Xmas Lights - Continued 2022

 This year I had plans to use the ESPCAM board to expand my lights, but after much messing about and the distraction of a couple of other non-lighting  projects I could not get the ESPIXELSTICK software to work reliably in a stable configuration as a FPP remote.  I ended up at last minute swapping it out for a 4 port falcon remote.

My matrix as not happy about the amount of rain this year, and I had a number of pixels that suffered as a result, although once I got into a situation that I could climb up and replace them they had dried out and were working again. (5v bullet pixels) - need to consider in next screen build if running the string horizontally may reduce the water running down the wires and into the back of the pixels?

Interestingly the much maligned in the lights community LED strip is still working strongly after a number of years, and seems to generally survive much better in the weather as long as you don't put strain on it (mine is all cable ties to conduit)

After setting up a couple of strings of LED seed pixels for a mate using a ESP8266 and WLED, I decided to look at WLED on the ESPCAM boards.  Interestingly it works fine for the bullet pixels and the LED strip I have but with the seed pixels I get the first LED being predominantly white and a lot of flicker, have not yet worked out how to solve that so it is still on the list.   Using WLED as and FPP remote is still listed on the future features list - SDCARD support is working if you turn on the user extension, the ability to play an fseq file does not seem to be too far away.

Todo
- assess matrix
- investigate seed pixels behavior
- monitor progress on espixelstick and wled firmware.

Flash ESP32-CAM with espixelstick 4beta4

 Downloaded firmware from https://github.com/forkineye/ESPixelStick/releases.

Unzipped folder

Connected up the ESP32-CAM (not the one that came with the MB) using the MB
(the ESP32-CAM variant that came with the MB plugged straight in and programmed)

The orange jumper puts it in programming mode

java -jar ESPSFlashTool.jar

Set configuration options for wifi/hostname and board type

Upload

when the first stage completes and it says that it did a hard reset - press the reset button on the esp board and the second stage will progress (it will fail if you don't press reset)

Remove the jumper

When the programming is complete press reset and it should boot into the software. (give it some time to set up)

Next I need to work out how to turn off the bright flash LED as it is blinding.

Pixel Controllers - ESP32-CAM

 After finding some interesting open source controller layouts by Scott Hanson (https://github.com/computergeek1507) I decided to get a couple of boards made by jcbpcb and have a go at some improved controllers.

After looking through the various controller layouts I settled on one based on the ESP32-CAM board, commonly available at a good price on aliexpress.  It seems to hit a sweet spot of being about to insert an sdcard, upload sequences from xlights and have it act as a FPP Remote, while giving 4 outputs for lights.  The only thing missing is ethernet, but at the same time I am looking for something at a lower price point than the big controllers.

The next step was to purchase the components to make up the board.  Mostly straight forward but the ESP32-CAM boards became interesting after making up the first board and starting on programming an configuration.

I ran into an issue where the first board I programmed would not boot when installed in the controller board, after some debugging with jumper wires  I found that if I didn't connect one of the GND pins it booted and ran.

After a bit more playing I decided to program up another ESP32, and this one would not program using the ESP32-CAM-MB, I eventually found a work around and got it programmed.  When inserted in the controller it ran without a problem - this is when I started to look closer at the boards as their behaviour was different.

ESP32-CAM-MB (only a RST switch)

ESP32-CAM - purchased with MB

ESP32-CAM - purchased separately from same supplier

If you look closely at the two ESP32-CAM boards you may notice the pin on the top left has a different label on each board - one is GND/R and the other GND.   It appears that they have linked this pin on the board that came with the MB to the RST pin of the ESP, therefore linking it to GND causes it to constantly reset and not boot.  The other visible difference is that the column of tiny resistors near that pin has 6 components, rather than 4 on the other board.

I have also had an issue with the SDcard in the board with the reset - still need to investigate that at some point, but at the moment I am continuing to build the first controller to determine if there are any other changes I need to make. 

The nice thing about making your own controllers is you do not need to buy components that add no value for your application, such as a voltage regulator for those powering it with 12v, as I am using 5v and plugs for the outputs when I can just attach the pigtails I want to use to the board.

2021 Christmas Lights

The lights have grown, the controllers are now a Falcon F16v3 (love the Falcon, but high cost is limiting) and two esp8266 home brew controllers running Espixelstick firmware.  The show is in it own vlan, run from a Raspberry Pi running fpp.  All sequencing is done in xlights.

