Let Twitch Chat Control Your LED Strings

Once upon a time, someone set up a livestream wherein the messages from Twitch chat could control a game of Pokemon. Since then, we’ve seen Twitch control all sorts of things. If you’d like to have them play with some LEDs in your house, you might like this project from [pfeiffer3000].

The concept is simple enough. The heart of the build is an ESP32 microcontroller, which is easy to integrate with web services thanks to its onboard WiFi capability. It’s hooked upt o a string of WS2812B addressable RGB LEDs. The LEDs themselves are installed within table tennis balls to act as nice, spherical diffusers, and installed in a square frame made of PVC pipes. As for code, the rig uses the WLED library to drive the LED strings, and code from TwitchIO to interface with Twitch chat itself. It’s as simple as rigging up a bit of Python. With everything assembled, [pfeiffer3000] had an attractive LED grid that could be controlled directly by anyone watching their Twitch stream.

We’ve explored how to control things via Twitch before, too. It’s a fun way to add some interactivity to your livestream that really gets viewers involved. If you’ve been building your own audience-controlled projects, we’d love to hear about them on the tipsline!