At seven minutes past eleven on a Sunday night in September 2016, a developer made a commit with a three-word message: “XML settings done.”[1] It held a program file of about 600 lines, a control page, a settings page, a to-do list and a readme of eight lines. The readme was honest to the point of comedy. It described the project as “a basic, fast and (relatively) (ok, VERY relatively) secure implementation of a ESP8266 webserver to control Neopixel (WS2812B) leds.”

Three days later, the same developer wrote a commit message that anyone who has ever built anything will recognize: “All working!”[2] Less than two hours later, he called it version 0.2.[3]

Ten years on, that project is WLED. As of October 2026, its main repository has more than 18,000 stars and 4,300 forks on GitHub.[4] Its own opt-in usage dashboard lists more than 190,000 devices[5] whose owners chose to report in, and the count is still climbing. Home Assistant’s analytics find its integration in more than 33,000 installations,[6] counting only the ones that share their integration list. None of that was planned. This is how it happened, told from the commits, release notes and public records the project left behind.

A web page for a strip of lights

The developer was Christian Schwinne, who goes by Aircoookie on GitHub. His GitHub profile[7] lists his location as Germany and opens its bio with five words: “WLED creator and Japan fan!” Hold on to the second half of that. It comes back.

The idea was modest. Addressable LED strips such as the WS2812B let you set the color of every single LED, but they need a microcontroller to drive them. The ESP8266 had Wi-Fi built in. That first readme lists what the web server running on it could do: RGB and brightness sliders, a settings page, and a fallback access point so you could always reach the light, even when your home network was gone.

The early commit log reads like a diary. A basic HTTP updater[8] arrived on 21 September 2016, so new firmware could be uploaded from a browser over Wi-Fi instead of a cable. On 27 November: “Nightlight working!”[9] On 14 December he began work on effects,[10] and three days later he integrated an effects library and added a fire effect.[11] That library was WS2812FX by kitesurfer1404,[12] which WLED still credits today in modified form.

The repository went up on GitHub on 20 December 2016.[4] Nine days later, a few minutes past midnight, he added the MIT license.[13] And on New Year’s Eve, at ten past nine in the evening, he committed a countdown to midnight with the message “end of year, silv. countdown.”[14] (Silvester is the German name for New Year’s Eve.)

Talking to Alexa

In 2017 WLED was still a one-person project. Every one of the 58 commits from that year[15] on today’s main branch carries his name. One of them landed at 23:59:47 on 21 February: “Added Alexa support.”[16] Thirteen seconds to midnight.

Voice control became a running thread. On 9 January 2018 he reworked it[17] so the light pretended to be a Philips Hue bulb rather than a Belkin Wemo switch, and the commit message spelled out why that mattered: “you can now say ‘Alexa, turn my light to 75%’”. That same day he published the code as a separate library, Espalexa,[18] which other ESP projects could use. Later that night came another commit, written with the dry candor that runs through the whole history: “Experimental, completely untested ESP32 support”.[19] The ESP32 was the ESP8266’s more powerful sibling. Today the readme[20] introduces WLED as firmware “for ESP32 microcontrollers.”

The first formal GitHub release, 0.5.0,[21] followed on 23 February 2018 with a nightlight page, a welcome page for new users and twelve interface themes. By 0.8.0[22] in October 2018, the release notes opened with a line in italics, “Mesmerizing new effects and MQTT support!”, and listed over 20 new effects, 44 color palettes and time-based schedules. The same release carried a growing pain: 0.8.0 no longer fit on the ESP-01 boards with 512 KB of flash.

The readme for 0.8.0[23] also included a new invitation: “Join the Discord server to discuss everything about WLED!” Below it sat a PayPal link and a wink: “If you insist that you just love WLED too much, you can send me a gift!” He was no longer coding alone: five other people[24] had commits land that year.

Home Assistant finds WLED

The year 2019 is when WLED stopped being a hobbyist’s secret. In January, Schwinne published the repository for a mobile app[25] that discovers WLED lights on the local network. But the bigger moment came from outside.

On 20 November 2019, Home Assistant 0.102[26] shipped a new WLED integration, written by Franck Nijhof (frenck) in pull request #28542.[27] WLED’s own credits page[12] thanks him for “an amazing, stable and feature-packed native integration”. A month later, on 19 December, the Self-Hosted podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting titled an entire episode “WLED Changes the Game”,[28] describing how “sometimes one project can lead to a hundred more.”

