Boblight Web GUI Control RaspBMC
Since setting up an boblight on my RaspBMC, I’ve been wanting a nice gui to manage it; turn it on and off, change colours.
I was going to make a plugin to improve my Python knowledge but decided a web plugin would be more flexible as it would be controllable from any device. Using Chris Oattes’ TV Control page as base, I moulded the PHP to be compatible with the standard RaspBMC setup, which currently uses the boblight-dispmanx service. The standard XBMC web server doesn’t support PHP and I couldn’t figure a way of getting it to, so my solution requires setup of another lightweight webserver: lighttpd:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lighttpd
sudo apt-get install php5-common php5-cgi php5
sudo lighty-enable-mod fastcgi-php
You’ll get an error as lighttpd will try to assign to the default web port 80 but libmicrohttpd will already be running on that. You could disable it but I use for remote control. Instead change the default port to something else, I use 3000:
vi /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf
Change server.port = 80 to 3000. Then sudo service lighttpd force-reload
Set the permissions for the server folder:
sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/www
sudo chmod 775 /var/www
sudo usermod -a -G www-data pi
Now all that is left is to copy my boblight control page to the /var/www directory:
wget /boblight.tar.gz
tar -zxvf boblight.tar.gz
mv -r boblight /var/www
chmod -R 775 /var/www/boblight
Visit http://[your raspbmc ip]:3000/boblight to set any static LED colour, disable the dynamic lights or turn off the lights all together. I plan on adding function to edit the boblight.conf settings and implementing some more visual effects.