HPR2173: Driving a Blinkt! as an IoT device

Driving a Blinkt! as an IoT device

Introduction

I managed to buy a Raspberry Pi Zero when they first came out in December 2015. This was not easy since they were very scarce. I also bought a first-generation case from Pimoroni and some 40-pin headers. With the Zero this header is not pre-installed and it’s necessary to solder it onto the Pi yourself.

I have had various project ideas for this Pi Zero, but had not decided on one until recently. Within the last month or two Pimoroni produced a device called the Blinkt! which has eight APA102 RGB LEDs and attaches to the GPIO header. This costs £5, just a little more than the Zero itself.

My plan was to combine the two and turn them into a status indicator for various things going on that needed my attention.

Long notes

I have written out a moderately long set of notes for this episode and these are available here https://hackerpublicradio.org/eps/hpr2173/full_shownotes.html.

Links

• Raspberry Pi Zero
• Pimoroni Ltd
• The Blinkt! add-on from Pimoroni
• Pimoroni’s documentation “Getting Started with Blinkt!”
• The GitHub repository for Blinkt!
• The RIBBA picture frame from IKEA
• Inkscape vector graphics editor
• MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport):
  • Wikipedia article on MQTT
  • Wikipedia article on the Publish-subscribe pattern
• BlinkStick MQTT page
• Mailbox Alert add-on for Thunderbird
• Jezra’s Orb project
• Resources:
  • My Inkscape template “blinkt_legends.svg”
  • My first primitive listener script “blinkt_client.py”
  • My cron script for checking comments “cronjob_comments”

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