Six days before that episode, on 13 December 2019, WLED shipped a feature people still build their setups around. The 0.9.0 beta[29] arrived with a headline aimed squarely at the season: “The wait for a festive update is finally over! Decorate for the holidays using multiple segments!” Segments let one strip be split into up to 10 parts, each running its own effect. A roofline could now be red and green on one side and twinkling white on the other. The same release quietly removed WLED’s older Home Assistant auto-discovery, “superseded by native integration.”

A week before the Home Assistant release, an archived copy of the GitHub page showed 759 stars.[30] That number was about to look very small.

Growing up in public

In 2020 the main branch saw more than 700 commits,[31] almost three times the year before. By our count of the git history they came from nearly a hundred different author names, more than in any year before or since. The project started to build the structures that a larger community needs. A Discourse forum opened in February 2020.[32] In March, a proper changelog[33] appeared, with the note “make tracking changes to code easier.”

The release notes from this era sound like letters from a maker to his users. Version 0.10.0,[34] on 3 May 2020, was called “Namigai” and introduced the Pacifica effect and per-segment brightness. It also announced that the smallest ESP8266 boards would lose support because the firmware had outgrown them. “Sorry for the inconvenience, this step is not taken lightly,” Schwinne wrote. “If you like soldering, replacing the SPI flash chip with a 32MiB one is a nice project.” He signed off with: “I wish you happy twinkling!”

That August, WLED got a face. Schwinne published Akemi,[35] the project’s mascot, described in its readme as “an RGB LED in a shrugging pose, brought to life in a 32x32 pixel art!” Akemi still sits at the top of the WLED readme[20] and even has its own 2D effect in the source code.[36]

The codenames, which began with “Namigai,” are where the “Japan fan” from the GitHub bio shows through. 0.11.0 “Mirai”,[37] released 29 November 2020, opened with “The future is here, and it is exciting!” It rebuilt presets from scratch (up to 250 of them), moved settings onto a real file system on the chip, and added playlists in beta. 0.12.0 “Hikari”,[38] on 2 April 2021, began: “Even now you are still my light.” Its headline change was support for several LED outputs on one controller, with pins chosen at runtime. “No more custom binaries for pin changes,” the notes said. For anyone who had been recompiling firmware to move a wire, that line was a relief. The changelog[33] for the same release adds one more item: “Hid some easter eggs, only to be found at easter.”

The 0.13.1 “Toki” notes[39] in March 2022 even quote a film. Under “Time is the most valuable thing in the world” sits a line of Japanese, 「かたわれ時だ」, given in the notes as “It’s magic hour” and credited to Your Name.

The stars kept climbing. Archived snapshots show 2,104 in June 2020[40] and 6,094 in June 2021,[41] nearly triple in a year.

Making the first install easy

In 2021 the project turned to the first ten minutes: getting the firmware onto a board and learning how to use it.

The documentation moved from the GitHub wiki to its own site, kno.wled.ge, backed by a separate repository[42] created on 18 May 2021. Nine days later, on 27 May, the repository for the WLED web installer[43] followed, and with it install.wled.me. Built on ESP Web Tools[44] from the ESPHome project, it flashes a board straight from the browser over USB using the Web Serial API. No toolchain, no command line. The 16.0 release notes would later give Sören (lost-hope) an honorable mention[45] as “Creator and maintainer of the web-installer.”

Hardware designers built around WLED as well. The credits page[12] lists Quindor (Andries F.), who “designed Dig-Quad, Dig-Uno, etc.,” and Serg74 (srg74 on GitHub), who “designed controllers and shields” and still hosts the nightly builds. Years later Adafruit would describe its Sparkle Motion boards as “designed by Ladyada to be compatible”[46] with WLED.

The 0.13.0 beta in June 2021[47] brought a playlist editor, sunrise and sunset timers and multiple buttons. Its notes also carried a thank you: “Thank you to @blazoncek for adding a lot of these features!” That name would matter a great deal.

The project outgrows its founder

Look at the contributor list for WLED[48] today and the name at the top is not Aircoookie. It is Blaž Kristan (blazoncek), with more than 2,300 commits,[49] against a little over 1,200 for Schwinne. Behind them come softhack007, netmindz, DedeHai and willmmiles. GitHub’s contributor list had passed 320 accounts[48] by October 2026, and it keeps getting longer.

