Hacker Lights

Inspiration

Who doesn't like blinkenlights? We wanted to build the "ultimate" LED lighting system - one that supersedes the capabilities of anything else on the market today, but is simple enough for anyone to use. At RamHacks, we took our homemade HackerLights control board, and created C++ and Network APIs for it, and then created a pair of demos showcasing the flexibility of our system when controlled via API.

Finally, we wanted to make an release-quality API so that we can open-source it after this event to share with the world!

What it does

The open-source HackerLights API has several core functions:

• Set All LEDs to a color
• Set all LEDs individually
• Play a prerecorded pattern
• Pause, Play, and adjust the playhead position

This can be done either over a network, or via a local serial connection. The core feature of the HackerLights controller is full-motion, full-color light patterns. Patterns can be of unlimited length, and are stored uncompressed and run at 30 frames per second.## How I built it

Challenges I ran into

We primarily used C and C++ programming which we are comfortable with, but ran into problems such as how you get around circular dependency errors.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

No magic smoke.

What I learned

During Ram Hacks, we learned how to build and and debug an API from scratch and the various tools available to programs to simplify such design.

What's next for Hacker Lights

The next step for Hacker Lights is to create more examples and tutorials on using the new Hacker Lights API. By creating more examples and documentation for the new API, we will be able to build and improve on the design we came up with this Hackathon.

Built With

• c-and-c++
• qt-creator-ide