Hackulele

OpenSource library to talk to a Populele's Led matrix

If you're interested about the story behind the project, how this came up to be, as well as more technical detains, I have another doc for you.

BlueZ to talk to the Populele right away

If you want to talk over bluetooth to your Populele, use bluez.py.

Pros:

No need for new hardware

Cons:

Not possible to set PWM per LED
Kind of slow
BLE is kind of unreliable

The script requires some dependencies. It is recommended to install them system wide (see pygobject if you want to use PuPI)

apt install python-pydbus python-gi

Make sure BlueZ is up and running. I've tested that everything works with version 5.50.

Then just hack the script to your liking and run python bluez.py.

Connect your own board to the Led Matrix

Pros:

Full LED matrix control over i2c
Fast & reliable

Cons:

Need to remove all the smart from the ukulele and insert your own.

The code should currently work on any board that can run Adafruit's CircuitPython.

I use the Feather M0 Bluefruit, as I intend to also implement my own BLE protocol. This one also has a battery charging circuit.

Wires & stuff

This is a bit trickier. Once you disconnected everything from your Uke, you'll be left with a JST-style connector. When looking at it you get the following pins:

          ___      ___
    _____|   |____|   |______
   |                         |
   |    5V     GND     SCL   |
   |                         |
   |    SDB    INT     SDA   |
   |_________________________|

Connect SCL/SDA/5V/GND to the same pins on your microcontroller board (5V is the one directly connected to USB).

Then put INT to GND, and SDB to pin D10.

Also remember SCL & SDA need to be Pull'ed UP, so connect them to 5V via a 4.7K resistor for each line.

Stuff everything back into the ukulele and you should be good to go.

Push the code

Your CircuitPython enabled board should expose a mass storage device. Just copy the relevant files to it:

mount /dev/sdXY /mnt/SOMEWHERE
cp main.py populele.py /mnt/SOMEWHERE/
cp -r animations /mnt/SOMEWHERE/
umount /mnt/SOMEWHERE

Add your own animations

This project is heavily influenced by the Best Badge Ever.

Both the CircuitPython main.py and BlueZ bluez.py scripts call whatever animation object Draw() method every interval milliseconds which in turn will call the Populele objects SetXXXX methods to change internal state.