Nuts and Volts - September 2014

a plastic bag — to tape up the sides of the face front to reduce exposure to the elements. I live in southern California where it rains very little; we don’t really have ‘weather.’ Finally, attach the face front to the light box with something like eye hooks and bungee cords. Or, if you’re short on time, duct tape will work its magic.

Electronics

Setting Up the Raspberry Pi

In the past, it used to take a desktop computer and an expensive controller in order to run holiday light shows.

Electronics have gotten much cheaper and more powerful since the first animated light shows, so it’s easier to get started.

Our animated display will be controlled by a Raspberry Pi (RaspPi for short). Even though it’s only $35, it’s a full Linux computer (Figure 9). There are several different versions of the RaspPi: A, B, and B+. The version that we need to use here is version B, as it has a built-in Ethernet port and more RAM. The B+ version should theorically work as well, but at the time of this writing the B+ had been announced and not released, so I was not able to test it.

The software that will be installed on the RaspPi is a wonderful software package called Falcon Pi Player (FPP), programmed by the talented Chris Pinkham. The software is available from http://falconchristmas.com. In order to install FPP, The USB drive will be used to store the animations and music. The RaspPi is fairly particular in how the SD card is formatted for its operating system. The SD card needs to have the format size adjustment off. This is something that Windows 8.1 has some difficulty doing. Fortunately, there’s a utility available by the SD Association called SDFormatter. The utility was specifically created for formatting external storage like SD cards. It’s available from www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4.