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casoich edited this page Nov 13, 2017 · 9 revisions

PixelMatrix

The PixelMatrix project, a LED light sculpture that uses a Raspberry Pi 3 to drive 280 LEDs, along with a NodeJS server to serve Angular-based control pages to the local subnet.

PixelMatrix running

The basis for this project is a Raspberry Pi 3, driving 10 meter* long strips of DotStar individually-addressable LEDs. * 28 out of 30 lights in the meter, explained in the Construction section.

The lights were mounted longitudinally along a PVC pipe in 10 rows equally spaced around the pipe. The diameter of the pipe was picked so that, with 10 rows, the inter-strip spacing was fairly close to the pixel pitch of the strips (in this case, 30 per meter).

The lights are driven by a Python script that has several pre-built show algorithms, that can be controlled and switched via local hardware buttons, command-line parameters (used for dev only), and via TCP messaging from the local NodeJS server.

The NodeJS server is a heavily-modified Express scaffold (originally used for an aquaponics app) to serve up control pages, and provide parameters to the Python script via polling.