“I've been wanting to hook my Pi up to some addressable lights for a while, but a lot of the info I'd found online either involved a level of electronics that was beyond me, or cautionary notes about the Pis lack of real time clock which put me off.
I bought this just to experiment and see how easy it was to program the lights and I've got to admit I'm impressed.
Within minutes of fitting it to a Pi (v2 modelB) and downloading the library as described in the getting started guide I was engrossed. Setting the lights couldn't really be any simpler.
I haven't programmed it to respond to any real world stimulus, just to make pretty patterns and scroll them about.
As evening settled in, I wrote a little bit of code to emulate the iconic (to those of us of a certain age) lights from the front of KIT in Knight Rider. I think I got a fairly accurate representation. It may not be the best bit of code, but it was a very nostalgic sight.
It is a shame that it occupies the full set of GPIO pins, but in return that makes set-up exceedingly simple.
What I'd love to see would be a hat intended to allow a number of the individual lights to be hung off it, or daisy chained from each other, allowing construction of something with a variety of lights all over it.
I still need that bridging step from the simplicity of this, to allowing me to buy and control a roll of the APA102 lights it uses.”
“Blinkt! is a quick and elegant way to add a row of RGB LEDs to your Raspberry Pi. At its current price, you might as well get one for any Pi that doesn't have a proper HAT installed yet.
The colours produced by the LEDs look great, and can be turned up to an eye-searing brightness. As with any RGB LEDs, a diffuser will help a lot with blending colours together. Without one, mixing RGB (with some tweaks) still gives perfectly fine results. Still, I would love to see a tiny Blinkt!-sized slide-on diffuser added as a purchase option, for those of us who don't have their Blinkt! inside a case.
Communicating with the APA102/APA102C LEDs is easy compared to the older and more common WS2812B's. Either grab Pimoroni's examples, or do it yourself with a simple data and clock signal. No strict timing required. If only we lived in a world where all RGB LED (p)HATs had these.”
“Simple to use, easy to set up, I love this little LED hat. I don't use Python so I wrote and published a Node.js library for this: https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-blinkt”
“Eight neo-pixels in a ludicrously simple package, with an oh-so-simple Python library - marvellous !!
Ok, it takes up the whole gpio header but, if you want to have some quick-and-easy visual feedback from a project or, like me, just like messing around with pretty lights (while polishing up my Python), it's brilliant!
Using one of these and an Analog Zero board I had a simple pulse-rate display going in about 5 minutes, in less than 10 lines of code!
This is one of those little add-ons that looks way too simplistic, until you start playing with it, then you find dozens of uses for it.”
