Lights that dance to the music.

ShinerCore is what I reach for whenever something needs to glow. It’s a firmware for the very small ESP32 boards from M5Stack — an Atom is about the size of a sugar cube — and it drives the addressable RGB strips you sew into a jacket, tape along a ceiling, or wind around a bike.

What makes it worth having over yet another blinking-lights sketch is that nothing is compiled in. You connect from the companion app, and every knob — colors, animation, speed, brightness, even the order the LEDs are wired in — takes effect on the strip while you stand there and watch. Animations stack in layers with blend modes, so a slow color wash can live underneath a fast sparkle with each tuned separately, and a whole stack of layers is a preset that the button on the device itself steps through. Which is what you actually want at four in the morning, when the phone is somewhere in a tent.

Then it grew ears. Give a core a microphone and it listens to the room, finds the beat, and runs animations in beats per cycle rather than seconds per cycle, so the lights pulse with the music instead of near it. Once several of them are in the same place they gossip over ESP-NOW: they share a single beat grid — whoever hears the music most confidently gets to lead — and they walk through their presets together, so a whole camp of jackets breathes in time.

It’s all open source: the firmware, and the app that configures it, which is on the App Store and runs as a Mac app too. Photos of the things it ends up inside are on @shiner.core.