Adafruit Matric Portal M4 App initial made for RUCHacks Spring '23 (written for the Adafruit Matrix Portal - CircuitPython Powered Internet Display).
Follow the assembly and prep instructions here. You will need to flash the board with the bootloader. A known working version is included here, but you can download and test newer versions too.
Once the board is configured, just copy the contents of ./src to the root of the board's drive (do not include src, just its contents!). If you plan on using the WiFi capabilities you will need to configure the secrets.py file with your 2.4Gz WiFi access point.
There are 4 default modes provided:
- Text Splash
- Conway's Game of Life
- Matrix Code Rain
- Weather Report
Once loaded you can use the UP button on the board to cycle through the modes. They mostly cover the base capabilities of the board. The weather mode by default is commented out, as it needs a local server running (feel free to change how this works!). The local server is detailed in the next section.
When connected to your computer you can use a serial connection to access the board and view any printed output. The file debug.py uses the Python package pyserial v3.5 to connect to the board. This has been tested on Windows, and you'll likely need to change the COM port referenced in the code. Just run the script and if it works then you should see output from the Matrix Portal board.
The current weather mode uses a stripped down response from https://api.weather.gov/gridpoints/PHI/40,75/forecast - the response is generally too big for the Matrix Portal to handle, so this webserver runs on a local PC (a raspberry pi perhaps!) which can handle the response. Install flask and run:
flask --app utilities.server.app run --host 0.0.0.0This will show 2 IP addresses in the output. For example, on my system I see:
flask --app utilities.server.app run --host 0.0.0.0
>>
* Serving Flask app 'utilities.server.app'
* Debug mode: off
WARNING: This is a development server. Do not use it in a production deployment. Use a production WSGI server instead.
* Running on all addresses (0.0.0.0)
* Running on http://127.0.0.1:5000
* Running on http://192.168.1.159:5000
Press CTRL+C to quit
The address that the Matrix Portal can see is http://192.168.1.159:5000 and so we want to place that URL in code.py. Note that your valid address may be different depending on your router/modem!. Once there the weather mode should pull the weather for the location specified in the server (the bit PHI/40,75 is approximately Camden County)