Raspberry Pi Halloween Animated Light Display – RGB Matrix LED display with pumpkin and PIR sensor

My Raspberry Pi Halloween project for this year is based around the Raspberry Pi RGB matrix display project. I have put the RGB Matrix outside of my house and wanted to display a Halloween animation on the display. I also wanted to include a PIR sensor which changed the display when someone approached the display. Changing from a friendly pumpkin jack-o-lantern display, but then changing to a scary pumpkin when someone approaches.

To display the animation I needed to create my own program code which could handle displaying static images and animations using PNG files. I also designed my own PIR mount using FreeCAD which allows the PIR to be mounted on the bottom of the LED matrix picture frame. This uses a program created in C/C++ (for maximum performance when displaying images) and a separate program which detects people using the PIR sensor and changes the images / sequences ate the appropriate date and time.

The code is available on GitHub, but please check the latest status as it’s under active development:

Raspberry Pi RGB matrix display project – step-by-step instructions

Code for Raspberry Pi RGB LED matrix image viewer and animation / video player

Download the files used in the Halloween 2020 Raspberry Pi RGB matrix LED display