Individually addressable LEDs, also commonly called "NeoPixels" after the popular Adafruit product, are a bright and colorful way to get started with basic Python programming. With an inexpensive ESP8266 or ESP32 microcontroller, it's easy to get started programming your own holiday lighting animations on a string of NeoPixels with beginner-friendly MicroPython!
NeoPixels are a great way to get started programming hardware, and if you want to get started using Python to create your own holiday light animations, you can get started using ultra-cheap components. Thanks to how easy it is to load MicroPython on an ESP8266 microcontroller, you can pick up a D1 Mini development board for less than $5 and start programming holiday animations on a strip of LEDs without needing to know much programming at all.
In our example today, we'll take a strip of NeoPixels and cut a strip of ten to program in MicroPython. We'll connect it to a D1 mini development board and then use Jupyter Notebook to control the lights while we prototype different animations.
What You Need
First, you'll need an ESP8266-based microcontroller. I'll be working with the D1 Mini today, but the NodeMCU or an ESP32 should work ..
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