External control of Bibliopixel - another process

Old Google Group Archive
#1

Hi gang,

Love the premise of bibliopixel. New to it, but looking forward to getting cracking.

I’ve got a raspberry pi project I’m working on. What I want to do is run bibliopixel continuously, then send it messages from another app I’m building to change animations.

Think of it as an idle animation, then getting special event driven animations. So bibliopixel is a companion service to my main app.

Seems to me that it should be doable with the ‘control’ classes. Either by sending midi messages on loop back or rolling my own extension based on ‘socket’ or similar. But not a lot of documentation there, and I’m a py noob. (c# etc normally)

Any pointers? People done this sort of thing before? Example code anywhere?

Thanks

#2

Just saw the post from March 1st! I gather I might be something of an early adopter here…

···

On Wednesday, April 11, 2018 at 2:35:28 PM UTC+10, Steven Nicholson wrote:

Hi gang,

Love the premise of bibliopixel. New to it, but looking forward to getting cracking.

I’ve got a raspberry pi project I’m working on. What I want to do is run bibliopixel continuously, then send it messages from another app I’m building to change animations.

Think of it as an idle animation, then getting special event driven animations. So bibliopixel is a companion service to my main app.

Seems to me that it should be doable with the ‘control’ classes. Either by sending midi messages on loop back or rolling my own extension based on ‘socket’ or similar. But not a lot of documentation there, and I’m a py noob. (c# etc normally)

Any pointers? People done this sort of thing before? Example code anywhere?

Thanks

#3

Interesting thought there Tom, thanks for the prompt response. That latter does seem like less work from my perspective -and no python. :wink:

On a pi you’d expect a complete reload of biblio to be pretty quick? as < 100ms?

In my case the setup is probably pretty simple, probably about 300 WS2812 configured as a linear strip, and the animations would be pretty simple (and only maybe 3 seconds long).

···

On Wednesday, April 11, 2018 at 5:57:05 PM UTC+10, Tom Swirly wrote:

Control classes are just finished, as you have observed, but are so far really stable, if basically undocumented. (I’m working on documentation but I’m a week at least from “controls” which will be close to the end - however if someone were using this, I could easily change the order I did it in.)

Indeed, there are two ways to do this - one of which doesn’t use controls at all.

  • We can write a custom control that accepts messages of some type from your main app
  • You can rewrite your project file and then send a message to bp to reread its configuration and restart

That second mechanism is pretty easy, and it all works today.

On Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 6:37 AM, Steven Nicholson ste...@airbagproductions.com wrote:

Just saw the post from March 1st! I gather I might be something of an early adopter here…

On Wednesday, April 11, 2018 at 2:35:28 PM UTC+10, Steven Nicholson wrote:

Hi gang,

Love the premise of bibliopixel. New to it, but looking forward to getting cracking.

I’ve got a raspberry pi project I’m working on. What I want to do is run bibliopixel continuously, then send it messages from another app I’m building to change animations.

Think of it as an idle animation, then getting special event driven animations. So bibliopixel is a companion service to my main app.

Seems to me that it should be doable with the ‘control’ classes. Either by sending midi messages on loop back or rolling my own extension based on ‘socket’ or similar. But not a lot of documentation there, and I’m a py noob. (c# etc normally)

Any pointers? People done this sort of thing before? Example code anywhere?

Thanks

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https://tom.ritchford.com

https://tom.swirly.com

#4

Everything I’ve built on this project so far is C# (mono).

But - how about we try the soft reload first, since it’s low hanging fruit. How does that work exactly?

In any event I still have to build my electronics, setup the drivers, setup the layout, setup the animations before I can even see if the soft reload lag bothers me or not. And I need to do all of that regardless.

If it does - I can see the general design pattern you’ve used in the KeyBoard control class so worse comes to worse I can have a crack at it myself.

Not in my best interest to say this obviously; but honestly if I were you I would think ArtNet or OSC would be a higher priority than this.

Than again, a websocket implementation (rather than raw UDP comms) would be a fairly unique (and welcome) addition in this space.

If I write anything I think you can use, I’ll fling it back at you.

