Help Creating a LED (WS2811) Climbing Wall.

[jacobgolden]

Hello,
Thanks for reading this! I'm mainly looking for advise as to which hardware to order from Adafruit. My Background: I'm pretty novice as far as hardware electronics goes but I'am a web developer so I know how to write code, (mainly Javascript but a little python as well. Also, I don't solder, so I'd like to use components that don't need soldering or at least minimally. (I do want to learn though! : )

So here is the project: I've created an indoor 'rock' climbing wall. It's roughly a grid of 7x9 Climbing holds with a W22811 LED placed bellow each hold (I say roughly because it's not an exact grid). I'm wiring each LED in series. They are individually addressable. The 'string' of LED's is made up of three wires, Positive, Ground and Data. I have a 12V power supply to power the LED's.

Screenshot 2023-02-06 at 12.11.03 PM.png (491.25 KiB) Viewed 44 times

The idea is that (if you picture the holds as a grid of roughly 7 holds going across (row) and 9 going up, where each row is a Letter A - I and in each row the holds are numbered roughly 1-7 (some rows have more some have less).

Walll.jpg (742.74 KiB) Viewed 44 times

The goal is to create 'routes' up the wall. So a route might look like: A2, C6, D3, F5, H1, I6, So I would program a series of these routes, which I'm guessing would be a series of Arrays. and then I can press a button (maybe on my phone) and it would light up the LED's associate with one of the Arrays, probably picked at random from a bunch of routes that I create in advance. I think I can figure out the programming side of it, although I'd love to hear advise as to the simplest way to accomplish this program with something like MicroPython or regular python or even better, javascript which I use for work, i've read that Adafruit has a library that might be helpful with this?
Here's the hardware I'm looking at (I'm open to suggestions, if someone more experienced has a better idea).

Adafruit (PID 3591) HUZZAH32 – ESP32 Feather Board
This would be powered by a Adafruit 328 Battery, Lithium Ion Polymer, 3.7V, 2500mAh with a Adafruit 259 , USB Li-Ion/LiPoly Charger, v1.2 for charging up the battery. I would connect the esp32 to a:
Adafruit 16x8 LED Matrix Driver Backpack - HT16K33 Breakout to be able to turn on the pixel that corresponds with the route coordinates. (I'm imagining there would just be a single 'data' wire that connects the Matrix Driver to the data input wire on my led string?) Does this sound like a good setup for what I'm trying to accomplish? Am I forgetting something or is there a better/simpler way to do this?

[adafruit_support_mike]

We don't have any Javascript interpreters for microcontrollers, but we do have CircuitPython: a subset of MicroPython that works the same way on a wide range of microcontrollers.

In terms of programming, you shouldn't have much trouble moving from Javascript to CircuitPython. All programming languages are functionally equivalent, and Javascript/Python belong to the family of C-like languages. There are a few keywords you'll need to learn, but there are no glaring conceptual differences.

If you're new to programmable hardware, start with the tutorials linked from our product pages, then explore other tutorials in the Learning System. Those have code, schematics, and explanations that should help you get familiar with the parts and the process. Start simple, then make small changes to make sure the mental model you're building matches the actual hardware behavior.

Any microcontroller that can run CircuitPython will be able to control WS2811s (we call them NeoPixels), so that won't limit your selection.

If you want a wireless control interface, you'll need either BLE or Wifi. Since you're already a web programmer, I'd suggest Wifi.

The ESP32-S3 Feather would probably be a good choice for you:

https://www.adafruit.com/product/5477

The ESP32 family of microcontrollers are System-on-Chip (SoC) devices built to do Wifi. The code support is already there, so you don't have to worry about connecting and talking to an external Wifi device.