A pixel control server, built in .Net/Mono
This is a general purpose server for controlling LED lighting systems (such as NeoPixels / WS2812) to be controlled over networks (using protocols such as OPC). It's inspired by FadeCandy.
(In brief: you can use this to drive NeoPixels over the network via your Raspberry Pi)
In it's first incarnation the system will support:
In future I hope this project will support multiple protocols, and multiple (pluggable) driver implementations, with probably a LDP8806 implementation next (because I have a strip of those too) and APA102's.
At the moment there's no binary distribution, so you'll have to build the source yourself. However there is a script to pull all the pre-requisites down for building on Raspbian. All you'll need up-front is git:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install git
git clone https://github.com/piers7/PiCandy.git
cd PiCandy
./pave.sh
./build.sh
./run.sh(TODO: I still need to get the nuget package restore working - the above doesn't work as is)
FadeCandy is great. However I blew up my first board, and whilst I was waiting for a replacement, libraries started to emerge to use RPi's PWM to natively achieve the same thing (more or less). If I could just swap out my FadeCandy server for another OPC implementation, but keep my Processing sketches, I figured I'd be happy. Plus one thing I don't like about FadeCandy is the 64 pixel-per-channel limit.
The .net runtime has some fantastic libraries which make writing servers like this really easy, and it's an area I'm relatively familiar with. Plus I was trying to force myself to write more F# (though this is all in C# at the moment)