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Halloween Controller RPi - Control your Halloween lights, triggers, props, sounds.

4475 Views 18 Replies 8 Participants Last post by  mobeye
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Hi All,

In the past i've designed and built my own Controllers but it's reached its limits, so I'm currently developing a software that makes use of the Raspberry Pi 2 capabilities to control RELAYS, INPUTS, SOUNDS and HIGH POWER outputs.

I would love to get some feedback from people here on the features you would like to see, it's almost in a usable state, pending some features i still need to implement, although i'm the only one using it and I would love feedback/suggestions.

If anyone want's to try out the BETA software and give feedback, you can PM me for details.

What you need in terms of hardware:
1 x Raspberry Pi 2
Runs the software and provides the I/O
1 x PCA9685 (~ $8 from ebay)
Provides 16 x PWM output channels
4 x MOSFET driver module (~$5/each on eBay)
To support the PCA9695 by providing HIGH DC current supplies (eg. Dimming of lights or motor control)
8 x Relay modules (~$8 on eBay)
8 x Digital Inputs

Currently, it supports the following;
- Ambient Sound, Light control
- Save/Load sequence
- Input triggered sequence (can assign as many of the available functions as you want)
On Trigger, you can set the following for each function;
- Assign start delay (Relay or PWM)
- Set the duration (Relay or PWM)
- Set PWM duty (eg Light brightness) (PWM Only)
- Lighting effect (Strobe, fade, etc) (PWM Only)
- Play a sound

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For me, the features would be to be able to run the program from a computer and manage several pis remotely, and second, manage videos (play, stop, pause) remotely.

I'm currently working on my timed projections (pumpkins, witch, and window) using python with 3 pis and my mac. I'm using the subprocess method to ssh into each pi and start a video which is working ok, but having to ssh into each one every time to pipe the omxplayer command can time out or take forever so timing is not reliable. Also, I need the pumpkins to pause at the end instead of stop and that's a whole different bag of worms that requires dbuscontroller... and I'm just learning all this so I'm a bit lost. But that's the fun of programming and doing this kind of stuff for Halloween, the learning.

I'm super interested in your program. Thanks for putting it together!
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