If there is one thing Adafruit is known for, its mega-blinky-fun-rainbow-LEDs. We just love sticking NeoPixels anywhere and everywhere. When we saw the new ‘PIO’ peripheral on the RP2040 from Raspberry Pi, we just knew it would be perfect for driving large quantities of NeoPixels. So we created this board, the Adafruit Feather RP2040 SCORPIO, designed specifically for NeoPixel (WS2812) driving but also good for various other PIO-based projects that want to take advantage of the Feather pinout with 8 separate consecutive outputs (or inputs).
The RP2040 PIO state machine is perfect for LED driving: it can generate perfect waveforms, with up to 8 outputs concurrently, all through DMA. That means that you don’t need to use any processor time to bit-bang-out the LED data. Just set up the buffer and tell the PIO peripheral to ‘make it so’ and it will shove that data to the 8 outputs without delay while your code can continue to read buttons, play music, run CircuitPython – whatever you like!
The SCORPIO has a clever pinout, where all the standard Feather pins are the same as the GPIO pins, plus the standard I2C, SPI and UART lines – and there’s still enough pins left over to have 8 consecutive pins for PIO usage on GPIO16 through GPIO23 inclusive.
To make NeoPixel usage glitch-free, there is a 3V->5V level shifter so that the output logic is 5V. If you happen to want 3V signals, you can adjust the shifter voltage with a jumper on the bottom. It’s also possible to flip the direction of the level shifter to make the 8 I/O pins inputs – say for making a logic analyzer – with a directional jumper selection also on the bottom of the PCB.
The RP2040 SCORPIO also has a ton of RAM, 264KB, making it trivial to buffer huge numbers of NeoPixels…several thousand if needed. In fact there’s so much RAM you can even dither the pixels to get finer brightness control, for better-looking LEDs at low brightness or for gamma correction.
A decade of change, politics, tragedy, art and musical revolution, the 1960’s was an interesting time. The George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York has some awesome film posters from the decade on display. Check it out if you’re in the area or view it through their virtual 360 tour.
Films from the 1960s depicted the turbulence of the time. Poster artists from across the globe assigned to capture the essence of these films brought their own wildly differing creative interpretations of the subject matter to the masses.
An era of political, cultural, and sexual revolutions, the 1960s was a decade of great changes and great tragedies determined by such world-impacting events as The Space Race, the Cold War, Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech, the JFK assassination, but also by the cultural influences of The Beatles, James Bond, and even fashions, including the popularity of jeans and bikinis. This was also one of the greatest decades in film history.
Hyperallergic surveys Nancy Holt’s work. Holt created sculptural pieces that were conscious of time and place, literally! The movement of bodies both human and celestial play into her work:
Nearly a third of Nancy Holt: Circles of Light at Gropius Bau is dedicated to preparatory drawings, scientific calculations, and time-based photographs for “Sun Tunnels.” Only after coming out the other end did I understand that the essence of the work — and Holt’s practice as a whole — lies in the interaction between human bodies and celestial systems like the stars, rather than the earthen materials and monumentality emphasized by many other Land Art practitioners.
For “Sun Tunnels,” Holt studied physics and worked with engineers to design culverts in which visitors could observe the sun falling and rising during the summer and winter solstices — but also to protect their bodies from extreme heat and cold. There’s great poetry in the image of a human body sheltering inside a circle, as the sun makes its circular journey, tracing shadows on concrete. The poetic dimension of this work shouldn’t be surprising. Holt borrowed her motto from the poet Emily Dickinson: “My business is circumference” — a line that’s all about geometry in motion.
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!
Many more people have easy access to macro photography, thanks to the bug-eyed reverse side of today’s smartphones. Access doesn’t equal sheer gumption, time, and dedication. Here’s Vadim Sherbakov with an amazing macro film that uses suprrising materials and macro photography to explore the cosmos. Here’s more from Sherbakov:
Exploration of a macro cosmos is a theme for this short film. The ink and glitter make the compositions like the outer space and I love to dive into that. I started that journey in my previous film called Velocit…and continue the journey in this one. I implemented new techniques and new materials including the magnets and different liquids and inks. A total of 12 hours of footage was captured for this film and only less than 1% of best shoots were used in edit.
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!
Jenny Holzer: Light Line is a reinterpretation of Jenny Holzer’s 1989 Guggenheim installation accompanied by pieces of Holzer’s other previous works and is on view through September 29.
What to Expect
Jenny Holzer: Light Line includes descriptions of violence, explicit language, low light levels, and an electronic light program.
The exhibition does not contain traditional wall labels or explanatory texts. To enhance your experience, download the free Bloomberg Connects app to access the museum’s Digital Guide, which offers information about the works on view in multiple languages.
We’ve got so much happening here at Adafruit that it’s not always easy to keep up! Don’t fret, we’ve got you covered. Each week we’ll be posting a handy round-up of what we’ve been up to, ranging from learn guides to blog articles, videos, and more.
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If you’re looking to interface with telco, retro or industrial equipment you’ll probably run into RS-232 interfaces. The Adafruit RS232 Pal – Two Channel UART to RS-232 Level Shifters is your friend in such cases, giving you two duplex channels of level shifting and taking care of the high/negative voltage generation all in a low cost breakout board. We use the trusty MAX3232E, a classic chip that is part of the MAX232 lineage so you know it will work great for all your RS-232 needs, up to 250Kbps.
