The Raspberry Pi series of single-board computers are an affordable platform for projects of all kinds, found in classrooms and industrial applications alike. Over the last decade, each new model has brought more impressive specs, including quad core processors, a separate GPU chip, multiple display support, and more. As the platform has matured, the list of available software has also grown to include a number of high quality tools for creative coding, all of which are free! In this post, we’ll take a look at a couple of great software tools for creating real-time generative graphics with a Raspberry Pi.
Before we get started, I want to point out that all screenshots contained in this post were taken on an actual Raspberry Pi 4B. For more info on the Raspberry Pi and different models available, check out the official Raspberry Pi website: https://www.raspberrypi.com/
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!
rp2040-psram is a header-only C library to allow access to SPI PSRAM via PIO on the RP2040 microcontroller as used on the Raspberry Pi Pico.
Due to the timing requirements of these PSRAM devices, reading data from them at high speed (>84MHz) requires the following clock behavior:
Read data needs to be sampled on the clock falling edge.
An extra “fudge factor” clock cycle is required before reading data.
Author Ian Scott says:
I could not get the hardware SPI interface on the RP2040 to work at high speed with this behavior, so I created a PIO SPI implementation specifically tailored to the behavior of the PSRAM chips and optimized for the highest speed possible:
A read or write command is given, followed by an optional read of data.
Chip select is driven by PIO.
DMA is used so CPU cycles are not used to service the PIO TX and RX FIFOs.<
Special optimized functions are provided for writing 8, 16, and 32 bit data as fast as possible.
All functions are tagged with __force_inline for the fastest speed possible.
The library is licensed under a permissive MIT License.
PicoMemcard, by Daniele Giuliani, allows you to build your own supercharged PSX Memory Card that can be connected to your computer via USB in order to transfer saves directly to/from your PSX.
You can use it to repurpose broken/counterfeit Memory Cards creating a better one using only a Raspberry Pi Pico.
We call these RadioFruits, our take on an microcontroller with packet radio transceiver with built-in USB and battery charging. It’s an Adafruit Feather RP2040 with a RFM69HCW 900MHz radio module cooked in! Great for making wireless networks that are more flexible than Bluetooth LE and without the high power requirements of WiFi.
It’s kinda like we took our RP2040 Feather and RFM69 900MHz breakout board and glued them together. You get all the pins for use on the Feather, the Lipoly battery support, USB C power / data, onboard NeoPixel, 8MB of FLASH for storing code and files, and then with the 8 unused pins, we wired up all the DIO pins on the RFM module. There’s even room left over for a STEMMA QT I2C connector an a uFL connector for connecting larger antennas.
This is the 900 MHz RFM69 packet radio version, which can be used for either 868MHz or 915MHz transmission/reception – the exact radio frequency is determined when you load the software since it can be tuned around dynamically. Despite calling it a ‘packet’ radio (and it does send packets of data) the RFM69 can also be used for non-packetized radio transmission and reception.
You’re probably really used to microcontroller boards with USB, but what about a dev board with two? Two is more than one, so that makes it twice as good! And the Adafruit Feather RP2040 with USB Host isdefinitely double-the-fun of our other Feather RP2040 boards, with a USB Type A port on the end for connecting USB devices to.
Now you might be thinking “hey waitaminute, the RP2040 doesn’t have two USB port peripherals???” and you’d be correct! But what it does have is a nifty PIO peripheral that can be (ab)used to emulate a USB host peripheral. You get to keep the main USB port for uploading, debugging, and data communication, while at the same time sending and receiving data to just-about-any USB device. This work is originally by sekigon on GitHub, and if you’re using Pico SDK that’s still the recommended library to use.
Note that this is definitely a firmware hack: you will need to dedicate the second ARM core and both PIO peripherals to just handling the USB messages, but we find that it does work fairly well, or at least as well as most microcontroller USB Host peripherals!
