For the last few years, I have helped my friends at the Post Nuclear Family Burning Man camp with the Addressable RGB LED’s on their art car.

This year is the first time I’m helping them without actually being on Playa. Today, the “deliverable” went out the door with some other friends to hopefully end up on Playa before too long. I designed it to be as plug-and-play as possible, and tried to make sure the code was clean and stable.

Now let’s talk about the tech that went into it!

I started with the Beaglebone Black. I knew it had been used for lighting projects in the past so when this project came along, I took a closer look at the platform. It was a good choice!… but it could have been a bit easier to get everything working.

The second thing I picked up was a 7” Touchscreen LCD Cape for the BBB from 4D Systems. This worked out well in the end, but it demanded a 5V 2A supply which I had to dig through some boxes to find. I swear, I hope DLink knows how to make power supplies better than they do their routers and hubs of days gone by…

The third thing I picked up was another BBB. This time it was the 4GB version. Adafruit just happened to have them in stock when I went looking.

Once I had all of that on my desk, I had another problem: the drivers weren’t fully working.

SGX Needs

I wrote up a post about this already. Once I fiddled with it enough, I just decided to stick with Elias Bakken’s (@AgentBrum) kernel build and FS image since it had a working SGX driver installed.

UI Needs

Initially, I was planning on using SDL for this project… but after seeing that Elias had already built some code using Clutter and Cogl, I decided to switch gears and work towards that.

And it was great fun! I like Clutter

LED Needs

The LED’s themselves… I kinda cheated on. I didn’t use the BBB’s IO pins to control the lights… but instead I used the libftd2xx FTDI bit bang driver to control the lights. This was left over from last year and worked great then… so hopefully it should work now.