I am about to embark on a new phase of the christmas lights with plans to expand, improve the configuration to reduce maintenance of props and controllers.

A couple of examples of current setup are on youtube

Christmas Lights - Part 2

So the bits started to arrive, early on were the first order of WS2812B LED Strip and a 5v power supply.  So I started looking for a way to test them.

These strips had 3 wires - 5v, Ground and Data.  I needed to find a way to send data, and then it hit me - Arduino - so out of the stash I dragged and Arduino Uno.  Found some examples of how to drive the pixels with the FastLED library.  As it had been a while since last using arduino this to a little bit of effort to remember all the steps, but I got a proof of concept up and running.

Next we needed to think about mounting the LED strips on the house.  After a bit of research on auschristmaslighting.com I found that a recommended method was to cable tie the strips to conduit and then mount hte conduit on the house.  This filled in a couple of days buying/measuring/cutting and mounting it on the house.  Then taking the conduit down to mount the lights on the conduit.  Care needs to be taken to not over-tighten the cable ties as you do not want to damage the strip, also you should resist the urge to pull the strip tight along the length of the conduit as this can cause failure.
(the reading I have done since buying strip would indicate that it is less robust than strings of LED and a number of people have had many failures)

During this process I also learned to shorten strips of led and also join strings of LED.  With care you can join it pad to pad like it is from factory.

With all the LED strips joined (total of 600 LEDS) the limitations of the Uno memory with FastLED became apparent.  I flashed the code the an Arduino Mega and this problem was eliminated for now.

During this process the DMX SPI decoders arrived.  So it was time to have a play, the end result was that until I could find time to work with sequencing software and true control of the lights this was a simple answer to drive the lights when they first got up on the house.

The reading continued looking at controllers and software....

Christmas Lights - Part 1

Well like a lot of people in the past I have put up a few lights on the house during December, having shifted from a house that had no street frontage this became something I could do.  I have not done this for about 7 years. So the result is a number of strings of lights of various types (incandescent and led), strings, icicles etc that all are driven from wall warts.

A couple of years ago I saw my first sequenced light show on a local house, the idea of computer control, music synchronization etc appealed to me.  I went home did a number in internet searches, realised the cost involved and then parked the idea.

2017 - found the 101 Lighting Manual on https://auschristmaslighting.com/  did some reading.  Great document but still really hard going.

Leap forward to 2018 the 11.11 sale on aliexpress and the lower prices of rgb led strips.  Then the research started properly.  It quickly became apparent that the only way I was going to get anywhere was to buy a few samples products and have a play.

• 4x 5meters DC5V 30LED/M WS2812b led strip 30IC/M SMD5050 led, IP67 waterproof
• 5v 40A LED power supply
• USB to DMX Interface
• DMX decoder 30 channels RGB LED strip lights driver DMX 512 Dimmer no Plastic Box DC 9V-24V

Anybody that knows anything about the above will know that this is a completely useless combination of parts to do anything, I was heading in two different directions at the same time.  As I read more in the evening I came to this conclusion, as a result one day later the next purchase was.

• 5M 300Led waterproof RGB led strip light 5050 DC12V 60Leds/M
  (to use with the DMX items above)
• DC5V ws2812B rgb controller decoder board ic led strip LED SPI Converter
  (to use with the LED strips in the first purchase)

Research continued....

OCR on Fedora Linux

I just had a problem that I have not dealt with for many years, as most documents I can get quite easily in a soft copy.  The problem occurred as I was provided with a print out of a document that I have to include in a newsletter, and I do not have time to track down the email of the author.  As a result I decided to look for an OCR solution for fedora.

Of course there are a number of packages available in the standard repositories, after reading some reviews on the net I decided to try tesseract, as although it is quite choosy about the input format it generally does a high accuracy job.

yum install tesseract

I used my brother MFC-7420 to scan the document using simple scan in fedora.  The default setting I had were 150dpi for text.

I saved the file as PNG(lossless) and then used gimp to convert it to tiff.

tesseract test.png test

The result was a file test.txt - not the best conversion - a lot of errors where things like 'in' had become 'rn'.  Clearly this was because the letters were running into each other a bit.

I then re-scanned the document at 600 dpi, gimp convert to tiff and tesseract again.  WOW - what a difference.  Apart from a few issues with spacing (not a problem as I need to re-format all files to suit scribus anyway) it has just saved me quite a time typing.

Yeah, another open source package that works!

References:
http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/linux-ocr.html
http://www.mscs.dal.ca/~selinger/ocr-test/