Lights! Python! Action!
summary
An animated garage-built sign with 12 lights and melodic chimes runs from a Raspberry Pi Zero 2, a Model Labs USB-relay board, six Shelly dimmers, and a mix of mechanical and solid-state relays; code uses gpiozero, pyserial, threading and signal for buttons, requests then asyncio + aiohttp to parallelize 12 channel updates, dataclasses and typing for clearer models, and a level shifter to handle a 5V remote receiver feeding 3.3V GPIO. The demo mostly works; cheap remotes and sequential HTTP calls caused the biggest surprises.
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chapters (16)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:00Toledo War anecdote
- 2:01Project motivation and setup
- 3:53First sign version
- 6:08Wire management techniques
- 7:53Raspberry Pi GPIO control
- 9:42Remote control added
- 11:50Hardware troubleshooting
- 12:51Wireless receiver and voltage shifting
- 13:54Dimmers and smart home
- 15:20Async for sequential ops
- 17:07Type annotations benefits
- 18:11Data classes simplification
- 19:36Dependency injection and ABCs
- 20:42Musical engine
- 21:44Lessons learned
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