blinkt: A C repository from philprobinson84

Eight super-bright RGB LED indicators, ideal for adding visual notifications to your Raspberry Pi on their own or on a pHAT stacking header.

Available from Pimoroni: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/blinkt

##Installation

Full install ( recommended ):

We've created a super-easy installation script that will install all pre-requisites and get your Blinkt! up and running in a jiffy. To run it fire up Terminal which you'll find in Menu -> Accessories -> Terminal on your Raspberry Pi desktop like so:

In the new terminal window type:

curl -sS https://get.pimoroni.com/blinkt | bash

If you choose to download examples you'll find them in /home/pi/Pimoroni/blinkt.

Library install for Python 3:

on Raspbian:

sudo apt-get install python3-blinkt

other environments:

sudo pip3 install blinkt

Library install for Python 2:

on Raspbian:

sudo apt-get install python-blinkt

other environments:

sudo pip2 install blinkt

##Usage

The two Blinkt methods you'll most commonly use are set_pixel and show. Here's a simple example:

from blinkt import set_pixel, show

set_pixel(0,255,0,0)
show()

set_pixel takes an optional fifth parameter; the brightness from 0.0 to 1.0.

set_pixel(pixel_no, red, green, blue, brightness)

You can also change the brightness with set_brightness from 0.0 to 1.0, for example:

from blinkt import set_brightness

set_brightness(0.5)
show()

##Documentation & Support

Getting started - https://learn.pimoroni.com/tutorial/sandyj/getting-started-with-blinkt
Function reference - http://docs.pimoroni.com/blinkt/
GPIO Pinout - https://pinout.xyz/pinout/blinkt
Get help - http://forums.pimoroni.com/c/support

##Examples

The examples in the examples folder should just work with Blinkt!, although you'll need to add Twitter developer access tokens and secrets in the twitter_monitor.py example. You can get these at https://dev.twitter.com/, after setting up a new application.

###HomeKit Example

Based on the Using Mote with Homekit and Siri tutorial (https://learn.pimoroni.com/tutorial/sandyj/using-mote-with-homekit-and-siri) and modified to support Blinkt by Phil Robinson (https://github.com/philprobinson84/blinkt).

Borrow the easy setup of Flask and Mote from the aforementioned guide:

curl -sS get.pimoroni.com/mote | bash

Next, run:

sudo python homekit.py

Then, open another terminal window or tab, and type the following to test that our API is working as expected.

curl -i http://127.0.0.1:5000/blinkt/api/v1.0/on

That should have just turned your blinkt on! You should also be able to do this remotely, on another machine, replacing the 127.0.0.1 part of the URL with the IP address of the machine on which your API is running. You should also be able to do this in your web browser rather than with curl in the terminal.

Try typing the following to change the colour of the blinkt LEDs to red.

curl -i http://127.0.0.1:5000/blinkt/api/v1.0/set/FF0000

Set brightness (doesn't change the colour):

curl -i http://127.0.0.1:5000/blinkt/api/v1.0/brightness/50

N.B. Homebridge, and therefore our API, uses a brightness value of 0 to 100, which is translated by homekit.py to the range 0 to 1 required by the blinkt Python library.

Now for Homebridge installation and setup.

Open a terminal, and type the following to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of Node.js:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_6.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

Before we install homebridge, we'll also need to install a couple of dependencies. Type the following to install them:

sudo apt-get install libavahi-compat-libdnssd-dev

Now, we can install homebridge itself, as well as the homebridge-better-http-rgb plugin:

sudo npm install -g --unsafe-perm homebridge
sudo npm install -g --unsafe-perm homebridge-better-http-rgb

Now that everything is installed, we have to do a couple more things to configure homebridge correctly. homebridge is configured through a .json file that must be put into the /home/pi/.homebridge/ directory. We'll create that directory now:

mkdir /home/pi/.homebridge

Now we'll copy the example JSON file over, change directory to wherever the blinkt examples reside, then:

cp homekit-sample-config.json /home/pi/.homebridge/config.json

To run everything, first we start the Python script:

sudo python homekit.py

Then in another teminal just type:

homebridge

If you're running iOS 10 or above, you can now open the Home app and the device will be shown, allowing you to change colour, brightness and other goodness. Enjoy!

####HomeKit_Multi There's also an example which configures HomeKit to address each LED separately - instructions and usage is almost identical to the HomeKit example, just look at the files examples/homekit_multi.py and examples/homekit_multi-sample-config.json.

###Extra Examples The examples in the examples/extra_examples folder are designed to work with other pHATs and HATs, so be aware of that before trying them.