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A project log for FLED

An LED display showing visualizations and rendering data from a variety of TCP sources over the Open Pixel Control protocol

ben-delarreBen Delarre 03/31/2015 at 21:133 Comments

Finally, after much fiddling around, the upgrade to FLED is operational.

We're now running a grand total of 1768 LEDs, in a 52x34 configuration. The setup is a Beaglebone Black connected to an RGB-123 48 output cape. The cape level shifts the Beaglebone GPIO to 5v to communicate with the APA102 LED strips. We're running 17 strips in a 104 LED per strip configuration.

The Beaglebone Black is running two pieces of software, first a Go program which I'm currently calling GoFLED which receives color data from any number of TCP streams. This program can do a number of effects processing on the streams, such as blending them over each other, providing transitions between streams and allowing for brightness and other modifications. It also provides a web UI to visualize the streams over a web socket, and provide an interface for controlling the system.

Once the LED data has been calculated it is then sent over a TCP connection to the LEDscape opc-server using the Open Pixel Control protocol, this then sends the data out across the strips as fast as it can.

As you can see from the video above its running pretty well, however there are still many things to do. Such as integrating the LEDscape code directly into GoFLED in order to avoid unnecessary data copies, making the GoFLED protocol comply with OPC, fixing some bugs in transition effects, and enabling some additional buffering of frame data from animation sources to avoid hiccups in the WIFI connection causing nasty frame drops.

Oh and just in case you think the above video looks washed out, rest assured this is a stupidly bright LED matrix. We're running it at 30% right now in the hopes of not blinding our colleagues, but I think we're still developing a tan!

Discussions

Sophi Kravitz wrote 04/01/2015 at 00:34 point

that looks so good!

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Richard Hogben wrote 04/01/2015 at 00:30 point

Cool!

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Jasmine Brackett wrote 03/31/2015 at 21:22 point

'After much FLEDding around'

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