We recently took the plunge and got a bunch of HomeKit enabled light switches for our house. After that we got a string of the Hue Lightstrips for pretty multi-colored lights! After looking at the Hue strip, I thought that would be a cool project to build your own version. It also gave me an excuse to play with some NeoPixels which I’ve wanted to play with for a while now. 🙂
I’ve had a couple of Raspberry Pis kicking around looking for a project, so I wanted to try and use that for this project.
After spending a bunch of hours cruising around the Adafruit website I came across the FadeCandy board and associated server software. This little board connects to a host via USB, and directly controls the NeoPixel strips. You run a simple server app on the host its connected to, which then allows you to make really simple calls to the server to control the lights. You can certainly control the lightstrips more directly, but having FadeCandy and the Open Pixel Control server in between makes talking to them a lot easier.
Since the Raspberry Pi can run the OPC server, and has USB to connect the FadeCandy to, it makes it a great little platform for this.
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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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Python for Microcontrollers – Adafruit Daily — Select Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: PyCon AU 2024 Talks, New Raspberry Pi Gear Available and More! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
EYE on NPI – Adafruit Daily — EYE on NPI Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey
