Lighting controller for Dionysus, a mutant vehicle
When we first built Dionysus in 2015, we intended to build a central computerized controller for its lighting effects, but time was not on our side. After a few years of hiatus, we brought her out of mothball and finally produced the lighting upgrade we've always wanted.
Dionysus's controlled lights consist of:
- The hexagons: Several diffused LED lights that require direct PWM control
- The chase lights: about 50 feet of WS2813 and WS2815 individually-addressable LED strips, cut up and rearranged around the vehicle
- The thrusters: Two large single-channel red LED panels in the rear.
The control hardware is:
- Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+
- Adafruit I²C PWM module (PCA9685) with a bunch of power MOSFETs hanging off it, divided into 5x RGB channels (hexagons), and 1x monochrome channel (thrusters)
- A cheap logic-level converter from Amazon
- A cheap USB audio interface from Amazon
On the software side, we're taking advantage of:
- rpi_ws281x's Python library to control the addressable lights
- Adafruit's PCA9685 Python library
- aubio for music analysis and beat detection
The software selects a random color palette and display mode for the chase lights, has some weird little routines that work with beat detection and peak volume levels, and uses it all to synchronize some interesting color displays to the vehicle's sound system. It was written in a hurry and crashes a lot, so a wrapper script restarts it when needed. But it looks great.
Hopefully we can add more info (setup, photos and video, etc.) soon!