Deadline Trophy Competition

Last years trophies

Last year we went a bit wild and built custom WLED-powered trophies for the first time — glowing pyramids of resin with 170 addressable RGB LEDs packed inside, all driven by an ESP32 running our own Deadline WLED fork.

This year, for the 11th Deadline, we’re taking it one step further:
there’s going to be a Deadline Trophy Competition, running directly on the trophy hardware!
And yes — the winner gets to take home one of these beauties.

The Hardware

Each trophy is a resin pyramid with a custom PCB at its core.

ESP WROOM 32D (240Mhz dual core 32bit microcontroller)
170x HD107s addressable RGB LEDs (106 in the logo, 64 in the base)
3x 0.5W LEDs (white/UV)
INMP441 I2S microphone

If you win a compo this year, there’s a good chance you’ll be going home with a tiny blinking piece of demoscene history.

Firmware & Simulator

To make development fun (and not just restricted to people with the actual Trophy hardware – just need one ESP), we’ve prepared two things:

🔧 Firmware (QM’s WLED fork for Deadline Trophy)
👉 https://github.com/qm210/wledline-trophies
🖥️ Deadline Trophy Simulator
👉 https://github.com/qm210/dltrophy-simulator

The simulator shows you what the LEDs would do in close-to-real-time, and the firmware fork gives you everything you need to code your own effects, with current limiting, proper LED segment mapping, and all the UDP magic required for the simulator.

Deadline Trophy Simulator (2D and 3D) in Action,
the effect running on a Trophy Prototype

How to Join

Grab the firmware, simulator, or both.
Hack your own LED effect – check out the example and how-to here: https://github.com/qm210/wledline-trophies/blob/main/DEADLINE_2025_HOWTO.md
Upload your FX_DEADLINE_TROPHY.h to the brand-new Deadline Trophy Compo 2025 through our party system.
The Deadline for your submission is Saturday at 17:00
If you win — you get the actual trophy, glowing away with your own code inside.

HAVE FUN! 🙂