Install Chameleon Firmware

Flash an ESP32 from this page — nothing to download

Flash it now

Plug an ESP32 controller into this computer with a USB cable, then press the button. Your browser talks to the board directly — there is no installer to download, no driver package from us, and no account to make.

  • This browser cannot talk to USB serial devices. Use desktop Chrome or Edge. This page has to be served over HTTPS for your browser to allow a serial connection.

Takes about a minute. The firmware is free, there is no licence key, and it keeps working whether or not you ever buy anything from us.

At your own risk. Flashing erases whatever is on the board, including its settings and any cloud certificate. The free firmware is provided “as is”, with no warranty, and we are not liable for damage to your equipment or property arising from its use — wiring, power supplies and compliance with local electrical code are yours. Read the full terms.

What the free firmware does

The honest version. Everything the controller can do on its own, on your own network, is free forever — and everything that needs our servers is not.

Free, on your network, forever

  • Every lighting effect. The whole engine — chases, wipes, waves, palette flows, fire, aurora, the lot. No effects are held back.
  • The bundled library — 5,282 patterns, palettes and playlists, and any you make yourself.
  • The app, over your own Wi-Fi. Colours, effects, brightness and schedules from your phone, with no account and no sign-in.
  • Up to eight LED outputs and four zones, running different things at once.
  • Up to ten schedules on the controller's own clock, so they keep running when your internet is down.
  • A local HTTP API on your LAN for settings, control and live preview — scriptable, documented, no cloud round trip.
  • Alexa, by pretending to be a Philips Hue bridge on your network. On, off, brightness and colour by voice, with no skill to enable and no account to link.
  • xLights and any DDP sender, streaming real-time frames straight at the controller over UDP.
  • Music-reactive effects, fed by standard WLED AudioSync frames from any compatible sender.
  • More than one controller on the same network.

You set it up from the app over your own Wi-Fi — pins, pixel counts, zones, effects, schedules — or, if you would rather, straight through the controller's own HTTP API on your LAN. Alexa and xLights are switches you turn on; they stay off until you do. What a licence buys is not a friendlier way in, it is everything on the right.

Not included — these need our servers

  • Control from away from home. Free firmware answers on your LAN and nowhere else. Off your Wi-Fi, it is out of reach.
  • Automatic holiday and game-day calendars. The scheduling that knows when Thanksgiving falls and when your team kicks off is computed by us and pushed down.
  • Community sharing. Publishing your own scenes, and browsing what other people have published. The 5,282-item library that ships with the app is yours either way.
  • Household sharing. Several people controlling the same lights from their own phones.
  • Over-the-air updates. Free controllers are updated the same way they were installed: this page, and a cable.

Those switch on when a controller is given a certificate for our cloud. Every image reserves the space for one and boots happily without it — that is the whole difference between the two columns, and it is why a free controller can be upgraded later without being reflashed.

How it goes

  1. Plug the board in

    A USB cable that carries data, not a charge-only one. If nothing shows up in the browser's device list, that cable is the first thing to suspect.

  2. Press Connect & Install

    Your browser asks which serial port to use. Pick the board, and the page writes the bootloader, the partition table and the firmware. Watch the progress bar; do not unplug it.

  3. Give it your Wi-Fi

    When the flash finishes, the same window offers to put the controller on your network. Pick your network, type the password, and it joins — over the cable that is already in your hand. No app install, no hunting for a temporary hotspot.

  4. Wire up your lights

    Tell it which GPIO pins your strips are on and how many pixels each run has, through the controller's own web address on your LAN. Then it is yours.

What you need

  • A desktop browser

    Chrome, Edge or Opera, on Windows, macOS, Linux or ChromeOS. This uses Web Serial, which Safari and Firefox do not implement and which does not exist on phones or tablets at all — not in Chrome for Android, and not in anything on iOS.

  • An ESP32 board

    The original ESP32 with 4 MB of flash. Tested on the QuinLED Dig-Uno and Dig-Quad and the Wasatch Quad and Advanced Eight, which come with their pin maps built in. Other ESP32 boards flash fine — you pick Custom and tell it which pins your strips are on afterwards. Full compatibility list.

  • A data USB cable

    Plenty of USB cables carry power only. If the board never appears in the port list, swap the cable before anything else.

  • A board you are willing to erase

    Installing wipes what is on it, including its saved settings. If this controller was set up with a Chameleon cloud account, flashing it here removes its certificate and it will stop reaching the cloud — talk to us first rather than flashing it.

Questions people actually ask

Is this a trial?

No. There is no clock on it, no feature that stops working, and no nag. It is not a version of our firmware — it is the same binary, byte for byte, that ships on the hardware we sell. A controller becomes a cloud controller by being handed a certificate, not by being reflashed.

Why can't I do this on my phone?

Because no phone browser can open a USB serial port. Web Serial is a desktop-only browser feature, and Apple has not implemented it at all — that is a limit of the platform, not something we chose. You need a laptop or desktop for this one step; everything after it works from a phone.

Nothing appears when I press the button.

Three usual causes, in order: a charge-only USB cable; a missing USB-to-serial driver for the board's chip (CP210x or CH340 — download it from the chip vendor, not from us); or the board needing to be held in bootloader mode. On a board with a BOOT button, hold it while you plug the cable in, then release.

Can I go back?

Yes. This flashes a complete image — bootloader, partition table and application — so anything else that flashes the same way, including whatever was on the board before, can replace it the same way.

What do you collect when I do this?

Nothing. There is no account, no sign-in and no registration step. The page serves you four files and your browser writes them to the board; the board never talks to us. See our privacy policy.

I want the cloud features.

Buy an activation code — $100 once, one controller, nothing recurring. It upgrades the board you just flashed, in place: the app hands the code to the controller, the controller gets a certificate, and the cloud comes up on its next boot. Nothing is reflashed and nothing you have set up is lost. The full comparison is on the firmware page.

Want the whole thing installed?

We do permanent outdoor lighting: the hardware, the install, the app and the cloud features, with a lowest price guarantee and usually a same day estimate.