PixelMaestro Studio

PixelMaestro Studio is a desktop application for controlling LED displays using the PixelMaestro library. Using PixelMaestro Studio, you can create custom LED animations, save and load presets, and control LEDs over USB.

Features

• Design rich, full color animations using interactive real-time visual editing tools
• Create time-based animations and transitions using an intuitive event scheduling system
• Upload your changes in real-time to Arduino and other devices over USB
• Save, load, and share your custom animations and configurations

Usage

Download the latest version of PixelMaestro Studio from the Releases page. The documentation explains how to use PixelMaestro Studio and its various features.

To learn more about the PixelMaestro library itself, visit the repository or check out the documentation.

Running PixelMaestro Studio

Download the latest version of PixelMaestro Studio from the releases page.

Windows

Download and run PixelMaestro_Studio.exe.

Linux

Download and run PixelMaestro_Studio:

wget https://github.com/8bitbuddhist/PixelMaestro-Studio/releases/download/{version tag}/PixelMaestro_Studio
chmod +x PixelMaestro_Studio
./PixelMaestro_Studio

Building PixelMaestro Studio

Build Requirements

• QT 5.12.3 or higher with the QtSerialPort module
• PixelMaestro core library (included as a submodule)

Build Instructions (Linux)

1. Download and install Qt along with the QtSerialPort module.

2. Clone the GitHub repository to your computer:

   • git clone https://github.com/8bitbuddhist/PixelMaestro-Studio.git

3. Navigate to the newly created repository folder and use git submodule to download the PixelMaestro core library:

   cd PixelMaestro-Studio
   git submodule update --init --recursive

4. Use qmake to build the project, or if you have Qt Creator installed, open the PixelMaestro_Studio.pro file.

   qmake PixelMaestro-Studio.pro && make qmake_all

Building Static Qt

When creating a static build of Qt 5.12.x, make might fail with a "bootstrap-private" error. See this StackOverflow answer for details

To fix this, install the following libs:

sudo apt install libxkbcommon-dev
sudo apt install '^libxcb.*-dev' libx11-xcb-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libxrender-dev libxi-dev

Then, clone the Qt Git sources and create a shadow build:

git clone https://code.qt.io/qt/qt5.git   // This should also work with Qt sources downloaded from the installer
cd qt5
mkdir build               // shadow build location
mkdir install             // where the static Qt libs will be installed
cd build
../configure -static -release -prefix ../install -opensource --confirm-license -skip webengine -nomake tests -nomake examples -nomake tools -system-xcb -recheck-all
make -j3                  // -j param specifies the number of cores
make install              // Compiled static Qt libs will be placed in the install dir

Building MXE

MXE is used to build the PixelMaestro Windows executable in Linux. git checkout changes to a commit that still supports Qt 5..

git clone https://github.com/mxe/mxe.git
cd mxe
git checkout 886f50722a943f4a20580facc2deb96d4779394f
make qtbase qtserialport

Credits

Icons based on the Monochrome icon set by Danny Allen, retrieved from Openclipart.