Hi. Looking to create an Audio Synced Light Projector

Introductions & Stories
1

Hi, I’m Tim. I’m a developer. My brother and his wife are expecting their first and I’m trying to win the coolest uncle game title right out of the gates. so I had this overly ambitious idea.

At a work code share session one of the developers on our team demoed a project they had been working on with Sonic Pi and I thought it was fascinating.

I wanted to create some sort of projector that would cast colored lights on a ceiling corresponding with notes in a programable song. Think a child’s mobile, meets ceiling projector, meets laser light show.

but you know… simple… :smile:

I know I’m trying to take a big bite here, but that’s kind of how I roll. I have experience with Arduino and Raspberry Pi’s and competently fluent in a couple of programming language, so the code writing portion doesn’t really intimidate me.

Wondering if anyone had worked on a similar project, or could point me in the direction of something that rings a bell. I’m super excited to work with and support this community.

Thanks!

2

Here’s the code for a recent project I did to drive the Pihut Christmas triee from Sonic Pi. (This is the new colour version)

previously I did a similar project for the monochrome version.

I hav also done several other projects on driving led displays from the Raspberry Pi, including PiBorg’s TroPI board, and a hack of the lightshowpi project to work with Sonic Pi.

Note if you want to use a Pi4, you will need to build your own Sonic Pi on it, as the current version contained on Raspbian doesn’t support MIDI or OSC.
You can of course use a Pi3 or earlier with Sonic Pi 3.0.1 with the earlier projects here.

3

Thanks @robin.newman! I’m getting cracking on this tonight.

4

@robin.newman I’ve downloaded your code for syncing the RGB Xmas tree/sonic pi but I get an error when trying to run the tree server.

IMG_20221112_204129
IMG_20221112_2041291800×4000 922 KB

I thought it was just because I didn’t have the Python osc library installed. So I installed it with sudo pip install python-osc rebooted the pi but still getting the same error. Any ideas what I’m missing?

5

try
sudo pip3 install python-osc

should work

6

Yeah just found the pip3 version from your other code for the old version of the tree and got it running. I’m just looking at the code to see if I can change it to my own song. I managed to write the 12 day of xmas in sonic pi before so going to see if I can swap it in and update the pattern.

7

Hi @TFischer.

A protocol widely used in professional lighting is DMX-512 there is a lot of hardware you can easily find, some lights already do what you want directly. But if you want more control you can use Arduino with a DMX hat and control everything by code.

Here you can download the library to control DMX with arduino.

I hope you find it useful.
Greetings.