HackSpace Magazine Issue 74 features “More blinkies for your rucksack with Adafruit NeoPXL8.”

For the last couple of years, we’ve had lights on the back of the rucksack. Originally, these were a simple string of battery-powered fairy lights from the sadly defunct Wilkos. Then we upgraded these with a strip of WS2811 lights (we preferred the form factor of these waterproof string lights to anything available using the smaller WS2812B LEDs). This helps us remain visible from behind, but we’ve never been too
happy with the visibility from the front. We’ve tried LEDs attached to the bike, but this has always been unsatisfactory. They get knocked about more than LEDs on the rucksack, and they’ve never lasted long.

This year, we wanted to up our visibility by attaching LEDs to the front as well, and the only front facing part of the rucksack – the shoulder straps.

Attaching the LEDs is only half the battle, though. We also need to control them, and fortunately, there are a couple of things that have made it easier to run multiple animations from a single microcontroller.

The first is NeoPXL8, a library that outputs data to up to eight strings of LEDs simultaneously, and LED animations, which is a module that does exactly what it says. Both of these have been developed by Adafruit and work with CircuitPython on Raspberry Pi Pico.

The first step in getting these modules to work is to download both CircuitPython for Pico and the Library Bundle from circuitpython.org.

See the whole article in HackSpace Magazine, issue 74 pp 80-83, download PDF, buy now, subscribe.