Converting Pixel Art for Matrix Portal
I tried my hand at pixel art and discovered I cannot do it. But I wanted to honor Justin in a pixel arty way, so I instead tried my hand at converting some of his pixel art for display on a 32×64 RGB...
View ArticleMagTag Day of Week
I’ve been very excited by CircuitPython’s move into the ESP32-S2 space. The ESP32-S2 is a WiFi-enabled microcontroller with built-in USB and a crypto engine so it can do HTTPS properly. And in Python!...
View ArticlePlaying with AxiDraw for the Holidays
For the month of December, Carlyn and I are making a vaguely tree-shaped “calendar” with 31 boxes, 30mm x 30mm each. This is a design exercise to get us more familiar with the very fun EMSL AxiDraw, an...
View ArticlePrecise flood fill with AxiDraw
We recently got some inexpensive multicolored 0.3mm technical markers (AmzAffil) for use on the AxiDraw and they are pretty good! For this week’s batch of days for our 31-box AxiDraw calendar, I wanted...
View ArticleWS2812-compatible “fairy light” LEDs that know their address
I’ve not done much on our plotter Xmas tree this week because, well… if you follow me on Twitter, it’s likely you’ve seen me ramble on about these crazy new Christmas Tree lights we got for our tree...
View ArticleDIY Neopixel / WS2812 Development Kit
If you are like me, you play around with Neopixel / WS2812-style LEDs a lot. Normally I solder my own custom-connectors and don’t use the ones that come with the reels I buy. But since we’ve been...
View ArticleGet HID Report Descriptors with “win-hid-dump”&“mac-hid-dump”
I help support the USB HID projects hidapi and node-hid. One of the aspects of HID that isn’t clear is that HID devices transmit and receive data with “reports”, fixed-size data packets. What reports a...
View ArticleQTPy-knob: Simple USB knob w/ CircuitPython
I like minimal solutions to problems. I was playing with a CircuitPython-enabled QT Py on a breadboard with and a rotary encoder and I ended up making a USB knob, like many others have done before. But...
View ArticleTwo-Wire NeoPixel WS2812 LEDs
Neopixel LEDs with only two wires?! Just data & ground? What kind of magic is this? This is my take on this hack that Parallax Propeller forum user “Tubular” posted about in 2014 (!) The trick is...
View ArticleMozzi Arduino synth lib on Oskitone Scout
Mozzi is an audio synthesis library for Arduino that can do multi-oscillator synthesis with filters and modulation on even an Arduino Uno. Oskitone Scout is an adorable tiny keyboard kit, based on an...
View ArticleMore Mozzi Experiments
Over on github, I’ve been extending my experiments with the Arduino Mozzi synth library. Mostly I’ve been focussing on SAMD21 chips (QT Py M0, Trinket M0) and the RP2040 chip (QT Py RP2040, KB2040,...
View ArticleCircuitPython in 2022
CircuitPython is an amazing microcontroller programming platform, running on many different chips and boards while providing a consistent API. I’m pretty experienced with embedded development and...
View ArticleMultiple Displays in CircuitPython & Compiling Custom CircuitPython
Did you know you can run multiple displays in CircuitPython? One way: wire up two displays in parallel. There’s also true dual displays, more on that in a bit. For the above, here’s the wiring diagram...
View ArticleSpeed up CircuitPython LED animations 10x!
In many LED animations, you need to apply an operation to all LEDs as fast as possible. Often this is something like “fadeToBlackBy”, i.e. “dim all LEDs by a given amount”. There are some common...
View ArticleCheap stereo line out I2S DAC for CircuitPython / Arduino synths
I am a big fan of these PCM5102A I2S DAC boards (3 for $15! affilliate) for playing around with audio synthesis, for example in this video about new `synthio` CircuitPython library or this repository...
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