~ / blog / Raspberry Pi Powered LED Lamp

# Hardware

To use SPI on the Raspberry Pi, you need to connect 4 pins. Adafruit has an excellent image in their tutorial that shows how you can do this, which I’ve also linked below.

I’ve used the same power source to the LED strip to power the Raspberry Pi as well.

I found the lamp shades on Amazon. I purchased them in white, since the LEDs are RGB.

I purchased the LED strip from Adafruit.

# Software

Download the latest Raspbian from the official source. I used the image 2016-03-18-raspbian-jessie.img. Flash the operating system onto a memory card.

sudo dd bs=1m if=2016-03-18-raspbian-jessie.img of=/dev/rdisk$DISKNUMBER

sudo dd bs=1m if=2016-03-18-raspbian-jessie.img of=/dev/rdisk$DISKNUMBER

When using dd on OSX, I’ve found that rdisk is much faster than diskBoth rdisk and disk will work fine, but if you are using disk be prepared to wait longer - it took about an hour in my case..

(Optional) Expand the file system to use all the available space on the memory card.

sudo raspi-config

sudo raspi-config

-> Expand File System
-> Save
-> Reboot

To control this particular LED strip, we are going to use the SPI bus on the Raspberry Pi. We need to set up the Pi to use SPI.

sudo raspi-config

sudo raspi-config

-> Advanced Options
-> Enable SPI
-> Enable on Boot
-> Save
-> Reboot

Next, we need to install some packages to use the SPI bus. First, let’s update the Raspberry Pi.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Then we need to install python-dev, pyspidev and BiblioPixel. These are all required to control the LED strip.

sudo apt-get install python-dev
sudo pip install spidev
sudo pip install BiblioPixel

sudo apt-get install python-dev
sudo pip install spidev
sudo pip install BiblioPixel

Instead of installing spidev and BiblioPixel, you can also clone the repositories and add them to your PYTHONPATH. I found that sudo pip install <package-name> is easier, however I had to browse through the source code of BiblioPixel and found having a local copy accessible was helpful.

Finally, we need Flask to set up a server on the Raspberry Pi.

sudo pip install Flask

sudo pip install Flask

I’ve used sudo for all the pip installations. It is definitely required for spidev, but may not be for the others. You will need to use sudo to run the application, since root access is required to control GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi.