Spotify Matrix

Shows the current Spotify album art on a 64x64 RGB matrix as a circular record. The album art is the record surface itself: it is cropped to a disk, spun while Spotify reports playback as active, and left stopped at the current angle when paused.

This uses Spotify's Web API currently-playing endpoint, not the browser-only Web Playback SDK. The first run opens Spotify OAuth, then the script stores a refresh token in .cache/spotify_token.json.

Files

• spotify_matrix.py - Pi runtime script.
• .env - local Spotify credentials, ignored by Git.
• .env.example - template for recreating local config.
• requirements.txt - Python dependencies, excluding the hardware-specific RGB matrix bindings.

Raspberry Pi setup

Install the RGB matrix Python bindings from the hzeller/rpi-rgb-led-matrix project for your HAT/wiring, then install this project's dependencies:

python3 -m venv .venv --system-site-packages
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

The --system-site-packages flag is useful if the rgbmatrix bindings were installed system-wide.

This install sometimes crashes the raspberry pi zero, I had to do some fancy workarounds. Might be easier to use a pi with more memory!

Spotify setup

In the Spotify developer dashboard, make sure this redirect URI is allowlisted exactly:

http://127.0.0.1:8888/callback

For a headless Pi, forward the callback port from your computer:

ssh -L 8888:127.0.0.1:8888 pi@raspberrypi.local

Then run the script on the Pi and open the printed authorization URL in your local browser.

Run

This is the working command to run the script on your raspberry pi:

sudo -E .venv/bin/python spotify_matrix.py \
  --rows 64 \
  --cols 64 \
  --chain-length 1 \
  --parallel 1 \
  --gpio-slowdown 4 \
  --no-hardware-pulse \
  --hardware-mapping adafruit-hat

Useful hardware options:

sudo -E .venv/bin/python spotify_matrix.py \
  --hardware-mapping regular \
  --gpio-slowdown 2 \
  --brightness 65

For a non-Pi test that writes one PNG frame instead of using matrix hardware:

python spotify_matrix.py --mock-output /tmp/spotify-matrix-frame.png --once

To verify the album art is what spins on the disk, render four local preview frames:

python spotify_matrix.py --preview-frames /tmp/spotify-matrix-preview