since my final project will require a bunch of LED strips performing a synchrononous lightshow, I figured it would be nicec to have a tool that i could use to interface with the LEDs from a remote computer
i started by wiring up a small portion of the LED strip (6 Neopixels) that wouldn't requirer any more than my 3.7V LiPo battery could give.
I started by scoping out how this guy booted up a php server using softoxide.com, but I figured it would be easier to just host everything on the RPi3B+ using Apache. I followed this tutorial from the RPi foundation to do that. The PHP works! Now to get the RPi to respond to the PHP requests...
In order to get the RPi3B+ up and running with the latest and greatest, there were quite a few package downloads that needed to be completed frrom the RPi terminal, so I'll try to consolidate them here:
#note: python 2 or 3 should work here. if using python2, just replace "python3" with python
sudo pip3 install python-dev swig
sudo pip3 install rpi_ws281x adafruit-circuitpython-neopixel
sudo pip3 install apache2 -y
sudo pip3 install php libapache2-mod-php -y
Ran into a snag with the python installation of the NeoPixel library. I read into Adafruit's basic instruction on how to get it running as well. Everytime I run my .py file, I'm served an error: "cannot import the module NeoPixel". I will update here once I've figured it out.