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I am soon making guy's helmet from daft punk. But I need to learn more about programming lights for music recognition to the songs. I have no idea where to start.

Moved from GNFD forum to Singer's Groove forum as the topic seems better suited here.

[tech talk]

Kobuk,I doubt the musicians/singers are going to know how to help him program a light helmet to music recognition patterns,he needs tech talk help from an electronics student or the help from the clever furs in the fursuiting section that know about programing multicoloured LED light-up tails and such. In this section,the closest anyone comes to that is Narei who does video/lighting for his DJ sessions I think...but programing/wiring a light up helmet?

I actually built a Daft Punk helmet a few years ago.

The lights were quite easy because - and here's the weird bit - I bought a gadget with LED lights that reacted, equalizer-style, to music. I think it was a coaster, , but you can get the same tech wired in to T-shirts, desktop toys etc.

So there you go. Get yourself to any shop that sells lame executive toys and gadgets, and rip the guts out of that. No programming knowledge needed!

The equalizer info is great, butvi also need flashing rainbow lights for the sides and preset images like a heart or smiley face.

Using the guts of a cheap China made toy is a great idea!  If you need to access larger banks of lights you can route the lighting wires to a transistor (<-kind of like a switch that is turned on and off by a low voltage) or a solid state relay if you wanted to do the wiring yourself.  These devices could trigger on the low current from a china toy for a single light to drive a whole bank of lights (on/off).  

If you want to build everything yourself you could try wiring in a Raspberry Pi.  The advantage here is that the Raspberry Pi has GPIO pins that can be turned on/off by by a very simple programing language (if you see their site 6 and 7 year olds are even using it).  In this situation if I was doing it myself I would load of the Pi SD card with my fav MP3s then route the audio to a small amp/speakers in the helm.  Next I would write a program that polled the Pi volume 3-5 times a second and based on the internal volume level turn on and off LEDs in the pattern I chose.  The logic and pattern could be chosen by you.

  That may be one way if you want to do everything from scratch.

Yes, but the actual programming is what I need help with.

Well as far as I know the dudes who do the Raspberry Pi have said that Python is their language of choice, and although I've never bothered to learn it myself I've heard that is a pretty easy one to pick up. There's also a lot of free, legal ebooks that'll teach you it if you search on Google (here's a reasonably short one that seems to be highly regarded).