New Guide: Make it Glow – Your First NeoPixel Project
You want to add lights to your costume but you don’t know where to start.
Every time you look at a beginning electronics guide, it talks about things like resistors and voltage, and after a few minutes you just close the window, because you don’t need to be an expert. You just want to add lights to your costume. Why is this so hard?
This very easy beginner guide will tell you exactly what to do to get your costume glowing. You’ll find out which lights are the best for costumes, which controller to use, and what kind of battery you’ll need. She’ll walk you through setup with no soldering iron or fancy tools required (except some wire strippers).
Once your lights are glowing, she’ll hand you the reins and point you at a ton of sample code that you can download and tweak to make your project work exactly the way you want.
From the guide:
Add animated programmable lights to your costume or project. This first-timer guide will walk you through the basics and get you up and running in minutes.
You don’t need any fancy soldering equipment or programming knowledge — Adafruit’s Circuit Playground Express makes it really simple, so you can spend your time on making your project amazing and unique.
We’ll be using NeoPixels in this guide. NeoPixel is a fancy name for lights you can program.
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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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