Tally Arbiter WS281x Listener

Tally Arbiter WS281x Listener was written by 5pm-HDH, using the TallyArbiter-Blink1Listener from josephdadams as Template and is distributed under the MIT License.

Tally Arbiter WS281x Listener is an accessory program that allows you to connect to a Tally Arbiter server and control WS281x LED Stripes based on the incoming tally information.

It is written in Python and designed to run on a Pi Zero with minimal configuration needed. It uses the python-socketio[client] library to communicate with the Tally Arbiter server.

To learn more about the Tally Arbiter project, click here.

It is not sold, authorized, or associated with any other company or product.

Getting Started

A lot of these instructions on getting started are available all over the internet. Some highlights are listed here that should cover it from a top-level:

1. The Raspberry Pi OS Lite version is sufficient for this use. You can download it here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/
2. Use Balena Etcher to write the image to your microSD card: https://www.balena.io/etcher/
3. Once the image is written, mount the card to your computer and enable SSH by adding a blank file named SSH to the root of the boot volume oef the card. If you're using MacOS, an easy way to do this is to open Terminal, type cd /Volumes/boot and then touch ssh. This will create an empty file. You do not need to put anything in the file, it just needs to exist.
4. Add another file to the root of the boot volume named wpa_supplicant.conf. Again, in terminal, just type touch wpa_supplicant.conf while you're in the root of the boot volume and it will be created.
5. The new wpa_supplicant.conf file needs to be edited. Use sudo nano wpa_supplicant.conf. This file should contain the following:

   ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
   update_config=1
   country=US
   
   network={
   	ssid="Your network name/SSID"
   	psk="Your WPA/WPA2 security key"
   	key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
   }
   

   Edit country=, ssid= and psk= with your information and save the file by pressing CTRL + X.
6. At this point, you can eject the card and put into the Pi and turn it on.
7. Now you can SSH into the Pi to continue configuration. You'll need the IP address of the Pi. You can usually get this in your router admin page, or you might need to do more depending on your network.
8. In the terminal window, type ssh pi@192.168.1.5 (replace with your actual Pi IP address). It will prompt for a password. The default is usually raspberry.
9. Once you're connected to the Pi via SSH, it's a good idea to go ahead and change the default password. You can do this by running the sudo raspi-config tool, Option 1. Reboot the Pi when you're done by using sudo shutdown -r now. Your connection to the Pi will be terminated and you can reconnect once it has booted back up.
10. Go ahead and update the Pi to the latest OS updates by running sudo apt-get update -y followed by sudo apt-get upgrade -y

Wire and Setup WS281x

For the default config just connect the DIN pin of the WS281x-Strip to the GPIO-18 pin of the RPi other usable gpio's are 12,13 or 10 using SPI

• Fill in your configuration in the config_ws281x.json

Installing Python Libraries and Script

The Tally Arbiter Python Listener Client uses the following libraries:

• rpi-ws281x-python https://github.com/rpi-ws281x/rpi-ws281x-python
• python-socketio[client]

These will have to be installed on the Pi in order for the script to function correctly.

1. In your SSH terminal session, run the following:

   • sudo pip3 install rpi_ws281x
   • sudo pip3 install "python-socketio[client]": This library is used to communicate with a Tally Arbiter server over websockets.
   • sudo apt-get install git To get the Tally Arbiter WS281x Listener from this Repo

   If pip3 is not installed, you can get it by running sudo apt-get install python3-pip.

Setting up the script to start at boot

To setup the script as a systemd service just run the install.sh bash-script as root. This will create a directory and install the script into /root/tally and enable a systemd service

sudo install.sh

The program should now launch every time the Pi boots up, and automatically connect to your Tally Arbiter server once the server is available. The ws281x strip will flash white until it successfully connects to the server.