The TallyPi service runs on the Raspberry Pi Zero W and allows for remote control of NeoPixels such as the 5x10 PixelLeaf RGB Matrix, the Pimoroni Blinkt! pHat, or a Pimoroni Unicorn pHat. This requires preparing your Raspberry Pi OS image, installing the libraries from Pimoroni, some Python libraries, and the TallyPi service itself.
The easiest way to install & set up the Raspberry Pi OS is using the Raspberry Pi Imager. With that app you can install the 32-bit mini OS on the Pi Zero W and configure WiFi a the same time. You can usually be up and running in under 10 minutes with this option.
If you are using an already installed version of Raspberry Pi OS, you can set up or change wireless access for your Pi without connecting it to a keyboard or a display. When you insert the SD card into your main Windows/Linux/MacOS computer, you should see two partitions or disk mounts appear - one of them will be labelled "BOOT":
Within this boot partition we need to create a file named "wpa_supplicant.conf". Use a text editor (like Notepad or TextEdit or vim) to create a new wpa_supplicant.conf on this partition of the SD card. You can generate the contents of this file by using Steve Edson's fantastic Config Generator, or by modifying this sample wpa_supplicant.conf.
Finally, create an empty file in the same mount point simply named "ssh" - nothing needs to be inside the file. When the Raspberry Pi starts up, it should see this file and automatically enable SSH connections.
Once you have generated your configuration and saved the file to your SD card, eject both partitions from your computer and insert the SD card back into the Raspberry Pi.
After you boot your Raspberry Pi with this configuration file saved in the
BOOT partition, it should connect to your wireless network! If you haven't
changed the hostname of your Raspberry Pi, the default should be "raspberrypi".
Assuming you haven't change your Pi's name, and if your wireless access point
is also your router and DHCP server, within a few minutes you should soon be
able to SSH into your Raspberry Pi using ssh pi@raspberrypi.
There are a few steps you can take to prepare your Pi and make it last for longer use... especially for studio use.
The first thing you want to do once the Pi is connected to your network is
set a new password, set your hostname, and possibly expand your filesystem
using sudo raspi-config.
I would also recommend you set up Uncomplicated Firewall using:
sudo apt-get install ufw
sudo ufw allow ssh
sudo ufw allow 7413
sudo ufw enable
This will start a basic firewall, and open the HTTP port used by the PiTally service.
You can also reduce the wear & tear on your SD card by moving your logs
to the in-memory tmpfs filesystem and disabling swap memory. To create
mount points for logging you can modify /etc/fstab to include:
tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs size=10M,nodev,nosuid 0 0
tmpfs /var/cache/samba tmpfs size=5M,nodev,nosuid 0 0
And then modifying /etc/rsyslog.conf to point the logging targets to the
tmp filesystem. As an example, you can moving the auth logging to:
auth,authpriv.* /var/tmp/log/auth.log
You can also disable swap using:
sudo dphys-swapfile swapoff
sudo systemctl disable dphys-swapfile.service
To be safe, I also usually modify /etc/dphys-swapfile likewise to set:
CONF_SWAPSIZE=0
To install the TallyPi software, first install Python requirements from an SSH session on your Pi:
sudo apt-get install python3-bottle python3-paste
Next, use wget to get the latest package of TallyPi from the release page at https://github.com/deckerego/tally_pi/releases. For example:
wget https://github.com/deckerego/tally_pi/releases/download/0.5.7/python3-tallypi_0.5.6-1_all.deb
After downloading the package, install it using:
sudo dpkg -i python3-tallypi_0.3.1-1_all.deb
Once the software is installed, you can enable it with:
sudo systemctl enable tallypi
Then reboot your Pi for everything to kick off!
Currently there are three different light modules you can specify within the
TallyPi configuration file at /etc/tallypi.conf: the default neopixel
module that users the Adafruit Blinka libraries, the blinka module for
the Pimoroni Blinka! pHat, the unicornhat module for the Pimoroni Unicorn
pHat, and the mock module for testing. Aside from setting the correct value
for light_module in /etc/tallypi.conf, you will also need to install the
necessary libraries to drive the appropriate type of device.
