So I’ve been working for some time now on a project that involves 15 squids on poles about 3/4 meter high, each one of them with a ESP32 inside receiving data from touchdesigner wia udp. We are using a router to have our own wifi network, and all of thema are usually on a 15 by 15 meter wide square. There is a controler in front of them that allows the user to have a conversation with them, that sends light signals and changes the animation patterns.
Each squid has 6m of led strip and two led ring of about 30 leds each for the eyes.
The first venue was for Burning Man in 2023, and it was quite fluid, but also in a wide area, and few people using their phones. Since then, we have had a LOT of issues with network, always.
Working fine for 1 hour, then lagging for the rest of the day, but basically it’s just always a struggle. Should we give up on the full wireless setup ?
Since the squids are on poles I’ve started to think maybe we could have data cables on some of the squids that could emit to the others ?
Anyone here have had the same kind of issues ? Here is a video of the installation : https://youtu.be/7ItTbB8nQ-4
Wifi will always be difficult in area with lots of people and devices. You can do somethings to reduce the chance of issues, like running 5GHz or 6GHz radios (not 2.4GHz which is very susceptible to noise), can you get better radios on the ESP32? You’ll need Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) or better for that.
Also review channel usage and select a less busy channel (often these are left to all work on channel1). Most router manufacturers have software to review channel usage and congestion.
I can not stress enough how woefully inadequate WiFi is for these kinds of installations… I’m surprised they ran smoothly even in the open desert, but that is pretty close to “optimal conditions” - AKA no obstructions, no existing wireless infrastructure, very few people on their phones / few if any competing WiFi signals. Any ONE of the above issues could easily cause this, so BurningMan might be literally the only place where all of those conditions will exist.
It also probably helps if you are using your own specific UDP packet format - regular sACN and especially broadcast ArtNet are very chatty and will destroy WiFi with more than a couple devices listening.
It looks like there are already power cables running up the poles to each squid in that video, so why not also run ethernet cables to each?? (unless they’re on batteries) You could use https://wasatchpixels.com/ controllers, either as is (WLED can receive sACN / ArtNet) or if you’ve already coded your own ESP32 firmware, it should be trivially easy to adjust it to work on the ESP32s in the Wasatch controllers. Then you have ethernet and power distro / fuses, all in in one package.
Beautiful installation! Don’t let it be held back by how shitty WiFi is…
Yeah a single gigabit switch should be plenty to run all of those LED fixtures. Even if each one was multiple DMX universes, you can run hundreds of DMX universes on one regular gigabit switch. I would recommend setting up unicast networking for simplicity and efficiency.