RGB matrix led display

Tinkering
1

Hi all,

I’ve created a python code to send the art of the current album playing to a RGB led display. The result is impressive. I don’t have strong coding skills, but I think this is a quite easy project!

20210804_181454_1_1

It’s all based on this post, so check this first for the hardware and to set up the screen; https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/ombwwg/my_64x64_rgb_led_matrix_album_art_display_pi_3b/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

I’ve created a Python code to get the art and track details from the web controller extension, so first you need to install this. (somebody with more skills could try to get this from the Roon API)

I’ve uploaded the code here: GitHub - kajuku87/roontomatrix

Hope you find this useful!

6 Likes
2

This is exactly what I was looking for! Thank you! I will be replicating this later in the week once everything arrives.

1 Like
3

Really keen to get this going. I have setup the hardware and managed to run both the server and client on th rPi no problem - I can send text, images to the display however i am having problems running the python code you link.

to successfully start my server i type the following from the folder that the ft-server is in:
sudo ./ft-server --led-gpio-mapping=adafruit-hat-pwm --led-slowdown-gpio=2 --led-rows=64 --led-cols=64 --led-show-refresh —led-brightness=50

I modified the line in your code to reflect this (as it didnt have = symbols in there for some reasson. The 3rd line of loadserver.py now looks like:
process = subprocess.Popen([“sudo ./ft-server --led-gpio-mapping=adafruit-hat-pwm --led-slowdown-gpio=2 --led-rows=64 --led-cols=64 --led-brightness=50”],stdout=subprocess.PIPE,stdin=subprocess.PIPE,encoding=“utf8”)

I have both python (2.7.16) and python3 (3.7.3) installed and get all sorts off errors depending upon what python i use and whether i’m running main, loadserver or getart scripts

errors relating to either ‘encoding=uft8’ or ‘file not found problems’ or if running getart problems relating to the selenium module not being seen (it is installed) or no module named ‘request’

I don’t have too much experience with Python. Can you tell me exactly what version and whether 2 or 3 is to be used. Also what dependancies do i need to install?

The error messages are not helping me and this is turning into quite an exercise.

I got the hardware and flaschen server - client going no problem

Any help really appreciate it

Thanks!!

4

I Jonathan, I used Python 3. It’s hard form me to help you from here as I’m not an expert on python either.
What I suggest you is going by parts.
I used the Thonny tool included in the raspberry OS to debug the code of the different modules. I would start with the loadserver.py. Make sure you have an image on the images subfolder and try to run the code line by line. This should help you identify if you have any dependency missing.
I hope this helps you

5

20220920_211427_1
Its pretty cool! I added 3 more screens to do a 128x128 matrix and made the backlight of the self match the dominant color of the album