Fully fledged Staircase implementation

Projects
155

I hope that this instruction will be helpful and will safe a lot of time all those who are faced with the issues of setting up this user mod. I want to confirm that usermod works out of the box and if something doesn’t work you should troubleshoot yourself as there are no such guides in the document. I used ESP8266 D1 Mini for my experiments but these steps will also work for ESP32 boards as well.

  1. As srg74’s links to download binaries do not work anymore, you have to compile it yourself. Follow the document of how to do it here.
  2. After you flashed your firmware to your ESP controller, make sure that “Info” tab has “staircase” and the power button next to it is green (you can also enable it under Config → Usermods tab under “starcase” section).
  3. Do not setup any PIR triggers or UltraSound sensors yet (set -1 for all sensors PINs and uncheck all UltraSound sensors).
  4. Open in another tab of your browser with the http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/json/state (use your WLED device IP address) and check that “top-sensor” and “bottom-sensor” both have “false” value (in case if you see “true” value on one of the sensors, see step #3).
  5. Configure your LED strip with the number of LEDs and check if it lights up when you Power On on the main web UI page (if it doesn’t turn on, look at the Segment 0 power button).
  6. In the WLED UI, configure a segment for each stair step and check it lights up and lights off when you click power button for each segment. (keep in mind that the Power button should be On on the main WLED UI, otherwise your segments will not turn on)
  7. Go to Config → Usermods and setup for example TopPIRorTrigger Pin to any pins which you are going to use with PIR sensor. Keep in mind that some of the pins should be used with pull-down resistors otherwise it will be always in “true” value. This is very important and this is where I spent a lot of time figuring out why the LED strip was always on and wouldn’t turn off when timed out. You can always check the status of triggers in step #4.
  8. At this point you can simulate of triggering one of the sensor from step #7 by just connect 3.3V pin with the sensor pin and your LED strips should light up one by one for each segment and lights off after timeout.
  9. Repeat steps #7-8 for another sensor in case your are using more than one sensor.
4 Likes