We also include a 1 Amp boost converter based on the TPS61023 so you can run from Lipo battery and get a nice clean 5V output for the USB devices. The booster has the enable pin tied to one of the extra GPIO on the RP2040 so power can be manually turned on and off to hard-reset whatever is connected.
At the Feather’s heart is an RP2040 chip, clocked at 133 MHz and at 3.3V logic, the same one used in the Raspberry Pi Pico. This chip has a whopping 8MB of onboard QSPI FLASH and 264K of RAM! There’s even room left over for a STEMMA QT connector for plug-and-play of I2C devices!
Divoom Pixoo Slingbag is nice looking handbag, with a 16×16 RGB LED screen in it. chebe was curious and wanted to look inside.
The bag is constructed well, of decent quality materials. The LED grid works very well. The app for it, on the other hand, is absolute hell. Other people have made alternative clients for them, like the DivoomClient for ESP32, Divoom Timebox Evo, but the only one I personally tried out was the Windows Diwoom client. Which worked pretty well, but made me realise the bluetooth communication isn’t protected at all.
If there isn’t a client currently connected to the bag, there’s nothing stopping anyone else from connecting and changing the displayed image. So clearly the hardware had to come out.
The chosen replacement display is a Pimoroni Stellar Unicorn, a 16×16 RGB LED matrix, with a Raspberry Pi Pico W attached in one package. MicroPython was used to program it.
There are repos that will decode the actual animations from the app, but there doesn’t seem to be a ready library for implementing them in MicroPython (I saw a promising one for CircuitPython, which alas is not MircroPython), but I’ll keep investigating.
Tom Fox the SPOKE board, an easy way to add up to 26 touch sensors to projects for interaction. Anything with capacitive potential can be connected to the pins and used to control computer inputs.
Create your own USB MIDI device, game controller, key mapper or other computer interface device by attaching metallic objects, conductive inks, conductive threads, fruits, plants, vegetables, cutlery, car keys, mushrooms etc. or use it just as a standalone device.
The custom circuit board houses a Raspberry Pi Pico. USB MIDI and keyboard are accommodated via CircuitPython code (GitHub).
Using Adafruit’s CircuitPython meant coding was super simple. So far I’ve been using it for USB-MIDI interfacing and also as a HID device to emulate keyboards and mice. mouses. Because of the simplicity of CircuitPython + Pico, the code can be edited in Notepad without needing to download any IDE’s.
Periodically, an HTTP request is sent over wifi to the Sentry web service to query for the asteroids with the highest threat levels. Typically 6 or 7 objects are returned.
Charlie Birks is running MS-DOS 3.3 and Microsoft Windows 1.01 on a Pimoroni PicoVision which has two Raspberry Pi RP2040 chips, HDMI video, microSD card, and audio.
Details are scarce, the post is on X/Twitter here and code on GitHub under a permissive MIT License.
The AUDIODiWHY blog wanted to build a clock multiplier for the bench, but needed a way to accurately read frequencies of incoming signals. Between 10hz and 100K.
The firmware for the reader is based on a cool RP2040 counting algo by Jeremy P. Bentham–see his blog post here and github page here.
I modified it a little, but not much, and made it display observed frequencies on a small OLED display using David Schram’s open source C library for SSD1306’s: here.
A few minor code changes were needed, for instance, the frequency reading algorithm put the frequency value into an integer in memory, but for the Schram1306 library I needed a string.
I am a simple midwesterner living in the middle of New York City. I put my shoes on one at a time, I apologize when I bump into people on the street, and I use AI inference to drop hats on heads when they stand outside my apartment. Like anybody else.
I have extremely high foot traffic outside my window. I see a sea of uncovered heads in the sun. I believe DropofaHat.zone will become the first of many window based stores. Here a busy New Yorker can book a 5 minute time slot, pay for a hat, stand in a spot under my window for 3 seconds, have a hat put on their head, and get on with their extremely important, extremely busy day all within a single New York minute.
As far as the mechanism used:
The Dropping Mechanism was the simplest thing to get working. I had a Raspberry Pi and an stepper motor lying around so I decided to put them to work.
