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Aspect Pro

— BLE LED Controller

A React Native app controlling an LED matrix over Bluetooth Low Energy, from device discovery to real-time color control.

Website ↗
scene editor with two connected Aspect lights arranged around a scenecolor selection screen with a color wheel and RGB sliderscolor palettes screen listing saved color palettes and photo paletteslight control screen with color sphere, strobe control, themes, and color presetsphoto palette screen extracting color swatches from a volcano photopresets screen listing saved color presets with power toggleslight control screen with white light, temperature slider, and theme pickerlight control screen showing brightness dial at 60% with temperature and strobe controls
React NativeTypeScriptreact-native-ble-plxRedux Toolkit + Redux-SagaShopify RestyleReact NavigationReact Hook Form + Yupapisaucereact-native-svgtinycolor2

Overview

Aspect Pro is a React Native app that controls a physical LED matrix over Bluetooth Low Energy. Point the app at the device and you get real-time control over brightness and saturation, a library of predefined color schemes, and the ability to generate a color palette from any photo and push it straight to the hardware.

It’s a hardware-adjacent project end to end: the interesting problems live at the boundary between the mobile app and the device.

My Role

I built the app end-to-end.

  • Implemented the full BLE lifecycle: device discovery, pairing, connection state management, and characteristic writes.
  • Built real-time brightness and saturation controls with immediate feedback on the physical device.
  • Wrote on-device color palette generation that extracts a palette from a user’s image and maps it onto the LED matrix.

Key Challenges

BLE state is messy. Connections drop, devices disappear mid-write, and platforms report state differently. The app had to model the full connection lifecycle explicitly so the UI always reflected reality.

Real-time control over a slow channel. Sliders that write over BLE need throttling and write-queue discipline — naive implementations flood the characteristic and the device lags behind the user’s finger.

Palette extraction on-device. Generating a usable palette from an arbitrary photo, fast enough to feel interactive, without shipping the image anywhere.

Outcome

A working controller that makes the hardware feel directly connected to your fingertips — and a deep dive into the BLE / hardware integration space I’m continuing to explore.