RGBcommander - new software announcement

[ZoOl007]

Hi people,

I would like to announce software I've been working on the past two months : RGBcommander.
It is LedBlinky's *nix counterpart at a basic level. It runs on Linux x64, x86 and ARM. That's right yes : you can now hook up RGB led's to your raspberry PI2 projects... 
Before general release I would like some testers and ask for 5, maximum 10 people with enough basic *nix knowledge and spare time to test it.
There's no need to compile it - it's a binary release. It's well tested and documented and I expect no major issues but with the great variety of distro's there is a test necessity.
My ideal test group looks like this : several recent popular 64 and 32 bit distro's and some raspberry PI's with PacLED64 and UltimateI/O's and ServoSticks.
It would be great if someone with a 4 player cab with 2 or more PacLED64's steps forward.
More details and an email are on the website http://users.telenet.be/rgbcommander . If you are interested, read it completely and if you like to participate do contact me please.
The download it not available on the website - I'll compile a final 0.1 release after feedback.
I hope you like it.

regards

Gijs

[nitrogen_widget]

I have none of those controllers but I am a linux guy & own an rpi2 but no cabinets yet.
What about parallel port control?

I have some 3w led's and controllers somewhere i can dig up for testing.
Can this also trigger a motor for a rotating setup?

[ZoOl007]

it's really written for usb controllers and it's rgb led controlling software so parallel is out of scope. As for the motor yes actually - it's possible to do that with a small relay board. My pinball cabinet is filled with stuff like that. rgbcmdd could be extended to allow it to control motors yes but I won' t pursue that right now but it's a good idea...
I'll keep it in mind once I start my linux cab build.

[Howard_Casto]

If I might offer a small suggestion.  Getting people to program stuff on Linux is hard enough... you will most likely be the only one to make any output software for the OS.  So if you are going to do it, mimic my mamehooker's features, which supports... well... just about anything.  It didn't start out that way... initially it supported the ledwiz, the keyboard lights and the parallel port and grew from there. 

What I would do is when someone asked for support for a specific device, I would look into it and 9 times out of 10 it was fairly simple to implement.  The parallel port, for example... I know in windows it was maybe 4 lines of code to add support. 

[ZoOl007]

I didn't even knew people were/are using that for arcade cabinets to be honest. I've never programmed the parallel port before but I had a quick look and at first sight I only have d0-d7 so 8 data channels that's 8 single color leds or 2rgb leds and that's not going to cut it for a control panel. My daemon and the whole xml is all about RGB from start to finish. (It does support single color leds).
I do understand your reasoning and I will support other hw as it becomes available to me but the  parallel port.... It'll be a lot more than 4 lines for me that's for sure
It interests me and if I have some time i'll look at it and make me a circuit and some testcode but I first need some testers to confirm RGBcommander's functionality.

@nitrogen_widget : can you tell me something more about that controller? specs/type/vendor/other Is it something special or is it d0-d7?
I was thinking about the motors and velleman sells usb relay boards and that's something worth implementing maybe - windows only... usb sniffer here I come again 
I know Ultimarc's UltimateI/O has some ports that should be capable to switch a relay - I'll look into that first - I have such a board available to me now.

Oh and -> Testers wanted please...

kind regards

 

[nitrogen_widget]

I have DC Stepper Motor Drive Controller Board Module Arduino L298N E1

https://www.dfrobot.com/wiki/index.php?title=Arduino_Motor_Shield_(L298N)_(SKU:DRI0009)

it's just a standard driver looking for a trigger I believe.

[ZoOl007]

The trigger being pwm. I think - with the emphasis on 'think' - that it should be possible to control a stepper motor using a regular output on a led board.
I'm not really into those things but I'll find me small motor to try - if it works I'll implement it but it'll take a while.
I will not support the parallel port.