Stranger Things Lights

This repo holds software for a project that is described in a blog post about recreating a famous scene from Stranger Things. This fork of the original repo builds on the original but aims to make it more approachable for people who are not linux or code experts.

This project makes use of the following technologies:

raspberry pi OS
the linux terminal (bash)
git
python3
flask
docker
docker-compose
ip version 4 networking
ws2811 programmable LEDs (neopixel)

This list may look daunting to newcomers, but don't worry, it's not as scary as it may look, and might just be an exciting introduction to technologies you can use far and wide!

Installation

This project involves assembling some hardware, and configuring and running some software. The blog post describing it can be found here: https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/stranger-things-lights-raspberry-pi

Hardware Prerequisites

Complete all the hardware steps shown in the original blog post. If you're unsure that you have the hardware connected right, the software does twinkle all the lights when it starts up, so once you're fairly confident that you've got the hardware done right, go ahead and move on to the software part.

Software Prerequisites

Raspberry Pi running raspios bullseye or newer. Here's a link to the 64 bit version of raspios for pi3b and pi4, and instructions on how to install raspios.
Optionally disable the desktop and enable ssh if you're going to be connecting remotely. These can be done in raspi-config 1 S5 B1, and 3 I2.
Docker installed on the raspberry pi. Instructions to do this are found in the docker/docker-install github repository.
Make sure your user has docker group access via sudo usermod -aG docker "$USER".
Reboot, then make sure docker is running and your user has the needed access by running docker info.

Project installation

Clone the repo via git clone https://github.com/danielhoherd/stranger_things_lights and then cd stranger_things_lights
Run make run. This step will download ~1GB of docker images and build two docker containers, then launch them via docker-compose. It will likely take more than a few minutes. You'll know you're done if the lights twinkle.

Using

Find the LAN ip address of your raspberry pi. There are many ways to find this. One is ip route get 4.2.2.1 | awk '{print $7}'. Another is curl -s -w '%{local_ip}\n' github.com.
Navigate to http://<pi_ip_address>:5000/ and test it out by inputting a sequence of letters like zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcba.
If everything is working, you can play with the arrangement of letters on the strand by editing worker/app.py and changing the mapping of letters to the numbered LED addresses. Any time you change this, you will have to press ctrl-c in the terminal where you ran make run and then run make run again.

TODO

Support spaces and phrases and longer input.
Improve this experience of mapping the letters to numbers. Try to make it so the server doesn't have to restart, because that takes a long time and requires juggling terminals.
Figure out why non-alpha characters are not working.
Find a way to synchronize prefs across both components. EG: char_limit has to be edited in both places, and if we could reduce that to one place that would be better.
Make a more aesthetically pleasing color picker: don't select the same color twice in a row, don't select multiple white-ish colors in a row, etc..
Have a daydream feature where when no input has happened for a period of time, the lights do slow animations.
Make a version of this that runs on an esp8266, or perhaps put just the worker on the esp8266 with a generic ws2811 web api.

danielhoherd / stranger_things_lights