partofthething / infopanel

Show live data, animations, pictures, or anything on simple displays like RGB matrices

Infopanel

Infopanel is a tool to organize and display live information from many sources (various sensors, etc.), simple animations, images, animated gifs and anything else on various screens. In particular, it is suitable for displaying various scenes on a RGB LED Matrix.

The code for this project, as well as the issue tracker, etc. is hosted on GitHub. The full documentation is hosted at https://partofthething.com/infopanel.

What is it?

Infopanel is useful as a component in a home automation system, as a fun decoration, or even as a system monitoring display. It can show you weather, traffic conditions, jokes, basically anything you can send to it. It gets data from MQTT, which can come from all sorts of sources.

It works with only one display so far, but more will be added if desired.

Installing it

To install, first install the dependencies:

• RPI-RGB-LED-MATRIX
• RPI-RGB-LED-MATRIX python bindings

You may also need to run:

sudo apt-get install libyaml-dev python3-setuptools git python3-matplotlib

We recommend running in a virtual environment just to keep the infopanel environment from the rest of your system. If you want to do this optional step, run something like this (with a path of your choosing):

python3 -m venv /path/to/infopanel-venv
source /path/to/infopanel-venv/bin/activate

The source code is hosted on github. Grab it and install infopanel:

git clone https://github.com/partofthething/infopanel.git
cd infopanel
python3 setup.py install

Note

If you don't have git, you can just download the source directly from here.

Using it

To use it you need to set up a configuration file that describes the screen, data sources, and various sprites, scenes (collections of sprites), and modes (sets of scenes). If you have a MQTT server for command and control you can point to it. Otherwise, skip that section.

mqtt:
  broker: yourserver.com
  port: 8883
  client_id: screen
  keepalive: 60
  username: user
  password: pass
  certificate: /etc/ssl/certs/DST_Root_CA_X3.pem
  topic: house/screen/#

RGBMatrix:
  led-rows: 32
  led-chain: 2
  led-parallel: 1
  led-pwm-bits: 11
  led-brightness: 100
  led-gpio-mapping: adafruit-hat-pwm
  led-scan-mode: 1
  led-pwm-lsb-nanoseconds: 130
  led-show-refresh: false
  led-slowdown-gpio: 0
  led-no-hardware-pulse: false

sprites: 
  I90:
      type: Duration    
      label: I90
      low_val: 13.0
      high_val: 23.0
      data_label: travel_time_i90

scenes:
  flag: 
      type: Image
      path: $HOME/.infopanel/flag.ppm
  cat: 
      type: AnimatedGif
      path: $HOME/.infopanel/rainbow_cat.gif

 modes: 
  morning: 
    - giraffes:
        duration: 15
        brightness: 50
    - traffic:
        duration: 10 

global:
    font_dir: $RPI_RGB_LED_MATRIX/fonts

and run (with sudo if using RGB matrix on a Raspberry Pi):

sudo python3 -m infopanel --config ~/.infopanel/infopanel.yaml

There are a few animations built in (e.g. giraffes), but you will have lots of fun building your own sprites and animations. See tests/test_config.yaml for full examples of this.

Note

If you set brightness in the mode section, it will constantly override any adjustments you make via the MQTT controller. Leave it out for useful remote control.