Blinkinlabs is shipping their product now after their successful KickStarter campaign, and I got mine in the mail a couple days ago. I had a few minutes and thought I’d get a basic example up and running. The Blinkinlabs documentation was confusing to me, however. The “Simplest BlinkyTape Sketch” wasn’t. The code was more complex than I had hoped, and I couldn’t find documentation of the API, but I noticed there were some examples that used the Adafruit NeoPixel library. Those examples didn’t run for me, but I figured if there were NeoPixel examples in the BlinkyTape repository, it should be possible to run the thing with that library.
A quick look at the schematics for BlinkyTape confirmed that it was indeed running the Atmega32U4, same as the Arduino Leonardo (their documentation’s good on setting the tape up as a Leonardo). Furthermore, the data in of the lights is connected to pin 13. From there, it was simply a matter of modifying the Adafruit NeoPixels to work on pin 13.
Like the BlinkyTape examples, most of the Adafruit NeoPixel library examples were all about color scrolling. I dislike color scrolling. Call me old and cranky, but I remember a time when lighting designers made color choices and stood by them; when the designers of lighting tools gave us controls that let us choose those colors easily. I’m hoping that someday we’ll look back on this era see color scrolling as a lighting design choice the same way as we see the mullet in hairstyle choice: a bad idea we had to go through to get to something more pleasant. Now you kids, get outta my yard! </cranky old man rant>
My sketch works like this: you send a serial string to the Arduino starting with a capital C, followed by the pixel number, the red level (0-255), the green level (0-255) and the blue level (0-255). The NeoPixel library then sets the color of the pixel you chose. That’s it.
Now that I know this thing’s so simple to use, I can see a lot of projects with it. Love the built-in processor too, makes it even more convenient. Makes me want to order a whole lot more NeoPixels from Adafruit too.
Here’s the code. You can also get it from gitHub.
[github_cv url='https://github.com/tigoe/NeoPixel_examples/blob/master/BlinkyTape/BlinkyTape.ino']