Second Light Controller Beta

Setup

Light Strip

This project should work out of the box with any LED strip driven by the LPD6803 chipset. This is the one I use.

Power Source

You will need something to power the LED strip. I have the LED strip wired directly to the power supply on my computer. But if you are uncomfortable with this, you can use a power brick like this.

Arduino

You will also need an Arduino. The cheap knockoffs will usually work just as well as the legitimate Arduino. I am using a legitimate Arduino Uno for this project.

Wiring

The LED strip should have four terminals labeled something along the lines of Cout (Clock), Dout (Data), + (Positive), and - (Negative).

• The clock terminal gets wired to pin 13 on the Arduino Uno. (Note: it may be different for other Arduinos)
• The data terminal gets wired to pin 11 on the Arduino Uno. (See above note.)
• The positive terminal gets wired to the positive of the power source you are using. (If you are using the a power brick like the one linked above, you can plug it in and ignore this step)
• The negative terminal gets wired to a GND pin on the Arduino
  AND the negative of the power source you are using. (If you are using a power brick like the one linked above, you can plug it in and ignore the LAST part of this step)

Software

Download Arduino.zip and extract it.

Open Arduino.ino in the Arduino IDE, and upload it to the Arduino.

IMPORTANT: After the sketch is finished uploading to the Arduino, make sure you quit the Arduino IDE.

Now launch Light_Controller and it should start working! If it's not, you can mess around with some of the code such as NUM_LEDS or BAUD_RATE in Arduino.ino and Light_Controller's settings.

Additionally, you can make your own patterns by adding one to your Documents/Light Controller/Plugins/ folder where you will find examples to help you out.

If your plugin analyzes sound, it will by default analyze the sound from your default input device. In Mac, you can reroute your audio output into an input using Soundflower.

Changelog v1.5b

• Lots of bug fixes
• Error messages contain a link to a specific error
• Error messages look nicer
• Menu bar icon is visible in light and dark Mac themes
• Uncheck all plugins to turn lights off
• First run welcome screen
• Load last plugin on startup
• Automatically re-searches for Arduino if not found the first time

If you find a bug, or would like a new feature, please report it here

This is the first release. It may be very buggy.

This release was compiled with Processing 2.2.1 (as later versions do not work for this project). The application has only been tested in Mac OS X 10.10.3.

Mac
In Mac, I made a mistake and included a space in the application name (Light Controller.app). There is a bug in getting file paths with spaces in them, so you will need to rename the app to Light_Controller.app. Sorry about this.

The Light-Controller-Mac-Java-Included version contains Java built in, so if you do not have Java installed in Mac, you should use this.

See README for instructions.