It's christmas time and every home owner decorates his house with nervously blinking christmas trees, grazing LED reindeers standing in frontyards and houses illuminated by laser animations.
I am also one of them. But I wanted to add a pinch of IoT and scoop of art to my installation.
So my LEDs are Instagram driven: It pulls images with the hashtag
#christmas from Instagram
and uses them to light up the RGB-LEDs.
Displaying the Instagram images pixel-row by pixel-row, from top to bottom creates amazing lighting effects with pulsating colors, moving dots and fascinating effects.
And none of the passers-by would ever believe that the source of the animation is the 500x500 pixel image of a christmas tree. They just think that this lights look different than what they are used to.
The picture-URLs are scraped via a headless chrome browser (as the Instragram-API does not allow getting the URLs anymore).
A python script running on a Raspberry Pi 3 is fetching the images an preprocessing them. I resize them, add gamma correction and a gaussian blur for smoother animation and prettier colors.
Using the approach described on the Adafruit blog I send the image row by row to a WS2812B RGB LED Strip I got on Aliexpress.
The strip is powered from both sides using a 100W, 5V power supply.
For a better effect I inserted the strip into a pump tube for pools I found here.
The whole logic is within the Python3 script animate-live.py. Use requirements.txtto
install the dependencies.
There is also a webserver which serves a live view of the currently displayed image. Use
Dockerfile to build a container. It will contact the webserver on the Raspberry Pi.