So I have been pretty sure I wanted a holiday light show at my home for many years now. You know that one house in your town with the radio station you can tune to and thousands of LEDs light up and blink to the music? I want to be that house. So I went down a rabbit hole of holiday light shows. I’m calling this operation blinky or gtfo. Here’s my method.
First step, get Falcon Player onto a BeagleBone Black via a freshly formatted microSD card. I chose a 32GB microSD card because the price was fine ($9.30 including tax), but you probably need at least 8GB. You can use the SD Card Formatter application from https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter/ .
Follow the command line instructions here: https://learn.adafruit.com/beaglebone-black-installing-operating-systems/mac-os-x#using-the-command-line-344290-11 and for a disk image use the latest release of Falcon Player for BeagleBone Black found here https://github.com/FalconChristmas/fpp/releases . I’m using FPP-v5.2-BBB.img.zip which expands to FPP-v5.2-BBB.img . You might want to pipe the dd command through pv to have a status bar for your disk copying. Something like this (please don’t copy and paste, u