Just wanted to give you guys a short update.

We've finally found an homer-like flaw (doh) in the i2c communication to the PCA9685. Some idiot (me) forgot to tie the address lines of the PCA to ground properly. So in some raw situations the chip decided to change it's I2C address while communicating, thus resulting in kernel panic's on the ESP32 side.

After fixing this, handling the ESP32 exceptions better, refining the I2C pull-up's and meassuring the i2c bus for stability, we could move on to our first real-world test. Currently we drive up to 40 channels with 24V LED's with four dimmers over UDP without any problem.

We've built a custom mqtt-adaptor to talk to the dimmer via node-red and get some status information back to display it on a dashboard.
This functionality will be integrated into the dimmer itself as soon as whe have time to implement it. All different communication path's (UDP, HTTP, MQTT) will be selectable from the dimmer's webinterface.

Currently the speed parameter is not working so well - next step here is to implement propper timing to be able to use miliseconds for this parameters.
The different dimming curves look stunning with smoth transitions, of course depending on the LED's.

For a test we've also built https://esphome.io/ to run on the hardware - worked after getting the configuration right, as the output enable of the PCA9685 is wired to a GPIO.

I'll leave you guys with a photo :-)
Feel free comment in any way.

Cheers,
Patrik