Tuesday 18 February 2014

Adafruit NeoPixel Ring

The NeoPixel ring I ordered in the Pimoroni sale came this morning, and oh, I love it. We love LEDs here at Raspberry Pi Projects and this is certainly one of our favourites! Adafruit do a great tutorial on how to use their library over at http://goo.gl/lK5CqX .

First program I did with it was make a single pixel 'run' around the ring, then modified this to make the 'on' pixel a random colour. After this one got a little boring to watch (not too boring, you can never get that bored with LEDs ;) ) I made the whole ring turn on with each pixel again being randomly coloured, and change every 100ms. This was preeetty cool!

Now, while I'm writing this up, it's running a ring chase program with the chase LED being orange and the others being blue.

Had to switch the camera to manual to get this pictured!

(Check out the video! http://youtu.be/bGtcuBwdITg it isn't too good, the FPS of the NeoRing was too high for the camera..)



Jamie

Friday 7 February 2014

New Year!

As they say, new year, new beginning; I think this year (even though it's already February now!) I'm going to try and most more often, now I've got back into Pi stuff after Christmas. It won't be quite as often as I'd like due to exams and coursework but I'll try my best.

Here's a few things to look forward to:
PiLite Pi Plate (LoL Sheild)
PiGlow Animation and Effects
Strip Light Drivers and Network Control
Air Play and Mirroring
Pi as Chromecast
IR Remote Interfacing
Portable Power
aaaand anything else that looks like either it's great fun, or uses stupidly large quantities of LEDs ;) (they're always good fun!)

Happy (a little late) New Year!

Jamie

PiLite

So,  I bought a PiLite a while back and as awesome as using it was using it as a message ticker over serial, I wanted to do a bit more with it. I'm not particularly fluent in python and so this is going to be a little tricky as writing scripts in python of simple text output on the serial out are fairly easy. As a bit of a learning curve, especially as I needed to know how to assign each LED individually I made this for a bit of fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcVTdnuIJSE

Apologies for the poor video quality, it was taken on the tablet as a spur of the moment thing and not with the actual camera.

Enjoy!
Jamie

(If anyone wants the code, leave a comment and I'll post a link up!)