It’s that time of the year, yet another holiday project. This time I decided to build a star jewel for my Christmas tree which can sit on top and light it up beautifully. [iot-star]

Share more @iayanpahwa how do you connect the Pi with the neopixel? :wink:

Initially I planned to design 3D printable holders in the shape of a star onto which I can stick my LED strip but it was too much time consuming , so decided to went analog, dusted my glue gun and soldering iron, ordered these parts and wore my safety glassed. [IMG_6612]

Bill-of-material : A pack of popsicle sticks :wink: WS82xx Neopixel LED strip Raspberry Pi board SD card Power Supplies (for pi and LED strip) Glue gun and sticks Soldering Iron Wires and general prototyping tools The base design [IMG_6614]

Sticking neopixel strip to popsicle sticks were as easy as peeling of the tape or if your strip doesn’t have that glue gun can always help: [IMG_6615]

Now comes the most scary part, soldering it all together. they way WS82xx LED strips work is by daisy chaining, i.e output of one LED (DOUT) goes to input of next LED (DIN) so need to be very careful with the direction, follow the arrow marking on silk screen of the LED strip. Also my LEDs are 5v, t…

Not to lie, it was hard to route all those wires, a multimeter came in handy checking for continuity, If I have to do it again and calmly I’ll rather use Neopixel Sticks and 3D printed brackets to make the Star v2.0 [image]

connecting strip to the Pi The next step is to connect this star to my Raspberry Pi board and now there are a few ways to do that, some are more safer than others, but I decided to live on the edge and try the most easier way connecting Vin of strip to 5V output of Raspberry Pi and GND to GND, thoug…

Using adafruit library examples and an arduino board, I gave a quick sanity test to the strip and it worked, some connections needs to be re-done but it all worked out in the end . then did the same with pi Libraries used : sudo pip3 install rpi_ws281x adafruit-circuitpython-neopixel sudo python…

IoTizing it Well, now comes the tricky part, I am okayish with soldering and using glue guns but not at all with JS and CSS, but I needed a frontend to control my new shiny star. Enter adafruitIO : which allows you to create b’full dashboards and control your edge device. You can send data to/from …

Here’s the sample application I created → https://github.com/iayanpahwa/holiday-star . You can clone it and deploy using balena push or use deploy with balena [deploy button] Don’t forget to add following device variables after adding devices to the fleet: Name Value NUM_PIXELS total numb…

IoT Christmas Star [ balena ❤️ adafruitIO ] -- build logs

Show and Tell

iayanpahwa December 18, 2021, 8:38am 15

Video : combined my ble-beacon project with this one

https://youtu.be/j4VxgesdVes

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IoT Christmas Star [ balena ❤️ adafruitIO ] -- build logs

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