Controlling a LED Strip Using Equations
November 23rd, 2022
I have an individually addressable LED strip, which I wanted to be able to control from my phone or computer. The LED strip contains about 250 LEDs. I wanted a way to easily program them to any pattern, so I came up with an expression language that lets you write things like.
t * 2 + i
Where i and t are special variables meaning the time and the index.
Assigning this equation to the hue of the lights would produce a rainbow pattern
across the lights. (try it out). This allows me to
create all sorts of patterns on my LEDs without requiring a code update.
How it works
First, here is a broad overview of the setup. I have a WS2812b LED strip which is connected to an Arduino MKR WiFi 1010 and a power supply I also have a Raspberry Pi and a webcam. The website is hosted on Github pages. The Arduino code is written in C++ and runs an interpreter which interprets a custom language (not the raw strings). The website is written using SvelteKit, TailwindCSS, and Typescript. The website compiles the expressions into a stack-based binary language (which I describe below). The Raspberry Pi runs websockify to proxy the WebSockets.
The Language
The expression language is described on the led site, but that language compiles to a binary language that looks a bit different. The binary language is stack-based. You push values onto the stack and then functions modify the values on the stack. So for example to add two numbers, the “assembly” looks like this.
VAL 10 # Push 10 onto the stack
VAL 20 # Push 20 onto the stack
ADD # Pop two values on the stack and push the result
The result of that “program” would be 30 on the stack. This is how you would
implement (10 + 20) * 3
VAL 10 # Push 10 onto the stack - Stack: [10]
VAL 20 # Push 20 onto the stack - Stack: [10, 20]
ADD # Add the two values - Stack: [30]
VAL 3 # Push 3 onto the stack - Stack: [30, 3]
MUL # Multiply the two values - Stack: [90]
The language is very simple. It’s all unsigned 32-bit integers when its
compiled and it supports the following commands: SIN, ADD, SUB, MUL,
DIV, SIN, POW, MOD, IF, EQ, GT, LT, AND, OR, VAL, VAR_T,
VAR_I, END.
VAL is a special code that prefixes numbers. It is not a function.
The Website
The website is written in SvelteKit, TailwindCSS, and Typescript and is hosted on GitHub Pages. The website compiles the expressions to the stack language and sends them over WebSockets to the Raspberry Pi. The compiler is pretty simple, the main part that probably doesn’t work quite right is the order of operations. The live stream comes from Twitch and I use OBS to broadcast it. The expressions are immediately sent to the server as you type them in, but it always waits for one expression to send before sending another.
Note: All the code that runs this setup is on Github
Wrap up
That’s it! If you have more questions, look at the code. It’s not very nice code, but maybe you can understand it. I only spent a few days coding this, so there are probably many bugs. Overall, it is a useful project for me and might be useful (or at least interesting) to someone else.
If you have a comment - email me at comments@anb.codes
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.