TUTORIALS Pico LEDs
Power projects with the best Pi Pico LEDs
RGB LEDS
We always knew Les Pounder was a bright spark and he proves it with the brightest possible LEDs!
OUR EXPERT
Les Pounder is associate editor at Tom’s Hardware and a freelance maker for hire. He blogs about his adventures and projects at http://bigl.es.
LEDs are the gateway to electronics. From the humble single-colour LED to the exotic RGB L LEDs, we’ve tried them all and love them all equally. But what if you want to start using WS2812B or APA102? Also, what do those mixtures of letters and numbers mean?
The goal of this tutorial is to learn how these RGB LEDs work and how we can integrate them into our Pi Pico-powered builds. We’ll be using Thonny to write the project code. An assumption is made that you know how to use Thonny with the Raspberry Pi Pico. If not, Tom’s Hardware has a guide at www. tomshardware.com/how-to/raspberry-pi-pico-setup/.
A NeoPixel world
WS2812Bs, more commonly known as NeoPixels, are addressable RGB LEDs that have been seen in a myriad of Pi projects over the years. Why? Because they are easy to work with and can be found rather cheaply via the usual online sellers. NeoPixels are addressable, and that means we can control an individual pixel (the common name for one LED in the chain) in a long series of pixels. The brightness and colour of a pixel can be set by the user. With some clever coding, you can make simple animated sequences. We’re going to wire up a length of NeoPixels to a Raspberry Pi Pico 2, and write some code to make random groups of LEDs light up in a random colour. Luckily for us, MicroPython now includes the NeoPixel module, so there is no software installation necessary.