Esp8266 FastLed Blynk

Need Help With My Project
1

Hello everyone,
I am fairly new to the Arduino community and i am kindly asking for any help i can get.
So im going to just jump right into it.
Recently i have purchased a esp32, an esp8266 and some digital leds from ebay (WS2182B) and my ultimate goal was to create a small project in which i can put the strip of leds under my car as under lighting. i wanted something in which i can wire the esp32/8266 (dont know which one i should use yet)
into the vehicle and have it turn on with the key ignition (i will have no problem with this as i am fairly educated on automotive systems and am ASE Certified) When the esp turns on it will produce its own either wifi or Bluetooth that i can connect to and control the leds with Blynk. I have looked into a project by a user named Jamin for his “SmartLED Controller” - ESP+FastLED+Blynk (Video) project. I absolutely love his project and admire him for his amazing work but i have a few small problems.

  1. His project uses an external wifi connection to connect to the esp (i understand its for a home application there is nothing wrong with it) my intentions are for the esp to be on a moving vehicle with no external wifi connection. Please remember i am extremely new to Arduino and Blynk and dont know how to code this for myself or reverse engineer his code to make it work for my application.

  2. His blynk project is amazing i just would like to be able to add more custom animations/presets and instead of having a single button that just changes the presets i want to have multiple buttons for each animation with it labeled instead of playing guesswork with the animations.

  3. My ultimate goal is to have different zones on the car that i can pick and choose what the leds do/color/animation. for example i would be able to select “Driver Front Wheel Well” and make all the leds in that region turn Green or play a animation and select a region like “Passenger Side” and make the leds play a rainbow animation. I would of course keep the leds even through the vehicle so for example the first 15 diodes would be the left front, the next 50 would be the left side, then the next 15 would be the left rear ect.

Thank you for taking the time to look over this insanely long and im sure annoying request but i am genuinely looking for any help i can get. Please and Thank you to all.

-Cam

2

Blynk is an IoT process… not really meant as a basic GUI, although many (like myself) primarily use it as such.

It consists of three sections, The App, The Server and the Hardware Device (AKA MCU) or in your case one of the ESP options (I recommend the ESP8266 to start for such usage). All need to communicate with each other… generally over the Internet, thus wirelessly.

One way you can use Blynk in a mobile scenario will be with a Local Server also installed in the car (typically on a Raspberry Pi which is also running as wireless AP), with both the App and the ESP connecting and communicating to it via WiFi.

Not an easy beginner project.

I recommend you do some simpler benchtop experiments and learning, long before going independently mobile with Blynk

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