Over the next several weeks, I spent my spare time setting up the build environment, brainstorming desired features, and writing code. There were a number of little problems, described primarily in the Git commit history, code, and in a blog post linked from the Project page. Probably the most interesting issue was that LEDs past about number 30 would sometimes get random colors. It took a lot of forum crawling, some trial-and-error, and a little oscilloscope work to establish that one ESP32 CPU core isn't powerful enough to handle both WiFi and IR transceiver (RMT) interrupts on the same CPU if the RMT load is high enough--like when doing tight-loop animations or writing to long strands. The fix was to move the RMT ISR to the second CPU.

A second interesting problem was programming colors. The ESP32 is capable of using floating-point representations for colors at all phases (barring its terrible floating point performance), but eventually they needed to be converted to the 24-bit RGB values the LEDs would accept. I ended up with a set of layered abstractions and conversion functions moving from the most abstract color systems, like CIE x,y values and color temperatures, down past HSV to linear RGB through to gamma-corrected RGB PWM values to be sent straight to the hardware. This felt like the part where I learned the most.

The remainder of the physical build was actually straightforward: drill some holes in plastic and aluminum, bolt things together, and run some wires. It sounds simple, but I ended up only getting three of the four board-mounting holes to line up well enough to use. (I also learned that a common battery-powered drill with wood bits is, with some effort, quite capable of working 1/16" aluminum.