Tag: Hyperion

Hyperion with Sunrise and Sunset

You may have gotten here from my hyperion with nagios writeup, this doesn’t follow on from that and is separate, but maybe of interest.

The basic idea: I’ve now got LED’s in my room and would like them to come on before I go to bed so I can see without falling over. The ones on the stair I just leave running, but like hell am I going to sleep with such a bright LED (I probably could, I can sleep in the day but I thought it would be a better idea for them to come on ready).

I could have just set this up on a basic cron and picked a time early enough to account for summer/winter before I go to bed. but where’s the fun in that. I know my PI can work out when the sunrise/sunset is. so it can’t be that difficult to set something up.

After a little bit of searching I come across sunwait you will need this or a similar program. I wont cover installing sunwait on the PI here. just the config I use with hyperion.

First I need a script that sunwait will call and tell it what it needs to do. Here’s my sun-light.sh

#!/bin/bash

COMMAND=hyperion-remote
COMMAND_PRIORITY=50
COMMAND_PATH="/usr/bin"
case "$1" in
sunset)
        /usr/bin/hyperion-remote -p 50 -e "Knight rider"
;;
sunrise)
        /usr/bin/hyperion-remote -p 50 -e "Little Chaser Blue"
;;

*)
        echo "Usage: $0 {sunrise|sunset}"
        exit 1
esac

exit 0

Don’t forget to make this script executable ‘chmod +x sun-lights.sh’

This is basically told to either run sunset or sunrise and will then call hyperion-remote passing the relevant priority and effect. (Little Chaser Blue is a copy and customisation of Knight Rider)

Then I added the following to /etc/crontab

0 02   * * *   root    sunwait -p sun up 51.xxxxN 3.xxxxW ; /root/sun-lights.sh sunrise
12 02   * * *   root    sunwait -p sun down 51.xxxxN 3.xxxxW ; /root/sun-lights.sh sunset

This basically run’s sunwait which will wait until the sun is either coming up or going down at the specified co-ordinates before running the bit after ;

The important bit to get your head around if you must have cron run this at a time well before the sun will rise or set. midnight and midday seems like a good safe bet.

I know I’ve skipped over the actual installation of sunwait and more details on hyperion and running the scripts to check it works, but it’s 1am and I just want to save this 🙂 So if you’ve got this far and are still confused, comment below and I’ll expand on the relevant bits.

Hyperion LED’s & Nagios (Part 3)

Hopefully you’d read Part 2. If not you’ll need to or this wont work.

So in this part we’re going to setup the nagios stuff to set off the alert LED’s. As a little bit of background my nagios installation is on a completely separate PI to the hyperion LED’s, but I have install hyperion on this pi to make use of hyperion-remote. Yes I was being lazy I could have used other methods instead of installing the whole thing.

First my nagios installation is in ‘/usr/local/nagios’, I’m not going to go through the commands to cd and edit, if you’ve installed and configured nagios I’ll assume you can do them 🙂

This is my /usr/local/nagios/libexec/notify-hyperion.sh

#!/bin/bash
STATE=$1
DURATION=23000
case $STATE in
"CRITICAL")
   EFFECT="Red Alert"
   ;;
"WARNING")
   EFFECT="Yellow Alert"
   ;;
"OK")
   EFFECT="Green Alert"
   ;;
*)
   ;;
esac

hyperion-remote -a osmc-l:19444 -d $DURATION -p 10 -e "$EFFECT" &
hyperion-remote -a rasp-light:19444 -d $DURATION -p 10 -e "$EFFECT" &
hyperion-remote -a webcam-pi:19444 -d $DURATION -p 10 -e "$EFFECT" &

For the nagios saavy amongst you, you’ll see I account for CRITICAL, WARNING & OK. Yes I do need to add DOWN, UNREACHABLE & UP for the host alerts

The DURATION sets how long in ms hyperion will run this effect for (best worked out in conjunction with the speed, freq & step from the hyperion config. I’ve got this just right to cut off the alert after (I think) 4 fades. I force the priority ‘-p 10’ to 10, anything else I do with hyperion generally has a priority 50, 100 or 1000 so these will take over.

The last 3 lines are 1 each for my hyperion installs, you will need to change the name’s or replace them with the IP addresses dependant upon your network configuration.

