Extreme Sound To Light Project

Difficulty rating: Beginner

Average time to build: One hour

Main electronics or robotics principals: Addressable LED's and sound pickup

Quick description

This projects uses a microphone to pickup sound. The sound is then changed into all kinds of light effects according to the beat of the music it receives. We have created different visual effects that you can change with the press of a button. You can also create your own visual effects if you want to and even add more light strips for even more impactful visual effects.

These visual effects look extremely great and will be a great extension to your gaming room, car interior and parties. Having your imagine running a bit wild will have real amazing applications for this sound to light project, how about putting it in a teddy bear for the wife.

"Extreme sound to light project" building summary

If you are already familiar with microcontroller programming you can create many more light sequences and because you are using the ESP32 microcontroller you can even control this whole project via your phone, the ESP 32 microcontroller comes standard with WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity.

WS2812B LED's. These LED's are called addressable because you can control each one of these LED's individually. As an example, you can have a strip of 10 of these LED's and tell each one what color they should be, should they be on or off and how bright they must be. If you look at the video above you can see how you can create all kinds of effects with these LED's. We went a step further and added a touch button so that you can go threw some of the patterns that we have already created. Every time you touch the touch button the pattern should change.

This is an easy project to build and consists of an addressable LED strip, microcontroller, push button and microphone as the main components. For beginners it is a simple process of connecting all together. 

ESP32 development board

WS2812B rgb led strip 60/m 5VDC

INMP441 Omnidirectional Microphone Module

ESP32 PROJECT BOARD

Male to Male Jumper Wire

Female to Male Jumper Cable Dupont

USB Cable Micro length 30cm Micro 

Step 1.

If you already have the Arduino IDE you can skip this step. You will need to download and install the IDE, you can download the Arduino IDE here. Please download the ESP32s drivers from the board manager which you can find in the tools menu bar. 

Place the ESP 32 onto the project board in the allocated space. Insure the ESP 32 is facing the correct way.

Solder the male to male jumper wires onto the WS2812B strip, next connect the strip with the wires to the project board.

Take the Female to male jumper wires connect them to the mic, then connect the male side of the jumper wires to the project board.

Plug in the ESP 32 into your computer via a USB micro cable that can transfer data and not only charge. Please make sure that you have downloaded the ESP 32 board version 2.0.3 in the Arduino IDE. Please make sure that your computer picks up the ESP 32 on a COM port.

This will be the final step in our step by step guide. Upload the below software and remember to press the boot button on the ESP 32 otherwise it will give you problems . Now you can play some music into the mic and see the magic happen. Please note that T0 on the project board is a touch button that is already activated you will need to press the touch button for the pattern of the lights to change to your desired pattern that you want.

Code example

Code