tt_build_project

Includes all the software for the Theta Tau build project

Software team: Will Xu Esther Zhao Neha Pusarla Rick Huynh Kyle Gillaspy Heather Gan Britney Tran

How to use:

The script will run automatically upon startup of the Raspberry pi. To stop, run:

ps aux | grep python

This will pipe all the processes running in the background to grep, and search for all the ones that include python. Find the process number by finding the led.py process, and it will be the leftmost number.

To kill the process, run:

kill -kill [process number]

if that fails, run

kill -9 [process number]

Links

[https://tutorials-raspberrypi.com/how-to-control-a-raspberry-pi-ws2801-rgb-led-strip/]

Directories (update as you add things)

led: contains all the LED software

Initial configurations

pip install Adafruit-WS2801 pip install Adafruit_GPIO

1. Enable SPI using sudo raspi-config

python ws2801_example.py

To enable script on startup:

1. crontab -e
2. At the bottom, add the line: @reboot python /home/pi/path/to/ur/script &
3. This also means you can add whatever scripts you want at startup to this crontab.

Making Changes

To make a change, first create a branch with git checkout -b [branch name], do your normal Git workflow, and then push with git push origin [branch name] then make a pull request and Will will approve it.

Creating Sprites

1. Create a draw function in led/draw_led.py
2. Each character will be represented as a 10 x 8 rectangle contained in front at index start.
3. By convention, we typically want a one pixel border on each side of the character, two pixels on top, and one pixel on the bottom. This rule should only be ignored if creating multi-character sprites.
4. Create a case in led/led.py in the draw_message function. Be sure to pick a uniquely encoded, singular character.

Current Letters

• is theta = is tau <> is a rose with the stem to the left () is a rose with the stem to the right ;:| is a hammer and tongs o is a binary 0 l is a binary 1 e is epsilon ^ is delta

ac is plant mg is DNA ik is building bd is rocket fh is potion

We also have A-Z and 0-9, with . and ! as punctuation.