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Jackson AndresandClaude Opus 5.5 87a0abca57
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Follow-me stair light for the Apollo MTR-1 and WLED
ESPHome package for the Apollo MTR-1: tracks people on the stairs with the
LD2450 radar and streams a lit window to a WLED controller over DDP. The
sensor serves a setup wizard that measures the stairs with one walk and
stores the setup on the device. installer/ holds the browser installer,
published to GitHub Pages on every version tag.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-14 20:08:40 -04:00

2.0 KiB

WLED

Settings follow-me needs

Follow-me streams frames to the WLED controller over DDP (UDP port 4048) while a person is on the stairs. WLED's own state stays off; the stream lights the strip by itself, and the strip returns to WLED's own state after WLED's realtime timeout (2.5 s by default) once frames stop.

The setup wizard's "Read" checks these settings and "Fix WLED settings" writes them.

Setting Value Why
Sync interfaces → Realtime → Receive UDP realtime On Turns on realtime input, DDP included
Realtime → Use main segment only Off When on, realtime LED numbers become segment-relative and the wizard's LED marks shift
Realtime → LED offset 0 Any offset shifts every LED
Realtime → Force max brightness On The stream sets brightness; WLED's master brightness must not scale it again
Realtime → Disable realtime gamma correction On The firmware applies its own gamma (2.2)
LED preferences → Turn LEDs on after power up Off (with "Pause While WLED On" set) While WLED is on, follow-me pauses (manual control wins); a WLED that boots on would leave follow-me paused after every power cycle
LED type / count Set to match the strip Follow-me reads both from WLED

Manual control: the firmware polls WLED's /json/state. With "Follow-Me Pause While WLED On" set (the default), while WLED reports itself on (turned on from Home Assistant, the WLED app or its button), follow-me sends nothing and makes WLED leave realtime mode at once.

Tested with WLED 16 (RGBW strip).

Glow rules

The firmware's glow follows rules found while tuning the look on a real strip:

  • No temporal dithering. At the lowest brightness steps the toggling is visible as flicker.
  • No fading trail.
  • The glow shape reaches exactly zero at its edge. A Gaussian lingers at the lowest steps, where each 8-bit step is visible.
  • Brightness comes only from the stream, not WLED's master brightness, to avoid quantising twice.
  • Gamma 2.2 before quantising to 8 bits.