Compatible Hardware
Glow Worm Luciferin is a firmware designed for ESP8266/ESP32 microcontrollers.
ESP8266 is the recommended microcontroller for Luciferin, it's cheap, it's fast, it's small, it has enough memory and built in WiFi, its ecosystem is generally more mature than other microcontrollers.
If you want to use another microcontroller you can build your own firmware.
Wemos and Lolin D1 Mini microcontrollers are premium ones and can handle 1 million baud rate without problems, cheaper D1 Minis aren't able to handle that speed.
| LOLIN | ESP8266 D1 Mini |
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A mini wifi board with 4MB flash based on ESP-8266EX.
| Lolin ESP32 D32 | TinyPICO ESP32 |
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A wifi&bluetooth board based ESP-32.
ESP32-S2 and ESP32-C3 support coming soon.
Thanks to Arduino Boostrapper it can run on a lot of devices but if you want to run of a different board than ESP8266/ESP32, you need to manually compile the firmware.
Luciferin supports RGB and RGBW strips. 60 LEDs per meter is generally bright enough for most applications and does not require a lot of power.
WS2812B RGB 5V LED strip | SK6812 RGBW 5V LED strip
You can learn how to configure Luciferin for RGB or RGBW strip here.
You need to buy a power supply capable of powering all the LEDs you want. For 60 LEDs a power supply of at least 5V/3A it's recommended, for 120 LEDs you need a 5V/6A power supply, do your math here. A bigger power supply generally works better and runs less hot than a smaller one. Don't undersize the power supply.
FULL firmware version adds suppmaddaort for remote control, if you flash FULL version you MUST configure WiFi and MQTT. With FULL firmware USB connection is optional.
If you flash LIGHT firmware you MUST use USB cable.
Note: If you want to use the FULL firmware without using a USB cable you need to connect the 5V microcontroller's PIN to the power supply.
If you don't want to design your own PCB and you have a soldering iron, you might find Luciferin's official PCB interesting.
Luciferin supports pre-build board like the QuinLED-Dig-Uno.