Raspberry Pi displays album art on LED matrix
We’ve seen a few innovative album art displays using Raspberry Pi, from LEGO minifigures playing their own music to this NFC-powered record player.
Maker Kyle Johnson was looking for a fun project combining Raspberry Pi and Adafruit’s LED matrix, and has created the latest cool album art display to grace our blog.
Hardware
- Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+
- Adafruit 64×64 RGB LED Matrix
- Adafruit RGB Matrix Bonnet for Raspberry Pi (this also powers the Raspberry Pi)
- 5v 10a switching PSU
- 3D-printed Matrix feet to stand it upright and Raspberry Pi mount to secure the Raspberry Pi to the back
How does it work?
The maker turned to PowerShell – a cross-platform task automation solution – to create a script (available on GitHub) that tells the Raspberry Pi which album is playing, and sends it the album artwork for display on the LED matrix.
Raspberry Pi runs a flaschen-taschen server to display the album artwork. The PowerShell script runs a ‘send image’ command every time the album art updates. Then the Raspberry Pi switches the display to reflect what is now playing. In the demo video, the maker runs this from iTunes, but says that any compatible music player (ie: Spotify) will work too.
Setting up your own LED album art display
The maker’s original reddit post shares a step-by-step guide to follow on the software side of things. And they detail the terminal code you’ll need to run on the Raspberry Pi to get your LED Matrix displaying the correct image.
They also suggest checking out Adafruit’s setup guides for the RGB Matrix Bonnet for Raspberry Pi and for the LED Matrix itself.
11 comments
Atul Kumar Pandey
It’s really cool project. Unfortunately, those matrix displays aren’t available yet for my region. But I’ll definitely try it as soon as it’s available.
BensTechLab
Hey this is fun project! I was thinking of writing a YouTube subscriber counter as a decoration for the studio (Like a knock-off of the LaMetric smart clocks that are LED pixel grids).
Sebastian
does it work with Roon or BluOS Controller?
Kyle Johnson
Looks like somebody has got it working with roon https://community.roonlabs.com/t/rgb-matrix-led-display/167552
Richard Ash
The link “RGB Matrix Bonnet for Raspberry Pi” doesn’t work (does not have a valid URL in the href attribute).
Raspberry Pi Staff Ashley Whittaker — post author
That’s weird. Works for me 🤷♀️
Try this: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3211
Duncan Carter
Would be awesome to build one of these that listened to what was playing and showed that, Shazam style.
Kevin Cossaboon
That would ROCk
Doug
I would love to see some sort of integration with the Last.fm API so that the album art can update when you’re scrobbling a song.
Samet Ayaz
What a nice work. Thanks for your time. I loved it. But what’s on the left? Case seems interesting. Does rpi 4 with ice tower cooler fit in it?
Nagai Yumi
Awesome project! Would look great with pixel art. How’s the heat however?