The Pixelblaze guy wants 30$ for his ESP8266 board (I get mine for 2,7€/piece). A lot of that money probably doesn't go into the development of the software, but manufacturing and shipping.
I just installed an Open Pixel Control [0] server [1] (receiver) on a Wemos D1 mini and can now stream pixel values to it using python [2].
This comes with all the downsides, of course, but does add a lot of flexibility. Pixelblaze is probably very well written and has some great features (and infrastructure, I'm considering writing a parser for the patterns). However I don't want to pay a gigantic markup for a weird ESP8266 board and have to wait for it to ship to me, supporting (while sinking a large part of the money into stupid overhead) the development of software that isn't even open source.
I just installed an Open Pixel Control [0] server [1] (receiver) on a Wemos D1 mini and can now stream pixel values to it using python [2].
This comes with all the downsides, of course, but does add a lot of flexibility. Pixelblaze is probably very well written and has some great features (and infrastructure, I'm considering writing a parser for the patterns). However I don't want to pay a gigantic markup for a weird ESP8266 board and have to wait for it to ship to me, supporting (while sinking a large part of the money into stupid overhead) the development of software that isn't even open source.
[0]: http://openpixelcontrol.org/
[1]: https://github.com/ppelleti/esp-opc-server
[2]: https://github.com/zestyping/openpixelcontrol/tree/master/py...