We are working with strands of Adafruit WS2801 LED pixels, configured in a grid installed on ceiling tiles. For more information on basic wiring and led function, see Adafruit's tutorial.
We're using a NodeJS v0.10.5 server on a Raspberry PI Model B with a breakout kit to drive the array.
To get the hardware ready:
- Download and flash the Occidentalis v0.2 distribution to an SD card. See this page for more details on flashing the OS.
- Download and compile node.js from source. Sadly, the binary distribution in the Raspbian repository did not work for us. Follow this guide but use the latest version of node. Compiling node on a 700Mhz ARM chip takes a long time, so grab a beer.
- Wire up your lights like so.
- Create an entry in your /etc/hosts for the IP address of the Pi named
leds.dev.
- Clone this repository:
git clone git://github.com/mattolson/blinken.git - Build/install node modules:
cd driver && npm install - Start server:
sudo node index.js - Open Chrome (or other browser capable with Web Sockets support) and visit http://leds.dev:8888/
Big thanks go to Alexander Weber for writing node-pixel, upon which some of this project is based, and Russell Hay for writing node-spi, a NodeJS interface to the SPI bus.