/micro-pixel-player

Primary LanguagePython

micro pixel player

Overview

This project allows you to build an LED animation by editing video.

Requirements

You need to have python3 (should come included on most Linuxes and recent macOS) and ffmpeg installed on your machine, e.g.

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

In your Python environment¹ install

pip3 install numpy ffmpeg-python rshell

Configuring

From video to animation data

The desktop/main.py expects a 1920×1080 video named video.mp4. This can be changed in the script. Running the script generates the file pico/frames.py.²

MicroPython script

Running

It should be enough to execute process-and-upload.sh. To generate and upload the data manually, follow the steps in the script.

Footnotes, tips and tricks

¹ Setting up a Python environment with venv

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

² A few words on the file format and naming

Some MicroPython IDEs, such as the beginner-friendly Thonny, don't play well with non-Python files on the microcontroller. Therefore, the file is named frames.py despite containing no meaningful Python code and – importantly – being read as a plaintext data file by the script, not executed or loaded as Python. The first and the last line only exist to create a syntactically valid Python file and are skipped when parsed. All other lines represent one frame. There is no representation of frame rates, the frame rate for replay is set in pico/main.py and should, but is not forced to, match the frame rate of the video. Within one line the pixels of the frame are concatenated by | and are represented by comma-seperated 0-255 int RGB values. The pixels are stored in their wiring order as defined in desktop/main.py's PIXEL_COORDINATES.

I'm seeing artifacts in the LEDs!

Things to consider:

  • Are all LEDs properly connected to ground?
  • Is the voltage at reasonable levels across the LEDs in question? Consider feeding your input voltage into your LEDs
    physically at multiple points.
  • Check if the artifacts are in your input video by replaying it frame by frame (use VLC and hit E to advance one frame at a time)