ESP32 feather board firefly project

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SciBri
 
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ESP32 feather board firefly project

Post by SciBri »

Hi I work at a Science Museum and we are trying to build an outdoor interactive with models of fireflies,
that flash a sequence of LEDs in their tails when you push a button.
We would like to have the fireflies communicate with each other so that when you press a button on one,
it sends a signal for the others to light up. This would be done with PWM.
They would be powered by solar and Lipo or Lion batteries.
The light source would either be some 5 volt white LED strip or RGB neopixel to get the right color temp to match the firefly light color
I would like to add a light sensor so that at night they would blink every few minutes.
I'm moderately familiar with Arduino and raspberry pi programming, but have very little ESP32 experience.
Does this sound like something the Adafruit HUZZAH32 board would be easily capable of?
I'm under the impression that it would.
Please Help!
Thanks, Brian

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: ESP32 feather board firefly project

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

Do you specifically need Wifi? That's the ESP32's main focus and advantage over other microcontrollers.

People have done LED firefly projects that demonstrate automatic self-synchronization using just the LEDs and light sensors.

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Re: ESP32 feather board firefly project

Post by SciBri »

I would really like to do it as simply as possible.
The fireflies will be between 50-100 feet apart, I'm not really sure the best way to connect them.
The space where they are has wifi, I think maybe Bluetooth low energy might be the way to go.

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Re: ESP32 feather board firefly project

Post by SciBri »

I'm assuming wifi would be the best option, as the stations would be around 75-100 feet from each other,
and each station needs to be able to send and receive signals from and to the others.

This is not possible with bluetooth correct?

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Re: ESP32 feather board firefly project

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

You definitely don't want Bluetooth for peer-to-peer communication. The protocol doesn't work that way. Beyond that, BLE is a near-field networking protocol.. getting connections beyond 10m is unlikely in the field.

Wifi would work for the distances you mention, and TCP/IP supports peer-to-peer communication. The challenge there will be letting each device know about the others.

The trivial solution is to program each device with the IP addresses of all the others. It's simple, but scales poorly.. any time you add or remove a device, you have to reprogram all the others.

A client-server model would work: have one device work as a point of contact for all the others. Then the other devices only need to contact the server. A protocol like MQTT would let all the devices stay in sync with each other through the server.

Another option would be to use packet radio instead of Wifi:

https://www.adafruit.com/?q=packet+radio&sort=BestMatch

They use a simple peer-to-peer protocol which allows a single radio to broadcast messages to any other radio in listening range. Basic packet radios are good for connections up to 100m or so, and LoRa works out to a couple hundred meters.. both those distances assume line-of-sight connections.

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