midi-lights

midi-lights

Choreographed Christmas Lights Controller for the Raspberry Pi

Powered by MIDI

MIDI files can be used to choreograph Christmas lights to music! midi-lights runs on a Raspberry Pi and the same hardware setup that works with LightShow Pi: a relay that toggles the power to 8 outlets. GPIO pins 0-7 are mapped to channels 1-8 of the relay.

A MIDI file contains a list of messages, each with a note, note status (on or off), and a time to wait before changing the status. A mapping of notes to lights allows the entire show to be choreographed with a keyboard.

If you don’t like MIDI, the cached command list from a midi file is stored as JSON. This file is what is sent to the remotes, and the midi file is not required for playing (only for running choreograph.py)

Usage

Create a config.json file, a sample is provided. Modify to fit your setup. Install packages from src/requirements.txt

Choreograph a song

./bin/choreograph wizards or python src/choreograph.py --song=wizards

This generates the JSON command files

Launch a node & wait for instructions

./bin/nodeup upstairs or python src/hardware_server.py --node=upstairs

Note: you will have to launch a master node server. The play process below will make a request to localhost to kick off the song

Play a choreographed song

./bin/play wizards or python src/play.py --song=wizards

MIDI Note-to-Channel mappings are defined in config.json

Turn all lights on or off

./bin/hardware on or python src/hardware.py --toggle off