C++, FreeRTOS
When I was living on my own in 2020, I had an apartment all to myself and had a dream of covering the entire surface area of my living room ceiling in addressable RGB LEDs. While that idea was prohibitively expensive, I managed to create a system with 1080 LEDs which was able to light up the room in dramatic fashion.
The ESP32 driving the LEDs uses both cores. One for WIFI communication, and one for calculating the colors for the various animations. I used the RMT peripherals to drive the LEDs on two channels. RMT is meant for inferred remote control communication. It essentially acts like a DMA peripheral, but with more control over the signal timing which makes it possible to push out commands to the addressable LEDs without taxing the CPU.
In order to power the 5-volt LEDs, I initially thought to use a large 5-volt power supply, but the huge amount of current through the cables was too much and had a large voltage drop over even short distances. Instead, I went with a 24-volt power supply and used 5-volt DC step-down converters at the end of each LED strip.
The ESP32 serves as a simple local web page that can be accessed on a phone or computer to control the system brightness and animation.
Before I moved out, I mounted the the LEDs to the wall of the room for a time before eventually taking it all down
