lamkin / xled_plus

Addons to the XLED package, to create nice effects for Twinkly LED lights

XLED Plus - Addons to the XLED package, to create nice effects for Twinkly LED lights

This package relies on the XLED package, which provides a python interface to Twinkly lights.

This XLED Plus packade provides addons to XLED, for making it easier to produce various still or animated, simple or advanced, prerecorded or created in real time, effects on the lights.

Some of the features in this package may eventually make their way into the XLED package, once they fulfil the stricter requirements of quality and stability of XLED. It means that XLED Plus may contain more experimental features, features that only work on some devices, features that changes unpredictably from one day to another, or even outright bugs. On the other hand the development speed might be higher here, and if there is a bug it might be fixed quicker. As usual, all code herein are provided as-is with absolutely no guarantee of its function for any specific purpose. The code in this package is under the MIT license.

Getting started

The easiest way to get started is:

1. Make sure you have Python installed on your computer.

2. Download the XLED Plus package, either through GitHub, or by doing

pip install xled_plus

3. Make sure your Twinkly lights are on-line, i.e connected to the same WiFi as your computer.

4. Try out some of the sample effects in the "xled_plus/samples/" directory:

python -m xled_plus.samples.spectrumlight

where "spectrumlight" can be replaced by another filename in that directory minus the ".py" suffix. It should find your Twinkly lights, upload the effect, and start playing it.

5. Also, check out the discussion under the "Discussions" tab in this repository on GitHub, where the "Daily effects" thread contains comments on the samples and gives some hints on how the effects can be modified.

6. You can also try the interactive, 3D, color picker: You need first to download the "colorsphere" package

pip install colorsphere

Then you can start it with

python -m xled_plus.xled_colorpicker

which should bring up a window on your computer with a spherical color body. Hovering with the mouse over it will display the color on the lights. Grab and drag the surface to rotate the sphere. Click on it to upload the color to your lights.