···

On 11 April 2018 at 18:28, Tom Swirly tom@swirly.com wrote:

Interesting question as to how long the reload would take on a Pi.

I coded the reload as a “soft reload” - in other words, it does not reload the program but just the *data. * This is precisely because reloading the program is unfortunately quite slow on the Raspberry Pi (5 seconds or so). I did some timing experiments, and I feel that it would be hard to make those 5 seconds just go away as about three of them are intrinsic to “starting up Python and loading the libraries”.

Now, even with the soft reload, we shut one project down and then start the next one up - which means that the lights do go to black for a tiny period of time and then restart. I haven’t actually tried to measure that period, but it is noticeable even on my desktop - on the other hand, I’m super-picky, so my guess it is 50-100ms, short enough that it doesn’t register as “time” even to my pickiness.,

Without some sort of brutal trickery, that tiny gap is going to be hard to get past. Now, brutal trickery isn’t out of the question - I find that artefact unaesthetic - but a little thought

If you wanted to have no gap, which honestly is better, the control mechanism will have none whatsoever. Literally one frame would be one animation, the next frame another.

Whipping up that remote control control (er, I need a better name, right? :-D) would be extremely simple for me. Basically, you’d just send JSON - just an address.

For example, if you had a collection of animations, named one, two, three, then you’d just send string messages like this containing an address

“animation.index = one”

“animation.index = three”

For more complex things you’d send a list looking like [address, value, value…] which I can code at the same time, even though you probably wouldn’t need it.

What language does your server run in?

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On Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 10:04 AM, Steven Nicholson steven@airbagproductions.com wrote:

Interesting thought there Tom, thanks for the prompt response. That latter does seem like less work from my perspective -and no python. :wink:

On a pi you’d expect a complete reload of biblio to be pretty quick? as < 100ms?

In my case the setup is probably pretty simple, probably about 300 WS2812 configured as a linear strip, and the animations would be pretty simple (and only maybe 3 seconds long).

On Wednesday, April 11, 2018 at 5:57:05 PM UTC+10, Tom Swirly wrote:

Control classes are just finished, as you have observed, but are so far really stable, if basically undocumented. (I’m working on documentation but I’m a week at least from “controls” which will be close to the end - however if someone were using this, I could easily change the order I did it in.)

Indeed, there are two ways to do this - one of which doesn’t use controls at all.

  • We can write a custom control that accepts messages of some type from your main app
  • You can rewrite your project file and then send a message to bp to reread its configuration and restart

That second mechanism is pretty easy, and it all works today.

On Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 6:37 AM, Steven Nicholson ste...@airbagproductions.com wrote:

On Wednesday, April 11, 2018 at 2:35:28 PM UTC+10, Steven Nicholson wrote:

Hi gang,

Love the premise of bibliopixel. New to it, but looking forward to getting cracking.

I’ve got a raspberry pi project I’m working on. What I want to do is run bibliopixel continuously, then send it messages from another app I’m building to change animations.

Think of it as an idle animation, then getting special event driven animations. So bibliopixel is a companion service to my main app.

Seems to me that it should be doable with the ‘control’ classes. Either by sending midi messages on loop back or rolling my own extension based on ‘socket’ or similar. But not a lot of documentation there, and I’m a py noob. (c# etc normally)

Any pointers? People done this sort of thing before? Example code anywhere?

Thanks

Just saw the post from March 1st! I gather I might be something of an early adopter here…

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/t

https://tom.ritchford.com

https://tom.swirly.com

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/t

https://tom.ritchford.com

https://tom.swirly.com

Steven Nicholson

Designer / Director

steven@AIRBAG.co

		[AIRBAG.co](http://AIRBAG.co)

		mobile: 61 408 446 978

		studio: 613 9429 7100

[104 Dover St, Cremorne

		Victoria 3121, Australia](https://maps.google.com/?q=104+Dover+St,+Cremorne+Melbourne,+Victoria+3121)


#5

Cool thanks.

For anyone else following along - bp has to be installed as administrator on windows or bp restart (and I assume the other PID dependant operations) won’t work.

