feram18 / now-playing

A Spotify 'Now Playing' Display for a Raspberry Pi driven RGB LED matrix board.

Now Playing

[Work In Progress] A Spotify 'Now Playing' Display for a Raspberry Pi driven RGB LED matrix board.

• Features
• Installation
  • Hardware
  • Software
  • Flags
  • Execution
  • Debug
• Sources
• License

Features

• Now Playing: Displays the current track's album cover, title, & artist over a matching background.
• User Screen: While not playing, display your username & the scannable Spotify Code to your profile.

Installation

Hardware

Materials needed:

• Raspberry Pi (Only tested on 3B+ and 4B, but should work on other models)
• Adafruit RGB Matrix HAT or Bonnet
• RGB LED matrix (128×64)

Software

Pre-requisites

• Git
• PIP
• Python 3.7+

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install git python3-pip -y

Installation

First, clone this repository. Using the --recursive flag will install the rgbmatrix binaries, which come from hzeller's rpi-rgb-led-matrix library. This library is used to render the data onto the LED matrix.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/feram18/now-playing.git
cd now-playing
chmod +x install.sh
./install.sh

Once installed, configure your Spotify credentials following these instructions.

Updating

From the now-playing directory, run the update script. The script will also take care of updating dependencies.

./update.sh

Flags

The LED matrix is configured with the flags provided by the rpi-rgb-led-matrix library. More details on these flags can be found in the library's documentation.

--led-rows                Display panel rows. (Default: 64)
--led-cols                Display panel columns. (Default: 128)
--led-multiplexing        Multiplexing type: 0 = direct; 1 = strip; 2 = checker; 3 = spiral; 4 = Z-strip; 5 = ZnMirrorZStripe; 6 = coreman; 7 = Kaler2Scan; 8 = ZStripeUneven. (Default: 0)
--led-row-addr-type       Addressing of rows: 0 = default; 1 = AB-addressed panels. (Default: 0)
--led-panel-type          Chipset of the panel. Supported panel types: FM6126A; FM6127.
--led-gpio-mapping        Name of GPIO mapping used: regular, adafruit-hat, adafruit-hat-pwm, compute-module. (Default: regular)
--led-slowdown-gpio       Slow down writing to GPIO. Needed for faster Pi's and/or slower panels. Range: 0..4. (Default: 1)
--led-chain               Number of daisy-chained boards. (Default: 1)
--led-parallel            For Plus-models or RPi2: parallel chains. 1..3. (Default: 1)
--led-pixel-mapper        Apply pixel mappers: Mirror (Horizontal) = "Mirror:H"; Mirror (Vertical) = "Mirror:V"; Rotate (Degrees) = eg. "Rotate: 90"; U-Mapper = "U-mapper"
--led-brightness          Brightness level. Range: 1..100. (Default: 100)
--led-pwm-bits            Bits used for PWM. Range 1..11. (Default: 11)
--led-show-refresh        Shows the current refresh rate of the LED panel.
--led-limit-refresh       Limit refresh rate to this frequency in Hz. Useful to keep a constant refresh rate on loaded system. 0=no limit. (Default: 0)
--led-scan-mode           Progressive or interlaced scan. 0 = Progressive, 1 = Interlaced. (Default: 1)
--led-pwm-lsb-nanosecond  Base time-unit for the on-time in the lowest significant bit in nanoseconds. (Default: 130)
--led-pwm-dither-bits     Time dithering of lower bits. (Default: 0)
--led-no-hardware-pulse   Don't use hardware pin-pulse generation.
--led-inverse             Switch if your matrix has inverse colors on.
--led-rgb-sequence        Switch if your matrix has led colors swapped. (Default: RGB)

Execution

From the now-playing directory run the command

sudo python3 main.py --led-gpio-mapping="adafruit-hat" --led-slowdown-gpio=3

Modify and include flags as needed for your particular setup. Running as root is necessary in order for the matrix to render. Privileges are dropped after initialization.

Debug

If you are experiencing issues, enable debug messages by appending the --debug flag to your execution command, logs are written to the now-playing.log file.

Sources

This project relies on the following:

• Spotipy library to access Spotify data.
• rpi-rgb-led-matrix library to make everything work with the LED matrix. It is included into this repository as a submodule.

License

GNU General Public License v3.0