Raspberry Pi Disco Lights - Pi Birthday 2016 and 2017

4 March 2016

Click the image above for the slides for the Disco Light talk at the Pi Birthday 2016.

Worksheet for Raspberry Pi NeoPixel practical session 2017

Below is a worksheet giving hands-on with connecting up NeoPixels to a Raspberry Pi using a breadboard.

This uses breadboard NeoPixels. These do need a little soldering initially, but once soldered can be easily connected to the breadboard and reused as required. Note that some breadboard NeoPixels use a different pin layout, so you may need to modify your design accordingly.

Raspberry Pi NeoPixel Worksheet

The following is an alternative using through-hole NeoPixel LEDs with no soldering required.

Raspberry Pi NeoPixel Worksheet (Through-Hole LEDs) - no soldering required

Important Update!

There is a potential problem with NeoPixels due to an incompatibility between the sound driver and the code used to control the NeoPixels. This can be avoided by blacklisting the sound driver to prevent it from loading. The worksheets above include the following instructions, but older versions of the worksheet may not.

To disable the sound driver create a new file called /etc/modprobe.d/snd-blacklist.conf

eg.
sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/snd-blacklist.conf

Add a single entry
blacklist snd_bcm2835

Now reboot the Raspberry Pi before running the test program.