Fire Umbrella Is Perfect for Adding Dynamic Beauty to a Patio

If you live in a place where the climate is appropriate and you have the space, you should really be taking advantage of your yard or patio. Doing so can easily add several hundred square feet of living space to your home, and a relaxing outdoor area is perfect for evening drinks with friends when the weather is nice. Of course, you’ll have to purchase the right furniture and decor to make it comfortable. There are plenty of furniture options available, and Redditor Davepl’s Fire Umbrella design is the perfect decor.

The Fire Umbrella was built on a 10-foot umbrella, and has more than 2,000 NeoPixel-style individually-addressable RGB LEDs arranged along its eight ribs. Every single one of those LEDs can be set to a specific color or brightness, which enables all kinds of mesmerizing lighting effects. Those LEDs are controlled by an ESP32 development board and powered by a beefy weatherproof power supply. Thanks to the ESP32’s WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities, the lighting effects can be controlled via a smartphone or computer.

Davepl has built in a number of effects that can be toggled or tweaked with a custom iPhone app or through a web server running on the ESP32. Other graphical effects can even be generated by Unity running on a PC, and sent wirelessly to the Fire Umbrella. The various effects can either move through preset patterns, or react dynamically to music using a built-in microphone. Davepl is investigating the possibility of selling the Fire Umbrella, but if that isn’t feasible then he’ll make the Arduino code that runs on the ESP32 available on GitHub.