Blinkytape

Yet another one of my Kickstarter jaunts turned up just before Christmas – the Blinkytape by BlinkinLabs. Essentially, this product is a strip of 60 LEDs connected to a USB interface, which allows you to address each “pixel” individually through a little bit of coding so you can build up your own programmable lighting show! So far I’ve only had chance to use this as a very nerdy alternative to Christmas lighting, and more generally expanding my knowledge of Python, but I’ve got big plans for it in future!

First up – getting started. I decided to use this in conjunction with a Raspberry Pi I had going spare from another project, as it gives me network connectivity and a platform to write and run Python scripts on. Conveniently, no powered external USB hub is required to run the Blinkytape off a Pi (as I had no other peripherals plugged in, your mileage may vary!), so it was just a case of plugging it in and installing the necessary Python libraries:

$ sudo apt-get install python-pip
$ sudo pip install pyserial

There is an official Blinkytape python library available from their GitHub repository (along with some other languages), however at the time when I was playing with this (before Christmas) their base class was lacking a lot of features – so I wrote my own! To get my integration script, run the following:

$ svn co http://projects.mattdyson.org/projects/blinkytape blinkytape

This will give you the main class (BlinkyTapeV2.py) and a couple of example files, all of which are commented in a (hopefully!) helpful manner to show what’s going on. The following video shows an example of the BouncingBlocks.py class in action (by running sudo python BouncingBlocks.py) followed by a more ‘festive’ example, something I knocked together very quickly to cycle through a series of effects in very Christmas-y red and green colours!

Overall, I’m very impressed by the quality of this product. I was expecting something very rough-and-ready, being a rather specialist product marketed through Kickstarter – however the LEDs themselves are very bright, and nicely packaged up in a plastic flexible strip in order to protect the circuitry. The ease with which I managed to write my own integration library is also a testament to how simple the electronic design of this product is.

So what am I planning on using this for? First up, I’m looking at building my own alarm clock that reads from Google Calendar to only wake me up when I need to be up – normal alarms don’t seem to have been built with shift work in mind! I’m hoping to integrate the Blinkytape into this project by creating an ambient light that gradually fades up after the alarm has gone off, hopefully easing the transition into daylight hours! There are also plenty of projects I was hoping to do with a Moore’sCloud Light, another Kickstarter project that sadly failed to meet their funding goals, but hopefully Blinkytape will fill the void! I’ll make sure to post back here with further updates when my Blinkytape gets put to use!