I literally copied code out of an Adafruit tutorial for the stepper motor. This is a single Python file on the Raspberry Pi that the computer will run when the AI determines someone is standing in the right spot and ready to receive their hat.
Alasdair Allan has done some solid work over the past years benchmarking machine learning accelerator hardware. Now he turns his attention to the Rasperry Pi 5 on Hackster.io:
Running the benchmarks on the new Raspberry Pi 5 we see significant improvements in inferencing speed, with full TensorFlow models running almost ×5 faster than on they did on Raspberry Pi 4. We see a similar increase in inferencing speed when using TensorFlow Lite, with models again running almost ×5 faster than on the Raspberry Pi 4.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!
An Alaska-based maker sees your flight tracker and raises you with a two-for-one: a flight-tracking, aurora borealis-photographing, roof-mounted setup.
A Raspberry Pi 4 wearing a PoE HAT is the brains of the operation, while a Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera wearing a fisheye lens looks up and captures amazing light shows in the Alaskan night sky. Raspberry Pi-compatible sensors for radio and for visible light tell the camera when to kick in and start photographing the sky.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!
The Adafruit RP2040 Prop-Maker Feather: an all-in-one combination of the Feather RP2040 with a Prop-Maker FeatherWing with a few tweaks based on feedback from expert prop-builders. Perfect for fitting into your next prop build! This Feather will unlock the ‘Imagineer’ inside all of us, with tons of stuff packed in to make sabers & swords, props, toys, mini robots, cosplay pieces, and more.
We looked at hundreds of prop builds, and thought about what would make for a great low-cost (but well-designed) add-on for our Feather boards. Here’s what we came up with:
Terminal Block NeoPixel Port – With easy-to-use screw terminals you can quickly connect and disconnect your NeoPixel strips and rings. This port provides high current drive from either the Feather Lipoly or USB port, whichever is higher. A 5V level up-shifter gives you a clean voltage signal to reduce glitchiness no matter what LED chip you’re using. You can also cut power to the entire strip instantly to reduce quiescent power, thanks to a separate control transistor. Works with any and all NeoPixels (SK6812 / WS2812 family)
Triple-Axis Accelerometer with Tap Detection – The LIS3DH is our favorite accelerometer, you can use this for detection motion, tilt, or taps. Here’s an example of a lightsaber that makes sounds when swung or hit. We have code for this chip in both Arduino and CircuitPython.
Extra Button or Output Pin – One more pin on the terminal screw block can be used for button input or digital output, for activation or a simple LED.
Servo Connection – Plug any hobby servo with 3 wires into the 0.1″ spaced header, and you can have quick motion control.
Low power mode! The power system for the NeoPixels and speaker amplifier can be controlled by a pin to cut power to them, so you have lower power usage when the prop is in sleep or off mode (but can wake up fast by listening to the button press or accelerometer data).
At the Feather’s heart is an RP2040 chip, clocked at 133 MHz and at 3.3V logic, the same one used in the Raspberry Pi Pico. This chip has a whopping 8 MB of onboard QSPI FLASH and 264K of RAM! There’s even a STEMMA QT connector for plug-and-play of I2C devices.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!
GeekMomProjects shows a work in progress: an LED stained glass type design that will adorn the back of a denim jacket.
The LEDs were diffused with hot glue!
Hot gluing in progress. It looks super janky from the back but hot glue works better for diffusing the LEDs inside the 3D printed shells than any other medium I’ve tried. The industrial size hot glue gun was a worthwhile purchase!
This past weekend San Francisco’s Black Terminus hosted the first Juneteenth Hack.
Juneteenth Reality Hack is a community-run augmented reality (AR) art hackathon co-hosted by Black Terminus AR and vision-aligned art, tech, and culture organizations.
The mapped complexities of the human brain paint a pretty picture. Based on 1.4 petabytes of raw data, google scientists of mapped a cubic millimeter of the human brain. Originally published by Nature picked up by My Modern Met:
The human brain is one of the most significant objects in the world, and also one of the most complex. Yet that three pounds of tissue that mediates every moment of our lives, every decision, every reflex, every emotion, is essentially still a mystery to scientists. A recent joint effort by Harvard and Google research teams has extracted an incredible amount of data from just 3 mm of brain tissue. With machine-learning modeling, the team created the world’s highest-resolution brain tissue map. This brain map lets researchers see 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses, which are connections between the neurons.
Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!
Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!
This all started from a conversation about the RP2040 MCU, and building a simple desktop/GUI for it. I’d made a comment along the lines of “or, just run some old OS”, and it got me thinking about the original Macintosh 128.
The £3.80 RPi Pico microcontroller board: The RP2040’s 264KB of RAM gives a lot to play with after carving out the Mac’s 128KB – how cool would it be to do a quick hack, and play with a Mac on it?
A Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller (on a Pico board), driving monochrome VGA video and taking USB keyboard/mouse input, emulating a Macintosh 128K computer and disc storage. The RP2040 has easily enough RAM to house the Mac’s memory, plus that of the emulator; it’s fast enough (with some tricks) to meet the performance of the real machine, has USB host capability, and the PIO department makes driving VGA video fairly uneventful (with some tricks). The basic Pico board’s 2MB of flash is plenty for a disc image with OS and software.
Sometimes you just need to get lost in the abilities and grace of expert craftspeople doing what they do best. In this case, THE PROCESS provides viewers a look into kumiko designs
This week, we worked on some testers and a few small designs. First up is the RP2040 Adalogger Feather which worked first try, so we’re already on to the tester – using our classic RP2040 brains, we’re now able to get a tester going in under an hour.
Next, we’re circling back to our floppsy interface board: we wanted to stock some floppy drives but found that a bunch of the ones we ordered don’t have an index pulse, so we designed a little test sketch to let us know if we are able to read MFM sectors.
We’re also still testing the ESP32-C6 Feather. We love using a TFT FeatherWing because it lets us verify I2C and SPI functionality – we’re dilly-dallying a bit but hope to send these PCBs out in a week or two.
Finally, we designed an IR transceiver, updated HUSB238 Type C PD, and designed two RS232 level shifters!
In this video, NetworkChuck, alongside new talent Alex, guides viewers through the process of installing RetroPie on a Raspberry Pi. They explain how this compact device can emulate games from nearly every retro console, featuring modern additions like achievements, save states, and online multiplayer. Alex demonstrates the setup step-by-step, from preparing the microSD card to configuring controllers and personalizing game libraries. The video also highlights advanced features such as cheats and retro achievements, culminating in a demonstration of online play between two Raspberry Pi devices, showcasing the impressive capabilities of RetroPie.
In Dungeons and Dragons, a fire wall is a wall of fire create by a magic user as a defensive measure that can also cause damage. In software, a firewall is essential protection for your operating system. In the world of dining, a raspberry pie is a tasty fruit-filled pastry. In the world of Adafruit, we’re a done with this bit! Here’s an article on installing a firewall on your Raspberry Pi, via Pi My Life Up:
Setting up a firewall on your Raspberry Pi helps protect a bad actor from potentially causing issues on your device or accessing services you don’t want to be accessed.
Most Linux operating systems, such as Raspberry Pi OS, already have a firewall built into the kernel. This is controlled by the somewhat complicated nftables. Nftables allows complicated firewall routing, but for most users, it can be a bit daunting.
If you’d like quickly get started with CAN bus interfacing, with no soldering required, our Adafruit RP2040 CAN Bus Feather comes ready-to-rock with a microcontroller, CAN chipset, and terminal blocks for instant gratification. The controller used is the MCP25625 (aka an MCP2515 with built-in transceiver), an extremely popular and well-supported chipset that has drivers in Arduino and CircuitPython and only requires an SPI port and two pins for chip-select and IRQ. Use it to send and receive messages in either standard or extended format at up to 1 Mbps.
