NeoPixel Library

[DWiskow]

I have both a couple of pyBoard 1.1's and a number of ESP8266 Adafruit and NodeMCU/DOIT boards . . . Having spent the weekend playing with the latest 1.8 release of MicroPython on all of these, I am a little perplexed that the ESP8266 has support for the NeoPixel library built in but the pyBoard version doesn't appear to! . . . Or am I doing something wrong ?

[drew]

Three years down the line, I'm running MicroPython 1.11 on a pyBoard..... and it still seems to be the case, none of the neopixel library documented on the micropython website seems to apply to the pyBoard. I did get it working ok via a 3rd party library..

[klauskn]

-> I did get it working ok via a 3rd party library..

Now it would be helpful to know which library you are using.

[jimmo]

Possibly https://github.com/JanBednarik/micropython-ws2812 or https://github.com/nickovs/ws2812-SPI Both of these generate the WS2812 data signal using SPI (by oversampling each bit into several SPI bits).

If you feel like building your own firmware, I have a neopixel driver written in C for pyboard that I've been meaning to find the time to upstream. PM me and I can rebase it onto master and share it. (Currently it adds a "neo" method to machine.Pin that takes an array of RGB data and uses the cycle counter to generate accurate timing for the WS2812 data signal, there's a corresponding neopixel.py that provides an easy high-level API to managing the RGB data -- looks just like the micro:bit or esp8266 neopixel library, with some extra methods -- Obviously to upstream it I have to not make it a method on Pin! ).

It's worth mentioning though -- if you have the choice, use DotStars (APA102) instead of Neopixels, because they have a much nicer SPI interface.

[lucille]

Possibly https://github.com/JanBednarik/micropython-ws2812 or https://github.com/nickovs/ws2812-SPI Both of these generate the WS2812 data signal using SPI (by oversampling each bit into several SPI bits).

If you feel like building your own firmware, I have a neopixel driver written in C for pyboard that I've been meaning to find the time to upstream. PM me and I can rebase it onto master and share it. (Currently it adds a "neo" method to machine.Pin that takes an array of RGB data and uses the cycle counter to generate accurate timing for the WS2812 data signal, there's a corresponding neopixel.py that provides an easy high-level API to managing the RGB data -- looks just like the micro:bit or esp8266 neopixel library, with some extra methods -- Obviously to upstream it I have to not make it a method on Pin! ).

It's worth mentioning though -- if you have the choice, use DotStars (APA102) instead of Neopixels, because they have a much nicer SPI interface.

Hi Jimmo,

can you share that C code please?

Best Regards.

[jimmo]

can you share that C code please?

Even better, Damien created a PR a few weeks ago (hopefully to be merged soon) that adds a proper driver to the stm32 port: https://github.com/micropython/micropython/pull/5318