LightCore

Real-time LED strip music visualization using Python and the ESP8266 or Raspberry Pi.

Special thanks to ❤

• Scott Lawson for the base project
• shunfu for the beat detection project

Components

The LightCore is mad up of 5 modules:

• /arduino - The Arduino code for the ESP32, needed to control the LED strip
• /light-client - Webclient to controll the render pipeline and make changes on stage
• /light-designer - Electron based GUI to design a stage and position the strips, bascily pepare everything
• /messageBroker - Websocket Server that handles most of the communication between the modules
• /connectoren -Adapters to easly integrate existing software/hardware with LightCore
• /python - Render pipeline for calculating the LED colors

QuickStart

To run this project you need to have NodeJS and Python3 installed. To get started run the two commands:

npm run init
npm start

Installing dependencies (manual)

The pip package manager can also be used to install the python dependencies.

pip install numpy pyaudio matplotlib zmq websocket-client scipy

If pip is not found try using python -m pip install instead.

Installing macOS dependencies

On macOS, python3 is required and portaudio must be used in place of pyaudio. If you don't have brew installed you can get it here: https://brew.sh

export LDFLAGS=-L/opt/homebrew/lib
export CPPFLAGS=-I/opt/homebrew/include
brew install portaudio
pip3 install numpy pyaudio matplotlib zmq websocket-client scipy

Running the visualization can be done using the command below.

python3 pipeline.py

Audio device configuration

For the Raspberry Pi, a USB audio device needs to be configured as the default audio device.

Create/edit /etc/asound.conf

sudo nano /etc/asound.conf

Set the file to the following text

pcm.!default {
    type hw
    card 1
}
ctl.!default {
    type hw
    card 1
}

Next, set the USB device to as the default device by editing /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf

sudo nano /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf

Change

defaults.ctl.card 0
defaults.pcm.card 0

To

defaults.ctl.card 1
defaults.pcm.card 1

Running this project (manual)

Install MessageBroker

cd messageBroker 
yarn 

Install Virtualization, this is only needed if you set your DEVICE to "virtual" or "espv"

cd light-designer
yarn 

Install the WebClient

cd light-client
yarn 

Run everything

cd startup-controller
yarn && yarn start

Technical Specs

Network Protocol

To have an nearly unlimited amount of Pixels we can control on one ESP, we needed to change the Protocol a little bit. It now looks like this:

<4Bytes Long>Epoch Timestamp
-> For each Pixel
    <1Byte>Address offset
    <1Byte>Address
    <3Bytes>RGB

The real Pixeladdress is calculated by i + 255 * [OFFSET]

Use an LogicLevel Shifter

I realised this is a crucial part to have an reliable data stream.

Pinning

On the ESP32 i use D4 as my data pin. This pin is directly wired to the low input of the LogicLevelShifter. It should step the data signal up to 5v. There are fore sure different ways out there to wire/build this, but since im not so much into Hardware im fine with this way :D