the [slides (german)](documentation/slides/Ein%20SmartLight%20im%20Selbstbau%20für%20unter%2015%20€_Pi%20and%20More%209.pdf) to this repository for your reference.
The project ist based on the famous ESP8266 microcontroller and WD2811/WS2812 LED strips. There are many variations of the ESP chip out there, but I chose the NodeMCU dev board, because it's powered by micro USB and has a voltage converter included to power the ESP which uses 3.3V.
A standalone ESP8266 or a Adafruit Huzzah should work too.
You use this project at your own risk. This is not a solution that should be used in productive environments, but this code and guide could give you a quick start for your own experiments. Please keep also in mind that there are currently some security features missing.
