Little Bird
PiGlow
Add colourful, programmable lighting to your Raspberry Pi with this compact add-on board featuring 18 individually controllable LEDs. It is designed to sit n...
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Add colourful, programmable lighting to your Raspberry Pi with this compact add-on board featuring 18 individually controllable LEDs. It is designed to sit neatly on the Raspberry Pi GPIO header and even fits inside a Pibow case.
PiGlow works with all models of Raspberry Pi, including the B+. It is handy for mood lighting, visual notifications, system status displays, or feedback from scripts and daemons running on a headless Pi.
The board uses I2C for communication and includes Python example code to help you start tinkering. Community support is also available for wiringPi, Scratch, Node.js, Perl, Golang, XBMC status display projects, and Python libraries with samples including gamma correction.
Features:
- Mood lighting / ambience
- Showing current system load
- Notify you of events like mentions in tweets or incoming e-mail
- Feedback the status of scripts/daemons running on your Pi
- Works great when VESA mounted to provide a cast against a wall
- ...and pretty much anything else you can think of!
- 18 LEDs (three each of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and white)
- Great to provide feedback if you're running your Pi headless
- PWM (dimming) control for each channel
- Fully assembled (no soldering required)
- Python code to access and control lighting provided
Specifications:
- LED driver IC: SN3218 8-bit 18-channel PWM chip
- LED type: 18 surface mount LEDs
- Communication: I2C over the GPIO header
- Bus address: 0x54
- PWM value: between 0 and 255
A fun little board for Raspberry Pi dashboards, ambient indicators, notifications, and maker projects where a bright visual status display is useful.
Jargon buster
Plain-language definitions for the technical terms used above.
- GPIO
- General-purpose input/output pins are microcontroller pins you can set in software to read signals, switch devices on and off, or connect to peripherals. The number of GPIO pins matters because it limits how many buttons, LEDs, sensors, and other parts you can wire directly to the board.
- I2C
- I2C is a two-wire communication bus used by many sensors and small modules. It matters because several I2C devices can share the same two wires, but each device needs a compatible address and your controller must support I2C.
- LED
- A light-emitting diode (LED) is a small electronic component that emits light when current flows through it in the correct direction. Because it only conducts one way, its polarity matters, and a through-hole LED must be soldered the correct way around to light up.
- LED driver
- An LED driver is a control chip or circuit that supplies and switches power to LEDs. For a display board, it reduces the number of microcontroller pins needed and handles tasks like lighting the right segments and adjusting brightness.
- PWM
- Pulse Width Modulation is a way for a digital pin to simulate variable output power by switching on and off very quickly. It matters for controlling things like LED brightness, motor speed, or servo-style signals from a microcontroller pin.
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