“Brilliant piece of kit. First time I've ever plugged anything into my RPi and I was a little nervous, but this fitted really well and felt secure. Was able to get up and running in no time thanks to the Pimoroni libraries.”
“Great little addition to the pi, used as a status display in my application can be dimmed to be very untrusive at night, or really eye-catching during the day. Could be used for a wide range of projects, the LEDs are all nicely balanced too with similar colour consistency.”
“Blinkt! is £5 retail in quantities of one so set your expectations accordingly, but you won't do better for the money and it's worth getting if you need something like this.
Colour balance is rather off and also non-linear (but so it goes with LEDs: lux/mA is highly wavelength-dependent). To my eye, green is subjectively at least twice the strength of red and blue, and red is a little stronger than blue. 0xffff00 and 0x00ffff respectively give a yellow and cyan somewhat indistinct from green, and the problem is worse at the lowest levels where the discrete colour LEDs don't combine as well.
As a first approximation, divide the green value by two and you'll get better saturation and linearity than you would otherwise (at the cost of losing one bit of luminosity resolution, not that output levels are remotely a problem!) At the lowest levels, the divisor might need to be closer to three or four but two will do.
I recommend that you improvise a diffuser to provide better colour mixing and avoid the worst of the nonlinearity, especially if you want to use it in a low-lit environment. Without, it's much much too bright and you won't be able to make use of the full dynamic range without blinding yourself. A piece of medium-weight card or translucent plastic would probably do. A diffuser means higher output power and therefore more heat dissipation, so take care to allow for that. Be sure to use a decent power supply.”
“I started a project where I needed a cheap way to visualise data. This little hat was perfect. So simple to use I was up and running in minutes even though I'd not used Python before.
I'd vote for flush fitting too.”
“Second add on I bought it was amazing really easy to setup and with the easy instructions to follow on learn.pimoroni.com it was the bes and one of the easiest to use -Daniel”
