hpr2173 :: Driving a Blinkt! as an IoT device
I have a Raspberry Pi Zero with a Blinkt! 8-LED array I'm setting up as a notification device
Hosted by Dave Morriss on Wednesday, 2016-11-30 is flagged as Explicit and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
Raspberry Pi, Blinkt!, BlinkStick, MQTT, Mosquitto.
6.
The show is available on the Internet Archive at: https://archive.org/details/hpr2173
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Duration: 00:39:09
general.
Driving a Blinkt! as an IoT device
Introduction
I managed to buy a Raspberry Pi Zero when they first came out in December 2015. This was not easy since they were very scarce. I also bought a first-generation case from Pimoroni and some 40-pin headers. With the Zero this header is not pre-installed and it’s necessary to solder it onto the Pi yourself.
I have had various project ideas for this Pi Zero, but had not decided on one until recently. Within the last month or two Pimoroni produced a device called the Blinkt! which has eight APA102 RGB LEDs and attaches to the GPIO header. This costs £5, just a little more than the Zero itself.
My plan was to combine the two and turn them into a status indicator for various things going on that needed my attention.
Long notes
I have written out a moderately long set of notes for this episode. Click this link to access them.
Links
- Raspberry Pi Zero
- Pimoroni Ltd
- The Blinkt! add-on from Pimoroni
- Pimoroni’s documentation “Getting Started with Blinkt!”
- The GitHub repository for Blinkt!
- The RIBBA picture frame from IKEA
- Inkscape vector graphics editor
- MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport):
- BlinkStick MQTT page
- Mailbox Alert add-on for Thunderbird
- Jezra’s Orb project
- Resources: