We heard your requests for a starter example using the AnyPixel framework. This documentation outlines how to connect a Raspberry Pi to a single LED button for roundtrip communication.

By the end of this documentation, your Raspberry Pi with AnyPixel will control a red blinking LED and upon interaction turn the light blue. Simple and straightforward.

We hope you scale this project to make other more complex grids at home. If you do, please share!

You will need to create an LED button using these steps from Adafruit.

With one LED button, your hardware setup should look like this:

NOTE: this example is only known to work on the first generation Raspberry Pi, the libraries used for controlling the WS281x LEDs has not been confirmed to work with Pi 2 hardware.

NOTE: If you plan on scaling this example, keep in mind that you may require additional hardware - port expander(s), level shifter(s), and possibly a power supply that supplies a higher amperage (here we're using 5 volts, 2 amps).

Link for Raspbian images & instructions can be found here

wget https://nodejs.org/dist/v4.0.0/node-v4.0.0-linux-armv6l.tar.gz tar -xvf node-v4.0.0-linux-armv6l.tar.gz cd node-v4.0.0-linux-armv6l 

Take the /rpi-example directory and transfer it to your RPi. You can simply clone this repo on your RPi to get it there easily.
Run npm install in that directory. This will install the GPIO driver dependencies for the app.
Then run sudo node unit.js to start listening to the UDP packets that will be sent in the next step.

Copy and paste frontend/examples/getting-started-rpi into appserver/public/apps/ and then:

cd appserver/public/apps/getting-started-rpi npm install npm run build 

cd /backend/emulator npm run build 

Open Chrome and visit chrome://extensions and click "Load unpackaged extension", and navigate to & select the /backend/emulator folder. This should enable the extension with confirmation in Chrome as follows:

cd /backend/udp-manager npm install npm start 

cd /backend/appserver mkdir -p public/js npm install npm install anypixel npm run build npm start 

cd /backend/chromebridge npm install 

Open Chrome and visit chrome://extensions and click "Load unpackaged extension", and navigate to & select the /backend/chromebridge folder. This should enable the extension with confirmation in Chrome as follows:

When you launch ChromeBridge, you should see the "Getting Started RPi" application in the dropdown menu, with a black square that turns blue every second. When you launch the emulator, it should also show up there.

Once you confirm that the emulator is working, you can quit it. Now we will start to point messages to the Raspberry Pi.

Once you have the IP address of the RPi, change out the first unit address in backend/config/config.emulator.js, and match the port set on the RPi server (unless changed, it's set to 3001). It should look like this, but with your IP address for the first entry:

var EmulatorConfig = module.exports = { unitAddresses: [ [ {ip: '10.0.1.4', port: 3001}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3002}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3003}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3004}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3005}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3006}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3007}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3008}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3009}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3010} ], [ {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3011}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3012}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3013}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3014}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3015}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3016}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3017}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3018}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3019}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3020} ], [ {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3021}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3022}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3023}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3024}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3025}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3026}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3027}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3028}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3029}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3030} ] ], powerUnitAddresses: [ {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3031}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3032}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3033}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3034}, {ip: '127.0.0.1', port: 3035} ] }; 

NOTE: Normally, the previous step requires changing config.physical.js instead of config.emulator.js. However, there is a bug at the moment that prevents this. We are working on resolving that bug but it will work as described.

Rebuild the chromebridge by running npm run build in /backend/chromebridge, and reload the ChromeBridge app in Chrome. You should now see your LED button blink blue. When you press it, the button turns red for 1 second. You should also see a red square show up at the top left of your ChromeBridge.