WLED and FastLED

If you have any interest in controlling LED, LED Strips, LED Panels or such you may have heard of FastLED and WLED. These projects and tools are designed around the ESP32 and WS2812B LED controllers.

This gives you almost a plug and play tool that allows you to control your LED devices in multiple ways with very little work by the end user.

However, if you have a Raspberry Pi Pico based LED device like the Cosmic Unicorn by Pimoroni, this app is not able to be used.

I’ve no hard fealings to the developers of FastLED and WLED, as this is the root they have taken and does have a lot of users and uses.

However, I have longed for the tools they have on my Unicorn. But I am not an expert coder and would not even know where to begin. So for a long time, it’s sat as a dream.

Claude

I have been toying with Claude and Claude code with more and more complex tasks over the past few months, trying to push it and push it.

After some good ideas came out, I decided now it’s time.

Claude Code

So, this weekend - I set about seeing just what Claude Code could do if given the task of taking the code base and converting or working it into something that would give as many of the features as possible to the Pico based device.

First Draft

Well, after many hours of prompting, many hours of testing and debugging, it’s created what I beleive is good enougth to be a first draft.

There where a few user errors initially as I mistakenly said I as using the Galactic Unicorn so the stuff coming out was completly wrong!

Once it found this out, it moved on quicker and quicker.

This burnt through about 2 and a half days of tokens on my $20 a month package.

However, what I have now is a panel that has lots of the effects that the big brained humans of WLED created ported over and controllable and most importatly FAST!

Give it a go!

If you have one of these panels, you can give it a go! https://github.com/vwillcox/wled_picohttps://github.com/vwillcox/wled_pico