Tim Bartlett shared his LED Strip Clock built around a Teensy and a 1-meter 60-NeoPixel LED strip — with a few tweaks you might be a ble to cheer on the changing of the NeoPixel in the comfort of your home instead of shivering in Time Square for the ball drop!
I just put together a clock with Adafruit’s 60-NeoPixel LED strip, running off a Teensy 3.0 microcontroller. The flexible 1-meter strip has 60 RGB lights, so different colors represent the second, minute, and hour — you can read it like a normal clock if it’s in a circle, but you can also leave it in a straight line or drape it over something for the Salvador Dalí look.
…The LED clock lets you pick different color schemes, add faint dots every 5 or 15 minutes (or none), and turn on blinking hour “chimes.” Right now you need to set these options in the Arduino IDE and re-upload, but I’ll add the ability to change that with buttons or a knob at some point.
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
