Simulator for WS2801/WS2812 NeoPixel LED displays
This is an NCurses / terminal-based simulator for NeoPixel LED displays. The simulator receives a pixel data stream over a named pipe, and renders the resulting display on the console.
Ed is a master of all things crafty. He builds strange and wonderful contraptions with his bare hands, then shares the contraptions with his friends so that they can create their own artistic wonders. The LED devices Ed likes to play with are usually WS2801 or WS2812 NeoPixel LED strips / rings. You can see the controller code in his rgb_led_control project. Because it isn't always practical to carry the physical LED devices, and for testing / development purposes, it is useful to be able to simulate the displays locally. This simulator makes that possible, by emulating the serial protocol used to drive the serial strips.
bundler can be used to pull in the required dependencies:
bundle install
You may need ncurses development headers to build the required ncurses-ruby Gem. This code was tested with Ruby 2.2.0.
To run the simulator, you will first need to create a named pipe to receive the serial control codes:
mkfifo /tmp/serial.pipe
Running the simulator is then a simple matter of:
bundle exec ruby sim.rb /tmp/serial.pipe
If you are using the arduino-lights library to drive your LED strips, you can pass the path of the named pipe into the serial_port constructor to connect to the simulator rather than the serial port.
This library is maintained by @codders
Pull requests are welcome!
This code is licensed under the GNU GPLv3, a copy of which is included in this repository.
Copyright Arthur Taylor 2017