If you wish to use NeoPixel hardware as the light for TallyPi, install the NeoPixel libraries on your Pi by runnning the following from an SSH session:
sudo apt-get install python3-pip
sudo pip3 install rpi_ws281x adafruit-circuitpython-neopixel
sudo python3 -m pip install --force-reinstall adafruit-blinka
After those libraries are installed, set the LED count and light module in
/etc/tallypi.conf, as in:
{
"light_module": "neopixel",
"light_led_count": 50,
"gpio_module": "rpi"
}
In this case, we are specifying 50 LEDs (as would be used in the 5x10 PixelLeaf RGB Matrix breakout board).
If you wish to use the Blinkt! pHat hardware as the light for TallyPi, install the Pimoroni Blinkt! pHat libraries on your Pi by runnning the following from an SSH session:
sudo apt-get install python3-pip
sudo apt-get install python3-blinkt
After those libraries are installed, light module in /etc/tallypi.conf as in:
{
"light_module": "blinkt",
"gpio_module": "rpi"
}
The number of LEDs are hard-coded in this instance and do not need to be configured.
If you wish to use the Unicorn pHat hardware as the light for TallyPi, install the Pimoroni Unicorn pHat libraries on your Pi by runnning the following from an SSH session:
sudo apt-get install python3-pip python3-dev
sudo pip3 install unicornhat
After those libraries are installed, light module in /etc/tallypi.conf as in:
{
"light_module": "unicornhat",
"gpio_module": "rpi"
}
The number of LEDs are hard-coded in this instance and do not need to be configured.
If you know the hostname of your Raspberry Pi, open up a web browser and
see if you can load the status URL to test it out. For example, if your
Pi is named raspberrypi, try loading the following:
http://raspberrypi:7413/status
It should reply back with:
{ "red": 0, "green": 0, "blue": 0, "brightness": 0.0 }
You can try turning your LEDs blue with:
http://raspberrypi:7413/set?color=0000FF&brightness=0.5
This should turn your LEDs blue at 50% brightness.
If you do not know what your Pi's hostname or IP address is, you can use the find_lights.sh shell script to search your network for any available TallyPi lights. If your wireless network is on the subnet 192.168.1.1/24, you could search by downloading the script and running:
find_lights.sh 192.168.1
The script will then crawl across your network, looking for an open 7413 port.
The tally lights require a consistent wireless connection to work. Following are some known issues with wireless and Raspbian with the Raspberry Pi Zero W.
Raspbian on the Raspberry Pi Zero W should disable power management on the build-in wireless network interface... but for some reason it seems to switch itself back on every so often. You can confirm this by running dmesg and finding the following lines:
[ 28.567231] brcmfmac: brcmf_cfg80211_set_power_mgmt: power save enabled
[ 30.082015] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): wlan0: link becomes ready
You can confirm if power saving is on for the default wireless module by running & reviewing:
pi@tally01:~ $ sudo iwconfig wlan0
wlan0 IEEE 802.11 ESSID:"YourWifi"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.462 GHz Access Point: FE:ED:FA:CE:BE:EF
Bit Rate=24 Mb/s Tx-Power=31 dBm
Retry short limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:on
Note the line Power Management: on. This indicates that power management is enabled for the device, even though the Raspbian kernel was supposed to have disabled that.
You can disable power management for a running system using:
sudo iw wlan0 set power_save off
Your best option to disable power management is to update Raspbian and make sure you are on the latest version - current releases should have this disabled. However, if your latest build of Raspbian still does work, you can add the following lines to /etc/rc.local:
# Don't let the default wireless interface go to sleep
iw wlan0 set power_save off
Note I've attempted to add wireless-power off to the interfaces config, but the setting doesn't seem to be properly obeyed in some Raspbian builds.
You can then reboot your tally light and confirm power management is disabled:
pi@tally01:~ $ sudo iwconfig wlan0
wlan0 IEEE 802.11 ESSID:"YourWifi"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.462 GHz Access Point: FE:ED:FA:CE:BE:EF
Bit Rate=24 Mb/s Tx-Power=31 dBm
Retry short limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off