christmas-music-carousel-snap

Play a christmas music carousel from a selection or pre-selected music. Can connect to grpc-piglow snap on a raspberry pi.

Setting up

On a 16.04 Ubuntu desktop, you can install this as a snap:

snap install christmas-music-carousel --beta --devmode

Optionally, connect on your network a Raspberry PiGlow with Ubuntu Core installed on it with a PiGlow. Install the grpc-piglow snap on it:

snap install grpc-piglow --beta --devmode

Finally, run the carousel with default music selection (as root):

sudo christmas-music-carousel

Usage:

christmas-music-carousel [-options] [LIST OF MIDI FILES]

Play a music carousel and optionally sync up with lights on a Raspberry PiGlow connected on the network.

A list of midi files can be provided, and in that case, the carousel will play over them in random orders. If none is provided, a default christmas selection is chosen. If you have a PiGlow on the same network, ensure you have the grpc-piglow snap installed on it.

This programs need to be ran as root on your laptop to connect to alsa.

Available options

• brightness (integer): adjust brightness (from 1 to 255) for light up PiGlow. Warning: any value above default (30) is dazzling.
• debug: Enable debug (developer) messages

Technical notes:

This project is orchestrating multiple binaries:

• TiMidity, a software synthesizer playing MIDI files
• alsa utilities: aconnect, aplaymidi: to play midi files and connecting MIDI ports
• music-grpc-events a python program in music-grpc-events/ directory receiving MIDI events and forwarding them to the PiGlow RPI board via gRPC.
• christmas-music-carousel, a golang program in *chrismas-music-carousel directory, which orchestrates all above tools, restarting them as needed, handling the notions of required and optional components. It's using the bonjour/mDNS protocol to detect the RPI PiGlow on the network and foward those connexions info to music-grpc-events

Related projects

More information on gRPC-PiGlow can be found on https://github.com/didrocks/grpc-piglow

Developing:

You need a Golang compiler with correct GOPATH set, and a python2 vm.

You also need timidity and freepats installed on your system. Ensure you don't have timidity running as a daemon. timidity-daemon package shouldn't be installed or it will start a blocking timidity daemon locking alsa if your hw doesn't handle multiple streams:

sudo apt install --no-install-recommends timidity freepats

Ensure you created a python virtualenv for music-grpc-events:

cd music-grpc-events/
virtualenv venv
. venv/bin/active
pip install -r requirements.txt

Regenerating the gRPC protocol (python)

In your virtualenv environment for music-grpc-events, regenerate piglow_pb2.py from our protobuf protocol (the proto file is in github.com/didrocks/grpc-piglow):

pip install grpcio-tools
python -m grpc.tools.protoc -Ipath_to_grpc-piglow/proto/ --python_out=musicevents/ --grpc_python_out=musicevents/ path_to_grpc-piglow/proto/piglow.proto