Interesting. I'm currently in the process of building something with a audio reactive LED strip but didn't come across this project yet.
The WLED [1] ESP32 firmware seems to be able to do something similar or potentially more though.
Check out the MoonModules fork/variant of WLED too, it has much better audio reactive user mods and visualisation options https://mm.kno.wled.ge/ than the main project.
And yea, I agree with the article. In my past I've also dabbled in audioreactive for LEDs and it's fiendishly difficult to make anything interesting.
Make it react too much, and it's chaos, and inversely when the algorithm reacts less the audio, it's boring.
And in all cases it's really not easy to see what the leds are doing in correspondence to all the complexity of music.
For my use case I want something fully portable and battery powered anyways. So the audio stuff should happen on the ESP32. (Or on my phone, that might work too)
Eh, it's probably OK either way. People have been saying since day 1 that Raspberry Pis are not low-power devices and they're probably right.
Everything is relative, though. In terms of maximums, a Pi 4 (for example) can use up to about 7 Watts under load by itself, which adds up fast when operating on batteries.
But a single 1 meter string of 144 WS2812B LEDs can suck down up to around 43 Watts, and 43 is a lot more than 7. :)
Lighting rigs are thirsty. The processing (even if it's the whole Pi) is generally a small drop in the bucket.
It is sort of baffling that people make some of these hideous fonts, look at them, and decide to publish them regardless. A font where the lowercase i and l are indistinguishable? Okay...
The one use case I've seen for Dank Mono was presentations with an overhead projector at conferences. The cursive for italics can make some of the structure of the code more differentiated when viewing it at a distance.
[1] https://www.metamateberlin.de/
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