···

On 12 April 2018 at 17:55, Tom Swirly tom@swirly.com wrote:

For the reload, you need to be able to call out to the bp program, like this:

bp restart

It finds the process ID of the existing animation process and sends it a signal to restart. You can experiment with it just by typing that into another terminal window.

I wasn’t even thinking a websocket implementation, though we already support websockets for our simulator. I was thinking of just blasting things down a regular http connection, just because it’s simpler on the client end… and because there’s no need for a return channel.

–

On Thu, Apr 12, 2018 at 7:00 AM, Steven Nicholson steven@airbag.co wrote:

Everything I’ve built on this project so far is C# (mono).

But - how about we try the soft reload first, since it’s low hanging fruit. How does that work exactly?

In any event I still have to build my electronics, setup the drivers, setup the layout, setup the animations before I can even see if the soft reload lag bothers me or not. And I need to do all of that regardless.

If it does - I can see the general design pattern you’ve used in the KeyBoard control class so worse comes to worse I can have a crack at it myself.

Not in my best interest to say this obviously; but honestly if I were you I would think ArtNet or OSC would be a higher priority than this.

Than again, a websocket implementation (rather than raw UDP comms) would be a fairly unique (and welcome) addition in this space.

If I write anything I think you can use, I’ll fling it back at you.

–
/t

https://tom.ritchford.com

https://tom.swirly.com

On 11 April 2018 at 18:28, Tom Swirly tom@swirly.com wrote:

Interesting question as to how long the reload would take on a Pi.

I coded the reload as a “soft reload” - in other words, it does not reload the program but just the *data. * This is precisely because reloading the program is unfortunately quite slow on the Raspberry Pi (5 seconds or so). I did some timing experiments, and I feel that it would be hard to make those 5 seconds just go away as about three of them are intrinsic to “starting up Python and loading the libraries”.

Now, even with the soft reload, we shut one project down and then start the next one up - which means that the lights do go to black for a tiny period of time and then restart. I haven’t actually tried to measure that period, but it is noticeable even on my desktop - on the other hand, I’m super-picky, so my guess it is 50-100ms, short enough that it doesn’t register as “time” even to my pickiness.,

Without some sort of brutal trickery, that tiny gap is going to be hard to get past. Now, brutal trickery isn’t out of the question - I find that artefact unaesthetic - but a little thought

If you wanted to have no gap, which honestly is better, the control mechanism will have none whatsoever. Literally one frame would be one animation, the next frame another.

Whipping up that remote control control (er, I need a better name, right? :-D) would be extremely simple for me. Basically, you’d just send JSON - just an address.

For example, if you had a collection of animations, named one, two, three, then you’d just send string messages like this containing an address

“animation.index = one”

“animation.index = three”

For more complex things you’d send a list looking like [address, value, value…] which I can code at the same time, even though you probably wouldn’t need it.

What language does your server run in?

–

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For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

–
Steven Nicholson

Designer / Director

steven@AIRBAG.co

		[AIRBAG.co](http://AIRBAG.co)

		mobile: 61 408 446 978

		studio: 613 9429 7100

[104 Dover St, Cremorne

		Victoria 3121, Australia](https://maps.google.com/?q=104+Dover+St,+Cremorne+Melbourne,+Victoria+3121)


On Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 10:04 AM, Steven Nicholson steven@airbagproductions.com wrote:

Interesting thought there Tom, thanks for the prompt response. That latter does seem like less work from my perspective -and no python. :wink:

On a pi you’d expect a complete reload of biblio to be pretty quick? as < 100ms?

In my case the setup is probably pretty simple, probably about 300 WS2812 configured as a linear strip, and the animations would be pretty simple (and only maybe 3 seconds long).

On Wednesday, April 11, 2018 at 5:57:05 PM UTC+10, Tom Swirly wrote:

Control classes are just finished, as you have observed, but are so far really stable, if basically undocumented. (I’m working on documentation but I’m a week at least from “controls” which will be close to the end - however if someone were using this, I could easily change the order I did it in.)

Indeed, there are two ways to do this - one of which doesn’t use controls at all.

  • We can write a custom control that accepts messages of some type from your main app
  • You can rewrite your project file and then send a message to bp to reread its configuration and restart

That second mechanism is pretty easy, and it all works today.

On Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 6:37 AM, Steven Nicholson ste...@airbagproductions.com wrote:

On Wednesday, April 11, 2018 at 2:35:28 PM UTC+10, Steven Nicholson wrote:

Hi gang,

Love the premise of bibliopixel. New to it, but looking forward to getting cracking.

I’ve got a raspberry pi project I’m working on. What I want to do is run bibliopixel continuously, then send it messages from another app I’m building to change animations.

Think of it as an idle animation, then getting special event driven animations. So bibliopixel is a companion service to my main app.

Seems to me that it should be doable with the ‘control’ classes. Either by sending midi messages on loop back or rolling my own extension based on ‘socket’ or similar. But not a lot of documentation there, and I’m a py noob. (c# etc normally)

Any pointers? People done this sort of thing before? Example code anywhere?

Thanks

Just saw the post from March 1st! I gather I might be something of an early adopter here…

–

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–
/t

https://tom.ritchford.com

https://tom.swirly.com

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–
/t

https://tom.ritchford.com

https://tom.swirly.com

Steven Nicholson

Designer / Director

steven@AIRBAG.co

		[AIRBAG.co](http://AIRBAG.co)

		mobile: 61 408 446 978

		studio: 613 9429 7100

[104 Dover St, Cremorne

		Victoria 3121, Australia](https://maps.google.com/?q=104+Dover+St,+Cremorne+Melbourne,+Victoria+3121)


#6

Yeah I posted that too soon. :wink:

Um yeah - I don’t think there’s anything quite like it. I figured you’d made some magic somehow. Not a thing I’ve ever tried before. Probably possible for dot net applications… but otherwise … :-/

I’m just going to fire up my vm and work there for now. :slight_smile:

···

On 12 April 2018 at 20:12, Tom Swirly tom@swirly.com wrote:

Oh, that’s really interesting.

Actually - on Windows right now, Restart won’t work at all. :smiley: I can tell you that for sure.

In fact, if you know something about this, can you tell me - if I were to send a signal on Windows to restart bp, what would that signal be?

On *nix, we use SIGHUP, which is the classic “reread your configuration files and restart” signal, but that doesn’t exist on Windows.

I have a list of the ones that MS supports, but none of them jumped out at me as “restart”

–

On Thu, Apr 12, 2018 at 12:07 PM, Steven Nicholson steven@airbag.co wrote:

Cool thanks.

For anyone else following along - bp has to be installed as administrator on windows or bp restart (and I assume the other PID dependant operations) won’t work.

–
/t

https://tom.ritchford.com

https://tom.swirly.com

On 12 April 2018 at 17:55, Tom Swirly tom@swirly.com wrote:

For the reload, you need to be able to call out to the bp program, like this:

bp restart

It finds the process ID of the existing animation process and sends it a signal to restart. You can experiment with it just by typing that into another terminal window.

I wasn’t even thinking a websocket implementation, though we already support websockets for our simulator. I was thinking of just blasting things down a regular http connection, just because it’s simpler on the client end… and because there’s no need for a return channel.

–
Steven Nicholson

Designer / Director

steven@AIRBAG.co

		[AIRBAG.co](http://AIRBAG.co)

		mobile: 61 408 446 978

		studio: 613 9429 7100

[104 Dover St, Cremorne

		Victoria 3121, Australia](https://maps.google.com/?q=104+Dover+St,+Cremorne+Melbourne,+Victoria+3121)


On Thu, Apr 12, 2018 at 7:00 AM, Steven Nicholson steven@airbag.co wrote:

Everything I’ve built on this project so far is C# (mono).

But - how about we try the soft reload first, since it’s low hanging fruit. How does that work exactly?

In any event I still have to build my electronics, setup the drivers, setup the layout, setup the animations before I can even see if the soft reload lag bothers me or not. And I need to do all of that regardless.

If it does - I can see the general design pattern you’ve used in the KeyBoard control class so worse comes to worse I can have a crack at it myself.

Not in my best interest to say this obviously; but honestly if I were you I would think ArtNet or OSC would be a higher priority than this.

Than again, a websocket implementation (rather than raw UDP comms) would be a fairly unique (and welcome) addition in this space.

