Retrofit a Raspberrry Pi 3 with Tidbyt Software

mavas · November 5, 2022, 6:59pm

Hey All!

I have been interested in the Tidbyt product for a while now but I haven’t actually bought a Tidbyt yet since I have been trying to retrofit a Raspberry Pi 3 with a 64x32 bit led matrix (attached to a led matrix hat) with the Pixlet/Tidbyt software.

Just was curious if its actually possible to load the Tidbyt software onto a official non-Tidbyt hardware to be able to take advantage of the Tidbyt platform/app?

Thanks in advance!

mwessler · January 2, 2023, 5:26am

Hi Mavis - I got pixlet running on my Raspberry Pi 4B; I’m not sure if it’s also possible on the 3, but I’m not sure why it wouldn’t work.

If you’re going to use the Pi to generate images and animations for the Tidbyt, you need to follow the directions here, including the three pre-requisites:

github.com

tidbyt/pixlet/blob/main/docs/BUILD.md

Building Pixlet
===============

Note - if you're trying to build for windows, check out the [windows build instructions](BUILD_WINDOWS.md).

Prerequisites
-------------

- Having [go installed].
- Having [node installed].
- Having [libwebp installed].

Steps
-----
- Clone the repository:
	```console
	git clone https://github.com/tidbyt/pixlet
	```
- Cd into the repository:
	```console

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You then run pixlet login to connect pixlet to your Tidbyt account, and pixlet devices to figure out the identifier for your Tidbyt box.

You don’t even need to write starlark scripts - you can use whatever programming language you like to generate webp images or animations, and then pixlet push <device-id> image.webp to get your image or animation to show up on your device.