What's this

Ruby wrapper around WS2812 LED driver for Raspberry Pi.

Or, to be more specific, a Ruby gem that encapsulates modified RPi ws281x library from UnicornHAT to help drive your WS2812 led chain (or matrix) from Raspberry Pi.

These WS281x LEDs are sometimes also known as NeoPixels.

Installation

As this is a published Ruby gem,

gem install ws2812

should be enough. But the examples will be hidden in 'gems' dir.

If you want to avoid the gem route, the following works just as well:

git clone https://github.com/wejn/ws2812
cd ws2812
# Assuming raspbian here; otherwise make sure you have 'mkmf'
# and can compile exts (failing that "rake compile" will bomb on you)
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y ruby-full
# .
sudo gem install rake rake-compiler
rake compile
# and then, to demo it:
sudo ruby examples/digiclock.rb

Examples

See the examples directory from the gem (or GH repo).

License

GNU General Public License v. 2, see LICENSE.txt.

Authors

This gem (all of the ruby code and some tweaks to the C extension) was originally created by Michal Jirků box@wejn.org, later extended by Philip Howard phil@gadgetoid.com to support newer Pi-s, and by Derek Stotz derek@springboardretail.com to support Buster.

And it wouldn't be possible without the original UnicornHAT repo.

From that repo I not only took inspiration when it comes to the interface, but I also also translated bits and pieces from Python to Ruby.

And, in turn, the UnicornHAT repo wouldn't be possible without Richard Hirst's modification of Jeremy Garff's RPi ws281x library.

Thanks to you both.

Links

• Pimoroni's UnicornHAT
• RPi ws281x mod by Jeremy Garff
• Original RPi ws281x library