Audio Reactive Holiday LEDs with Raspberry Pi

Happy Holidays everyone!

To celebrate, I updated my Audio Reactive LEDs project for the Raspberry Pi for the holidays. Now you can play music directly on the Raspberry Pi and make the lights dance. Check out the full demo video below:

Audio Reactive Holiday LED Lights Tutorial

Being able to play songs directly from the Pi has been the most common request so I decided to take some time and set that up. If you’re interested in the written tutorial, check it out at https://www.easyprogramming.net/raspberrypi/audio_reactive_holiday_leds.php

Get the code at https://github.com/naztronaut/dancyPi-audio-reactive-led/tree/no_mic

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My September project is a cool one I think. It’s a Flask App hosted on a Raspberry Pi (behind Apache) which controls some WS2812b LED Strips. It’s a good way to test your strips.

It’s still a work in progress and in the demo, I show you what I’ve done so far.

See the written tutorial at https://www.easyprogramming.net/raspberrypi/audio_reactive_led.php

And watch the video embedded below:

Get the code at https://github.com/naztronaut/dancyPi-audio-reactive-led

Like what I do? Consider becoming a Patron on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/nazmus

Just support me on Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/nazmus



In Dec 2018, I created a tutorial showing how to create your own Audio Reactive LED strip with a Raspberry Pi. The original tutorial had a lot of steps (30+) that you needed to take in order to get the software up and running.

A lot of viewers have also asked if there were ways to make the installation simpler. So I took a stab at it and got the installation steps down to just 2! Clone the GitHub repo and run the installer. Of course I’m not counting the hardware set up!

See the written tutorial at https://www.easyprogramming.net/raspberrypi/audio_reactive_led.php

And watch the video embedded below:

Get the code at https://github.com/naztronaut/dancyPi-audio-reactive-led

Like what I do? Consider becoming a Patron on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/nazmus

Just support me on Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/nazmus

Been a while since my last update but I’ve still been at it with my home automation projects. This project lets me control my Garage Door from my phone!

ESP8266 + Raspberry Pi Garage Door Controller

Find the written tutorial at https://www.easyprogramming.net/raspberrypi/nodemcu_garage_door_control.php

Get the code at https://github.com/naztronaut/NodeMCU-Pi-Garage-Control

And watch the video demo below:

The written tutorial is all there is to the tutorial, I tried something different and did not do a full video tutorial but don’t worry, the written tutorial is still very thorough!

Questions or comments? Feel free to share on EasyProgramming.net, on YouTube, or open a Github issue in the Repo above.

As part of my 12th Raspberry Pi tutorial, I’ve installed some kitchen cabinet lights that I can control from my mobile phone. Here’s a quick demo:

Demo of Raspberry Pi controlled Kitchen Cabinet Lights

What’s on my phone is actually just a simple web app so you can actually control the lights from any browser whether it’s from your phone or computer.

Here are some resources:
Written Tutorial on EasyProgramming: https://www.easyprogramming.net/raspberrypi/remote_control_led_strip.php
Get the code from GitHub: https://github.com/naztronaut/raspberryPi-control-led-strip

And as always, here’s the associated video tutorial:

Control an LED Strip with a Pi

Questions or comments? Feel free to share on EasyProgramming.net, on YouTube, or open a Github issue in the Repo above.

Since the holiday break, I’ve been working on this little Raspberry Pi project. It’s dubbed the Website Uptime Monitor.

I use several uptime monitors including pingdom and Jetpack (used on this site). And I typically use the Free version because I am okay with being offline for a few hours if it comes to it. But then I thought, I can create my own uptime monitor that works just as well as the paid versions and I’ll have full control!

Of course I don’t have the skills or time to do what these paid monitors do but thought I’d try anyway. I also wanted some kind of visual indicator if any of my sites go down. And in comes the Raspberry Pi. I love the Pi. If you know me in person, you know that I have a dozen different Raspberry Pis around the house doing different things, such as control my lights, act as PiHole, PiVPN, etc.

Before I continue, I want to share the project with you. You can find instructions on how to set things up on GitHub pages here: https://uptime.easyprogramming.net/

You can watch the quick demo of the software here:

If you prefer to read about it over watching a demo video, keep reading!

The idea I had was to have three lights, like a traffic light: red, yellow, and green. I’m still working on the rules for when the lights come in, but they’re as follows:
– Only Red – either everything is down or my internet is down
– Only Green – everything is good!
– Yellow – this light can be on in conjunction with the green light. This will come on if 1-3 sites are down. And if Green is on along with yellow, it means at least some sites are loading.

Pretty simple rules but I still think I can do better. That’s why this is still in beta! Current version at the time of writing this post is 0.3.0-b01.

The application will check sites every 15 minutes (this is configurable) and record all activity in a database. If a site is reported down three times in a row, the app will send an email with an outage report. The Email notifications are also stored in the database so you can look up whether or not an email was successfully sent out. Failure to send an email would typically mean that your internet was down.

Since everything is stored in the database, everything is reportable! For this, I created a Flask app with a bunch of API endpoints that can be accessed by any web application. These endpoints will output data from the MySQL table into neat JSON. You can also write to the databases using POST and PUT API calls.

I think I’ve covered a lot of what the application does. It’s still in beta and I’m still working on improving it. If you have ideas or questions, please ask on GitHub or in the video above. Also ask on Easy Programming here: https://www.easyprogramming.net/raspberrypi/website_uptime_monitior.php