BamboozLED is a compositor for Open Pixel Control servers. It proxies the commands to another OPC server while adding one additional command that accepts RGBA pixels instead of plain RGB. This allows multiple clients to connect and push pixels at the same time with BamboozLED blending each buffer together and sending them to the destination server.
$ git clone https://github.com/milkey-mouse/bamboozled
$ cd bamboozled
$ make
# make install
Create a config file at /etc/bamboozled.json:
{
"listen": ["127.0.0.1", 7891],
"destination": ["127.0.0.1", 7890],
"background": [0, 0, 0]
}
listen specifies which address & port to listen on. By default it only allows connections from localhost, but by changing 127.0.0.1 to null or 0.0.0.0 you can allow connections from any IP on your local network.
destination specifies the address & port of the "target" OPC server that BamboozLED sends the composited pixels to. By default it is 127.0.0.1:7890. destination can also be a list of destinations, and BamboozLED will forward OPC commands to all of them.
background is the color "beneath" all the dyamic layers; that is, if no clients are connected or a pixel is transparent, this background color will show through. (If the lights are supposed to actually light up the room as well as looking cool, it is recommended to set it to [255, 255, 255] (white) so they provide light when no clients are connected.)
If your system uses systemd, make install automatically added a systemd unit file that can be used to automatically start BamboozLED. Enable it to run on startup with the following command:
# systemctl enable bamboozled.service
The first (bottommost) layer is the background. The initial layer order is determined by connection order: each client to connect to the server gets a new layer on top of all the others. Layers can be reordered, however: see Moving layers. BamboozLED will composite layers on top of each other.
In order to preserve compatibility with existing programs that expect to set pixels with RGB triplets, BamboozLED uses OPC command 2 (0 and 1 are in use) for sending RGBA pixels. The command functions the exact same as the existing command 0 (send RGB pixels) but expects 4 bytes per pixel instead of 3:
| channel | command | length (n) | data | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0-255 | 2 | high byte | low byte | n bytes of message data (RGBA) |
SysEx (command 255) is also captured and used for moving layers up and down:
| channel | command | length | system ID | BamboozLED command | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| any | 255 | 0 | 3 | 0xB0B |
0-3 |
The channel number doesn't matter because a layer encompasses all channels sent by that client. The BamboozLED command can be any of the following:
| BamboozLED command | Action |
|---|---|
| 0 | move layer to front |
| 1 | move layer to back |
| 2 | move layer up by 1 |
| 3 | move layer down by 1 |
Any other OPC commands will be passed through as-is to the destination OPC server.