The shift shows up in Schwinne’s own activity. By our count of the main branch, his commits went from hundreds a year in 2020 and 2021 to a few dozen in 2023 and only a handful from 2025 on. He never disappeared. On 5 October 2026, a small fix from him, pull request #5886,[50] was merged into the main branch. But the daily work had passed to others, and the readme[51] now says so plainly: “Originally created by Aircoookie, now maintained by a community of contributors.”

The sound-reactive branch of the family

Some of WLED’s best-known features grew up in forks. In March 2020, Andrew Tuline, whose GitHub bio describes him as an “Open Source hobbyist specializing in FastLED, Arduino Nano, ESP8266 and ESP32 sound reactive and WLED animations”,[52] created a fork of WLED[53] on GitHub. The MoonModules documentation calls it “WLED SR,” for Sound Reactive: lights that move with music.

In June 2022 that work came home. According to the usermod’s own readme,[54] the code was “Ported from soundreactive WLED” by blazoncek and the SR-WLED team, and the readme calls the result “an evolution of SR-WLED.” In October 2022, members of the same team created WLED MoonModules.[55] Its documentation[56] explains the fork was made “to make development against v0.14 possible while still preserving Atuline/WLED v0.13 as a stable and supported version.” The 0.14.0 beta in December 2022[57] then put 2D matrix support, rewritten segment and effects code and the new Audioreactive usermod in front of everyone.

WLED 0.14.0 “Hoshi”[58] shipped on 13 October 2023 after “more than 15 months of new features, bug fixes, testing and improvements.” Its opening line was a question: “If you saw a shooting star, what would you wish for?” Its thanks went to the whole community: “You all made WLED better and made this version happen!”

Changing the license

There was a catch in all that sharing. WLED had been MIT-licensed since 2016, which lets anyone reuse the code with almost no conditions. In July 2023, MoonModules put its own additions under GPLv3,[59] a license that requires shared changes to stay open. That answered a worry some contributors had, that others would profit from their work without giving anything back, but it also meant those additions could not flow back into MIT-licensed WLED.

On 15 October 2024, Schwinne opened and merged pull request #4194,[60] moving WLED to the European Union Public Licence (EUPL v1.2), a copyleft license. His explanation is the closest thing to a personal history the project has: “When I started the WLED project in 2016 and it was a one-man-show with a small code base, I didn’t really care about how it would be used and didn’t ever anticipate it becoming this huge!” He wrote that some contributors had hesitated “out of concern their hard work will be misappropriated by ‘freeloaders’ profiting off of it without giving anything in return.” And he announced that “both the MoonModules and base WLED collaborators have decided together to adopt EUPL and thus free exchange between the two repos can commence again!”

For home users, he was clear that nothing changed: “everything will stay as it is with the added reassurance that WLED will now legally stay free forever.” Versions up to and including 0.15.0-b6 remain available under MIT. MoonModules had already switched its repository to EUPL[61] twelve days earlier, on 3 October 2024.

Two months later, 0.15.0 “Kōsen”[62] shipped on 10 December 2024 with the Audioreactive usermod included by default in every compatible build. Its beta had opened with “May the ray of light inspire you to do great things.”

A new home and a new number

In February 2025, a contributor updated links across the codebase[63] “to point to the new repo.” WLED had moved out of Aircoookie’s personal account into an organization of its own, first under the name wled-dev and today at github.com/wled.[64] The repository that started as one person’s side project now belonged, in name as well as practice, to a team.

That team lost one of its central figures before its next big release. The 16.0 release notes[45] record that blazoncek “chose to leave the development team at the end of December” 2025, while recognizing that “he was a very important part of the development cycle for this version.”

The app side moved on too. The original WLED app’s readme[25] now warns that it “is no longer maintained” and points users to WLED Native by community member Moustachauve. The 16.0 notes credit Moustachauve as “Creator and maintainer of the official WLED app.”

