I finally caught the bug. After seeing a neighbor choreograph his entire outdoor light display with music, I set about trying to figure out how to do something similar. I’m starting small, just trying to automate 6-8 different sets of lights on a tree, but you never know where this will end.

After a quick google search, I stumbled upon this article on by Osprey22 on Instructables Raspberry Pi Christmas Tree Light Show

I bought some gear to get started:

SainSmart 8-Channel Relay Module - this is used to turn power on and off to the individual power outlets

Jumper Wire Cables

CanaKit Raspberry Pi 2 Complete Starter Kit with WiFi - to get me started easily

I hooked them up to a wireless keyboard/mouse and a monitor (using a HDMI cable), popped the SD card into the Raspberry Pi (RaPi) and installed Raspian operating system using the NOOBS installer. This already cam installed on the SD card, but you can also visit the Raspberry Pi NOOBS Setup page to learn how to do this yourself

Next I started following the instructions in the Instructables article

Static IP Address

I setup a static IP address by right-clicking on my wifi connection and selecting WiFi Networks (dhcpcdui) Settings. Select interface and wlan0 and set the IP address and Router number

Install Telnet

Next, I installed telnet:

sudo apt-get install telnetd
sudo /etc/init.d/openbsd-inetd restart 

Verify the telnet by opening a command prompt:

netstat -a | grep telnet

You should only see something like this:

tcp 0 0 *:telnet *:* LISTEN

but once you connect to it from another machine using telnet, you’ll see something like:

tcp 0 0 *:telnet *:* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 raspberrypi.loca:telnet 192.168.15.161:49610 ESTABLISHED

Finally, if you want to restrict who can login:

sudo nano /etc/hosts.allow

and add lines similar to these at the bottom of the file:

in.telnetd : 192.168.1.161 : allow
in.telnetd : 192.168.15. : deny

Save and restart the service:

sudo /etc/init.d/openbsd-inetd restart 

FTP Services

Next, I installed an FTP Server

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install vsftpd

Let’s see if it’s installed

netstat -npl|grep vsftpd
tcp6   0      0 :::21           :::*            LISTEN      1984/vsftpd     

That’s it. If you want to configure the service (like add security features) check out the article linked above.

Install PyGame

To write scripts to play audio, install pygame for Python 3. I also referenced this article

sudo apt-get install mercurial 
hg clone https://bitbucket.org/pygame/pygame
cd pygame

sudo apt-get install libsdl-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev libsdl-ttf2.0-dev 
sudo apt-get install libsmpeg-dev libportmidi-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev
sudo apt-get install python3-dev python3-numpy

python3 setup.py build 
sudo python3 setup.py install

Wiring up Relay Module

This great video made it really clear about how to connect the Rasberry Pi to the SainSmart relay module. He talks about an issue he had with the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, but I never experienced it.

Wired the board up using GPIO.Board configuration. Plugged it in and ran the basic.py test script:

python ./basic.py

and everything worked

Automatic Lightshow

I found an article by Chivalry Timbers (it could be his real name) about running a light show directly from a MIDI file. About three paragraphs in, he referenced a project called Lightshow Pi that will allow you to use a MP3 instead.

Download Lightshow Pi

# Install git (if you don't already have it)
sudo apt-get install git-core

# Clone the repository to /home/pi/lightshowpi
cd ~
git clone https://togiles@bitbucket.org/togiles/lightshowpi.git

# Grab the stable branch
cd lightshowpi
git fetch && git checkout stable

Install LightShow Pi

cd /home/pi/lightshowpi
sudo ./install.sh

The install process can take several minutes. You should reboot after the install completes:

sudo reboot

Verifying Your Hardware Configuration

You can verify your hardware setup and configuration are setup properly by blinking each channel one at a time using the following command from the main LightShow Pi directory (/home/pi/lightshowpi if you’ve followed the default install steps):

sudo python py/hardware_controller.py --state=flash

You can also fade each channel in and out using software PWM using the following command:

sudo python py/hardware_controller.py --state=fade

Press -C in the same terminal window to stop the blinking / fading lights test.