launchpad-display

A Node.js server for running the Novation Launchpad as an interactive display

🏗️ Under Significant Rewrite ⚠️

What you see now in this repo is under significant rewrite. Old code was very janky and unmaintainable. I'm leaving the rest of readme as is, and the functionality should be soon on par, or better than the old code.

Also fixed node_modules since .gitignore didn't work for some odd reason, figures.

What I've used

• Node.js - obviously (though not really, there are great .NET libs for Launchpad)
• Lawrence Sans
• launchpad-mini

Prerequisites

• Node.js (tested with 16.16.0)
• All requirements for the npm midi package (check for your OS)

Run

npm install
npm start

Modes

Switching

You can switch between the modes by either pressing the buttons on the right side of the Launchpad or by using the API (described later). In the order of buttons going from top you have:

• Clock
• Controls
• Character
• Draw

Clock

In this mode Launchpad displays a digital clock. It fits the hour and minutes, as well as a blinking second indicator.
You can use the 🔼 button to change the font face to:

• classic - 4x3 pixel arabic numbers
• modern - a custom 4x4 symbol set (unintuitive at first)

Controls

In this mode you can control various stuff like volume and music. Currently you can control:

• master audio volume
• play/pause, next, previous

Note: the play/pause button uses stupid logic for blinking when active and does not know if the music was already playing or not.

Character

In this mode you can print to Launchpad a string of characters.
There are 2 ways to do so:

• clicking on the 🔼 button
  • this will open a prompt in the Node.js terminal for a string input
• using the API

The text will scroll and the characters will be displayed in the Lawrence Sans 8x8 pixel font.

Draw

Here you can draw anything you want on the main 8x8 grid with the use of the color picker.

Current options:

• clear all
• clear color
• green, amber and red in medium light
• green, amber and red in full

You can chose either of the option form the top row buttons.

Bad Apple

It plays Bad Apple!

API

This project not only enables interactions with the Launchpad via, well, the Launchpad, but it's also a web server. There are several endpoints that allow you to control the Launchpad.

• / - hello world placeholder, for now
• [GET] /clock - toggles the clock font
• [POST] /mode - accepts {mode: <string>} and changes the mode according to the defined modes (so Clock, Controls, Character etc.)
• [POST] /character - accepts {string: <string>} and optionally {color: <color>}, where color is either red, green or amber (default). Will display passed in string in color (if provided).

Future

• Add photos to this ReadMe
• Audio bars visualizer (was done with C# here, will try something similar)
• A better font than Lawrence Sans
• Non-fixed width font support (it's hardcoded 8 width)
• More clock fonts? Then the API would change from GET to POST and something like {font: <string>}
• API for Draw mode. Perhaps to send over an image?

Notes

This project is kinda a resulf of "well, I'm not using it much often,w hat else could I do with it?" and then I remembered Madeon Adventure Machine and went "oh, I can use JS".
Now the aim is to have a fancy pixel display sitting somewhere in the room, so when guests come by they are like "ohh, fancy" and "how do you even read the time off that?".