On 3 May 2026, WLED 16.0.0[45] arrived. The leading zero was gone, and the version jumped from 0.15 straight to 16.0. The release took “almost one and a half years to finish” and drew on “59 contributors.” Its codename in the source is “Niji”.[65] The highlights list shows how widely the work was now shared. Blaž Kristan contributed true segment layering and new transitions. Damian Schneider (DedeHai) built a particle system with many new effects and a palette editor with over 800 palettes. Will Tatam (netmindz) and Frank Möhle (softhack007) added support for HUB75 video wall panels. Schwinne himself wrote GIF playback. In all, the notes count 36 new effects. Among the first-time contributors listed was @ladyada,[45] the same Ladyada whom Adafruit credits with designing its WLED-ready Sparkle Motion boards. Adafruit’s own guide called WLED 16 “the biggest LED control software upgrade in years.”[46]

The same notes say plainly who does this work and why: “We all contributed to this update in our spare time, driven by passion and the desire to make something useful for everyone.”

Counting the community

Numbers for an open-source project are slippery, so here is each one with its source and its limits. All figures were checked in October 2026.

On GitHub. Archived snapshots let us trace stars over time:

DateGitHub stars
November 2019759[30]
June 20202,104[40]
June 20216,094[41]
July 20229,077[66]
June 202311,822[67]
July 202414,213[68]
December 202415,522[69]
October 2026more than 18,700[4]

Across every release, GitHub counts more than 3.3 million downloads[70] of WLED firmware files so far. The 16.0.1 files alone, released in July 2026, had passed 300,000 downloads[71] by early October. A download is not a device: one person may download several files, and builds fetched elsewhere are not counted.

In conversation. The WLED Discord server reports more than 34,000 members[72] (Discord’s own approximate count), and the number goes up most weeks. The forum[73] holds more than 4,900 topics and 40,000 posts from over 6,100 registered users.

In homes. Home Assistant’s analytics are opt-in.[74] As of October 2026, more than 690,000 installations report anything at all. More than 550,000 of those also share which integrations they use, and the WLED integration appears in over 33,000 of them,[6] about 6 percent. Installations that share nothing are not counted.

On the lights themselves. Since late 2025, the WLED web interface has asked, after a fresh install or an upgrade, whether the owner wants to share hardware details[75] such as chip type and LED count with the developers. Those opt-in reports feed a public usage dashboard.[76] In early October 2026 it listed more than 190,000 devices,[5] with new reports arriving daily: over 130,000 on the original ESP32, more than 41,000 on the ESP8266 and the rest on newer ESP32 chips such as the C3 and S3. Devices with a known location span more than 160 countries and territories,[77] led by the United States (more than 34,000) and Germany (more than 21,000). The most common setup has 101 to 250 LEDs.[78] Only owners who open the web interface and click “Report update” are counted, so these numbers are a floor, not an estimate of every WLED light in the world. The dashboard does not publish its counting rules, so read them as a rough guide.

WLED has also become a building block that the maker press mentions in passing, the way you would mention a screwdriver. In 2020 Hackaday described a desk project where the maker could “control them with his phone via WLED, or make Alexa do it.”[79] In May 2026, a Hackaday write-up of an IKEA lamp mod explained that “control and automation comes from WLED”.[80] Espressif, the company that makes the chips WLED runs on, wrote in 2025 that it is “one of the most popular community projects based on the Arduino core”[81] for the ESP32 and ESP8266.

Where WLED is heading

The project keeps its plans in the open, with a caution attached. The roadmap page[82] points to GitHub milestones and warns: “There is no guarantee if and when a new feature or bugfix will be available!”

With that in mind, here is what the public record shows. A 16.1 milestone[83] collects fixes and smaller improvements to the current release. The bigger story is 17.0,[84] described as the “Next major version - built using the V5 platform,” meaning Espressif’s ESP-IDF version 5 framework. Groundwork is in place: ESP-IDF V5 support[85] reached the main branch in July 2026, carrying work for the newer ESP32-C6, C5 and P4 chips[86] with it, and the main branch’s build file[87] now has targets for all three. In October 2026 the usage dashboard listed only a few dozen devices on those chips, the first early adopters. An open planning issue from release manager netmindz, “Version 17 - key features”,[88] lists four items so far: “realtime review”, “New AR model”, “LED bus” and “New settings UI”.

Nobody can say what WLED will look like at 18.0. But the pattern of its first ten years is clear in the commit log. It began with one person who wanted to control a strip of lights from a browser, wrote “All working!” when it did, and kept sharing what he built. Others did the same, and kept doing it.

We make WLED Max, a third-party WLED app for iOS and Android. WLED Max is an independent app and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the official WLED project.

Sources

Live figures were checked in October 2026 and keep growing. Sources were accessed 8 October 2026 unless noted.

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