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Raspberry Pi - Control RGBW LED Strip from your browser

Controlling RGBW LED Strip lights from your browser with a Raspberry Pi Zero.

RGBW Raspberry Pi Lights

Getting Started

This project contains the tutorial files for EasyProgramming.net.

If you've followed my other tutorials, browser control should be something that is familiar to you. The requirements below should also be very familiar:

Hardware

In order to complete this project, you will need some of these hardware:

  • Raspberry Pi - can use Zero, Zero W, 2, 3, 4
  • (Optional) Wireless dongle - If you are using the basic Pi 0 v1.3. This is not necessary for the other versions of the Pi.
  • RGBW LED Strip - These normally have 5 connections, One for each color and an additional for Ground.
  • Pi Power Supply - need 5V to your Pi
  • LED Strip Power Supply - 12V power adapter passing 1-2 Amps of current will be sufficient. This should also work with a 24V LED Strip.
  • Logic Level MOSFET Transistor - I use MOSFETS for this project. They can be any logic-level transistor (most of them start with IRL - the L is for 'logic'). It just needs to be able to turn on with 5v or less of power.
  • Wiring - You need 5 wires to connect the LEDs and Ground. You can find adapters or you can use individual wires.
  • (Optional) Aluminum Extrusion - although not necessary, an aluminum extrusion will help dissipate heat as well as make your installation more sturdy.
  • (Optional) Pi Case - Something to house your Pi and Relay. You can make your own or if you want, you can just leave it as is but be careful of shorts and electric shocks!
  • (Optional) Soldering Iron - if you are comfortable, it is best to solder the lights and connections in place so they don't disconnect easily.
  • Tools - a wire cutter/stripper would be most helpful to you.

Prerequisites

The prerequisites for this tutorial is the same as the last because everything in this tutorial is the end product of what we've learned so far about the Raspberry Pi and some things we learned with JavaScript and jQuery. If you get stuck anywhere, take a look at these tutorials:

  1. Headless Raspberry Pi
  2. Previously we needed RPi.GPIO library, for this, we need pigpiod - More info at http://abyz.me.uk/rpi/pigpio/pigpiod.html
  3. Run Apache on your Pi
  4. Running a Flask App on your Pi
  5. Run Flask behind Apache
  6. Simple AJAX with jQuery/JavaScript

Installation

Follow the tutorial here to learn how to run a Flask app behind Apache: https://www.easyprogramming.net/raspberrypi/pi_flask_apache.php

As stated in the above tutorial and in the Prerequisites, here's a very quick checklist for this project:

  • Apache
  • venv (virtual environment)
  • activate-this.py inside your venv
  • Mod-WSGI More info below
  • [] pigpiod

As stated in the last point above, we need to install pigpiod:

wget abyz.me.uk/rpi/pigpio/pigpio.zip
unzip pigpio.zip
cd PIGPIO
make
sudo make install

I will also include a version of the zip in this repo as a backup.

After you install pigpiod, run it with:

sudo pigpiod

Technically, you can run this outside of venv and it'll still work, because it's running globally and our virtual environment will have access to the daemon. But we still need the library in our venv, so while activated inside your virtual environment, install pigpio with:

pip install pigpio

Now when we run our pigpio commands, we won't get an error.

Apache and WSGI - Web Server

The rgbw.wsgi file should be placed in the same directory as rgbw.py which contains your Flask controllers. Make sure the paths for activate_this.py and rgbw.py match your installation. If you rename the flask controller, you have edit the wsgi file to reflect the changes.

Take the utils/apache-led.conf configuration file and place it in the appropriate Apache/sites-available directory and enable it with with:

sudo a2ensite apache-led.conf

Feel free to use your own configuration and name it anything you want! This should be used as a template.

Once that's done, restart Apache with:

sudo service apache2 restart

If you get a WSGI error, your Pi may not have Mod-WSGI installed. Run the following and restart apache:

sudo apt install libapache2-mod-wsgi-py3 -y

Note the apache configuration enables CORS from all origins. If you don't want to enable CORS and want to handle these requests another way, remove this line in apache-led.conf:

Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"

IF you have this enable, you must enable mod_headers on your Pi with the following command for this to work:

sudo a2enmod headers

As long as you don't open your Pi to the outside world, you should be fine. You can also specify which origins are allowed to make requests.

If everything is set up correctly, the AJAX call will happen with the following url: http://{{ip_addr}}/api/kitchen?status=on

Only a status of on or off are accepted. Anything else will return a simple error message. Open up the JavaScript console for more info.

API endpoints

/api/lr?red=255&green=255&blue=255

You can pass in 4 different query string parameters of red, green, and bluewith values of 0 to 255. A value of 0 means off (or no power) and 255 means on (or full power). Different combinations will cause different colors and brightnesses. The Frontend should allow you to send these using a color picker.

These parameters are optional. If they are not sent, they will automatically be given a value of 0. For example, the following request:

/api/lr?red=255&white=150

Will return this:

{
    "blue": 0,
    "green": 0,
    "red": "255",
}

Sending no values will turn the lights off.

/api/lr/white?white&blue=255

The white lights were separated for simplicity. Since the frontend color picker only produces Red, Green, and Blue color codes, the white was left out. For simplicity, I've separated it so it can be turned on and off with a button instead. I will apply a brightness option later.

Crontab

When the Pi first boots, pigpiod is not automatically started. To ensure that it starts properly, I'd recommend entering this into your crontab. First edit crontab with this:

crontab -e

Then enter this in the file and save:

@reboot sudo pigpiod

If you don't do this, the next time your Pi reboots, pigpiod won't be running and your lights won't work until you turn it on.

Authors

  • Nazmus Nasir - Nazm.us - Owner of EasyProgramming.net

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.md file for details

Questions ?

Have questions? You can reach me through several different channels. You can ask a question in the issues forum, on EasyProgramming.net, or on the vide comments on YouTube.

Contribute

I will accept Pull requests fixing bugs or adding new features after I've vetted them. Feel free to create pull requests!