About

This project provides a web interface for a hardware 16x16 LED matrix where users can quickly and easily program simple animations which are then played on the LED matrix. The goal is to provide a similar experience to Shadertoy.

Prerequisites

This software is meant to run on a Raspberry Pi with 256 WS2812 LEDs. It makes use of the rpi_ws281x library. Adafruit has a good tutorial on how to set up the hardware for these LEDs. You should be able to run the strandtest.py example as described in the tutorial before using this software. The setup assumes that you use the default configuration of the rpi_ws281x library (GPIO pin 18). If your setup is different, please edit cpp/screen/Screen.cpp.

Installation

1. Clone this repository:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/marian42/ledcpp

Note that you need to clone recursively in order to initialize the submodule.

2. Go to the ws281x library and build:

cd ledcpp/cpp/screen/rpi_ws281x
scons

Usage

From within the project root directory, run sudo python server/server.py

Use a webbrowser to go to the IP address of your Raspberry Pi and you should see the web interface.

Writing apps

There are three templates of apps you can choose from:

1. ShaderApp Inspired by fragment shaders, you implement a function that computes a color given the screen position. It is called for every pixel, every frame.
2. LoopApp You implement a method that is called once per frame and draws something on the screen.
3. App You have control over timing and you write the draw loop yourself.

Color

The color class is mutable. Its values can be changed like this:

color.r = 128;                // 0 .. 255
color.rgb(255, 255, 0);       // 0 .. 255
color.hsv(10, 255, 255);      // all values 0 .. 255
color.gray(255);              // grayscale
color.hue(0);                 // fully saturated colors
color.blend(c1, c2, progress);// progress 0 .. 1
color.set(color)              // copy existing color

Math and convenience methods

These common methods are available:

min, max, map, fract, clamp, modulo

And some more specialized ones:

float getRadius(int x, int y);        // distance from (8,8)
float getAngle(int x, int y);         // angle around the center, in radians
float map(float value, float oldLow, float oldHigh, float newLow, float newHigh);
float noise(float x, float y);        // Simplex noise
int getRing(int x, int y);            // distance from (8,8) counting concentric square rings
int getRingPosition(int x, int y);    // position of the pixel within its ring

In addition, you can use everything from cmath, write your own functions or include other libraries.

Known issues

The user written C++ code is run directly within the python server. Whenever the user code causes an error, the entire server crashes and needs to be restarted manually. That's annoying and I'm working on a solution.