If I write anything I think you can use, I’ll fling it back at you.

–
/t

https://tom.ritchford.com

https://tom.swirly.com

On 11 April 2018 at 18:28, Tom Swirly tom@swirly.com wrote:

Interesting question as to how long the reload would take on a Pi.

I coded the reload as a “soft reload” - in other words, it does not reload the program but just the *data. * This is precisely because reloading the program is unfortunately quite slow on the Raspberry Pi (5 seconds or so). I did some timing experiments, and I feel that it would be hard to make those 5 seconds just go away as about three of them are intrinsic to “starting up Python and loading the libraries”.

Now, even with the soft reload, we shut one project down and then start the next one up - which means that the lights do go to black for a tiny period of time and then restart. I haven’t actually tried to measure that period, but it is noticeable even on my desktop - on the other hand, I’m super-picky, so my guess it is 50-100ms, short enough that it doesn’t register as “time” even to my pickiness.,

Without some sort of brutal trickery, that tiny gap is going to be hard to get past. Now, brutal trickery isn’t out of the question - I find that artefact unaesthetic - but a little thought

If you wanted to have no gap, which honestly is better, the control mechanism will have none whatsoever. Literally one frame would be one animation, the next frame another.

Whipping up that remote control control (er, I need a better name, right? :-D) would be extremely simple for me. Basically, you’d just send JSON - just an address.

For example, if you had a collection of animations, named one, two, three, then you’d just send string messages like this containing an address

“animation.index = one”

“animation.index = three”

For more complex things you’d send a list looking like [address, value, value…] which I can code at the same time, even though you probably wouldn’t need it.

What language does your server run in?

–

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For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

–
Steven Nicholson

Designer / Director

steven@AIRBAG.co

		[AIRBAG.co](http://AIRBAG.co)

		mobile: 61 408 446 978

		studio: 613 9429 7100

[104 Dover St, Cremorne

		Victoria 3121, Australia](https://maps.google.com/?q=104+Dover+St,+Cremorne+Melbourne,+Victoria+3121)


On Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 10:04 AM, Steven Nicholson steven@airbagproductions.com wrote:

Interesting thought there Tom, thanks for the prompt response. That latter does seem like less work from my perspective -and no python. :wink:

On a pi you’d expect a complete reload of biblio to be pretty quick? as < 100ms?

In my case the setup is probably pretty simple, probably about 300 WS2812 configured as a linear strip, and the animations would be pretty simple (and only maybe 3 seconds long).

On Wednesday, April 11, 2018 at 5:57:05 PM UTC+10, Tom Swirly wrote:

Control classes are just finished, as you have observed, but are so far really stable, if basically undocumented. (I’m working on documentation but I’m a week at least from “controls” which will be close to the end - however if someone were using this, I could easily change the order I did it in.)

Indeed, there are two ways to do this - one of which doesn’t use controls at all.

  • We can write a custom control that accepts messages of some type from your main app
  • You can rewrite your project file and then send a message to bp to reread its configuration and restart

That second mechanism is pretty easy, and it all works today.

On Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 6:37 AM, Steven Nicholson ste...@airbagproductions.com wrote:

On Wednesday, April 11, 2018 at 2:35:28 PM UTC+10, Steven Nicholson wrote:

Hi gang,

Love the premise of bibliopixel. New to it, but looking forward to getting cracking.

I’ve got a raspberry pi project I’m working on. What I want to do is run bibliopixel continuously, then send it messages from another app I’m building to change animations.

Think of it as an idle animation, then getting special event driven animations. So bibliopixel is a companion service to my main app.

Seems to me that it should be doable with the ‘control’ classes. Either by sending midi messages on loop back or rolling my own extension based on ‘socket’ or similar. But not a lot of documentation there, and I’m a py noob. (c# etc normally)

Any pointers? People done this sort of thing before? Example code anywhere?

