I have a project in mind similar to what’s being discussed here, and I want to build it on top of WLED. I’m planning to use ESP-NOW for the communication. ESP-NOW allows an ESP device to be in AP mode or otherwise not connected to a network, and still receive a broadcast message from the one device that’s setup to send out messages to control the rest (among other use cases).
I added some ESP-NOW code to the WLED Soundreactive fork, and was able to set up two devices, one to broadcast a ~75 byte message containing FFT info at 50Hz, and another to listen for broadcasts and display FFT-based patterns, and it works well at short range with only occasional missed messages. I had to turn off the “Disable WiFi Sleep” option in Wifi Setup for the receiver to get reliable reception.
I plan on sending minimal info over ESP-NOW to the devices - mostly to sync patterns on the devices similar to the existing UDP sync - and having the devices generate the patterns themselves. Imagine a 2D pattern that is the shape of the stadium in the video. If each device knew its approximate position in the stadium (I have some ideas on that, plus the IR idea I wasn’t considering before until reading this thread), each device could compute the full 2D pattern and only display the section appropriate for its position in the 2D map. Of course depending on the pattern it may not need to compute the full pattern, and just the values relevant to what it needs to display.
Next steps for me on this project is to make an ESP-NOW Usermod. I’ll post back when I have more updates.
More ESP-NOW info: