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Blinkt!

In our makerspace, we use these programmable leds a lot. Here is a summary page of our essential hat.

Blinkt! is a Pimoroni Bar of eight super-bright RGB LED indicators that are ideal for adding visual notifications to your Raspberry Pi. The price as of this writing is rather good - 5 GBP.

Blinkt

Introduction

These boards are developed to be used as status indicators. Blinkt! offers eight APA102 pixels in the smallest (and cheapest) form factor to plug straight onto your Raspberry Pi. No soldering required.

Each pixel on Blinkt! is individually controllable and dimmable allowing you to create gradients, pulsing effects, or just flash them on and off like crazy. The data and clock lines are connected to GPIO #23 and #24 respectively but for simplicity you can just use the Pimoroni Python library to drive them.

Features

  • Eight APA102 RGB LEDs
  • Individually controllable pixels
  • Sits directly on top of your Pi in a tiny footprint
  • Fits inside most Pi cases
  • Doesn't interfere with PWM audio
  • Compatible with Raspberry Pi 3, 2, B+, A+, and Zero
  • Python library
  • Comes fully assembled

Software

The Blinkt! Python library will have you blasting out rainbows in two shakes of a unicorn's tail! There's a stack of examples too, from binary clocks to cheerlights and flickering candles to Larson scanners!

Notes

  • Be careful to plug in your Blinkt! the correct way round, it has curves on the top that match the corners of your Raspberry Pi.
  • If you want to access the rest of the GPIO at the same time as using Blinkt! then our Mini Black HAT Hack3r is the ideal accompaniment, allowing you to combine Blinkt! with another HAT or pHAT, or just prototype using the GPIO pins for your own project.
  • The dimensions of Blinkt! are 65mm long x 8mm wide x 8.5mm thick (thickness includes header and pixels).

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