Controlling RGB LED stripes using a Raspberry Pi

This project provides a server, written in in python. It can be connected by a simple TCP stream socket and controlled by command strings. We use the pigpio library to control the GPIO outputs.

• Raspberry Pi
• 3 x TIP120 power transistors for each LED strip (in case you wanna control them separately)
• RGB LED strip
• Perfboard/Breadboard or Dupont cables
• 12V power supply (Watt amount needed depends on the used LED-stripe and its length)

sources & helpful links:

• michael at mitchtech.net - Assembly
• thomas at tbideas.com - PWM
• The pigpio Library - pigpio

Before you can start using RGB-Pi you have to set it up. You can do this easily by running this command: configuration of the server:

sudo python configure.py config

First thing to do is installing pigpio by calling number 1 in the configuration script: configuration of the server:

1: install/uninstall pigpio

After installing pi-blaster you have to set the pin numbers according to the pins you connected the rgb-channels of your LEDs. This is done by the 2nd option of the configuration script:

2: configure LED-channels

The next steps are optional. You can change the server runtime constants with the 3rd number of the configuration script:

3: configure server

Setup RGB-Pi as service. So it starts on boot:

5: enable/disable autostart (root)

This value indicates the minimum value of the sum of red, green and blue channels. If a color is set with R + G + B < MIN_VALUE, rgb-pi will set black (off) as color to prevent the LEDs from blinking.

MIN_VALUE = 0.00

This is the minimum value threads wait between their processing intervals increase this value to get more cpu time for other programs decrease this value, to get smoother fading. Do not set this value lower or equal 0!!!

DELAY = 0.01

TCP port the server is listening on:

SERVER_PORT = 4321

The maximum time waited till a sending or receiving socket operation is aborted (in seconds). The value 0.0 enables the non-blocking mode for the connections. Default value: 1.0

CONNECTION_TIMEOUT = 1.0

RGB-Pi is also able to control a local or remote XBMC-service. In order to make this available you have to set the IP of the service (127.0.0.1 or localhost your Raspberry Pi itself is running XBMC) and the port the service is listening on:

1: ENABLE_XBMC_REMOTE
2: XBMC_HOST
3: XBMC_PORT

simply changing color:

python rgb.py c 1.0 0.2 0.4

starting the server:

python rgb.py server

A documentation to the communication protocol can be found here (http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/ryupold/rgb-pi/blob/master/doc/protocol.html)

The server can receive commands from third party applications, like mobile apps. To send commands to the server, a TCP stream socket has to be initialized and connected to the raspberry pi host ip. The command has to be a unicode string.

By default the server listens to port 4321, but this can be configured with python configutre.py config.

BenjaminDieter (https://github.com/BenjaminDieter)
ryupold (https://github.com/ryupold)

The MIT License (MIT)

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