Thanks to tony-fav, the latest version of Tasmota now includes DDP support. The DDP protocol is designed for controlling a network of lights in real-time. This may sound very cryptic, but it unlocks some very cool lighting effects on light strips and light bulbs running Tasmota, including our CloudFree Smart Bulb.
What You'll Need
- CloudFree Smart Bulb or other lighting device running Tasmota, configured on your network
- An ESP-based development board, preferably an ESP32 Board
- A Micro-USB cable to flash the ESP board with WLED
Getting Started with WLED
WLED is an ESP firmware, like Tasmota, that is designed for directly controlling LED light strips. However, it also has the ability to communicate and sync up other lights over your network using DDP.
On an ESP8266 board you are limited to controlling 3 devices, whereas an ESP32 board will allow you to control up to 10 devices using the standard WLED build.
Flashing WLED is a very simple process and instructions are available in the WLED documentation.
Updating Tasmota
You'll need to update your light bulbs to a custom build of Tasmota that includes the DDP capabilities as the default build does not. We have custom builds ready to use, just paste link into the "OTA URL" page in Tasmota and upgrade.
For the CloudFree Smart Bulb: http://tasmota.cloudfree.io/tasmota-lbc.bin.gz
For other devices: http://tasmota.cloudfree.io/tasmota-ddp.bin.gz
To enable DDP control on your Tasmota devices, go to the console and run the following
For lights, run Scheme 5
For WS2812 light strip controllers, run Scheme 15
Configuring WLED
Now that our Tasmota devices are listening for DDP commands, we just need to configure WLED to control them.
On your WLED page (accessible at the IP address of your ESP development board), go to Config -> LED Preferences
Input the IP addresses of your Tasmota bulbs in positional order on this page with a length of 1. If you have an individually addressable LED strip, then set the length to the number of pixels on the strip.
When finished hit save at the bottom of the page.
Try it out!
Go back to your WLED homepage and see what it can do!
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