Drive WS2812B "NeoPixel" RGB LED strips from a Raspberry Pi using Elixir!
This project was designed to make it easy to drive a string of AdaFruit NeoPixels from a Raspberry Pi using Nerves. The code would probably also work outside of Nerves with minor modifications to the Makefile, if you so desire.
Unfortunately, since the Raspberry Pi has 3.3V I/O outputs and the NeoPixels require 5V I/O input, a little piece of hardware is required. You can read more about this in my blog post about the project.
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Add it to your list of dependencies in
mix.exs
:def deps do [{:nerves_neopixel, "~> 0.3.1"}] end
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Ensure it is started before your application:
def application do [applications: [:nerves_neopixel]] end
Supervision trees and an Elixir Port
are used to maintain fault-tolerance when
interfacing with the low-level driver, which is written in C. To drive an
NeoPixel strip, you just have to configure which GPIO pin to use and how many
NeoPixels are in the strip by passing the configuration settings to
Nerves.NeoPixel.start_link
.
Once the process is started, you can call the Nerves.Neopixel.render
function
with a list of tuples representing the pixel data, along with the overall
intensity, as follows:
alias Nerves.Neopixel
ch0_config = [pin: 18, count: 3]
ch1_config = [pin: 19, count: 3]
{:ok, pid} = Neopixel.start_link(ch0_config, ch1_config)
channel = 0
intensity = 127
data = [
{255, 0, 0},
{0, 255, 0},
{0, 0, 255},
]
Neopixel.render(channel, {intensity, data})