Remora listens to UDP short commands to trigger LED Animations. Receives ; commands from ORCΛ

As a side fun idea while learning Nodejs and while working for a bigger and more complex project with my partner Hendrik I programmed Remora just to have an easy way to launch animations from ORCΛ

If you want to try it out please check the requirements and components on the repository or on the hackaday project page.
After getting addressable LEDs and any ESP32 board, it’s easy to compile this, reading the provided instructions with Arduino or Plataformio. It needs simple configuration, to know your WiFi credentials and the length of your led stripe.
After initializing and getting online, the firmware will listen by default in port 49161 and launch short animations as fast as the UDP message hits the chip. To test it send an UDP message using netcat or any other way. In Linux that can be done like this:

echo '82O'|nc -w1 -u ESP32_IP 49161

IMPORTANT: If you copy the upper text make sure that the quotes are single quotes otherwise the compiled C will not recognize what animation to start

That is enough if you want to send animations to one controller. If you need more then we created a simple UDP redirector script that lives in the extras folder. This can be run using:

nodejs udproxy.js

After configuring a simple ip-config.json file that has an id to IP lookup table:

{
    "1":"192.168.0.74",
    "2":"192.168.0.73"
}

When this is running in the background, it will just process any message coming, extract the first character and pick up that ID from the table. Then it will redirect the rest of the message to that IP, same port 49161. To explain it more graphically, sending:

echo '282O'|nc -w1 -u localhost 49161

will lookup IP 2 and send 82O to 192.168.0.73 enabling you to send animations to different LED Stripes from Orca sequencer software.

Schematics

Additional info

Public repository
https://github.com/martinberlin/Remora Stable branch: master (only ESP32)
Hackaday project page for Remora – Find component list there.
Approximate cost of hardware not including 3DPrint: 19€ or about 22 dollars