A LED display for pixel art animations.
This project builds on Matt Lai's LED matrix control board (see also his blog post on the development process!) to create a display for pixel art animations.
Coupled with a companion webapp and corresponding back-end (TBD), it can be used by groups of people to share animations amongst themselves, creating a shared experience despite being physically distant.
- Blinkenlights/Blinkenlights.ino: Arduino code for the firmware
- Blinkenlights/blinkenlights.py: Crude utility to upload 16x16 PNGs to the board
- WebApp/*: proof-of-concept single-page web application that can talk to the board using the WebSerial API.
The web app is very bare-bones, still needs dealing with coordinating the input and output streams, so it lacks any ability to recover from any errors that the board may report. It also doesn't have any ability to talk to a server (which isn't in place yet anyway).
The web app code is heavily based on the webserial codelab, and the sample pixel art is based on henrysoftware's free pixel food collection.
The WebApp allows you to interact with the display from your browser. Two caveats:
- it requires a browser with WebSerial support. Chrome works, and so should Edge and Opera, but I haven't tested them.
- it won't work if you just load Webapp/index.html from the disk: WebSerial will not get access to the port unless the page has been loaded over HTTP.
If you just want to take the WebApp for a spin, the easiest way to satisfy the second requirement is to click here.
That won't work if you want to test your own local changes to the WebApp. In that case, running Python's default HTTP server in the WebApp directory will do:
cd Blinkenlights/WebApp
npm install
npm run-script build
python -m http.serverYou can now load the app at http://localhost:8000/ and get it to talk to the
board by clicking on the Connect button and selecting the approriate serial
port in the pop-up that appears.
Once connected, you use the various UI elements to display stuff in the matrix.
Copyright 2019 Google, Inc.
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