When the Raspberry Pi 5 came out, it was released on completely different underlying hardware than the previous Raspberry Pi boards. Specifically, it used the RP1 chip to handle pretty much all of the Peripheral IO. This made some of the existing libraries such as RPi.GPIO and the NeoPixels stop working and alternatives needed to be found.
For Blinka, libgpiod was originally used because many of the other supported boards had worked with this library and with some testing, I found it to be about 3 times faster than the recommended gpiozero. However, this lacked some crucial features such as PWM. Eventually, I stumbled upon rpi-lgpio, which was basically a wrapper around another library called lgpio, and served as a drop-in replacement for RPi.GPIO and included PWM. Unfortunately, because the RP1 chip remained undocumented, the only option for folks to use NeoPixels was with the Adafruit_CircuitPython_NeoPixel_SPI library and it used the SPI port, so it couldn’t be use in conjunction with another SPI device.
However, with the release of the RP1 documentation…
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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 — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: Open Hardware is In, New CircuitPython and Pi 5 16GB, and much 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
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