This daemon is designed to control a WS2812B RGB LED strip via a Raspberry Pi. This daemon requires zero root privileges to run.
Uses rpi_ws281x and colour.
You must be controlling your pi over SPI for this, so it can run as a non-root user. Specifically, you'll probably need to modify your /boot/config.txt and /boot/cmdline.txt as outlined in rpi_ws281x's readme.
DBUS is used for passing messages from the ctl script to the daemon. If you don't have a dbus session bus (i.e. from an X session), I've included some systemd unit files.
My wiring setup is as follows:
- Single pin connector from SPI 0 (GPIO 10) to DIN on the LED Strip
- Raspi ground to ground on the LED Strip
- Positive from a power supply to the 5V power line on the strip
- Ground back into the negative on the power supply.
A 3.3V -> 5V voltage step is not required for the WS2812B, since (most) 2812B strips take 3.3-5V DIN, since DIN and power have been decoupled and no longer need to be run at the same voltage.
Build and install rpi_ws281x and colour (not strictly needed, but handy for animations). Make sure to follow the instructions for SPI as given in the rpi_ws281x repo.
Don't forget to run the python library installer in the rpi_ws281x/python/ directory!
rpi_ws281x must be from at least this commit or newer, so that rootless SPI works.
- Clone the repo.
- Install the libraries you are missing. Most definitely youll need to install the ws281x library.
- Run the
installerprogram. For basic full-install, run./installer install all.
You can specify a variety of options to the installer for where files get installed to.
To use lightctl, make sure its install dir is in your $PATH. By default, it installs to ~/.local/bin.
You must be a member of the gpio and spi group in order to run this code.
After installing the files, you should be able to just systemctl --user enable --now rgbd. You may need to tweak your config file.
See the included animation scripts for examples on how to create animations.
A big part of why I wrote this daemon is so that animations can be dynamically loaded, and for good dynamic control of my lights. If something is going to be dynamically loading and executing script files, it should not be doing that as root.
This left me with a few options:
- Run the animation scripts in a separate downgraded process, with limited shared resources. Pretty workable, but difficult to rig up animation timings.
- Disallow dynamic config loading (boo).
- Set up a root daemon we can control (less performant/communication is hard)
- Run everything as our own user.
The last option was the best, but required a decent amount of setup to get right.
If you want the script to persist beyond your session, then you will need sudo rights to set some loginctl stuff, but that's it. For all regular usage, it can just stay running as a user daemon without any need for elevated permissions, ever.
You might want to check out LED-Dashboard, a web server that runs on the pi that controls the rgbd daemon.