Rapid Riter OS

what is this?

the "Rapid Riter" is a LED display from the 1980s (the copyright on the PCB says 1985), 96 pixels wide by 38 pixels high. it's both giant and tiny.

the display is currently installed at the Recurse Center

this repo/software runs on a connected raspberry pi and goes through "shows" i.e. text, p5.js scripts, and GLSL shaders, and renders them all on the LED display

(this repo) also presents a django-based web UI so that people can add/edit shows. that is mostly a work in progress.

the rapidriter/raspberry pi are hosted + deployed + managed using disco

thanks

huge thanks to Antoine Leclair for his help in architecturing and all things async!
thanks to MaxD who retrofit the display so that it would accept frames over UDP at over 40fps!
thanks to Jesse Chen for the custom pixel font aka "bubbletea"! More info in the font's repo!
thanks to Brandon Sprague for the WASM renderer!

how to start / run locally

pre-setup

make a copy of web/.env.example into web/.env
make a copy of worker/.env.example into worker/.env

run

start django

cd web
source venv/bin/activate
./bin/serve.sh

start worker

cd worker
source venv/bin/activate
python worker.py

start a renderer, for example p5js:

cd renderers/p5
source venv/bin/activate
python p5.py

other renderers might require npm install, etc.

Running everything in Docker

Create a bridge network with docker network create rapidriter
Build and run the web server

cd web

docker build -t rapidriteros/web .

docker run \
  --rm \
  --network=rapidriter \
  --name=rrweb \
  -p 8000:8000 \
  rapidriteros/web

Build and run the worker

First, make sure you have a worker/.env that looks something like:

RENDERER_OSC_HOST=""
RENDERER_TEXT_HOST="http://rrtext:80"
RENDERER_SHADER_HOST=""
RENDERER_P5_HOST=""
RENDERER_WASM_HOST="http://rrwasm:80"

DO_NOT_SEND_TO_RITER="true"

WEB_SERVICE_HOST="http://rrweb:8000"

The rrtext, rrwasm, and rrweb refer to the other containers by their names using in-Docker networking.

cd worker

docker build -t rapidriteros/worker .

docker run \
  --rm \
  --volume .:/app \
  --network=rapidriter \
  rapidriteros/worker

Build and run (for example) the text renderer

cd renderers/text

docker build -t rapidriteros/text .

docker run \
  --rm \
  --network=rapidriter \
  --name=rrtext \
  rapidriteros/text

Add the WASM renderer for good measure

cd renderers/wasm

docker build -t rapidriteros/wasm .

docker run \
  --rm \
  --network=rapidriter \
  --name=rrwasm \
  rapidriteros/wasm

gregsadetsky / rapidriteros