Lights

The Waveshare S3 needs none of this. Its drive light is the LED on the board, and its screen draws the strip: the S3.

Two lights for an ESP32 dev board in a case: a drive light, one pixel that shows the board's storage at work, and a strip of pixels, ten as shipped, that shows who is on. Both are optional, and both stay off until you give them a pin. Wire the strip, give it a pin, and each caller who dials in lights a pixel of their own.

What you need

• WS2812B pixels, the kind sold as NeoPixels: one for the drive light, and a strip of 1 to 16 for the strip. The common 5 V ones take their data straight from the board's 3.3 V pin, with nothing in between.
• A 330 to 470 ohm resistor for each, in the data line at the first pixel. It keeps the signal clean on a length of wire.
• A 100 nF capacitor for each, across the pixel's 5 V and ground.
• For the strip, a 5 V supply of its own, rated 1 A or more.
• Jumper wires.

The drive light

One pixel. Amber when the SD card is read or written, cool white for the board's own flash, a slow red blink after a storage error, and a dim glow in between. Every flash is held long enough to see, so a read that takes two milliseconds still shows.

It has four styles, and the colours are the same in each:

• pc, as shipped: a short flash on each access and a flicker through a long one, like an IBM PC/XT.
• 1541: lit for the whole access, like the Commodore drive.
• disk2: lit for about a second after the last access, like the Apple II Disk II, whose motor kept running.
• breathe: a slow pulse at rest, with the access colour on top.

The strip

1 to 16 pixels, 10 as shipped, which is one for each caller line.

Give the strip a 5 V supply of its own. Ten pixels at full white draw about 600 mA, and the board needs up to about 400 mA of its own when its radio transmits. That is more than a USB port gives: the voltage sags, the board restarts, and the port may cut the power altogether. Join the supply's ground to the board's ground, connect ground first, and disconnect it last.

What it shows:

• nodes, as shipped: a pixel for each caller line, dark while it is free, in the caller's colour from WHO while somebody is on, and flickering with their traffic.
• hayes: a Hayes Smartmodem's front panel on the first eight pixels, from the board's real state.
• blinken: a front panel's lamps, changing faster the busier the board is.
• scanner, c64, boing, rainbow: a sweep, the Commodore badge stripes, the Amiga ball, the colours.
• vu: the board's traffic as a bar, green, then yellow, then red.
• wifi: the board's Wi-Fi signal as a meter, like the bars on a phone.
• manual: each pixel its own effect and colour.
• off.

From firmware 1.2.0, a board with a screen can draw both lights on it, over a picture of a machine of your choosing: see skins.

Telling the board about it

Log in as the sysop and type CONFIG lights. Switch the plugin on, set Drive pin to 13 and Strip pin to 14, and Strip len to the number of pixels you have. Saving puts it live. Or in the file:

[plugin:lights]
enabled     = yes
drive_pin   = 13
strip_pin   = 14
strip_count = 10

Then type LIGHTS TEST. Every pixel shows red, green, blue and then white, a second each. LIGHTS on its own shows each output's pin, effect, brightness and colour order, and the colours it last sent.

Brightness is a percentage for each output, 10 as shipped. Past 30 is your call, and it is where the strip's draw goes past what USB gives, which is what the separate supply is for.

When it does not work

The board refuses a pin the flash uses (6 to 11) and one the chip does not have (20, 24 and 28 to 31), and the two outputs cannot share a pin. Since firmware 1.1.0 it also refuses a pin something else on the board already holds, such as the card's or the BOOT button's; the last row is for a board set up before that.