Patterns for the 500 LEDs on my bedroom wall.

Usage

Installation and setup:

git clone https://github.com/milotoor/wall-patterns.git
cd wall-patterns/node
npm install

To execute a pattern, use the run script:

./utils/run.js simple_crawl

to run the pattern.

The code makes use of async-await syntax, which is supported by node v7+. You will need to have a compatible node version to run the code. If you need to update node to run the patterns, I recommend looking into nvm.

Options

Some scripts have options. To see the options for a given script, call it with the --help option.

There are two options available in every script: --host (-h) and --port (-p). By default the script will try to communicate with a FadeCandy server at ws://localhost:7890. If you are developing patterns from your own machine you will need to change the --host option (--port can probably remain the same). The grid of LEDs is controlled by a Raspberry Pi with a hostname of grid.local. So, to remotely run a pattern on the grid, you should execute

./utils/run.js random_row_or_col --host grid.local

Creating Patterns

The code comes with a number of utility methods for rapidly iterating on pattern design. The pattern lifecycle looks something like this

1. Options are declared and parsed
2. The connection to the grid is made
3. A loop function is entered, which makes updates to the pattern and then "flushes" it to the LEDs

Option parsing is done with the commander package. The connection is established by web sockets, using the ws package. Most likely you will not need to be concerned with connection management.

The loop function is the main control mechanism for patterns. The generic loop function takes the form

loop(sleep, callback, [iterations])

sleep indicates the amount of time, in ms, between loop intervals

callback is the method that will be called with each iteration. It receives a single argument: a number representing the current loop's iteration number. This function may be asynchronous, so you can do virtually anything you want inside, including sub-looping.

iterations indicates the number of times the loop ought to iterate before terminating. Defaults to -1, which will cause the loop to continue forever.