Don’t forget to make the script executable, and you can test it with ‘./notify-hyperion.sh OK’

With the above tested and working, I’ve added the following to my nagios command.cfg

# 'notify-host-by-hyperion' command definition
define command{
        command_name    notify-host-by-hyperion
        command_line    /usr/local/nagios/libexec/notify-hyperion.sh "$HOSTSTATE$"
}

# 'notify-service-by-hyperion' command definition
define command{
        command_name    notify-service-by-hyperion
        command_line    /usr/local/nagios/libexec/notify-hyperion.sh "$SERVICESTATE$"
}

Then added the following to contacts.cfg

define contact{
        contact_name                    nagios-hyperion
        alias                           Nagios Hyperion
        service_notification_period     24x7
        host_notification_period        24x7
        service_notification_options    w,u,c,r,f
        host_notification_options       d,u,r,f,s
        service_notification_commands   notify-service-by-hyperion
        host_notification_commands      notify-host-by-hyperion
        }

define contactgroup{
        contactgroup_name       nagioshyperion
        alias                   Nagios Hyperion Notifications
        members                 nagios-hyperion
        }

For my installation I’ve then added

contact_groups                  nagioshyperion

To my template’s. You could add this to each service/host.

Within my setup I’ve stopped using email alerts, so changing the contacts to hyperion was fine. Within the templates I then have the notify_interval setup for 15 minutes. This means it will fire an alert to hyperion every 15 minutes. If you use email on your system too, you may not want to do this. an alternative could be changing the duration above, so that the red and yellow alerts are constant and the green run’s for a limited time before clearing down.

I did contemplate using event filters instead of contacts, so I could have the emails turned back on at some point, but decided against it as I would have to check before sending a green alert that it’s not already in green or I’d just end up with green all the time.

After all of the above make sure you restart nagios for the new config to take effect.

As a side note, I was sat watching TV this evening all of a sudden my room was yellow and I thought WTF. I do have hyperion setup in my room to start the LED’s at sunset but it was still light out and shouldn’t have fired. Then it clicked NAGIOS. and yes hey presto nagios had throw this site into warning status as there were updates available. I can see it getting annoying if my ISP drops out and I end up with alerts for hours. but on the whole I’m really happy it works, all I need now is a red alert klaxon 🙂

If your interest in setting up hyperion at sunrise/sunset I’ll be writing that one up separately.

Hyperion LED’s & Nagios (Part 2)

Maybe you read Part 1, maybe you skipped it 🙁

Either way Part 2 is going to cover creating a new effect for Nagios. I wont say it’s the best bit of python programming I’ve done (Yes I copied and changed another effect as a starting point). The main thing I wanted was an alert status (yes Star Trek does come into it).

There’s 4 files to this effect:

  1. alert.py – The actual python program
  2. alert-green.json – etting a green colour (yes it’s spelt COLOUR not color!!!!!)
  3. alert-yellow.json
  4. alert-red.json

My hyperion is installed to ‘/opt/hyperion’ so first thing is to go to the effects directory

cd /opt/hyperion/effects

Then create the alert.py file

nano alert.py

Paste the following into it and save the file

import hyperion
import time
import colorsys
import numpy as np

# Get the rotation time
colorfrom =     hyperion.args.get('colorfrom', (0,0,0))
colorto =       hyperion.args.get('colorto', (0,255,0))
speed   =       float(hyperion.args.get('speed', 0.05))
freq    =       float(hyperion.args.get('frequency', 2.5))
step    =       float(hyperion.args.get('step', 30.0))
ledCount =      hyperion.ledCount

# Setup the colors
colorfromnp     =       np.array(colorfrom)
colortonp       =       np.array(colorto)

#define the lerp calc
def lerp(a, b, t):
        x = a*(1 - t) + b*t
        x = np.around(x)
        x = x.tolist()
        return x

