For my wedding next year, I’ve been working on a lighting system consisting of LED lights in bottles, which are controlled using a remote which transmits the selected LED pattern using a BLE mesh.
Yesterday I got it working. Now I just need to get some more old bottles, put a bunch of lights in them, and take them down to the bar.
I’d love to take a peek at the code, I’ve played a bit with BLE on ESP32 but not with the mesh feature, so I’m curious how it works!
Can you share a video or a gif? They look amazing!
So flipping cool!
@Willybood just to check my understanding, the concept of the “mesh” is that every node re-advertises the advertisement that it’s heard (up to some TTL limit)?
That’s a cool idea, is this an “official” way to do BLE mesh or something that you came up with?
It’s unofficial. I struggled to get the official version working, so I borrowed the concept of the TTL from the official specification and got dual advertisement and scanning working instead in a slightly hacky way.
I’m losing a couple of things as a result (for instance it will be easy to hack the lights as there’s no encryption or authentication), but it only needs to work for one wedding party so it’s all good.
WARNING
I once shoved multiple light into a bottle thinking I was into something magical. Before long induction in the cable caused by the entangled wires eventually heated the project up like a toaster. The result being a mass of wires melted into a ball in a bottle. Needless to say this was a bit dangerous. I’d proceed with caution if you wish to display any fairy lights in this manor.
I did a soak test with these bottles for a few hours, and they seemed to be OK. They did get a little warm, but certainly not hot enough to melt anything.
It probably helps that these are LEDs and not bulbs.
hmmm, when and where is that wedding party again, and are we invited? 
Hi Billy,
We are starting to look at our content inclusion for the Dulwich festival Maker fair we have a “Don’t be Shy! submit your Make” event happening on Friday. Would this be of any interest to you maybe and/or do you know anyone else I can reach out too?
Cheers
Dorine
