“Picked up a couple of these LED SHIMs for a project and they're absolutely cracking. Started off testing with the rainbow.py example which worked a treat - lovely smooth colour transitions across all the LEDs. Dead easy to get going with the Python library and gave me confidence the board was sound.
Once I'd got the hang of it, went on to configure my own matrix-style pattern with green cascading effects. Proper chuffed with how it turned out - the LEDs are bright and responsive, perfect for the retro look I was after. Perfect size for what I needed and the build quality is spot on.
Had a bit of a nightmare with one of them though - rainbow.py worked fine but my custom matrix code just wouldn't run properly. Thought I'd mucked up the programming but everything looked right. Fired off an email to support with a photo of the board and Rico got back to me within hours. Sharp eye on him - spotted straight away that there were some solder bridges between a few pins that were causing the trouble. I'd completely missed them!
Quick touch with the soldering iron to clear the bridges and Bob's your uncle - working perfectly with both the examples and my matrix effects. Really impressed with how quickly Rico diagnosed the problem just from the image. Could've saved myself hours of head-scratching if I'd contacted them sooner!
Great product and even better support. Will definitely be ordering more Pimoroni kit in future. Cheers to Rico and the team for sorting me out!”
“Perfect for testing out I/O ports along with a couple of Button Shims for inputs ... shame they don't do an 8-switch Button Shim, or even a combined I/O Shim with 8 LEDs and 8 buttons.”
“If you need a mess-free LED control without breadboards, resistors and jumper cables to deal with this is a perfect solution. You will however need to use its library if you're coding in Python. It will also need some additional coding to control directly from a GPIO pin unlike a simple on/off state through code. Plenty of examples are provided to use as a starter for any custom programming. For this price, it's highly recommended.”
“LED Shim worked perfectly and arrived within days in Canada from the UK. Couldn't be happier! This is a great addition to my robot and will give visual insight into what the sensors are seeing.
thanks!”
“This works very nicely and the Python examples provided are a great starting point for my own ones. I calculated though that using it to count seconds in binary would take about six years!
If I hadn't read earlier reviews I might have been surprised at the small size and lack of brightness of the LEDs but I have other high-brightness displays so this is perfect for me.
Pimoroni also seem to have cracked getting post through to the EU without problems which is great. Some other suppliers are still struggling.”
