Hi all,

I'm the proud new custodian of a Raspberry Pi 2, two sets of 12v 5050 SMD RGB light strips, and a live music party in outback Australia in a couple of weeks.

I'd like to use the Raspberry Pi to make the LED strips respond to the live music. I figure the easiest way for me to do this would be to make a puredata patch, running on the Raspberry, to analyze the live sound. That part I think I can do...

But I'm not quite sure how to get puredata talking to my LED strip lights via the pins on the Raspberry Pi, yet. Has anyone got any suggestions?

[EDIT: Just to clarify, it's the software side of things downstream of PD that I'm stuck on. I can manage the hardware interfacing, I hope...]

Cheers,
Jon

I have my lighting at home controlled by pd on a rpi, but that is through an external usb-dmx controller.
You have different needs.
You will need to pwm (pulse width modulate) your gpio pins.
First you need to be able to talk to them.. http://nyu-waverlylabs.org/rpi-gpio/
Then you will need a 12v power supply, and some transistors (probably mosfets) with enough current capacity for your led strips. Opto isolation would be a good idea as well, but not vital. Other people have preceeded you, just not using pd.
Here you will find info about the external electronics that you will need: http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/13479/controlling-multiple-analog-rgb-12v-led-strips
David