Thanks

Just saw the post from March 1st! I gather I might be something of an early adopter here…

–

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/t

https://tom.ritchford.com

https://tom.swirly.com

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–
/t

https://tom.ritchford.com

https://tom.swirly.com

Steven Nicholson

Designer / Director

steven@AIRBAG.co

		[AIRBAG.co](http://AIRBAG.co)

		mobile: 61 408 446 978

		studio: 613 9429 7100

[104 Dover St, Cremorne

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#7

Tom… honestly, as long as it works, I vote for just using a windows signal that you expect won’t ever be sent by anything else and use that for restart on Windows. Not our fault they don’t support 40+ year old standards!

···

On Thu, Apr 12, 2018 at 6:29 AM, Steven Nicholson steven@airbag.co wrote:

Yeah I posted that too soon. :wink:

Um yeah - I don’t think there’s anything quite like it. I figured you’d made some magic somehow. Not a thing I’ve ever tried before. Probably possible for dot net applications… but otherwise … :-/

I’m just going to fire up my vm and work there for now. :slight_smile:

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On 12 April 2018 at 20:12, Tom Swirly tom@swirly.com wrote:

Oh, that’s really interesting.

Actually - on Windows right now, Restart won’t work at all. :smiley: I can tell you that for sure.

In fact, if you know something about this, can you tell me - if I were to send a signal on Windows to restart bp, what would that signal be?

On *nix, we use SIGHUP, which is the classic “reread your configuration files and restart” signal, but that doesn’t exist on Windows.

I have a list of the ones that MS supports, but none of them jumped out at me as “restart”

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On Thu, Apr 12, 2018 at 12:07 PM, Steven Nicholson steven@airbag.co wrote:

Cool thanks.

For anyone else following along - bp has to be installed as administrator on windows or bp restart (and I assume the other PID dependant operations) won’t work.

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On 12 April 2018 at 17:55, Tom Swirly tom@swirly.com wrote:

For the reload, you need to be able to call out to the bp program, like this:

bp restart

It finds the process ID of the existing animation process and sends it a signal to restart. You can experiment with it just by typing that into another terminal window.

I wasn’t even thinking a websocket implementation, though we already support websockets for our simulator. I was thinking of just blasting things down a regular http connection, just because it’s simpler on the client end… and because there’s no need for a return channel.

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		[AIRBAG.co](http://AIRBAG.co)

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On Thu, Apr 12, 2018 at 7:00 AM, Steven Nicholson steven@airbag.co wrote:

Everything I’ve built on this project so far is C# (mono).

But - how about we try the soft reload first, since it’s low hanging fruit. How does that work exactly?

In any event I still have to build my electronics, setup the drivers, setup the layout, setup the animations before I can even see if the soft reload lag bothers me or not. And I need to do all of that regardless.

If it does - I can see the general design pattern you’ve used in the KeyBoard control class so worse comes to worse I can have a crack at it myself.

Not in my best interest to say this obviously; but honestly if I were you I would think ArtNet or OSC would be a higher priority than this.

Than again, a websocket implementation (rather than raw UDP comms) would be a fairly unique (and welcome) addition in this space.

If I write anything I think you can use, I’ll fling it back at you.

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On 11 April 2018 at 18:28, Tom Swirly tom@swirly.com wrote:

Interesting question as to how long the reload would take on a Pi.

I coded the reload as a “soft reload” - in other words, it does not reload the program but just the *data. * This is precisely because reloading the program is unfortunately quite slow on the Raspberry Pi (5 seconds or so). I did some timing experiments, and I feel that it would be hard to make those 5 seconds just go away as about three of them are intrinsic to “starting up Python and loading the libraries”.

Now, even with the soft reload, we shut one project down and then start the next one up - which means that the lights do go to black for a tiny period of time and then restart. I haven’t actually tried to measure that period, but it is noticeable even on my desktop - on the other hand, I’m super-picky, so my guess it is 50-100ms, short enough that it doesn’t register as “time” even to my pickiness.,

Without some sort of brutal trickery, that tiny gap is going to be hard to get past. Now, brutal trickery isn’t out of the question - I find that artefact unaesthetic - but a little thought

If you wanted to have no gap, which honestly is better, the control mechanism will have none whatsoever. Literally one frame would be one animation, the next frame another.

Whipping up that remote control control (er, I need a better name, right? :-D) would be extremely simple for me. Basically, you’d just send JSON - just an address.

