nightfire

nightfire is an audio to light project. The goal is to create a tool that allows for expressive visualization of sound, combining user input and automatic audio processing. This is the repository containing the code, an overview of features and demos can be found at nightfire.io.

Structure

This project is developed in rust, and contains 5 crates (organized in workspaces).

nighfire: The nightfire crate contains the core code for audio processing and light modeling.

nf_lichtspiel: Uses the nightfire crate and contains code to handle pi-blaster (interfacing with the LEDs) and HID handling (PS controller). It also contains the code to interact with jackd, to read out microphone inputs.

rest: mixxx_data contains a tool to extract features from songs from the Mixxx DJ software. beat_trainer contains some python code to inspect said data and some experimental neural networks trained on them. bpm_tapper contains a small tool to tap BPM along to a song and visualize them.

confs: contains some sample configuration files to use for running the nightfire binary.

Building and Installing

The main binary is built with:

cargo build --bin nightfire

Which compiles the full LED/Sound/Controller handling component.

Builing for arm

Cross-compilation for arm uses cross, which builds armhf binaries in docker container. This also requires that docker is installed, and the build image is build with

docker build -t nightfire-build-armhf:latest .

Then, the binary for nightfire can be built as such:

cross build --release --target armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf --bin nightfire

The file is output in target/armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf/release/nightfire.

Raspberry Pi Setup

These things need to be installed on the Raspberry Pi.

• pi-blaster: Is needed to set the pins, controlling the LEDs. pi-blaster can be found on github
• libjack0: This dependency is required because nightfire is compiled with jack support. You don't actually need to install jack if you don't want to do audio processing, but the library still needs to be there. Can be installed with sudo apt install libjack0.

The binary and config file (conf.yaml) needs to be in /opt/nightfire.

systemd

put the following in /etc/systemd/system/nightfire.service:

[Unit]
Description=The Nightfire light server
After=pi-blaster.service
Requires=pi-blaster.service

[Service]
Type=simple
Environment=RUST_BACKTRACE=1
WorkingDirectory=/opt/nightfire
ExecStart=/opt/nightfire/nightfire

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Configuration

The software is configurated in a conf.yaml file that should be in the working directory. The config file could look like this:

audio-in: system:capture_1
pi-blaster: /dev/pi-blaster
lights:
  Top:
    r: 14
    g: 15
    b: 18
  Bottom:
    r: 23
    g: 25
    b: 24
  Left:
    r: 17
    g: 27
    b: 22
  Right:
    r: 10
    g: 9
    b: 11

audio-in is a device:port entry that specifies which jack port to read from. It can also be set to off to disable reading audio input. Do this if jack is not setup on the device.

pi-blaster refers to the path of the pi-blaster device path.

The numbers in the lights refer to GPIO pin numbers. The number of a pin can be found here.