A one-tap remote for the trim lights on my house

I have permanent trim lights on my house. They run on WLED controllers, which can do almost anything, and the app that comes with them shows you almost everything at once: effect numbers, palette lists, speed and intensity sliders, segment settings. Changing the look before people came over meant poking through all of it. So I built the remote I actually wanted. It's called Forecheck WLED, and it now sits with our other demos.

Tap a look, the lights change

The first screen is a set of looks grouped by season. With Halloween close, the top of the list is Pumpkin Patch, Witching Hour, Monster March and a few more, with everyday looks like Porch Light and Clean White underneath. Every card plays a small strip of its look, so you see it moving before you tap. Tap one and the house changes.

When a look is close but not quite right, the mixer tunes whatever is playing:

• Colors: pick from sets like Candy Cane, Harvest or Team Colors, or choose your own.
• Move: hold still, breathe, fade, twinkle, march and more.
• Energy: how lively it is.
• Spacing: leave a few lights dark between the lit ones for a cleaner, spaced-out line.

Spin picks a random combination when you want a surprise. Land on something you like, give it a name, and tap Save preset. It shows up at the top as a one-tap button that brings back the whole thing, brightness included. Save under a name you already used and it replaces that preset instead of making a second one.

Every phone in the house sees the same thing

Presets, schedules and team colors are kept on the light controllers themselves, not on one phone. Anyone in the house opens the app and sees the same list. If someone changes the lights from another phone, every open copy catches up within a few seconds, and it shows the name of the look that is playing, even one somebody just spun up and never saved.

If two people save at the same moment, both saves stay. If a phone saves while the lights are unplugged, it holds the change and sends it when they answer again, and it tells you that's what happened.

Schedules that run with no phone awake

A schedule is saved on the controllers too, so the lights turn on and off on their own. Mine comes on 15 minutes after sunset with whatever was playing last, and goes off just before 1 am. Sunset moves every day and the lights move with it, and an off time after midnight belongs to the morning after the evening it started, so a schedule never switches the lights off before it switched them on.

Private to the owner, with a demo anyone can try

The web version is private to the owner. Only the owner's email can sign in, using an 8-digit code that's good for 10 minutes, and everyone else gets turned away.

The demo runs the same app on pretend lights, with a row of lights and a 3D house that show what the real ones would do. It walks you through the sign-in too, with the code email showing up on the screen instead of in a mailbox, and a Behind the scenes panel explains the parts a demo can't show on its own. It always runs the current version of the app.

This one is for my own house, not a client. It's the same idea we build for owners, though: software that puts the few things you actually do one tap away, instead of every setting at once. If you want to click around the demo, or you run a business on an app that makes you dig, send me a note through the contact form at https://forecheckai.com.