Sep 25, 2025
I love projects I can finish in one evening, the day before a fair starts
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I love projects I can finish in one evening, the day before a fair starts
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch β’ No registration required β’ HD streaming
More Sparkle Motion testing - 24V Neon Neopixel Tubes β¨π
This chonky neopixel tube is a treat with full, smooth color all the way around - but it's also a real pain to drive, given it requires 24V power. Or at least it would be if we didn't have this Sparkle Motion
Coming soon! We're designing a board for using WLED - and we want to make like the bestest board in the wholeworld. Our resident me
board we are testing! With USB PD support, it's easy to plug the board into a USB C laptop power supply that can provide 20V at up to 5A - even though it's under 24V, we've found the LEDs are just as bright. Looks great, we're going to keep testing and get these boards ordered, hopefully before the year's end!
Festival of Lightsβ¦ A 'USB Stick' Sparkle Motion WLED driver β¨π‘ππ
To wrap up this year, we're doing 8 days (maybe!) of light-filled designs. We started with the Sparkle Motion Mini
mini Sparkle Motion prototype - a tiny, fully-featured WLED board β¨πππ‘π
which can drive thousands of shimmering RGB LEDs. Next, we were going through some of our NeoPixel samples today and found some "LED Christmas light kit" with star LEDs, its basically these stars
Attaching NeoPixel strips to your costume can be a struggle as the flexible PCBs can crack when bent too much. So how to add little shooting
with a little USB plug that has IR, a crummy mic, a tactile switch to cycle modes manually, and a tiny microcontroller that turns the LED selections to different patterns - kinda like this:
The idea is cute - but the implementation could be improved with a lil sparkle motion
Coming soon! We're designing a board for using WLED - and we want to make like the bestest board in the wholeworld. Our resident me
! we made a PCB that would fit into the same plastic enclosure but with an ESP32 instead. it's got an IR receiver, ICS-43434 I2S digital microphone
https://www.digikey.com/short/mmv3tthz
gpio 0 button in the 'right' place, 5V 2A fuse, USB-serial converter for uploading/debugging, and two level-shifted outputs. We can probably get the case in quantity or have this be a 'DIY replacement' that folks can use to make their existing setups WLED/xLights friendly.
Driving HUB75 RGB Matrices on Raspi 5 with PIO π‘π
Since the latest release of 'piolib' we can do things like drive NeoPixels on any pin on the Raspberry Pi 5
CircuitPython is the best new way to code microcontrollers. But what if you want to run that same code on a more POWERFUL computer like a Ra
which rocks, and means we can tackle the next, more complex, project: driving HUB75 RGB Matrix displays
Wintertime can be rough in the city. The sky is gray. The weather is unpredictable. So slough off those seasonal blues with some&n
these require even MORE timing freakiness: using 10 pins, and 'manual' PWM means we have to constantly blit out the color dithering. Historically this was done with mmap'd memory to the GPIO controller bitbanging, which required a full core and could jitter depending on load. But now we can use the PIO peripheral! We can drive massive display arrays at high speeds and color depths using just about any pins. The future is looking bright π
BIG BIG rainbows on "Sparkle motion" WLED driver board ππ‘
We got our WLED-friend PCBs
https://blog.adafruit.com/2024/12/02/leftovers-layout-wled-board-revision-a-completed/
and are testing it with various LED grids. First, we tried out a 16x16 NeoPixel grid that runs on 5V. Since that worked well, we're now onto a much bigger 60 x 60 grid - that's 3,600 LEDs! These are some NeoPixel pebble
We have all sorts of LED strips for a wide range of needs. Chonky strips? We got those! Strips with alligator clips 
netting samples we're also testing at the same time; each one has 20 x 60 pixels and uses 12V power, so it's a good test of the DC pass-through for higher voltages. Since WLED has a limit of 2000 pixels per output, this demo uses the three output ports that are then 'merged' together in memory to make a single large grid. We have more to test soon: the onboard IR receiver, USB PD, I2S microphone, extra I/O pins, and I2C, so watch for those videos as they come together. Coming soon -
Coming soon! We're designing a board for using WLED - and we want to make like the bestest board in the wholeworld. Our resident me
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch β’ No registration required β’ HD streaming
Testing PIO support for RP1 chips on Pi 5 Computers
Ladyada tasked Jepler with exploring the new libPIO for Raspberry Pi 5 computers: this gives us access to the RP1 chip so that we can run custom PIO state machines on the GPIO pins. A common use case is NeoPixels, because of the tight timing requirements of the WS281x LEDs. Here is our first light test that shows it is possibleβ¦
Raspberry Pi 5 / RP1 chip support for Neopixels with Python bindings coming soon ππ‘π₯οΈππ
Hot off the PIO-presses, our resident Jepler created a Python binding for the Raspberry Pi 5 that lets us use the RP1 chip
Raspberry Pi 5 is our first flagship product to make use of silicon designed in-house here at Raspberry Pi: the RP1 I/O controller.
on the 5/500 series boards to drive Neopixels using PIO. This is great because we can now use Neopixels
Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits : NeoPixels - Tools Gift Certificates Arduino Cables Sensors LEDs Books Break
and friends on the latest Pi boards, and we can use any pin because PIO is not limited by underlying peripherals. You do need the latest kernel and firmware, so it is not quite ready for prime-time, but once piolib
A collection of scripts and simple applications. Contribute to raspberrypi/utils development by creating an account on GitHub.
is more readily available, we'll be able to have folks test this out.
π¨β¨ New at Adafruit! β¨π¨ π» Raspberry Pi USB 3 Hub - 5 Gbit/s USB 3.2 Gen1, π Adafruit NeoPixel Pebble / Seed LED Strand - 100, 150, 200, and 300 LEDs, π Adafruit bq25185 USB / DC / Solar Lithium Ion/Polymer charger, and β‘ Adafruit bq25185 USB / DC / Solar Charger with 3.3V Buck Board. Head over to https://adafruit.com/new