Hello I was wondering if it is possible to have multiple Blinkt! units on one Pi?
With some creating wiring and tweaks to the library, yes, it’s just APA102 pixels with a very basic shift-register protocol that will run from any two pins you like. And the clock pin could probably be shared among all the Blinkt! so you could run 10+ simultaneously if you got creative.
The library isn’t complex- it just toggles two pins to clock out the APA102 protocol which involves 32bits per pixel (brightness/start byte, plug R, G, B bytes) and some start/end frames.
See: https://github.com/pimoroni/blinkt/blob/master/library/blinkt.py#L41-L82
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I was thinking of wiring a whole car up with police-like lighting since the LEDs in Blinkt modules are very bright at their maximum and cheap! Plus then I can program all sorts of patterns and colours :)
Just be careful lighting it up “police like”. That could potentially get you into a lot of trouble, depending on where and when you do it. ;)
I’m aware of the law and legally I’m allowed to use blue lights in the UK.
Cool, have fun then. =)
Here blue lights are not allowed. People will get pulled over if they have the blue lights lighting up their licence plate. That’s why I mentioned it.
By blue lights I meant emergency flashing ones
That wouldn’t go over very well here either. Guarantied ticket.
so it would be safe to say use the Hack3r gpio board with say 4 ribbon cables running to 4 different blinkt! boards for say a jukebox lighting or arcade cabinet lights? They would all be doing the same task so the script would be the same as running one. My main concern would be if it maybe too much draw, or would the simply get more dim or not work if too many were ran. I more then likely will only use 2-4 blinkts since thats what i have laying around and thats what the gpio on the hack3r board are accessible.
I’ve just tested with four Blinkts running on a Pi 3, with official Pi touchscreen display, all running at full brightness, with an official Raspberry Pi 2.5A power supply supplying both the Pi and display, and it ran quite happily without any undervoltage warnings. :-)
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@sandyjmacdonald any chance of sharing your code for your 4 blinkt stack (assuming you played with blinkt.py)? I have a project in mind that will involve using exactly 4 blinkts and lighting 4 sets of different LEDs, returned after 4 API calls.
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would also like this please :)
Blinkt! should be pretty simple to get up and running with multiple instances yourself- the APA102 pixels just behave like a chain of shift registers- simpler, in fact- so driving them involves just toggling two pins: data and clock.
Now, you could get canny about the pinouts and have all the clock lines of your Blinkt! paired together onto one pin- allowing a theoretical maximum of (I think) 27 Blinkt! running from the same Pi without using an IO expansion. (That number might be a little high, since the i2c pins hardware pullups may cause trouble)
Anyway, I digress- you’re only really interested in this part of the Blinkt! library:
def _write_byte(byte):
for x in range(8):
GPIO.output(DAT, byte & 0b10000000)
GPIO.output(CLK, 1)
byte <<= 1
GPIO.output(CLK, 0)
def _eof():
GPIO.output(DAT, 0)
for x in range(36):
GPIO.output(CLK, 1)
GPIO.output(CLK, 0)
def _sof():
GPIO.output(DAT, 0)
for x in range(32):
GPIO.output(CLK, 1)
GPIO.output(CLK, 0)
def show():
"""Output the buffer to Blinkt!"""
global _gpio_setup
if not _gpio_setup:
GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM)
GPIO.setwarnings(False)
GPIO.setup(DAT, GPIO.OUT)
GPIO.setup(CLK, GPIO.OUT)
atexit.register(_exit)
_gpio_setup = True
_sof()
for pixel in pixels:
r, g, b, brightness = pixel
_write_byte(0b11100000 | brightness)
_write_byte(b)
_write_byte(g)
_write_byte(r)
_eof()
Which, for the sake of sanity, we can assume the GPIO pins are already set up and express as just:
def show():
"""Output the buffer to Blinkt!"""
# First we output 32 clock pulses with DAT set to 0/LOW to reset the APA102s
# This gets them ready for the data stream
GPIO.output(DAT, 0)
for x in range(32): # Toggle the clock 32 times, easy!
GPIO.output(CLK, 1)
GPIO.output(CLK, 0)
# Loop through each pixel in the array of pixels
# Each pixel is a tuple of (r, g, b, brightness)
# Brightness is a 5bit value that's sent along with the pixel start
# Then we send Blue, Green and Red in turn
for pixel in pixels:
r, g, b, brightness = pixel
_write_byte(0b11100000 | brightness) # Add brightness (0-31) to the start indicator
_write_byte(b) # Send Blue
_write_byte(g) # Send Green
_write_byte(r) # Send Red
# Finally we output 36 clock pulses with DAT set to 0/LOW to latch the APA102s
GPIO.output(DAT, 0)
for x in range(36): # And now 36 times (don't ask!)
GPIO.output(CLK, 1)
GPIO.output(CLK, 0)
def _write_byte(byte):
# All write byte does is set each bit in the byte to the DAT pin, one at a time
# And then toggle the clock pin HIGH/LOW to clock that bit out
# We use a mask "0b10000000" to select the highest bit (APA102s are most-significant-bit first)
# Then we shift the byte left one place, so the next bit becomes the highest
#
# So if we want to send 172 (0b10101100) something like this happens:
# 0b10101100 & 0b10000000 = 1
# 0b01011000 & 0b10000000 = 0
# 0b10110000 & 0b10000000 = 1
# 0b01100000 & 0b10000000 = 0
# ... and so on
for x in range(8): # Loop through 8 bits of our bytes (0-255)
GPIO.output(DAT, byte & 0b10000000) # Set the MSB to DAT
GPIO.output(CLK, 1) # Toggle the clock HIGH
byte <<= 1 # Shift the byte left one place
GPIO.output(CLK, 0) # Toggle the clock LOW
So- challenge time :D
Armed with the breakdown above, can you write some Python code to run your 4 Blinkt! (or however many you have) from different Clock/Dat pins on your Pi? Don’t worry about sharing the clock yet. You can just duplicate, or functionize the code above to substitute CLK/DAT for the pins of each Blinkt!.
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