# Start the write data loop
while not hyperion.abort():
        for i in range(0,int(step)):
                n = i / step
                thiscolor = lerp(colorfromnp, colortonp, n)
                colorLedsData = ledCount * bytearray((int(thiscolor[0]), int(thiscolor[1]), int(thiscolor[2])))
                hyperion.setColor(colorLedsData)
                time.sleep(speed)
        time.sleep(speed*10)
        for i in range(1,int(step)):
                n = i / step
                thiscolor = lerp(colortonp, colorfromnp, n)
                colorLedsData = ledCount * bytearray((int(thiscolor[0]), int(thiscolor[1]), int(thiscolor[2])))
                hyperion.setColor(colorLedsData)
                time.sleep(speed)
        colorLedsData = ledCount * bytearray(colorfrom)
        hyperion.setColor(colorLedsData)
        time.sleep(freq)

I do use a numpy array, I can’t remember installing it but may have done. You can test if you have it installed

python
import numpy as np

Then we create the alert-green.json

nano alert-green.json

And Paste

{
        "name" : "Green Alert",
        "script" : "alert.py",
        "args" :
        {
                "colorfrom" : [0,0,0],
                "colorto" : [0,255,0],
                "speed" : 0.05,
                "freq" : 2.5,
                "step" : 30.0
        }
}

alert-yellow.json

{
        "name" : "Yellow Alert",
        "script" : "alert.py",
        "args" :
        {
                "colorfrom" : [0,0,0],
                "colorto" : [255,255,0],
                "speed" : 0.05,
                "freq" : 2.5,
                "step" : 30.0
        }
}

alert-red.json

{
        "name" : "Red Alert",
        "script" : "alert.py",
        "args" :
        {
                "colorfrom" : [0,0,0],
                "colorto" : [255,0,0],
                "speed" : 0.05,
                "freq" : 2.5,
                "step" : 30.0
        }
}

Finally restart hyperion to pickup the new effects

service hyperion restart

That’s it, you should now be able to run these effects. From the terminal:

hyperion-remote -e "Red Alert"

Should start the led’s glowing Red. If not I’d start with ‘hyperion-remote -l’ to check the effects are listed, then move on to working out what’s missing (see above about numpy array).

A few notes on this effect:

  • Originally I programmed it forced to black, but it made sense to change this to a colorfrom value for future (if you want it green and fading to red for example).
  • The speed is how quickly to progress through the fade.
  • The step is how many colours it goes through to get from the colorfrom to the colorto
  • Working out the speed and the step together are important for a nice fade (not jerky).
  • The Freq in how long it stays on black before running the fade again.

This completes the hyperion side of the setup. I now have this effect installed and running on 3 PI’s and yes when there’s a problem they ALL go to yellow/red alert

See Part 3 for the nagios setup

Hyperion LED’s & Nagios (Part 1)

Part 1 is more Background story on my use of WS2801 WS2812b and Hyperion with the Raspberry Pi. Skip to Part 2 for the techy bit.

I’ve been using Hyperion for a while. I setup light behind the TV first off (using sticky tape) WS2801 and RaspBMC. This work brilliantly and I loved it. Spent hours tweaking the config so the LED’s were picking up the correct colour to the screen.

With all that working and a length of LED’s left over I decided to run some up the stairs. They sit just under the banister lip so you can’t see them, just the light on the stairs. I set these to Rainbow swirl and let it. They’re been running for months, occasionally changing the effect to show off what they can do.

Then disaster struck, the power adapter stopped working. Have to be honest I didn’t really notice until I was going to bed at 2am and almost fell over. They’ve been there giving off light (possibly a bit bright if anything) and I just got used to being able to see in the middle of the night without any other lights.

Anyway I digress, ordering a new power adapter I went searching for more LED’s (yes you can’t have enough of them once you’ve been playing). I decided that I’d really like to run some in my bedroom, the effects are cool and there would be plenty of light I wont need to use the main light with them on.

So I looking at where I originally bought my WS2801’s and nothing 🙁 so off to google, the obvious thing was I was going to have a hard time sourcing them in the UK. but why they’re great. So off I went to the hyperion git site for info and found there’s newer versions WS2811 and WS2812b. ah that may help, another search and I found someone selling a load on ebay. So I bought all he had 3xreels of WS1812b’s.

They turned up and I connected them up to try them as directed by hyperion. It was at this point I read the important bits RPi2 isn’t working yet and there maybe a problem with the PI communicating with them due to the voltage. I really thought I was going to have to make another little circuit to (buffer?) get them working. As a last ditched attempt it was mentioned try removing the resistor and try running them direct from python. I did both at the same time (not the best decision for troubleshooting. But to my surprise they worked.

