Here’s a nice quick one on how set up a visual notification system with a couple of Raspberry Pis, a Pimoroni Unicorn HAT LED matrix, Skywriter HAT 3D gesture sensor and a couple of USB wifi adaptors.
The inspiration was the tap notifications on the upcoming Apple Watch. I realised that you could set up something very similar with the kit above.
The end result is pretty awesome and takes next to no time to set up. You can see it in action below. It’d be ideal for quietly calling someone upstairs without waking the kids, for example.
Setting it up
What you’ll need:
- A couple of Raspberry Pis A+ or B+
- A Pimoroni Unicorn HAT
- A Skywriter HAT
- A couple of USB wifi adaptors like these
As always, do a sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade to get
everything up-to-date on your Raspberry Pi.
As in my previous tutorials, set up the Unicorn HAT and Skywriter as follows:
sudo pip install unicornhat
and then
sudo pip install skywriter
Then you can clone the GitHub repo with the two scripts you’ll need by typing:
git clone https://github.com/sandyjmacdonald/unicorn_notifier
I’ll presume that you’ve set up wifi on your Raspberry Pis already, but if not
then it’s really easy - just plug in a monitor and keyboard, launch the desktop
by typing startx and then set up your wifi to connect to your router there.
You’ll need to make a note of the IP address of the Pi into which you’ve plugged
the Unicorn HAT. You can find it by typing ifconfig and then looking under the
wlan0 section. I set up all of this over SSH, but alternatively you could
plug each Pi into a keyboard and monitor and start the two scripts running
before moving them to wherever they’ll be getting used.
On the Pi with the Skywriter attached, the sender, you’ll need to edit the line
that says host = '192.168.0.XX' and add the IP address that you wrote down
earlier. Then run the script by typing:
sudo python skywriter_send.py
On the other Pi, with the Unicorn HAT on, type:
sudo python skywriter_receive.py
You should see it say Waiting to receive messages....
Now, if everything is working properly, you should be able to tap the centre of the Skywriter on one Pi and the Unicorn HAT will pulse gently on the other Pi. There’s a touch of latency because the request has to go over wifi between the Pis, but it’s remarkably responsive in my testing.
A word of warning!
This sends the requests un-encrypted in the open between the Pis, so make sure that the port that your doing this over, 13000 in my script, isn’t open to the outside world. If you are concerned about this, then you can send all of the requests over SSH. I won’t go into how to do that here, but Google it if you want to do it that way. The other option is to use a router that isn’t connected to the internet and then security won’t be an issue.
Taking it further
The most obvious improvement for this would be to make it a two-way notification system. You could set this up with an extra Unicorn HAT and Skywriter and a couple of Black HAT Hack3rs.