A client/server suite for controlling a LED display using Python and a Particle Core (formerly "Spark Core")
LED display : array (16x16 in my case) of Neopixel WS2812B RGB leds
Spark Core (now: "Particle Core"): The Spark Core is a wifi and cloud enabled development platform that controls the leds and acts as server, programmed in C (Arduino).
Please note that "Spark" was renamed to "Particle", so this is now called a "Particle Core", though most code was written before the name change and references the "Spark Core". Ideally I would like to replace it with a Photon as soon as the kinks in the FastLED library are sorted out for the Photon. The Core is awesome, but just borderline fast enough (CPU and netwrok) for what we want to do here, so the Photon should be awesome(r)! ;)
"SparkLED" scripts: python client that connects to the Spark Core over wifi and sends commands and animations/pictures for it to display on the LED display (in my case these run on a PC).
FastLED: FastLED is an excellent library for controlling a range of LED strips and displays. For now, using the Spark Core branch until it gets merged into master
Just a few simple steps to get it to work:
- Get a Spark Core and wire it up to your LED display. Some instructions here, but don't get confused by mentions of the Neopixel library. We will use FastLED instead - it's significantly more feature rich and faster. Alternatively, skip both LEDs and Spark Core (see below)
- Flash the SparkLED.ino file to your Spark Core (and find it's IP address)
- Replace my internal IP address in serverIP in the initialize() function in SparkLED.py with yours
- Run SparkLED.py to test, and tweak main in SparkLED to include the animations/scrollers/images you want
Note: You can test this script without a LED display or SparkCore by running the led_server_emulator.py script. Just rememer to set the IP address in serverIP in the initialize() function in SparkLED.py to 127.0.0.1 (localhost) if you run both SparkLED and the emulator on the same machine
Also note: It is my intention to automatically find the IP adress of the Spark Core using the Spyrk library, though this is not complete. It needs some data in a file called config.py, two lines to be exact, like so:
DEVICEID = '555555555555555555555555'
ACCESS_TOKEN = '6666666666666666666666666666666666666666'
Both deviceid and access token can be found at spark.io once you have registered the core. If you're using the emulator, just put some dummy values here, like the ones in this example.
And finally note: The python is all written in Python 3.4. Pthon 2.x will not work without a rewrite.
Copyright (c) Ole Jakob Skjelten, 2015