From the Forums: BiblioPixel: a pure Python 2 library for programming light animations

We’ve posted previously about Adam Haile’s extended Raspberry Pi library for LPD8806. Now, he’s written in with an updated library called BiblioPixel. On the Adafruit Forums he writes:

Two years ago, you posted about my extended Raspberry Pi library for the LPD8806 LED strips
(http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/10/12/extended-raspberry-pi-library-for-the-lpd8806/).
Well, I’ve been working for over a year on a completely new, rewritten
library I call BiblioPixel.

This time, I’ve gone way beyond just the LPD8806 and Raspberry Pi. BiblioPixel takes the pain out of controlling your LEDs and programming your animations. It provides a “code once, run on anything” foundation with a robust driver model, allowing control of nearly any display type, strip or matrix. For matrices built from LED strips, it automatically handles the conversion of (x,y) coordinates to strip indices. It is also orders of magnitude faster than the old library, having been written with high frame rates in mind.

On devices with SPI output, such as the Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black, strips like the LPD8806 or WS2801 can be controlled directly. Animations can be sent over a network connection to a remote device, and then output to a set of LEDs. There’s even a built-in software visualizer for displaying animations directly in a window; great for testing.

What makes this new library special is the ease of writing new animations and adding device support. Details on both are available in the GitHub wiki.

https://github.com/ManiacalLabs/BiblioPixel

Check it out here.


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