New Guide: Bluetooth Controlled Programmable Room Lights
Home automation is all the rage. We’ve got Alexa and Siri playing us music, remote controlled room blinds, bluetooth controlled thermostats and video doorbells. We live in the future!
Jump on the Home Automation bandwagon like the DIY master you are. This new tutorial from Erin St. Blaine will show you how to assemble, install, and custom program a strip of NeoPixel lights in your home or RV, and control them with Adafruit’s BlueFruit app on your smartphone or tablet. This solution is more affordable and much more customizable than other commercially available products. Most bluetooth controllable light strips are not “addressable,” meaning the strip can show all the colors but only as a unit. You can’t always make animated rainbows or torchlight flickers, or starry night skies with comets going by. This guide will show you how to do all that, at a price that’s less than you’d pay for name brand solutions.
From the guide:
Install a strip of NeoPixel lights in your bedroom or living space. Hook them up to a Circuit Playground Bluefruit and control the lights with your phone or tablet. You can add as many different animation modes as you like – it’s really easy to do with Adafruit’s CircuitPython LED Animations Library.
Choose from millions of colors with our graphical color picker. And the library includes around a dozen pre-written animations that you can customize to your heart’s content including Rainbow, Pulse, Sparkle Pulse, Color Chase, Comet, and more. Within each animation you can set custom colors, speeds, directions and brightness. You can even layer the animations over one another to create your own custom animated lighting scenes.
Cycle through modes and fine-tune your brightness levels using Adafruit’s free BlueFruit app, which works seamlessly with our CircuitPython sample code.
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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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