Messages are sent at about 1 Mbps rate – you set the frequency for the bus and then all ‘joiners’ must match it, and have an address before the packet so that each node can listen in to messages just for it. New nodes can be attached easily because they just need to connect to the two data lines anywhere in the shared net. Each CAN device sends messages whenever it wants, and thanks to some clever data encoding, can detect if there’s a message collision and retransmit later.
We’ve added a few nice extras to this Feather to make it useful in many common CAN scenarios:
5V charge-pump voltage generator, so even though you are running 3.3V on a Feather board, it will generate a nice clean 5V as required by the internal transceiver.
3.5mm soldered terminal block quick access to the High and Low data lines as well as a ground pin, without any soldering.
120-ohm termination resistor on board, you can remove the termination easily by cutting the jumper marked TERM on the top of the board.
CAN control CS, Reset, Int, standby pins connected internally so you can use any FeatherWing without pin conflicts.
At the Feather’s heart is an RP2040 chip, clocked at 133 MHz and at 3.3V logic, the same one used in the Raspberry Pi Pico. This chip has a whopping 8 MB of onboard QSPI FLASH and 264K of RAM! There’s even room left over for a STEMMA QT connector for plug-and-play of I2C devices.
The Adafruit Feather ecosystem is so rich with hardware diversity, we wanted to share them, one each day. Today is the Adafruit Feather RP2040 with DVI Output Port – Works with HDMI!
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could display images and graphics from a microcontroller directly to an HDMI monitor or television? We think so! So we designed this RP2040 Feather that has a digital video output (a.k.a DVI) that will work with any HDMI monitor or display. Note it doesn’t do audio, just graphics!
It’s kinda like we took our RP2040 Feather and DVI Breakout board and glued them together. You get all the pins for use on the Feather, the Lipoly battery support, USB C power / data, onboard NeoPixel, 8MB of FLASH for storing code and files, and then with the 8 unused pins, a DVI output that can be used CircuitPython or with the PicoDVI library in Arduino or Pico SDK
Note that the DVI video generation uses one full core, both PIOs, and 150K (320×240) or 190K (400×240) of SRAM. It’s kinda maxed out so be aware of the remaining resource limitations.
We also connected the HDMI-connectors I2C pins to the SDA/SCL of the Feather (through a safe level shifter) so you can read the EDID EEPROM of displays, and have broken out the CEC and Utility pads. The Hot Plug Detect pin is also available on the very end of the 16-pin header. Read this pin to know when a display has been connected!
A little over a decade ago, the YBox2 Kit was all the rage. It used a Parallax Propeller chip with Ethernet to connect to the Internet and display custom widgets via a composite video output. Years later, it felt like it was time to revisit this project concept with new hardware. The next generation YBox, the YBox3, uses a Raspberry Pi Pico W to run Arduino code that connects to WiFi and displays custom widgets via DVI output with a DVI PiCowbell.
The Adafruit Feather ecosystem is so rich with hardware diversity, we wanted to share them, one each day. Today is the Adafruit Feather RP2040!
When we saw the Raspberry Pi RP2040 chip, we thought “this chip is going to be awesome when we give it the Feather treatment” and so we did! This Feather features the RP2040, and all niceties you know and love about Feather.
Features:
RP2040 32-bit Cortex M0+ dual core running at ~125 MHz @ 3.3V logic and power
264 KB RAM
8 MB SPI FLASH chip for storing files and CircuitPython/MicroPython code storage. No EEPROM
Tons of GPIO! 21 x GPIO pins with following capabilities:
Four 12-bit ADCs (one more than Pico)
Two I2C, Two SPI, and two UART peripherals, we label one for the ‘main’ interface in standard Feather locations
16 x PWM outputs – for servos, LEDs, etc
The 8 digital ‘non-ADC/non-peripheral’ GPIO are consecutive for maximum PIO compatibility
Built-in 200mA+ lipoly charger with charging status indicator LED
Pin #13 red LED for general purpose blinking
RGB NeoPixel for full-color indication.
