Need Some Guidance for a project . envolving coding for servos and wled in tandem along with an Amazon echo
Posted: Wed Jul 02, 2025 4:30 am
OK bare with me I'm just getting into the world of ESP32 ... or micro controllers in general. totally new to coding but here's my project.
To most of you it will probably sound simple and easy. but here goes
I found an old Philco radio and love the look of it and wanted to modernize it as well as add a goofy spin to it .
I have many Alexa devices in my home. After seeing Thomas Burns build on youtube ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO-DWWFolPw&t=601s , I knew I had to try it out. at first it was just going to be replace the guts with a small but modern amp powering a DVC speaker and an echo dot. but after seeing that I wanted to expand . Simple in my head ... Very similar to Thomas' build upon the wake word I would like a servo to move the station needle back and forth for a couple seconds and turn the dials randomly for a couple seconds, as well as some LEDs in the mix as well, back lighting the AM/FM window and possibly putting some behind the dials . I planned on using 2 ESP32's, one for the servos (5 total) and one for the LEDs using WLED.
Thomas used a couple contacts with in the echo that , when the blue LEDs lit up on the echo , the contact would show a voltage drop by about a volt . he used this a trigger to wake his little friend. but in his video he doesn't go into much detail on the coding side of things .
I would like to program mine so upon seeing the voltage drop on servo ESP32 i currently have this on pin 19 and a single servo on pin 18... it will turn the the servos and send a signal via an io pin to the WLED esp32 to trigger the lights at the same time. I'm assuming il need another device to run more than one servo at a time , also looking for suggestions for that .
any help would be Fantastic .
Thanks
Austin
To most of you it will probably sound simple and easy. but here goes
I found an old Philco radio and love the look of it and wanted to modernize it as well as add a goofy spin to it .
I have many Alexa devices in my home. After seeing Thomas Burns build on youtube ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO-DWWFolPw&t=601s , I knew I had to try it out. at first it was just going to be replace the guts with a small but modern amp powering a DVC speaker and an echo dot. but after seeing that I wanted to expand . Simple in my head ... Very similar to Thomas' build upon the wake word I would like a servo to move the station needle back and forth for a couple seconds and turn the dials randomly for a couple seconds, as well as some LEDs in the mix as well, back lighting the AM/FM window and possibly putting some behind the dials . I planned on using 2 ESP32's, one for the servos (5 total) and one for the LEDs using WLED.
Thomas used a couple contacts with in the echo that , when the blue LEDs lit up on the echo , the contact would show a voltage drop by about a volt . he used this a trigger to wake his little friend. but in his video he doesn't go into much detail on the coding side of things .
I would like to program mine so upon seeing the voltage drop on servo ESP32 i currently have this on pin 19 and a single servo on pin 18... it will turn the the servos and send a signal via an io pin to the WLED esp32 to trigger the lights at the same time. I'm assuming il need another device to run more than one servo at a time , also looking for suggestions for that .
any help would be Fantastic .
Thanks
Austin
(You have 2x8 PWM channels provided by the LEDC peripheral alone, then you also have the MCPWM peripheral, could use the RMT peripheral, and even 'hack' another peripheral (e.g. SPI) to generate some more PWM outputs for you.)