The SPI Driver¶

Many small computers like the Raspberry Pi have an Serial Peripheral Interface or SPI bus, which allows the machine to directly control LEDs.

This driver controls this

Example: The driver section of a project using Serial communication

driver:
  typename: .serial
  ledtype: LPD8806
  c_order: GRB
  gamma: 2.5
  device_id: 2

Serial Driver Fields¶

ledtype: LED protocol type - see below for details
dev: Serial device address/path. If not set, the first serial device found will be used.
c_order: RGB color order - see below for details

gamma

spi_speed (default 2): SPI datarate for applicable LED types, in MHz
restart_timeout (default 3): Seconds to wait between reconfigure reboot and reconnection attempt
device_id: Device ID to connect to. If not set, connect to the first device ID found on the device
hardwareID (default '1D50:60AB'): A valid USB VID:PID (vendor id : product id) pair. The default is the VID:PID pair for the AllPixel
baudrate (default 921600): Baud rate to connect to serial device

`ledtype`¶

The Serial Driver already understands many brands and varieties of RGB LED strips out of the box. They are identified by a string called the LEDTYPE.

APA102
APA104
LPD1886
LPD8806
NEOPIXEL
P9813
SK9822
SM16716
TM1803
TM1804
TM1809
UCS1903
WS2801
WS2811
WS2811_400
WS2812
WS2812B
GENERIC # No processing

If you don’t see your brand of LED strip, just ask the mailing list. It’s very likely that it’s either a variant of one of the above, or we can figure out how to handle it.

Color Order¶

The c_order field sets the order of the color RGB components in the LED strips - which are unfortunately different between different brands.

Basic Usage¶

[TODO-API: embed or point to generated documentation for serial/driver.py]

LEDTYPE¶

The Serial Driver needs to have an LEDTYPE set to identify the LED chipset and hardware. This must be one of these values: [TODO-API: point to or embed generated documentation for ledtype.py]

shape: [61, 13]
animation:
  typename: $bpa.matrix.MathFunc
  palette: bold
  func: 8

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