Made for the Pimoroni Unicorn Hat HD, this program loads "slides" and switches between them while running. Each slide can run it's own logic, with the only limitation being that each iteration, it has to return a 2D Array (the resulting pixels to be displayed.)
There is also a web API (built with FastAPI) that allows remote control of 'The Screen', such as setting brightness, a specific slide, or rotation. The full list of endpoints can be found after hosting at hostname:port/docs.
A front-end UI is planned, but I have yet to decide on the technology.
In this repo, you'll find some slides I have already created:
| Game of Life | Wolframs CA |
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| PONG (plays itself) | Matrix |
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| Starfield | Demo Shader |
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| GIF Playback! (you may need to squint...) |
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- a few more examples taken from Pimoroni's GitHub repo.
Slides planned:
- Pendulum Simulation
- Snake
- Weather Forecast
- Sand/Water automata
- Perhaps 1v1 PONG via the planned Web UI.
Since the API was built using FastAPI, documentation is generated and served on the server/docs endpoint, it also provides helpful error messages when the API is called incorrectly.
Each slide is located in the /slides directory is dynamically loaded in by Yapsy, and if no errors are present, will be automatically ran and displayed at runtime. I'm using python's inter-process communication to send commands from the API server process to the process running the screen, and therefore the screen process can be run without the need for the server.
Pre-requisites: Powerful enough Raspberry Pi (currently running well on a Zero 2). A UnicornHatHD for the display.
- First, clone the repository and ensure Python >3.8 is installed.
- After this, move into 'the-screen' directory and run:
pip install -r requirements.txt - Then, you should be able to simply run ./start_server.sh and the animations should start!
To create a slide, first create a folder with the slide name. Inside that folder, then create a python file with the same name, and another file with the same name, but the extension should be '.yapsy-plugin'
The python file should include a class that inherits from slide.BaseSlide, this file defines some class attributes, along with two methods:
- init - called with width and height info
- get_pixel - For pixel shading. called when slide.use_pixels = true. This will apply a function to a pixel, given x, y, and time as t.
- get_buffer - For when you want to handle the entire matrix generation. Used in more complicated slides, such that the slide can operate on the raw matrix, and return it as numpy 2d array for display. (the format of this: [[255, 0, 0], [0, 255, 0]... for each line])