When you first power up your lights, the colors might not match what you expect—clicking yellow might give you blue, for instance. This just means the color order needs adjusting. Go to Config → LED Preferences, and under Color Order, change it to RGB. That should fix it!

Let’s make our first preset. Start with a solid color—click a color button and watch the lights change. Fun, right? But even better, you can use animations. For this project, I love the Chase animation. You can customize it with different foreground and background colors, adjust speed and width, and more. When you like what you see, go to the Presets tab, click Create New, give it a name (like “Red and White”), and click Save.

There’s also a checkbox for Apply at Boot—this lets the animation run automatically every time the project turns on.

Want to level up? Create a playlist of presets! Set durations, transitions, and shuffle settings, and let your arrow cycle through animations all night with no extra work.

Finally, let’s make the project sound reactive. Go to the Sparkle Motion Guide and find the pinout diagram. It shows you that the onboard I2S microphone uses GPIO pins 12 (WS), 13 (data), and 14 (clock). Go back to WLED, open Config → User Mods, and enable the Audio Reactive mod. Enter the pin numbers from the diagram, click Save, and reboot the board.

Once it restarts, you’ll see some effects with little music notes next to them—that means they react to sound! Play around and enjoy the reactive light show.

I really hope you enjoyed this project. If you make one, let me know in the comments—I’d love to see it!