I'm working on a project, definitely less far along, that's open-source and uses the ESP32 for additional Bluetooth functionality. There's an open-source cross-platform app for control. https://github.com/hobzcalvin/blume
The Pixelblaze guy wants 30$ for his ESP8266 board (I get mine for 2,7€/piece). A lot of that money probably doesn't go into the development of the software, but manufacturing and shipping.
I just installed an Open Pixel Control [0] server [1] (receiver) on a Wemos D1 mini and can now stream pixel values to it using python [2].
This comes with all the downsides, of course, but does add a lot of flexibility. Pixelblaze is probably very well written and has some great features (and infrastructure, I'm considering writing a parser for the patterns). However I don't want to pay a gigantic markup for a weird ESP8266 board and have to wait for it to ship to me, supporting (while sinking a large part of the money into stupid overhead) the development of software that isn't even open source.
Hi, Pixelblaze guy here :)
I totally get where you are coming from. It would be nice if you could drop this on any old board and be up and running. Hopefully I can share some of my perspective.
Pixelblaze is a commercial venture for me, and I have to figure out how to make some $ from it to pay for my time so that I can keep making it better. I can't afford to spend the amount of time that I do on a hobby, and I don't have a sponsor.
If I figure out a way to open source it and have financial incentive to keep working on it, I'll do that. I've been carving out bits and pieces to open source that I think are useful utilities.
The hardware itself solves a few problems, such as level shifting, that I haven't see embedded on other esp8266 boards. It also provides a platform for more interesting hardware such as the (fully OSS+OSH) sensor expansion board.
On the pricing side of things, the hardware isn't a majority of the cost. OTOH I'm never going to compete with the $3 boards w/ free shipping. I don't have the volume where I can drop the per unit 'software overhead' to a level where I'm competitive with the low end Chinese markets.
The price of the product as a whole is very competitive in this market. There are cheap no-feature (completely closed) LED controllers for not much less, and high-end controllers start in the hundreds of dollars.
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If you want to replicate something like the language in Pixelblaze, it's not so bad. Its syntactically ES6, though without many of the dynamic features of JavaScript.
Michael Leibman (@michaelleibman) put together this codepen that emulates Pixelblaze compatibility here:
You could use that as a starting point for some kind of RPi nodejs app that pushes pixel data to your ESPs, or perhaps port the functions (they aren't rocket science) to Python.
I toyed with the idea, but realized I have too many hobbies already :)
