Using Processing to control strips

Processing
1

Hi,

I have 12 Dotstar strips from Adafruit https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-dotstar-leds?view=all and I’d like to use them as a big matrix to display animated images or animations.

Therefore my question is : how to use processing to control the 12 strips from SPI ?
instead of a standard display ?

PS: python would be the best way if possible

2

As explained on the page ( https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-dotstar-leds?view=all ), the Strip is connected to an Arduino (or Rasberry)

You program the Arduino to do its job.

You can’t do this via processing but the Arduino IDE is derived from the processing IDE

Check out https://www.arduino.cc/en/software

Then on the initial page there is a lib you have to install etc., read the page

for py: see Overview | Adafruit DotStar LEDs | Adafruit Learning System

3

Thank you Chrisir for your answer.
I actually prefer any Linux board (Raspberry, Beaglebone, oodo, wanderboard, etc) over Arduino to be able to code Python.
However, I 've already wired 3 strips to my PI so this SPI part is working, the main thing for me is to be able to make Processing talk to the Strips .
With these strips behaving independantly as slaves

1 Like
4

@dlewin,

Here is a sample sketch for using Adafruit DotStar LEDs with Processing for Pi on Raspberry Pi over hardware SPI

:)

5

thanks @glv some days ago I’ve found this, which is the most promising I know. Even if, it needs to be adapted to use different SPI slaves.

I’ve did some searches here in the forum and I still wonder : although there is a processing.py port, why not using the Adafruit Dotstar lib in python in a server ?
there is not possibility for Processing to send commands to a Python server ?