WS2812B LEDs (or NeoPixels, as they’re commonly known) are LEDs that can light up in any colour. Really, they’re three LEDs (one red, one green, and one blue) in a single package. Also in there is a tiny processor that supports a simple networking protocol that lets you control lots of NeoPixels from a single pin on your microcontroller.
CircuitPython has great support for NeoPixels using the neopixel module. Using this, you can turn individual LEDs on and off and change their colour easily, but in this article, we’re going to look at something a little more complex – LED matrices. These are rectangular grids of LEDs that can be used to display lights, shapes, text, and more. You can build your own tiny Times Square. To make it simple to draw images and text on these displays, we can use the pixel_framebuf module. In this article, we’ll be using an 8×8 matrix, but you can use larger ones.
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