Purple Air / Kano Pixel

I had three of these little Kano pixel units which I bought for the kids to learn some programming on when they were on sale. Turns out the kids didn’t really use them much, and now Kano seems to be history.

The boards are based on the ESP-32 WROOM microcontroller, and can be programmed using the Arduino IDE, but they can also run MicroPython – a version of the Python programming language that runs on microcontrollers like this one. Furthermore, there is already a library which adds support for the LED matrix (128 NeoPixels), the buttons and the rotary dial on the top. Sadly, it does not have support for the USB connectors, or the built-in microphone (which I suspect is connected via the 4th USB channel that the hub IC on the board provides).

Once I had it running Python, my next thought was what could I do with it…

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CircuitPython & MacOS Catalina 10.15.6

A while ago now I bought an ItsyBitsy M4 Express, and two of their NeoPixel Jewel LED boards from AdaFruit to create eyes for a plastic skull halloween decoration. Until this last weekend, I haven’t had time to play with it much though. Beyond soldering the headers on the board (the two sides, not the end one), and adding some patch wiring to the NeoPixel boards too so I could build up the electronics part on a breadboard to experiment with.

Looking on the AdaFruit site I discovered two things about this board that are going to make the project easier:

  1. The board runs CircuitPython out of the box (although an older version the I needed to upgrade)
  2. There is a CircuitPython for Jupyter Notebooks, which is a very powerful way of prototyping Python code straight from a browser.
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