meeting-in-progress

LED meeting indicator

Components used -

• 8X8 WS2812B LED Matrix from AliExpress
• Raspberry Pi 4 
• Jumper wires
• 5 push switches from Amazon
• Solderless breadboard
• Soldering kit

Wiring information - I connected to the following GPIO pins.

1. 8x8 WS2812B LED Matrix

- DIN -> GPIO18
- GND and 5V can be connected to corresponding pins in the GPIO

2. Buttons

- Button 1 OUT -> GPIO 12
- Button 2 OUT -> GPIO 4
- Button 3 OUT -> GPIO 11
- Button 4 OUT -> GPIO 26
- Button 5 OUT -> GPIO 16
Each button also had GND connections made to corresponding GND pins in the GPIO

pinout - command turned out to be super useful for me to understand the GPIO pin positioning on the RPi

sudo pip3 install rpi_ws281x - pip3 for python 3 and rpi_ws281x package for programming the matrix.

Now I was ready to write a simple Python script which would light up the LEDs and change to different states using switches.

The two Python scripts I wrote are,

• ledBoardController.py
• buttonController.py

I used different messages and the understanding numbering of LEDs was important,

During the implementation phase, I used the following command to run buttonController.py script and test,

sudo python3 buttonController.py

Once everything was in place, I wanted to use the Pi in headless mode and kickoff buttonController script, so I SSH'd from my personal laptop using the following commands,

ssh [email protected] sudo python3 buttonController.py

More details available on my blog - https://s1ndhu.medium.com/the-one-with-the-raspberry-pi-3b572a9c219c