IDEA: Attraction Mode

Osglith

Hello out there, I'm not smart enough to really do this idea myself, but I know some of you are real good at this. Here is my idea. I would like to add some "attraction" lighting to my desktop arcade cabinet. In a perfect world, the upper graphic will be backlit, and I'll add bumper LED chase lights down the sides of the unit using LED T-molding like THIS. The LEDs will switch colors and basically be in "attract" mode (similar to actual arcade machines) until somebody plays a game. Then they would calm down (as not to distract from the game).

I'm thinking of adding another Pi to my cabinet to control all the LED controls. I'll see about networking the two Pi's together (again, beyond me, but I'll try) so when a game is started, it could send a signal to the other pi to end "attraction mode". I could turn to someone like adafruit for LEDs and chase scripts, but I have a cool idea that is beyond my abilities...

Wouldn't it be awesome if while you were selecting the different RetroPi emulators (and even individual games!) if the LEDs switched colors to match? So, if there were a lot of green or red in the graphic, the LEDs would compliment that and change to one of those colors.

So, I love this idea, but have ZERO clue how I could ever make it happen. Thoughts? Ideas? Has someone already done something like this?

Hex

@Osglith This is very easy to achieve. You will need to write a server on the second pi to control the leds and set modes based on async requests (preferably http). Then the first pi can signal when and which game is being launched. Based on that you can extract colours from the artwork to obtain colours for the LEDs.

You will have to do all the work for the second pi. How good are you with python?

For the EmulaionStation part you will have to just modify the runcommand file and that should work nicely.

Osglith

Wow, thanks for the reply! Sadly, I know zero python. I'll start asking some of my more intelligent friends if anyone I know is familiar with the language. I'm heartened by your comments that this might be possible. I think it would be really awesome if it is.

Thanks again for taking some time to reply!

meleu

@Osglith do you know any programming language?

I'm asking because I also had zero python knowledge but I know some other languages (bash, C, Java, and, of course, logical thinking...). And recently I wanted to implement a feature in a part of RetroPie that is written in python and did it. I mentalized and wrote the logic using bash, and then googled about the python syntax and translated it to python, and then I realized that python is a very friendly language, it's worth learning it.

To be honest when I needed to learn about lists and dictionaries I borrowed the book Learning Python, 2nd Edition in a library (yeah, the 2nd edition is a bit old, but it was what I had within reach). I didn't read all the book, only a few parts about lists and dictionaries was enough to reach my goal.

Hex

@Osglith @meleu This is where I learnt python from. At least the basic stuff.

http://www.pythontutor.com/visualize.html#mode=edit

Osglith

@Hex Thanks for the info!