Friend faces

Interconnected touch activated lamps

Aim of the project

This project is aimed to people with little knowledge on programming and electronics and therefore the explanaiton is as simple as possible.

The aim of this project is to create a pair of "lamps" that are interconnected through internet over wifi and that respond to the event of each other. The "lamp" will hold up to 5 capacitive sensors (touch/proximity) and will run different actions on the lamp.

• Manually activate the LED ring
• Manually deactivate the LED ring
• Change the color of the LED ring gradually, and save the resultant color.
• Send greetings. Send a "ping" message to the other lamp <- This was my main goal

Requirements

The links to the components are just a suggestion on where to get them. Internet is full of shops selling the very same components.

• Raspberry Pi Zero Wireless (Raspberry Pi Z W)
• MicroSD card for the Pi
• NeoPixel LED ring (default 12 leds)
• A free account in Pusher
• Capacitive sensor (5-pad)
• You will also need some electric cables to connect everything together.

Installation

• Install Raspbian into the Raspberry
• Set up the wifi. (I recommend using a headless installation)
• SSH into the raspberry
• Install the rpi_ws281x Library
  • sudo apt-get update
  • sudo apt-get upgrade
  • sudo apt-get install build-essential python-dev git scons swig libssl-dev libffi-dev python-pip
  • pip install pip --upgrade
  • pip install setuptools --upgrade
    • If you run into a problem saying something along this:

      File "/usr/bin/pip", line 9, in <module>
      from pip import main
      ImportError: cannot import name main"
      

      You might want to try to run this instead python -m pip install setuptools --upgrade --user
  • git clone https://github.com/jgarff/rpi_ws281x.git
  • cd rpi_ws281x
  • scons
  • cd python
  • python ./setup.py build
  • sudo python setup.py install
  • Update package needed: wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/ez_setup.py -O - | sudo python
• Install the project
  • git clone https://github.com/umbertix/friend-faces.git
  • cd friend-faces
  • sudo python setup.py install
• Config your "lamp"
  • Within the project there is file named config.ini that holds your credentials for the pusher service. You will need to update those in order to communicate, also if you decide to use any other pin setup or ring size.

How to run the script on boot

Inside the project files you'll find the launcher.sh, just create a cron that call it on the reboot and you are good to go. The command to do so are as follow:

• Make the file executable: chmod 755 launcher.sh
• Create a cron: sudo crontab -e
• Inside the cron write: @reboot sh /home/pi/friend-faces/launcher.sh