pyanoled

Piano LED visualizer based in Python 3.x. Inspired by the onlaj/Piano-LED-Visualizer project.

Table of Contents

• Hardware Setup
  • LED
  • Raspberry Pi
• Install/Run
• TODO

Hardware Setup

Setup instructions for the hardware are covered in onlaj/Piano-LED-Visualizer. It lists out all of the parts and equipment, and references a lot of other sites with useful information on how to setup and configure the hardware. Here are some of my takeaways:

LED

For a standard 88-key piano, the distance from lowest and highest key is just 4 meters. The WS2818B LEDs have enough LED density to align with every key, so 4 meters of that will be around 172 LEDs.

• It is recommended to purchase the longer-lengthed strip and cut it down to 4 meters. Soldering two shorter strips together is more tedious. Here is a good instructional video on how to do that.
• Finding vendors selling 4 meter long aluminum casing was also troublesome. Here is a vendor that offers custom-length cases and lids.
• Get a 5V power supply that draws 10A of current.

Raspberry Pi

The instructions for setting up the Raspberry Pi are pretty straight forward, but here are some issues that I ran into:

1. Installing Rasbian

   • To enable wifi: do not need to set country code value in wap_supplicant.conf if you have Raspbery Pi Zero

2. Configuring Raspbian to work with WS2128

   • To disable sound: if /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf is not found, try /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf

3. Enabling SPI

4. Configuring MIDI

   • Missing Jack module errors: sudo apt-get install libjack-dev
   • Python 3 packages: libatlas-base-dev

5. Additional packages that might be needed

   • sudo apt-get install libjpeg-dev zlib1g-dev

Install/Run

1. Setup your virtual environment

   virtualenv <path to env>
   source <path to env>/bin/activate

2. Install project from package or source

   • To install from pypi:

     # in raspberry pi, install the project from pypi
     pip3 install pyanoled

   • To install from source:

     # in raspberry pi, clone repository
     git clone <repository>
     
     # in project root directory, run setuptools
     # note: some dependencies (like numpy) can take a long time to install this way. can install those
     # dependencies through pip first before running this step
     python3 setup.py develop

3. Run project

   # console script setup as entrypoint
   pyanoled

TODO

• Persist PyanoLED app configuration changes
• Dockerize PyanoLED
• MIDI playback
• Synthesia support
• Additional color schemes and effects
• Additional configuration exposed in UI