 Hi I'm Erin St. Blaine for Adafruit and for today's project we are making a jellyfish umbrella. This is a full build video so first we will install the software on the cutie pie and then we'll wire up the lights and then finally I'll show you how I built my jellyfish umbrella. We're going to use a cutie pie PGRW and WLED which is a free downloadable easy-to-use controller interface. You get a whole menu of lights and options and it just takes a couple minutes to install with no coding required. WLED is also great for syncing multiple projects together if you have a Wi-Fi network available. It's a really powerful piece of software and it is my favorite way to control nail pixels so let's get started. Plug your cutie pie into your computer and head over to install.wled.me. Click install and select your board. Enter your Wi-Fi credentials then click visit device. Go to the config tab and go to Wi-Fi setup. Under MDNS give your project a name that's easy to remember. Then you can type this into any browser to control the lights. I'm using umbrella.label. Next click LED preferences. Under hardware setup I've made my length 20 since there are 20 lights in my strands. Pin A0 on the cutie pie is GPIO pin 26. I'm using two data pins so click the plus button and add another strip on GPIO 25 which is pin A1 on the cutie pie and that's all you need to do to get the software set up. Let's wire up some lights so we can play with it. The code for this project is really simple. The tricky part is the wiring. I've wired together six strands of lights to two different microcontroller pins on the cutie pie pico. The four light strands on the top of the jellyfish head are wired in a starfish configuration so they all mirror each other. The two strands of the tentacles are wired together to a different controller pin. They mirror each other but can be controlled separately from the strands on the top. I'm using this neopixel led dot string. This thing is really cool. All the little LEDs are encased in resin and the wires are silicone coated and super strong and flexible. You can flex these hundreds of times and they're not going to break unlike some of the fairy light strands that are available out there. This is my favorite strand of LEDs to use for costumes and festival type projects which are going to take a lot of wear and tear. They also have connectors soldered on to both ends so if you want you can chain them together real easily. We're not going to be using the connectors. We're going to solder in a starfish configuration instead but it is really nice to have. We're also going to be using the cutie pie pico w for this project. This is a pretty inexpensive little board and it works great with WLED. It has Wi-Fi support and everything you need. However, it is a little bit difficult to prototype with. I can't really hook up my LED strand to this without soldering and getting really committed. So I have another board that I'm using for prototyping. This is a circuit playground express board. These things are great. They have sensors on them. They have buttons and switches and they have these fantastic copper pads which I can attach alligator clips to and the alligator clips can then attach to my bare wires and I can test my LED strips. If you don't have one of these I highly recommend picking one up from the shop. You can still test with your cutie pie if you don't have one but this makes it a lot easier. Load up the test code from the tutorial on your circuit playground express. On my strands, the ground pin is in the middle. Power is on the left. If you look close it's a reddish wire inside the silicone coating and the data wire is on the right. First we need to find the in end of the strip. For me this was the end with the female connectors. Cut off the female connector. I like to leave some wire attached so I can use it for another project. Strip about a quarter inch of shielding off of each wire and connect an alligator clip to each one. Power goes to V out. Data goes to A1 and ground goes to ground. If the strip lights up, you've got it right. Mark the wires so you remember which is which. This is important. You're going to have a lot of bare wires during this project. Do the same with the second strand and twist the matching pairs together. Test them again. I have six strands total so I made three sets of matched pairs. Take one matched pair of lights and solder a single red and black wire to power and ground and a colored wire to data. Test them again. Then cover the connections with heat shrink. These are going to be the tentacle lights. Take the other two matched pairs and twist them together into a matched quad. Solder on a single red black and colored wire in the same manner as before. Now we're ready to connect them all together. Connect your two red wires together and solder on another red wire so power will flow to all six strands. Do the same with a black wire for ground. The data wires will get treated a little differently. We want to solder to two different microcontroller pins so we'll need to keep them separate. You can test each strand by moving your alligator clip to each data wire individually while power and ground are shared between all strands. Next we'll wire up the on-off switch. We have a lot of lights in this project so it's best to wire the power directly to the light strands instead of routing it all through the microcontroller. Grab your JST connector and your switch. Cut the red wire in half and solder each half to one of the wires on the switch. Twist another short red and black wire to each side. These will go to the cutie pie. Twist all the red wires and black wires together and solder them. Don't forget the heat shrink. Test again and make sure your lights turn on and off with the switch. Finally we're ready to wire up the cutie pie. My yellow wire is going to A0 and my white data wire goes to A1. The red wire goes to 5 volts and the black wire goes to ground. Once everything's wired up, turn it on. Your light should come on in yellow. If they don't, check the Adafruit Learning System Guide for some troubleshooting tips. I'm using an iridescent vinyl umbrella and a whole bunch of different fabric for my jellyfish tentacles. I really like lots of textures in my jellyfish. I want this jellyfish to be able to open and close for transport, so I'm keeping that in mind during the build process. I put some industrial velcro around the pole above the stopping point and some more on the outside of my battery. This stuff is really strong and I'm pretty confident my battery will stay put, but it will be easy to remove for charging. To attach the lights, I just wrapped the strands around the umbrella's spokes underneath the vinyl. I have eight spokes, so I put a light strand on every other one and then let them dangle at the end. I cut a circle out of organza and finished the edge on my serger, then attached to the top of the umbrella using fray check on any unfinished edges or holes that I made. There are lots of tutorials available about how to do this part, so do a little research for the method that you like best. I used E6000 to glue a strip of secret fabric around the edge of the umbrella and used a combination of sewing and zip ties to add more tentacles. For the ones in the center, I just pulled them through and wound them around, checking so often to be sure the umbrella still closes. Head to umbrella.local in your web browser, on your computer or your phone. We have two different light strands slotted to two different pins. By default, the tentacle lights act like an extension of the top lights. WLED treats the two pins like one continuous strand with 40 lights. You also have the option to treat them as two separate segments and run different animations on the two areas. If you want to do this, click Add Segment and create a separate segment for the tentacle lights. There's a lot of documentation on how this works, but it's pretty user-friendly, so play around with it and see what configurations you like. Choose an effect and a color palette and watch your lights change. When you find a setting you like, you can save it as a preset. Then you can string all your presets together into a playlist. You have control over the order of presets, the length of time they play, and the transition time. Since I'm taking this out to a festival where there won't be Wi-Fi control, I'm going to set up my playlist to start automatically when I turn it on. Take note of the number assigned to your playlist. Click Config and LED Preferences and then scroll down to Defaults. You can tell it which preset or playlist you'd like to start with by entering the number here. This way your project will still run your animations, even when you're not near a Wi-Fi controller. Thanks so much for watching! You can check out the full build tutorial at learn.adafruit.com and remember to like and subscribe if you like more projects like this.