maruel / ellee

Esphome Lambda Light Effect Emulator

Esphome Lambda Light Effect Emulator (ellee)

Creating a new effect for an addressable light in esphome can be tedious. To try a new lambda you just created, you have to compile, upload, have the device reboot, then switch the effect on ... just to realize nothing happens because the esp8266 or esp32 crashed. 😩 It's really hard to debug when a lambda causes a crash! 💣

What about emulating the effect on your local terminal instead and be able to debug locally? This project does exactly that! 🎉

Ellee loads an esphome.io configuration yaml file, finds the addressable_lambda effect and generates a standalone C++ executable that emulates a LED strip for faster iteration!

Crank these animations! ⏩

Prerequisites

• macOS
  • Install Xcode
  • Install python dependencies with: ./setup.sh; source venv/bin/activate
• Windows
  • Run: setup.bat
• Linux or Windows under WSL
  • Run: sudo apt install g++
  • Install python dependencies with: ./setup.sh; source venv/bin/activate

Usage

ellee requires a esphome.git checkout to get the C++ source files to build your lambda. Then pass both the path to esphome.git and your esphome yaml file containing a addressable_lambda to generate an executable that will output the effect at the terminal when run. For example:

git clone https://github.com/esphome/esphome ../esphome

# A simple count down timer that can be used in meetings to alert partitipant
# that time is up.
./ellee.py samples/timer.yaml
./30s_count_down

# Compare different sinus implementations by looking that the raw values in HEX.
./ellee.py --as-hex --once samples/sin.yaml
./half_sin8
./sin16_c
./sinf

Ctrl-C out to stop the animation.

Tips

Explore the samples/ directory for ideas how to make the best use of this tool. ellee tolerates underspecified effect (e.g. printf_then_exit.yaml) for quicker iteration.