emlyn / sonic-pixels

Interactive lighting effects for Sonic Pi

Sonic-Pixels

Interactive lighting effects for Sonic Pi.

Requires:

• A strip of NeoPixel LEDs (or similar, as long as it's supported by rpi_ws281x). If you don't have them yet, but still want to try this out, you can run in fake mode and it will just display the LED colours in the terminal.
• One Raspberry Pi, to control the LED strip (again, not needed to run in fake mode).
• One copy of Sonic Pi, to make some phat beats and control your lighting fx.

It should work with any version of the Raspberry Pi, but I used a Pi zero set up to run in USB OTG mode (so it behaves like a USB gadget and draws its power from the host computer running Sonic Pi, and you also get a nice stable network connection over USB). Alternatively you could run Sonic Pi on the same Raspberry Pi that's controlling the LEDs, so you don't need a separate computer.

sonic-pixels's Issues

Gamma correction

LEDs get very bright very quickly, colours will probably look less washed-out with some gamma correction.

"neopixel" is no longer provided by rpi_ws281x

As of version 4.0.0 rpi_ws281x drops the "neopixel" module from its package, canonicalising instead on "rpi_ws281x", see: https://github.com/rpi-ws281x/rpi-ws281x-python/releases/tag/v4.0.0

So you would need to change:

from neopixel import Adafruit_NeoPixel, Color, ws

to

from rpi_ws281x import Adafruit_NeoPixel, Color, ws

And then - once rpi-ws281x/rpi-ws281x-python@75f4b64 makes it into a release - you should be able to use the rpi_ws281x package.

Support for 2D arrays of LEDs

There's some token attempt at support in places, but it's by no means complete.
It would also need the fake pixels to use curses or similar to be able to update multiple lines.

Improve FX system

Lots (e.g. keeping track of previous image, start time etc) is handled by each derived effect. Should move this to base class to make writing new FX easier.
Make getDisplay set properties, then call an 'abstract' render method in derived FX.
Also abstract out argument parsing (handling optional args etc).

Improve command handling

Effects should register themselves so you don't also need to add a case statement for each new FX.

Remove spectra dependency

Can use PIL.ImageColor to do colour string parsing. Will need to implement equivalent of spectra.scale though.