Mopidy-JukeboxLights

A Mopidy extension that drives WLED LED strips with colors pulled from the album art of whatever is playing.

What it does

• Color from the sleeve. Averaging album art gives brown every time. Instead this buckets pixels, discards anything too dark or too washed out to register as light, and scores the rest by pixel count weighted by saturation — so a small bright detail on a black sleeve still wins.
• Two-color cabinets. Picks an accent from the strongest hue at least ~29° away from the dominant, and paints nominated segments with it. A red-and-blue sleeve lights red and blue, not two shades of purple.
• Event driven. A Mopidy frontend actor listening for track_playback_started, so the lights change the instant the track does. Network calls run on a worker thread and never block Mopidy's event loop.
• Idle and dark states. Breathes amber when nothing is playing, and goes fully dark when a kiosk panel blanks — see follow_display below.

Status page

Once running, http://<your-host>:6680/jukeboxlights/ shows what the lights are doing and, more usefully, why — whether WLED is reachable, which segments were discovered, and whether the strip is following music, breathing amber, or dark because the kiosk panel blanked. It also has a button to cycle red/green/blue/amber for checking wiring without needing to play anything.

Installation

python3 -m pip install Mopidy-JukeboxLights

Configuration

[jukeboxlights]
enabled = true
wled_host = 172.20.25.44       # IP or host:port of your WLED device
brightness = 160               # 1-255
idle_after = 45                # seconds of silence before the idle effect
idle_color = amber             # name, hex, or r,g,b
accent_segments = 1,2,3        # segment ids that get the accent color
follow_display = true
display_flag = /run/jukebox/display-off

Segments are read from WLED at startup, so a strip run in one uncut piece with hidden stretches behind a door frame works without any config here — define the visible runs as WLED segments and this follows them.

Idle color

idle_color accepts a name, a hex string, or an r,g,b triplet — amber, #f0a830, f0a830, #fa3 and 240,168,48 are all the same colour. Named options: amber, warm-white, candle, gold, red, oxblood, pink, purple, blue, cyan, teal, green, lime, white.

The status page has a swatch grid and a colour picker that apply immediately, so you can try colours against the actual cabinet before committing one to mopidy.conf. Changes made there are not persisted — the config file stays the source of truth across restarts, and the page shows the line to paste.

Turning the lights off with the screen

If something else on the machine creates the file named by display_flag when a kiosk display blanks, the strip goes fully dark rather than breathing — but only while nothing is playing. Remove the file and it comes back. Set follow_display = false to ignore this entirely.

Project resources

• Source code
• Issue tracker

Credits

• Original author: King Butter
• Current maintainer: King Butter x