Always wanted pixel art or a playing gif on your wall, then this program is for you!
LED-Engine is a software program that lets you control your led's with a Raspberry Pi from an external device like a laptop or a smartphone (no apps required on external devices :D ).
- The left image shows the different modes you can play on an led panel.
- The top right image shows the drawing canvas
- The bottom right image shows me using the Load Image (displaying an image on to the led panel)
What can you exactly do in LED-Engine:
| LED-panel | LED-strip | |
|---|---|---|
| Static Color | ✔ | ✔ |
| Rainbow mode | ✔ | ✔ |
| Sine Wave | ✔ | ✔ |
| Star Effect | ✔ | ✔ |
| Fire Effect | ✔ | ✔ |
| Knight Rider | ✔ | ✔ |
| Conway's Game of Life | ✔ | X |
| Langton's Ant | ✔ | X |
| Brian's Brain | ✔ | X |
| WireWorld | ✔ | X |
| Drawing canvas | ✔ | X |
| Display images (from image url or upload) | ✔ | X |
| Display gif (from gif url) | ✔ | X |
| Text | ✔ | X |
| Fishtank | ✔ | X |
With WireWorld you first have to draw your "circuit" on the website. When you click play it will play wireworld with your circuit on the LED-Panel!
With Drawing canvas you have a canvas with the same amount of pixels as your LED-Panel has. You can draw pixel by pixel on the canvas, you select the color with a color picker or by pressing on one of the preset color buttons. Every time you draw a pixel the LED-Panel directly shows the pixel you drew on the canvas.
You can display an image on the LED-Engine. You can simply get the url of the image and the program will take care of it. You can also upload an image from an external device. Most image formats are supported and any resolution so the resolution of the image does not have to match the resolution of the led panel because the program will automatically downscale it! The image will also be displayed on the Drawing canvas so you will be able to edit it.
Display gif is the same as Display images but then it plays a gif on the LED-Panel.
I hope you will try out LED-Engine. All the info to install/use this program is written into this readme file!
All raspberry pi's are supported from the pi 4 to the pi zero w. The pi zero w is reccomended for this project because you don't need more processing power running LED-Engine (though the pi 4 will be quicker of course!).
We are using the Adafruit neopixel module that support WS2811/WS2812 led's. If you have a different module you would like to use then you can change the file: "LedEngine/led_lib.py" and change the module to whatever you want! This is the only place in the program were neopixels is being used (to make it easyer switching between modules). Led-Engine will support multiple modules in the future!
We are currently working on a document that describes step by step how you can add your own mode. Expect this coming soon!
We have two ways of installing LED-Engine.
- Installing LED-Engine with bash script
- Installing LED-Engine from scratch
This way is reccomended if you already have an raspberry pi os on your pi.
this way is reccomended if you had trouble with Installing LED-Engine with bash script.
This will guide you installing LED-Engine on a raspberry pi that already has an os installed. To make installing easy for you we have a bash script that you can download to you pi and run. The bash script will detect what pi you are using and will install all the dependencies needed.
First we need to download the bash script:
git clone https://github.com/merijndewit/Led-Engine.git
Then we can execute the script:
./Led-Engine/installLedEngine.sh
After you see this in the terminal the install was succesfull:
Successfully installed LED-Engine!
Type './Led-Engine/LedEngine/startLedEngine.sh' to start LED-Engine.
Enjoy using LED-Engine!
Then simply enter:
./Led-Engine/LedEngine/startLedEngine.sh
And the program should be running!
This is a step by step guide to get LED-Engine running from a clean install of raspbian os. Raspberry Pi OS Lite (bullseye) is reccomended for LED-Engine. The desktop version will also work without any problem but will be a bit slower.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-systems/
Once you've installed Raspberry Pi OS on your pi follow all the steps below:
Let's begin with installing nodejs. LED-Engine uses perfectly with nodejs v12.9.1 so thats what i recommend. Newer versions of nodejs might have some trouble with older pi's. First we need to know what arm platform the pi is using by entering the command:
uname -m
look for the file that has your arm platform in the file name and with the file extention: .tar.xz and copy the download link: https://nodejs.org/dist/v12.9.1/
unofficial builds for older pi's on arm6 : https://unofficial-builds.nodejs.org/download/release/v12.9.1/
Now we enter this command to download the file:
note: change "download-URL" to the correct download link
sudo wget download-URL
To unpack the file we've just downloaded:
note: change "filename.tar.xz" to the downloaded file
sudo tar -xvf filename.tar.xz
Now we want to go into the folder of the files we've just extracted.
note: change "filename.tar.xz" to the folder containing the extracted files
cd extracted-folder-name
Now we want to copy all the files to /usr/local/
sudo cp -R * /usr/local/
Now node should be installed! To test if nodejs is working we type:
node -v
Now we want to go cback to the root folder and install the socket.io package:
cd /
sudo npm install socket.io
sudo npm install formidable
Now we want to install all the python dependencies. First we want to install pip:
sudo apt-get install python3-pip
Now we can install python dependencies. Enter the following commands:
sudo pip3 install board
sudo pip3 install rpi_ws281x adafruit-circuitpython-neopixel
sudo pip3 install pillow
After we've installed all the python dependencies we can install git and clone the GitHub repository:
sudo apt install git
sudo git clone https://github.com/merijndewit/Led-Engine.git
Now we are ready to run LED-Engine! Follow the steps at "How to run LED-Engine" to run the program!
In order to run LED-Engine we need to run 2 programs: webserver.js & Controller.py. webserver is the frontend and Controller is the backend. Both programs need to be running at the same time for everythong to work.
First we want to go into the project folder most likely called: Led-Engine. Then we want to go into the folder LedEngine
cd /Led-Engine/LedEngine/
When we are in the folder LedEngine we want to run webserver.js:
node webserver.js
Then we want to run Controller.py in another terminal:
sudo python3 Controller.py
Note:If you get the import error "ImportError: libopenjp2.so.7: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" run this command: sudo apt-get install libopenjp2-7
Note: If you get the import error "ImportError: libtiff5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" run this command: sudo apt install libtiff5
Now the program should be running, and you should be able to open the website on an external device like a laptop or mobile phone!
You can access LED-Engine on any browser by typing the pi's address and default port for LED-Engine Example: 192.168.x.x:8080