Building The OhSillyScope

April 7, 2023 by Al Williams 6 Comments

If you have a Raspberry Pi connected to an LED matrix, you might think about creating a simple oscilloscope. Of course, the Pi isn’t really well-suited for that and neither is an LED matrix, so [Thomas McDonald] decided to create the OhSillyScope, instead.

The device isn’t very practical, but it does add some flash to live music performances or it makes a cool music visualizer. The matrix is only 64×64 so you can’t really expect it to match a proper scope. Besides that, it pulls its data from the Pi’s ALSA sound system.

You can find a video of the device on [Thomas’] Reddit post and a few additional videos on his Instagram account. Looks like a fun project and it also serves as a nice example if you need to read data from the sound card or drive that particular LED matrix.

We might have opted for PortAudio if we had written the same code, but only because it is more portable, which probably doesn’t matter here. Of course, you could also use GNURadio and some Python to drive the display. As usual, plenty of ways to solve any given problem.

LED Spectrum Visualizer Driven By Raspberry Pi

February 22, 2021 by Lewin Day 19 Comments

Back in the 1980s, spectrum displays on audio equipment were absolutely must have, and the aesthetic came to define the era. This lingered on through the 1990s, and remains a cool look even to this day. [Arduino Guy] decided to put together such a display using a Raspberry Pi and a large LED display.

The LED display in question is of the 64×64 RGB type, available from Aliexpress and other electronics suppliers online. To run the display, an Adafruit RGB Matrix Hat is used with the Raspberry Pi 3B, which makes driving the panel a cinch. The visual effect is run via a Python script, which plays a wave file and produces the spectrum graphics via a Fast Fourier Transform.

While the code isn’t able to act as a general-purpose equalizer display for any content played on the Raspberry Pi, creating such a script could be an entertaining exercise for the reader. Alternatively, the Pi could be hooked up to a microphone to run the display based on ambient room noise. In any case, we’ve seen great projects like this before, such as this laser-based display. Video after the break.

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800+ LED Wall With Diffuser Panel Is A Work Of Art

July 20, 2014 by James Hobson 21 Comments

LED Wall

What happens when you take over 800 individually addressable super bright RGB LEDs and house them in a giant diffused panel? You get awesome. That’s what you get.

[Epoch Rises] is a small electronic music and interactive technology duo who create cool interactive projects (like this wall) for their live shows and performances. They love their WS2812B LEDs.

The cool thing about this wall is that it can take any video input, it can be controlled by sound or music, an iPad, or even generate random imagery by itself. The 800 LEDs are controlled by a Teensy 3.0 using the OctoWS2811 library from Paul Stoffregen which is capable of driving over 1000 LEDs at a whopping 30FPS using just one Teensy microcontroller. It works by using Direct Memory Access to send data over serial into the Teensy’s memory and directly out to the LEDs with very little overhead — it is a Teensy after all!

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