Now it's time for the fun part: make the stars animate and glow and twinkle! This is easy in WLED: you've got a design interface with buttons and sliders and color palettes that all update and animate in real time. What a departure from the Arduino code wrangling one had to do just a few years back! WLED makes programming lights accessible to anyone, coder or not.

Head to starcrown.local (or whatever you named your crown during setup) on your phone or in your web browser. The crown needs to be powered up, but not plugged into your computer -- it will connect over the WiFi. Be sure you're on the same WiFi network you set up in settings or you won't be able to connect. 

Choose an effect and choose a color palette. Play with the sliders at the bottom of the Effects panel to speed up or slow down the animation. When you find a combination you like, save it as a Preset in the Presets panel. 

Once you have a handful of Presets, you can create a Playlist and run each preset sequentially. WLED gives you control over the amount of time each preset runs plus transition time. It's pretty self-explanatory, and there are a ton of tutorials available online if you get stuck.

Custom Color Choices

For my crown, I want exclusively shades of gold: gold twinkles, gold with glitter, gold blinking, and gold gradients. There aren't any gold-only palettes available, but luckily we don't need them. Most effects can use one or two custom colors chosen from the color wheel. 

Click the circle below the color wheel to select it, then choose a color to populate it. Select the next circle to choose that color, and so on. The top few palette choices get populated with the colors you pick, and that becomes the palette for your preset. 

• Color 1 just shows the color you've chosen. 
• Color Gradient shows a gradient between colors 1-2 or 1-BG.
• Colors 1&2 mixes those colors
• Colors Only places colors 1, 2, and 3 next to each other

Not all effects have this option - for example, you can only choose one color for "Solid" since that effect only shows one color. Some effects have a background color you can choose and some don't. Some use palettes and some don't. Play around until you find effects that give you the control options you want. 

There are also custom palette tools available so if you want a specific, complex color pattern you can make that happen. Click the + at the bottom of the palette list to find the custom palette editor.

Backing Up Presets

Once you're happy with your animations, go to Config / Security & Updates (from your computer) and choose "Backup Presets". This will save your presets as a .json file you can share with your other projects.