Is there an easy way to do PWM yet?

[UltraBob]

Dave,

I really appreciate you taking the time to walk me through all of that! I guess my things to try once I get home are hooking the blue lead of that tri-color directly to 5v and see if it lights up, then see if I have MOSFETs among the components I have lying around and try that out. It mentioned in the arduino tuorial (and I think that LED strip is using the same tri-color LED component), that you can hook the arduino up to a 9-12v power supply and then Vin will supply that voltage. Does that mean that the vin pin on the micropython board delivers 5v? If I plug the board into a 9v battery will it deliver 9v?

Feel free to stop answering me any time, I'm sure you have better things to do than answer questions that are undoubtedly very basic. I'm really trying to pick all this stuff up with a minimum of having accidentally fried components, especially for something like the micropython board that I would not easily be able to replace quickly. Any pointers to good websites or books or videos or anything that would be a very good way to get familiar with the knowledge needed to build circuits and control them with microcontrollers would be greatly appreciated. I feel like there is a lot about how these microcontroller boards work, that if I got my head around, would make things a lot clearer. Especially the pin modes are and do, and what they are good for, and whether those things work very similarly across different types of boards or are unique to each.

Thanks very much!

[dhylands]

It mentioned in the arduino tuorial (and I think that LED strip is using the same tri-color LED component), that you can hook the arduino up to a 9-12v power supply and then Vin will supply that voltage. Does that mean that the vin pin on the micropython board delivers 5v? If I plug the board into a 9v battery will it deliver 9v?

When you "plug in" to a 9v battery, you're providing the 9v on VIN. I provided some more details on this thread.

Make sure you definitely don't exceed 10v on VIN. I wouldn't use a 9v battery. Much better to use 3 x 1.5V batteries.

[UltraBob]

Tried it out last night, and of course you were right, with 5v the blue led showed up. Now I need to track down some MOSFETS.