Glow Bird Protocol

I have an LED strip behind my desk running WLED, and it mostly just sat there showing static colors. So I wrote Glow Bird Protocol: a Python tool that listens to whatever audio is playing on my Linux system and makes the strip react to it in real time.

The audio is captured through PulseAudio/PipeWire and analyzed with an FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) using NumPy, which splits the sound into 16 frequency bands. Those bands get packed into a UDP packet and sent to the WLED device. The latency is low enough that the lights genuinely feel like they react the moment a beat hits.

Configuration is just a simple conf.txt file, and the tool runs as a systemd service so it starts automatically in the background. Set it up once and never think about it again.

While making this project I learned a lot about signal processing, how real-time audio capture works on Linux, and how the UDP protocols behind WLED actually work.

Source Code

---

Take a closer look at the source code here: GitHub