/pyWalNeopixels

Primary LanguagePython

pyWalNeopixels

BEFORE USE

Before anything in this repo will work for you, you must install CircuitPython libraries on your raspberry pi according to this guide(I used a raspberry pi 3b+). After this, in your raspberry pi's terminal run: sudo pip3 install rpi_ws281x adafruit-circuitpython-neopixel This must be done with python 3, as python 2.X will not work. If python3 is your default python, you may need to run the same command with pip instead.

Installation

This is the easiest way to wire your LED strip to your raspberry pi. Keep in mind that using a standard iphone wall charger (5v 1a) this will only work with very short (<20) strips of LED's, otherwise you need a separate powersupply. When I Plugged my raspberry pi 3b+ into a 5v 4amp wall adapter, it was enough to power a strip of 43 LED's, though from my research this might be pushing the limits a little bit.

Diagram taken from https://cdn-learn.adafruit.com/assets/assets/000/063/929/large1024/led_strips_raspi_NeoPixel_bb.jpg?1539981142

After you've installed CircuitPython, rpi_ws281x, and adafruit-circuitpython-neopixel as directed in the before use section, clone this git repository onto your PC. Make sure your raspberry pi and PC are on the same network. Change directory into pyWalNeopixels/PC_files and open startLEDS in your favorite editor. Make the following adjustments:

  • Line 6, COLORS_DIR: This is set to the default colors.json file generated by pywal. If your path is different, place it here. Your file should be named colors.json.
  • Line 9, REPO_DIR: Set this to the path of your cloned pyWalNeopixels repo. The default is "$HOME/Documents/GitHub/pyWalNeopixels".
  • Line 11, USER: This is the user of your pi. In my case, since I just use the pi's default user 'pi', I set USER to "pi"
  • Line 12, IP: This is the IP address of your pi. In my case, it's 192.168.0.25.

Now, open stopLEDS and make the following adjustments:

  • Line 5, REPO_DIR: Same as in startLEDS.
  • Line 7, USER: Same as in startLEDS.
  • Line 8, IP: same as in startLEDS.

I know these changes are redundant, I'm just not well versed in scripts like these. If there's some way to make a header file so that all these changes can be made only once in one file, please let me know!

After these changes, run chmod 700 startLEDS and chmod 700 stopLEDS. You can copy these to anywhere you like on your PC and they should run just fine. I added them to my path so I can have them execute when i3 starts.

To run these scripts, run ./path/to/repo/PC_files/startLEDS. Same thing but replace with stopLEDS to turn them off.