README.md

skyglow

Python program written for the ecoLux project in the ecoTron to periodically set light-intensities of the LED's in the ecoUnits.

• Parses a file containing the time and light intensities (mlx) for the moon
• Converts the lightintensities to a DMX-Value (0-255)
• Sets the moon-LED and 3-lightpollution LED's for each ecounit
• logs the time and value

This was tested and run on a Raspberry Pi connected via DMX to the LED's in the ecounits. OLA (Open Light Architecture Framework) is used to write to the DMX-Bus.

##Usage##

	skyglow.py

will look for a file called moon in its directory, to extract the intensities of the moon for the current time. Alternatively you can also pass a file as an argument.

	skyglow.py /path/to/moon/file

If everything worked, a line should be added to skyglow.log:

	#date				moon[mlx] moon[dmx]		lightpollution[mlx]
	2020-07-21 15:00:00 	0.05	11	[15, 54, 4, 19, 0, 1, 5, 0, 40, 12, 123, 123]

The indices of the list containing the lightpollution values refer to the number of the ecounits.

##Setup##

###Building OLA###

In order to get a recent version with python support we need to build OLA. See this and this for details.

Install libraries (Python 2.x):

	sudo apt-get install libcppunit-dev libcppunit-1.15-0 uuid-dev pkg-config libncurses5-dev libtool autoconf automake g++ libmicrohttpd-dev libmicrohttpd12 protobuf-compiler libprotobuf-lite17 python-protobuf libprotobuf-dev libprotoc-dev zlib1g-dev bison flex make libftdi-dev libftdi1 libusb-1.0-0-dev liblo-dev libavahi-client-dev python-numpy

Clone repository:

	git clone https://github.com/OpenLightingProject/ola.git ola
	cd ola

Configure for python:

	autoreconf -i
	configure --enable-python-libs

Build Note: Use jobs to speed up the building process

	nJobs=$((`nproc` * 2))
	make -j${nJobs}
	make -j${nJobs} check
	sudo make install
	sudo ldconfig 

Run the daemon:

	olad

###new moonfile### If you acquire a new moonfile, make sure to replace all occurrences of 24:00 to 00:00. Otherwise python will throw an error.

	sed -i 's/24:00/00:00/g' moonfile

###cron### Set up a cronjob to check for new values every minute. Run

	crontab -e

and insert

	PATH=/usr/bin:/path/to/directory/containing/skyglow/
	* * * * * skyglow.py

Check the skyglow.log to see if it gets updated every minute.

	watch -n1 tail skyglow.log