Can Blinkt be used as a VU meter?

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As above really, i have fitted my blinkt on a stacking header on a phatdac.

Is there any way of interrogating the music stream and representing it on the LEDs?

Thanks

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It could indeed! The code would be very similar to the pHAT DAC/Scroll pHAT spectrum analyser tutorial below, except with a single band, or taking the highest value from the band at each time point.

Using system audio is considerably more difficult, and we still haven’t cracked that particular nut! It involves ALSA loopbacks and jumping through other such hoops.

https://learn.pimoroni.com/tutorial/sandyj/scroll-phat-spectrum-analyser

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Thanks for the reply Sandy.

That sounds great, hadn’t thought of just using the highest values, had only thought of an overall meter.

Though ran into a hurdle from the off, running the install script bombs out with the below output. I tried to switch to the mopidy user and run it though with it needing root, i don’t know the password for that user, haven’t used that one yet, tried the usuals, musicbox, raspberry and root.

curl -sS get.pimoroni.com/scrollphat | bash

Ah, scratch that, created a “pi” user and added it to the sudoers and ran the script, didn’t fall down this time, could have edited this to delete the screen shot, thought it better to show my working. (even though i’ve got various pi’s for some time now i’m still a relative n00b to linux and pythoning.

It’s installed now and i’ve created the spectrum analyser program, so i’ll test that later when i get home, when i can see the lights themselves (ssh’ing at the moment from the office).

Will report my failings findings.

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Yee! Brilliant! Let us know how you get on. :-)