Kyle Johnson's Home Streaming System Gets Chunky Album Art Visualization on a 64x64 RGB LED Matrix

Kyle Johnson has given his home audio system a makeover, courtesy of an album art visualization system powered by a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ single-board computer — and outputting to a chunky 64x64 RGB LED matrix display.

"While thinking of fun uses for a [Raspberry Pi] Pi/[LED] matrix combination, I wrote a PowerShell script and hook for the Monstercat visualizer Rainmeter skin to send my now playing album artwork over to the Pi for display. Overall it was a really fun project."

The heart of the system is a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ single-board computer, connected to a modified Adafruit Matrix Bonnet with pulse-width modulation (PWM) for brightness control and an additional address line to suport a 64x64 RGB LED matrix — also from Adafruit, and based on a 2.5mm pitch.

"The pi is running a Flaschen Taschen server, a project based on the rpi-rgb-led-matrix library by the same author [Henner Zeller]," Johnson writes. "The nice thing about FT is you can test how it displays in the terminal if you don't have a matrix yet."

"The PowerShell script hooks into the visualizer code to run a send image command every time the album art updates. In the demo above I'm using iTunes, but any player the visualizer is compatible with (Spotify) will work too."

Johnson has published his PowerShell script to GitHub under an unspecified open source license, and has instructions on how to set up the software and hardware on Reddit.