Synesthesia Project Light Desk

A Node.js library for creating virtual control panels for controlling lighting and other things. These control panels are designed to work well with both touch-screen devices and mouse cursors alike.

You simply install and use the node module in your Node.js project, and then visit a specific URL from your web browser to access and use the control panel while your project is running.

This project is very much a work in progress!

Installation

You can install this library from NPM:

$ npm install @synesthesia-project/light-desk

or

$ yarn add @synesthesia-project/light-desk

Alternatively, you can add this repository as a submodule to your repo, and add a symlink from node_modules/@synesthesia-project/light-desk to the location of that submodule within your repo to use in-development versions, and if you want to contribute, such as what's done in the synesthesia-project/synesthesia repo.

Usage

Virtual desks are constructed from individual components that you collect together in groups to distribute them over your desk. Groups arrange their components either vertically or horizontally, and can contain sub-groups.

Light desks must have a "root" group, which components are then added to to build up the layout of desks.

Usage with Typescript

If you use typescript for your project, types for this module when you import should work automatically. There is no need to install a specific @types/X package etc... as they are included in the @synesthesia-project/light-desk package (light-desk is itself also written in TypeScript, and so the type declarations are generated automatically).

Examples

See the examples directory for full examples.

Hello World Example

const lightDesk = require('@synesthesia-project/light-desk');

function buttonPressed() {
  console.log("The button was pressed!");
}

const desk = new lightDesk.LightDesk();

// Create the root "group" for your desk, which new components can be added to
const group = new lightDesk.Group();
desk.setRoot(group);

// Start the desk
desk.desk.start({
  mode: 'automatic',
  port: 1337
});

// Create a button that calls buttonPressed(),
const button = new lightDesk.Button("Hello World");
group.addChild(button);
button.addListener(buttonPressed);

Upon running this code, a URL will be printed to stdout which can be visited from a web browser to view the control panel, e.g:

$ node index.js
Starting light desk on port: 1337
Light Desk Started: http://localhost:1337

Light Beat Example

A basic example TypeScript project that uses light-desk to control a virtual "flashing light". It should be pretty simple to extend this project to actually control the brightness of a real light, e.g. some light strip controlled by a raspberry pi, or some DMX fixture.

A demo video of this example project in action can be found here: https://youtu.be/d5p26aAb-hQ

Documentation

Full documentation and API Reference can be found on the documentation site.