LED-Matrix

This project is based on the work of stahlfabrik's https://github.com/stahlfabrik/RibbaPi.

And the additions made by ElectiveRob.

Many thanks to you two.

What is this project about?

This project brings an old study project of mine back to life. Together with some collegues I built a simple LED matarix with APA102 LEDs that are controlled by a Raspberry Pi 1.

After some years of inactivity I had some time to re-activate this project and found the repository of stahlfabrik, who has also built a LED matrix with similar hardware. So I continued his work.

If you have also built such an LED matrix, this project may help you to do some cool stuff with it.

Preparations

This project is designed to be used in conjunction with an Alpine Linux installation on a Raspberry Pi.

To install Alpine Linux on a Raspberry Pi please stick to the official documentation: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi

Build Alpine package

A ready-to-use package can be downloaded from the Releases page. This package is built by a GitHub Actions workflow.

Alternatively you can also build it on your local PC by running the following make target:

make build-alpine-package

NOTE: This requires a working Docker installation.

After that you find the apk-package in the dist directory of this repository. This package is needed in step 3 of the Installation section.

Installation

Enable write support on your SD card partition:

mount -o remount,rw /media/<sd_card>

You get the correct mount location form the LBU_MEDIA parameter in the /etc/lbu/lbu.conf file.

Enter the directory of the mount point:

cd /media/<sd_card>

Copy the apk-package (that was built or downloaded previously) from your local PC to the current directory on the Raspberry Pi, e.g. by using scp.
Install the package:

apk add --allow-untrusted <package_name>.apk

Edit the /etc/led-matrix.ini file to your needs. The available settings are documented in the file. Don't forget step 9 after every change!
Test the installation:

led-matrix /etc/led-matrix.ini

If everything runs without errors, stop the execution with Ctrl-C. If there are errors, feel free to open an issue with an detailed error report on GitHub.

Disable write support on the SD card again:

mount -o remount,ro /media/<sd_card>

Add this project to the autostart of Alpine Linux:

rc-update add led-matrix

Commit any change to the file system:

lbu commit -d

Usage

If everything went well, there should be a web interface available under:

http://<ip-of-raspberry-pi>:<port-from-config.ini>

From there you can manage most of the settings of the LED matrix. And you can start/stop and schedule animations.