So I killed the python program and restart hyperion, yep they’re working.

So off I went to stick them to the ceiling (they have sticky tape on the back). Done. If only I’d thought about connecting them before I stuck them up. I now had to work up in the air joining the cables. Not to worry I’ve done worse.

So I go to get what I need, by the time I got back up they’ve come down 🙁 bloody gravity! Now you’d think at this point I’d connect them up and sort out attaching them later Nope! (didn’t even enter my head) I was now on track to get them to stay up. Enter ‘SuperGlue’, applied little dots along the strip and stuck them up (yes I glued my fingers to the ceiling too). Finally they’re up and staying there. Oh I should have connected them when they were down!

‘Bugger it, where’s my screw driver’ I connected them up, put a power connector on the end and powered them and the PI.

Then installed hyperion on yet another pi. and it all worked like magic.

Have a look at the video, there’s no light other than the TV and it’s dark outside, but the room is really bright.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khfJW3vXcCE]

Click here for Part 2

Raspbmc Hyperion On/Off

I’ve just finished making the surround for my TV after testing it all with sticky tape 🙂 it’s looks awesome.

But the first question I was asked “How do I turn it off?”, Apparently the answer of “You don’t” wasn’t the right one. So a little searching brought me to a fellow blog post http://blog.nadnerb.co.uk/?p=11 which takes you through setting up a remote button in xbmc to disable the service.
While I’d be happy with the remote button option, turning the entire service on and off doesn’t sit well with me, what if I want to set mood lighting from my phone 🙂

So I had a little play with hyperion-remote and thought yeah I can script that. So below is my quick and dirty alternative to disabling the service.

First connect to the PI and create a new file (I called it hyperion_toggle_black.sh)
nano -w hyperion_toggle_black.sh

#!/bin/bash
priority=222

hyper_check=`hyperion-remote -l | grep -i ""priority" : $priority"`
echo $hyper_check
if [ -z "$hyper_check" ]
then
   hyperion-remote -p $priority -c black
else
   hyperion-remote -p $priority -x
fi
exit 0

Next make the script executable
chmod +x hyperion_toggle_black.sh
Now you can test it using ./hyperion_toggle_black.sh
Run it a few times and see that the LED’s go on and off.
The important part of this is the priority, XBMC seems to use a priority of 1000, so any number lower should be great. The android app and hyperion-remote seems to default to 50 or 100. Since I want these to still work I need a value higher than these. 222 should be good, but your free to change it if you like. If for example you want a complete off, setting it to 0 or 1 should be above everything else.
This script basically gives hyperion another job at priority 222 to set all the LED’s black, if there is no current priority 222, and clears priority 222 if it already exists. hence the toggle. On the plus side this wont require root privileges to start/stop the service.
Now you can edit the remote keymap file
nano -w /home/pi/.xbmc/userdata/keymaps/remote.xml
Because I’m using an LG TV and the symlink seems fairly basic, I’m limited to what buttons I can assign. I’ve already previously added a ‘Home’ button to my pause, So I’ve decided to change this slightly by using the pause button to trigger the script while it’s already on the Home screen.
Adding the line  lines
<pause>XBMC.System.Exec(“/home/pi/hyperion_toggle_black.sh”)</pause>
Within the Home>Remote section, but keeping the Global>Remote as
<pause>XBMC.ActivateWindow(Home)</pause>
This took a little playing around to work out which buttons I can use, the blog post at http://forum.osmc.tv/showthread.php?tid=6978 gave me the debug and tail commands to use.

Reboot the PI and viola. There’s about a 1 second delay between pressing the button and the LED’s going off/on, but I can live with that for now.

I didn’t need the XBMC notifications like the other blog post, but if this is something you want, you can mash my script to his and get your own thing 🙂

Notes:
I’m not entirely sure if turning the LED’s Black actually turns them off (i.e. no power) so I may in the future expand it with maybe a relay to control the actual power to the LED’s, but this would break the priority thing unless I put in some checks and run the script in the background.
I could also then add a push button to the PI’s GPIO triggering the on/off script at more of a physical level, hey I could even add a few buttons to be able to select an effect. but for now I’m happy to do all of that via my phone, and just have a priority function for XBMC.