rpi-led-strip-controller

A software controller for generic LED strips for the Raspberry Pi.

This software is meant to enable replacing the hardware controller and remote combo that is bundled with these strips. Hooking these up to a Raspberry Pi allows for a multitude of new possibilities:

• custom color transitions
• remote control
• integration with home automation systems

Wiring

Popoklopsi has written a great tutorial on how to connect an RGB LED strip to a Raspberry Pi.

Installation and Dependencies

At the moment, there is no automated installation process. In order to run this project, you will need in manually install the following libraries:

• pigpio
• Flask

With these in place, just run server.py which will start the server on port 5000.

Interface

The server works by accepting HTTP requests for program (which can be either a static color or a name of a particular color transition type) and speed.

Examples:

curl localhost:5000/speed/1
curl localhost:5000/program/red
curl localhost:5000/program/00FF00
curl localhost:5000/program/smooth
curl localhost:5000/?speed=1
curl localhost:5000/?program=red
curl localhost:5000/?program=00FF00
curl localhost:5000/?program=smooth
curl localhost:5000/?program=smooth?speed=10

Home Assistant Integration

One of the main motivations of this project was gaining the ability to control LED strips from a Home Assistant dashboard.

First, we define two notification services:

notify:
  - platform: rest
    name: led_program
    resource: http://rasbperrypi.lan:5000/
    method: GET
    message_param_name: "program"
  - platform: rest
    name: led_speed
    resource: http://raspberrypi.lan:5000/
    method: GET
    message_param_name: "speed"

Then, we define two user inputs that correspond to the requests that our server can process:

input_select:
  led_program:
    name: "Program"
    options:
      - 'off'
      - red
      - blue
      - green
      - white
      - purple
      - flash
      - fade
      - strobe
      - smooth

input_slider:
  led_speed:
    name: "Speed"
    icon: mdi:speedometer
    initial: 1
    min: 1
    max: 20
    step: 1

We tie the two by creating two corresponding automation triggers that will call the appropriate service when the state of our inputs changes:

automation:
  - trigger:
      platform: state
      entity_id: input_select.led__program
    action:
      service: notify.led__program
      data_template:
        message: '{{ trigger.to_state.state }}'
  - trigger:
      platform: state
      entity_id: input_slider.led__speed
    action:
      service: notify.led__speed
      data_template:
        message: '{{ trigger.to_state.state }}'

Finally, we can groups these two together in the UI by creating a group:

group:
  'LED':
    entities:
    - input_select.led_program
    - input_slider.led_speed

And we're done. Voila!