For example, if you had a collection of animations, named one, two, three, then you’d just send string messages like this containing an address

“animation.index = one”

“animation.index = three”

For more complex things you’d send a list looking like [address, value, value…] which I can code at the same time, even though you probably wouldn’t need it.

What language does your server run in?

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On Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 10:04 AM, Steven Nicholson steven@airbagproductions.com wrote:

Interesting thought there Tom, thanks for the prompt response. That latter does seem like less work from my perspective -and no python. :wink:

On a pi you’d expect a complete reload of biblio to be pretty quick? as < 100ms?

In my case the setup is probably pretty simple, probably about 300 WS2812 configured as a linear strip, and the animations would be pretty simple (and only maybe 3 seconds long).

On Wednesday, April 11, 2018 at 5:57:05 PM UTC+10, Tom Swirly wrote:

Control classes are just finished, as you have observed, but are so far really stable, if basically undocumented. (I’m working on documentation but I’m a week at least from “controls” which will be close to the end - however if someone were using this, I could easily change the order I did it in.)

Indeed, there are two ways to do this - one of which doesn’t use controls at all.

  • We can write a custom control that accepts messages of some type from your main app
  • You can rewrite your project file and then send a message to bp to reread its configuration and restart

That second mechanism is pretty easy, and it all works today.

On Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 6:37 AM, Steven Nicholson ste...@airbagproductions.com wrote:

On Wednesday, April 11, 2018 at 2:35:28 PM UTC+10, Steven Nicholson wrote:

Hi gang,

Love the premise of bibliopixel. New to it, but looking forward to getting cracking.

I’ve got a raspberry pi project I’m working on. What I want to do is run bibliopixel continuously, then send it messages from another app I’m building to change animations.

Think of it as an idle animation, then getting special event driven animations. So bibliopixel is a companion service to my main app.

Seems to me that it should be doable with the ‘control’ classes. Either by sending midi messages on loop back or rolling my own extension based on ‘socket’ or similar. But not a lot of documentation there, and I’m a py noob. (c# etc normally)

Any pointers? People done this sort of thing before? Example code anywhere?

Thanks

Just saw the post from March 1st! I gather I might be something of an early adopter here…

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#8

Actually I did this about a year ago for a Burning Man regional project. We had an elevated glowing chapel with an led chandelier in it and a rotary phone hooked up to a raspberry pi. People could dial a number on the phone and leave a confession, or they could call another number and listen to a random confession from someone else. Lights on the inside and outside of the chapel were controlled by another raspberry-pi running bibliopixel.

After a lot of trial and error with bluetooth, not actually being a python programmer, etc, I eventually connected the two pis via ethernet. The phone controller was a ruby program, the led controller was a ruby program running a server and running a bibliopixel animation. When people interacted with the phone (picked up the headset, were recording a confession, some easter eggs, etc) I sent an HTTP command to the light controller – that killed the bibliopixel process and started a new one running a different animation. Lag wasn’t too bad actually, but I’m super grateful for the new control functionality.

Definitely a basic HTTP controller seems like it would be easy enough to write and it could run a server that would accept get requests and pass the payload to the running bibliopixel animation.

get http://bibliopixel.local?command=brightness&value=50

get http://bibliopixel.local?command=brightness_up

get http://bibliopixel.local?command=switch_animation&value=2

with the way the controls are written it seems like it would be pretty easy to register any word as a command value that does something, and for some of them also grab the value number if the command needs it.

Could even be a great basic interface for another program running on the same machine – most people know how to send an HTTP request from another program (no matter what language they are writing it in) and registering the params would be pretty straightforward.

I actually could use this for the BP project I am building right now which includes a lot of work I’m doing in ruby (cause it’s my main language) to build an interactive fortune teller – if I could just have that program make http requests to a running bibliopixel process and not even worry about whether it was on the same machine or not, that would be great and cut down on things I have to think about.

#9

hmmm, nevermind, it looks like there already /is/ some sort of API and that is what the web-ui is using…

Man it’s gonna be great when there is well organized and thorough documentation :smiley:

(I know, I know, docs are hard and new features are fun)