QLC+ on the Raspberry Pi
In the last few years a new category of devices spread out and gather a huge success and a good response on the market.
Projects like Arduino, Beagle Board and Raspberry Pi are in the center of many projects in robotics, surveillance and electronics controlling but also in the education field.
Thanks to the donation of a QLC+ user, a challenging task has been started back in November 2013 to offer a very cheap (around $40) and easily portable solution for controlling lights. It's been challenging in the sense that at that time (Nov 2013) a Raspberry Pi 1 was based on a single core 700Mhz ARM processor with a limited amount of RAM, while QLC+ was used to run on 2-4-8 core desktop processors with 2-3Ghz clock frequency. Things improved with the Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 and now QLC+ runs quite smoothly on the current generation devices.
Features in a nutshell
QLC+ on Raspberry Pi is an optimized version that tries to get the best out of a limited device while keeping the whole set of functionalities offered on the desktop version.
Let's go directly into the techy details to let you understand what kind of gear is powering QLC+ on the Pi:
- Supports every 64bit Raspberry Pi model (3, 4, 400, 5 and Zero 2W)
- A Linux system based on RaspiOS Bookworm, with a 6.6 kernel and optimized for the ARM64 architecture
- Just 120MB of RAM used when QLC+ is running
- Minimal software image that fits into a SD card with a size of just 4GB and still leaves around 1.5GB of free space
- Powered by Qt 5.15.2 directly running on OpenGL for fast 2D rendering of the User Interface. An X server is not present in the image.
- Web interface access, including all the network settings to use a wired or wireless network
- All the QLC+ plugins are available in this version, including OLA, UART, GPIO and a powerful SPI plugin to natively control LED strips and RGB LED Panels
- Boots in about 30 seconds on a RPi 5
- They start automatically in operate mode and with web access activated.
- It is possible to define a project to be loaded and started at boot time.
How to download it - Read carefully
Due to the huge amount of effort dedicated to offer an optimized version of QLC+ on the Raspberry Pi, in this case I need to ask for a small contribution for the results of months of efforts.
As many other open source projects do, there is no cost for the software. It is, and always will be, free and open source. You can still build QLC+ on the Raspberry yourself.
Therefore I request a contribution of 20€ or the equivalent amount in your currency (but you can donate more if you want!) to obtain the software image download links. As the PayPal system works by email addresses, you will be contacted back via the MailChimp service, with an email providing the URLs to download the software and a user guide PDF.
Please note: normally you will receive an email within 24 hours from the donation. This is not an automated service. Check also your spam and advertisement folders to avoid missing the email (especially @hotmail and @outlook accounts).
After donating, any future update will be provided automatically and free of charge.
Please, click on the button below and enter an email address where you can be reached and the amount you wish to donate. (€20 or more)
If you don't use PayPal, you can purchase the image from our shop!