On-board STEMMA QT connector that lets you quickly connect any Qwiic, STEMMA QT or Grove I2C devices with no soldering!
Both Reset button and Bootloader select button for quick restarts (no unplugging-replugging to relaunch code)
A massive light field opened in NYC this last winter. Field of Light is the work of artist Bruce Munro comprised of 18,750 fiber-optic bulbs spread over 3 city blocks. Admission is ticketed but free. For more pics check out their instagram – @fieldoflightnyc
Spanning across six acres in Manhattan, Field of Light at Freedom Plaza features an array of 18,750 lowlight, fiber-optic stemmed spheres that illuminate with a slow subtle change of hue. Guests are immersed in the installation as they walk a winding path through the ethereal painted landscape framed by the city’s iconic skyline and the East River waterfront. Made possible by The Soloviev Foundation, Field of Light at Freedom Plaza welcomes guests free of charge.
Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!
Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!
YouTuber Frost Dragon Designs shows their enamel cat pin design process and the result is absolutely adorable. Their cat pin series is of the cuter things I’ve seen on the internet recently. You know we’ve got a thing for pins, so we figured we share someone else’s pins!
Rasberry Pi is making news again this week with the announcement of their AI kit. Eben Upton of Raspberry Pi and Orr Danon of Hailo talked with ZDNet about the new kit and their partnership.
Mixing AI with the Raspberry Pi architecture is nothing new. But now, Raspberry Pi is shipping its own $70 AI Kit, based on hardware from edge chipmaker Hailo. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes discussed the tech in this kit in his article on the topic. He’s intrigued by the camera and pose analysis capabilities, with an eye towards upgrading his security system.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!
One of the disadvantages of having a smart phone is that we lose our need for technologies of old. Wasn’t it nice to wake up to a clock radio playing a random song, rather than a beep from an everything device that can lead us from alarm to doomscrolling with the flick of a thumb? On the other hand, these dead media devices can be repurposed in very cool ways. darkfly over at instructables has great project that turns a vintage clock radio into a media player. Here’s more:
I wanted to make a multimedia player with an above average sound system and a touch screen. I really had no idea of what I wanted the system to look like. After thinking of several design concepts, the answer came to me one day while walking through a thrift store. I realized that I didn’t need to create a unit to install the components in. I would simply repurpose an old object to serve as the case/frame for my multimedia center.
With this new idea in mind, I started looking at every single item as a possibility. I had many ideas about what to use; everything from wooden crates, old nightstands or even an old vinyl record. I know some ideas sounded crazier than others, but it seemed to be a fun direction to take this project in. Then I noticed something that I thought would work quite well, a vintage Philco clock radio. When I first noticed the clock radio, I fell in love with its old charm. It seemed like the perfect case/frame for my creation.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!
Add colorful, arduino controlled lights to your outdoor space. Install outdoor cafe market lights with edison-style bulbs and addressable LEDs inside, and control them with code to create an amazing ambiance in your yard.
These lights require 12v, and most microcontrollers need 5v power. This guide will show you how to use a QT Py SAMD21 and a DC Power BFF add-on to power both the lights and the controller from one power source.
From the guide:
Cafe-style light strands with edison bulbs are a beautiful way to decorate your patio. They are a fantastic and classy way to light up any outdoor space. Wineries, bistros, and night markets use them to create a cozy, intimately lit space that’s warm and inviting to diners, and they look fabulous in backyards of just about any size.
These lights are a programmable, addressable version of the cafe market lights you can find at the hardware store. Add Arduino or CircuitPython code and you can turn your lights on in party mode, sending warm rainbow animations across your yard.
These lights require 12v power, and also need to hold up in an outdoor environment. This guide will focus on how to power a 5v microcontroller and 12v lights from the same setup, and also show how to use a waterproof enclosure to keep your lights safe from rain and weather.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!
