Set colors, animation speed, choose your animation and more – all from an onboard menu system.
This guide shows how to make a five-input helper-gadget for designing animations on NeoPixels. A digital readout shows RGB values and other data. It allows you to select from a collection of animations and fine tune them for color, speed, direction or any other variable you program for.
Techniques for repurposing and decorating a scavenged case are also shown. The basics of coding a simple menu-driven selection system is demonstrated. And the advantages of a modular, tabbed approach to coding in the Arduino IDE are discussed.
Who Is This For
This is an advanced beginners project. The provided sample code should be ready to load-and-run. But to modify it you should be familiar with for-loops, functions, the case-statement and controlling NeoPixels with Adafruits library.
If you have several breadboards filled with switches and pots always sitting around, and you swap them between test projects, you might benefit by making this permanent version.
If you are a visual designer and crafter, you might find this useful for determining colors and patterns before embedding the NeoPixels into your final project.
Adafruit Pro Trinket – 5V 16MHz: Trinket’s got a big sister in town – the Pro Trinket 5V! Pro Trinket combines everything you love about Trinket with the familiarity of the common core Arduino chip, the ATmega328. It’s like an Arduino Pro Mini with more pins and USB tossed in, so delicious. (read more)
NeoPixel Ring – 12 x WS2812 5050 RGB LED with Integrated Drivers: Round and round and round they go! 12 ultra bright smart LED NeoPixels are arranged in a circle with 1.5″ (37mm) outer diameter. The rings are ‘chainable’ – connect the output pin of one to the input pin of another. Use only one microcontroller pin to control as many as you can chain together! Each LED is addressable as the driver chip is inside the LED. Each one has ~18mA constant current drive so the color will be very consistent even if the voltage varies, and no external choke resistors are required making the design slim. Power the whole thing with 5VDC and you’re ready to rock. (read more)
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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.
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