I have been watching tons of videos trying to figure out a simple spiral tree display. I have wled working fine with a nodemcu my string of lights. All the wled stuff works. Now I’m trying to make a better display with xlights. Does xlights load onto the nodemcu and wled runs it? Is xlights a completely different thing? Do I need something else to get xlights to work without my computer?
To use xlights you will need to download it from xlights website. It runs on a pc.
Once you have xlights you will need to do the following. Model your display, input the nodemcu ip, then build a sequence. Yes I am leaving out many details, this is high level.
I would suggest looking up videos on xlights site they have plenty of tutorials. Once you get going it is very user friendly but the first one can be tough.
I have xlights downloaded and have created a sequence (lots of videos). Now, how do I get it loaded onto my nodemcu? Is it only possible to run the sequence on my computer? I don’t want to manually run it every 30 minutes.
You don’t run xlights on the nodemcu, it needs to be run from a computer. To avoid manually running the sequence from your PC, people use a third piece of software called Falcon Player installed on a Raspberry Pi or other SBC. Here is the list of boards xlights says will be compatible with Falcon Player, Here is the Github for Falcon Player, and Here is the very first search result for “xlights raspberry pi”, which gave me the answers you needed. Everything should be pretty well documented elsewhere, happy googling!