{"id":16525,"date":"2017-03-03T11:00:57","date_gmt":"2017-03-03T10:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.recantha.co.uk\/blog\/?p=16525"},"modified":"2017-03-09T10:32:09","modified_gmt":"2017-03-09T09:32:09","slug":"new-kickstarter-encourages-you-to-sculpt-with-rgb-leds-and-a-raspberry-pi-arduino-and-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.recantha.co.uk\/blog\/?p=16525","title":{"rendered":"New Kickstarter encourages you to sculpt with RGB LEDs and a Raspberry Pi, Arduino, DigiSpark and Wemos"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Alex Eames (from RasPi.TV<\/a> and Rasp.io<\/a>) has run several Kickstarters and his new one<\/a> looks to be his best yet.<\/p>\n

His new campaign is called RasPiO Inspiring<\/a><\/strong>. It is a new system for ‘sculpting with RGB LEDs’ and is made up out of several different geometric shapes with a standard 10cm side length, covered in ultra-bright APA102 RGB LEDs and housing a standard solderable connector. This makes it easy to combine them into other 2-dimensional or even 3-dimensional shapes. To start with, Alex is offering a ‘straight-8’ (stick), a triangle and a circle, together with the Raspberry Pi driver board, along with some bundles.\u00a0If the campaign does well, he plans to expand the range with a semi-circle and a square. Who knows where else he could take it? Letters? More shapes?<\/p>\n

The really interesting part for me, apart from the new shapes (I really like the triangle), is that the Inspiring<\/a><\/strong> family can be driven from a Raspberry Pi (via a driver pHAT), an Arduino, an ESP8266 (for example, the Wemos) or a DigiSpark. This means that you can drive your\u00a0shapes and sculptures from something very small (like the Digispark) to something larger (like a Pi 3). With the launch of the Raspberry Pi Zero W (which is compatible with Inspiring, as are all 40-pin Pis), the idea of an Internet of Things blinky riot of colour becomes possible. He’s even written a Python library for the Raspberry Pi to make it easy to get started and there’s an existing library called FastLED for the other platforms.<\/p>\n

There are lots of other uses for bright LEDs, of course, and he identifies some of them on the Kickstarter campaign page<\/a>.<\/p>\n