/siknas-skylt

Primary LanguageProcessingGNU General Public License v2.0GPL-2.0

Siknas skylt

This repository contains code for running a custom interactive LED display, together with some helper tools.

The display uses the Fadecandy LED controller board https://github.com/scanlime/fadecandy that supports the OpenPixelControl (OPC).

To use this software, a Fadecandy server needs to run and be connected to the display via Fadecandy USB controller boards.

Build release package

This program was designed to run on a Raspberry Pi along with Fadcandy fcserver.

Creating the debian package

Currently this is a multi-stage process.

  1. Build the animations themselves (Note requires using the Processing GUI, since the CLI is broken, see processing/processing#5468).
    • Open each Processing sketch under animations/
    • File -> Export Application...
    • Click Export
    • Make sure the sketch dir contains animations/animation_name/:
      • application.linux-armv6hf
      • application.linux-amd64
  2. Now run: 
    ./build-animations.sh
  3. Create thumbnails. (Note this will start the server and send actual traffic that is recorded and made into animated Gifs. So don't touch the webapp during this. Details src/thumbgen/README.md): 
    ./make-thumbnails.sh
  4. Now build the executables and static files (This includes Windows, OSX, Linux, Linux ARM): 
    ./build.sh
  5. Finally build the debian packages: 
    ./build-debian.sh

Install debian package on the Raspberry Pi

The assumption the RPi will run in "headless" mode. This means we need to use Xvfb for a virtual screen buffer since Processing needs that to generate the animations.

Pre-requisite (Fadecandy)

Follow the instructions in README_FADECANDY.md on how to build and install Fadecandy.

Install

  1. Copy the debian package to the RPi somehow. For example using SCP: 
    scp build/siknas-skylt-server-armhf.deb my-rpi:.   # my-rpi is the ip or hostname of the RPi
  2. Install the debian package: 
    sudo dpkg -i ./siknas-skylt-server.armhf.deb  # This complains about unment dependencies
sudo apt-get -f install  # Fixes dependencies.

Quickstart (Development)

Running while developing under docker.

See the TUTORIAL.md for details.

# Create and edit src/server/sikas.yaml
cp src/server/siknas.yaml.example src/server/siknas.yaml

# Start server.
docker-compose up -d

# (Separate window) Run Xvfb inside of server docker.
./run_xvfb.sh

# Surf to http://localhost:8080 (Linux)
open http://$(docker-machine ip):8080   # OSX
start http://$(docker-machine ip):8080  # Windows.

Display

Example image of the real world display.

Siknäs skylt

Simulator

To enable development and testing animations on the display a simulator was created in Unity: https://github.com/JoakimSoderberg/OPCSim

Siknäs skylt simulator

Repository structure

  • docs - Contains some documentation on how the display works.
  • animations/ - Contains Processing sketches that animates the display using OPC.
  • image-gui/ - A .NET C# program used to map real pixel locations to the virtual ones. (Used to produce layout.json that the Processing sketches use).
  • layouts - Contains the layout.json created by using the image-gui, and the source image used to do this.
  • scripts/ - A script to re-scale the coordinates in layout.json.
  • src/controlpanel/ - A websocket client that talks to the control panel via a serial port over USB. The Websocket client connects to the server. Written in Golang.
  • src/server/ - A server that hosts an OPC proxy, as well as a webserver and websockets server. This forwards the OPC traffic to the display coming from the processing sketches (that it starts and stops). It also broadcasts the traffic to connected webclients via websockets. The webserver hosts a web page that will let the user chose which processing sketch to run.
  • src/server/static/ - Hosts a webpage written in Aurelia that displays the list of Processing sketches used to animate the display. This webpage also listens to the binary OPC traffic, and uses D3 to animate an SVG copy of the real display.
  • src/thumbgen/ - Used to generate gif thumbnails by looping through and recording all the animations. These are used in the webapp to show a preview of the animation.

Generating thumbnails

The webapp displays animated gifs as thumbnails for the animations.

To regenerate these, run the script below:

./make_thumbnails.sh

Or for details look at the README.md for Thumbgen.

System overview

System overview