Pixoo

A library to easily communicate with the Divoom Pixoo 64 (and hopefully soon more screens that support Wi-Fi)

An non-trivial example, with re-connecting and API-calls can be found in examples/power-usage. In this example I read the current kWh from my P1-meter and display the current power usage of my house in a neat little graph.

Tested on a Pixoo 64, with Python 3.12 on MacOS Sonoma.

The all new ✨REST-interface✨

It's pretty much fully functional now. You can find the example in examples/pixoorest on how to start a script that runs the REST server. Most of the methods available in the Pixoo library are supported- except currently for loading a local image (for obvious reasons).

Basically, anywhere in the code you can start a (blocking!) server thread by making a PixooREST object as such:

PixooREST()

Look into the PixooConfiguration and RESTConfiguration objects if you want to do some customizing. This will be documented more later on.

These are the currently supported REST calls, and can be made with both POST and GET calls. A more REST-like interface is coming, but I wanted to make the interface as easily accessible as possible for now.

Pixoo equivalent	URL and variables
clear	/clear/<int:r>/<int:g>/<int:b>
draw_character	/drawcharacter/<string:character>/<int:x>/<int:y>/<int:r>/<int:g>/<int:b>
draw_filled_rectangle	/drawfilledrectangle/<int:top_left_x>/<int:top_left_y>/<int:bottom_right_x>/<int:bottom_right_y>/<int:r>/<int:g>/<int:b>
draw_line	/drawline/<int:start_x>/<int:start_y>/<int:stop_x>/<int:stop_y>/<int:r>/<int:g>/<int:b>
draw_pixel_at_index	/drawpixel/<int:index>/<int:r>/<int:g>/<int:b>
draw_pixel_at_location	/drawpixel/<int:x>/<int:y>/<int:r>/<int:g>/<int:b>
draw_text_at_location	/drawtext/<string:text>/<int:x>/<int:y>/<int:r>/<int:g>/<int:b>
device_configuration	/deviceconfigurations
device_time	/devicetime
fill	/fill/<int:r>/<int:g>/<int:b>
play_local_gif	/playlocalgif/<path:file_path>
play_local_gif_directory	/playlocalgifdirectory/<path:path>
play_gif_file_url	/playnetgif/<path:gif_file_url>
push	/push
reboot	/reboot
send_text_at_location_rgb	/sendtext/<int:x>/<int:y>/<int:r>/<int:g>/<int:b>/<int:identifier>/<int:font>/<int:width>/<int:movement_speed>/<int:direction>
set_brightness	/setbrightness/<int:brightness>
set_channel	/setchannel/<int:channel>
set_clock	/setclock/<int:clock_id>
set_face	/setface/<int:face_id>
set_high_light_mode	/sethighlight/<int:on>
set_mirror_mode	/setmirror/<int:on>
set_noise_status	/setnoise/<int:on>
set_score_board	/setscoreboard/<int:blue_score>/<int:red_score>
set_screen	/setscreen/<int:on>
set_visualizer	/setvisualizer/<int:equalizer_position>
set_white_balance_rgb	/setwhitebalance/<int:white_balance_r>/<int:white_balance_g>/<int:white_balance_b>
sound_buzzer	/soundbuzzer/<int:active_cycle_time>/<int:inactive_cycle_time>/<int:total_time>

The Simulator

.. Simulator might be a bit of a big word, but if you want to test your own drawing stuff, I've included a simple "simulator" that can render the buffer to a GUI so it's easier to debug without having to connect to the device.

It's in a very early stage, but it supports all methods that start with draw_ and can be "pushed" to the GUI, just the way you'd use it normally.

NOTE: When enabling and using the simulator, the actual connection to the device will be completely ignored. So don't expect to see anything on your device when simulating.

The simulator can be activated as such:

pixoo = Pixoo('192.168.1.137', simulated=True, simulation_config=SimulatorConfig(4))

The SimulatorConfig currently only takes one argument, which is the scale to display the images at. Should be 1 or a multiple of 2 if you want nice looking results. It seems like 4 and 8 are working great, in my experience. With scale set to 4 it'll look like this on MacOS:

Installation

You can install the library as a package via pip

pip install pixoo

Alternatively, you can install the pixoo package as developer locally with next command running from cloned folder:

python -m pip install -e .

Or Simply install the required dependencies via PIP. Navigate to the directory where you installed this library. Then execute:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Install the requirements.txt via pip install

On some newer versions of MacOS, if you want to use the simulator you might have to manually install the tkinter library. I use brew:

brew install python-tk

Getting started

Create an interface with your device as such (of course use your own local IP-address):

pixoo = Pixoo('192.168.1.137')

For now, the easiest way to learn how to use this library is to check the examples.py, and the example directory for a neat project. I'll be adding examples to this page over time as well, once the project matures a bit more.

NOTE: Be sure to call push() after performing all your draw actions, to push the internal buffer to the screen. * Try to not call this method more than once per second if you don't want the device to stop responding!*

Usage

Stability increase

Use the refresh_connection_automatically boolean variable in the constructor of Pixoo to force a reset of the internal counter on the device. This should make the application much more stable at the expensive of a slight delay in updating every 32 frames. I haven't tested it myself just yet, but theoretically this would solve the "After updating the screen +/- 300 times the display stops responding" bug.

Special thanks

PICO-8's fantastic low-res font

Special thanks goes to the fantastic PICO-8 and its creator. I've written a small script to convert the font to simple pixel matrixes, which are used as "glyphs" within the draw_text methods.

Supported characters so far are:

0123456789
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
!'()+,-<=>?[]^_:;./{|}~$@%

Known bugs

Simulator shows black screen on Macbook with M-processors

Run the following commands (not tested personally, but based on this Stack Overflow thread)

brew uninstall tcl-tk uninstall
pyenv uninstall 3.10 # Replace this with the global Python version you have installed
brew install tcl-tk
pyenv install 3.10
pyenv global 3.10

You need to install tk via homebrew before installing Python with pyenv because pyenv will automatically try to use whatever tk package it can find when it installs Python.

This will also work if you are using pyenv to upgrade from one version of Python to another.

Previous buffer/image is still partially visible

Unfortunately, the Divoom Pixoo 64 doesn't seem quite ready for prime time- yet. There are some known buffer issues that can cause issues, basically meaning that parts of the previous image are still displayed even though a newer image has been pushed to the display. I'm sure this will be fixed in the future though, the dev team seems to be working hard!

After updating the screen +/- 300 times the display stops responding

This seems to be an internal bug with the current firmware. I'll update the code once a better way to push a buffer to the screen becomes available.

TextScrollDirection.RIGHT seems to invert the string

.. and some other issues. Seems like for now, text can only really be scrolling left with most fonts. This will likely ( hopefully?) be fixed by the dev team in the future.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.