Circuit Cinema

Make RGB NeoPixel LEDs on Adafruit Circuit Playground Express glow in sync to host computer's monitor sprucing up your movie / game with fabulous ambient lighting.

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your CPX connected to your host machine.

If you're new to CircuitPython or CPX, start here.

Prerequisites

• Micro B USB connector. Go with the tried and true micro-B USB connector for power and/or USB communication.

• Circuit Plaground Express flashed with CircuitPython (5.3.0) - Installing CircuitPython

• This project is built in Python, so make sure Python 3.x is installed on your system. Once Python is installed, create a virtual environment in the root directory of this repo using the following command:

    $ python3 -m venv circuit-cinema-venv

Then activate this virtual environment using:

    $ source ./circuit-cinema-env/bin/activate (for Windows users this can look like workon circuit-cinema-env, see the relevant virtualenv documentation for exact usage)

Now install the dependencies using the following command:

    $ python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Installing

• After installing all the dependencies, connect CPX to computer, the board shows up as a USB drive called CIRCUITPY. The CIRCUITPY drive is where your code and the necessary libraries and files will live.

• CircuitPython looks for code.py or main.py files (in this order) and runs the contents of the file automatically when the board starts up, reloads, or when you save changes to the file.

• Next, copy and replace the contents from code.py (in this repo) with the one in CIRCUITPY drive and save.

• Now run the ./screen_reader.py (with escalated privileges or as root on *nix OS's and in circuit-cinema-env venv).

  • This will capture your screen, calculate RGB values for NeoPixels, encode them and send them via serial connection using PySerial.

  source ./circuit-cinema-venv/bin/activate
  

  python3 screen_reader.py
  

Voila, enjoy the lightgasm on CPX while you watch a movie.

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Authors

• Manan Nahata - kill-gear

• Saurabh Chaturvedi - schedutron

License

This project is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 - see the LICENSE file for details.