“Kit went together very easily, but I soldered the two wings on, as one of them didn’t make very good contact. Blinking away now like a good ‘un. Possibly one of the greatest wastes of computing power of all time, it’ll get dragged out every year!”
“A nicely made kit and an easy soldering exercise. Looks very nice assembled.
I couldn't get LED 11 to light, and spent ages tracing the circuit trying to find the fault ... a circuit diagram would have helped. I eventually concluded that there was a broken track on the PCB between pin 5 of the header and R19 (the resistor for LED 11) and patched it with a bit of wire. All working now.
Like the other DJ I had to work out the LED to GPIO to Pi pin numbering relationships the hard way; it would have been nice if this had been documented. Maybe it would have been better to label the LEDs with their GPIO numbers rather than 1..24?”
“For me, the example code only lit up a single LED and didn't do much more. I adopted it into something that seems to work better (for me):
from gpiozero import LEDBoard
from gpiozero.tools import random_values
from time import sleep
tree = LEDBoard(*range(2,28),pwm=True)
while True:
for led in tree:
led.source_delay = 2
led.source = random_values()
sleep(5)”
“Just the mapping of pins to LEDs....
I worked it out by hand (2's the star, 3's unknown) and put together this bit of code for a cascade of LEDs...
from gpiozero import LEDBoard
from time import sleep
from signal import pause
treelights=[ 18, 5, 9, 11, 21, 10, 7, 12, 6, 1,14, 3, 20, 24, 13, 15,2, 17, 16, 23,8, 22, 4, 19 ]
treemap={ 1:4, 7:5, 16:6, 22:7, 6:8 , 14:9, 8:10, 21:11, 15:12, 3:13, 19:14, 2:15, 9:16, 10:17, 20:18, 18:19,17:20, 4:21, 24:22, 23:23, 13:
24, 5:25, 12:26, 11:27
}
leds=LEDBoard(*range(4,28), pwm=True)
def labelToPin(l):
return treemap[l]
def toBoard(l):
return labelToPin(l)-4
while True:
for i in treelights:
sleep(0.1)
leds.on(toBoard(i))
for i in treelights:
sleep(0.1)
leds.off(toBoard(i))
Have fun...”
“Works great on this side of the channel too!
It would be nice to get some auto-boot code so that my boys can just turn it on in their room.
As a beginner in the Pi World, I'll have to dive deeper into the PI code to do that.
Thanks PiHut for a nice kit and an innovative ordering process which made it even more desirable.”
“From a UK supplier I have ordered the GPIO Hammer Header (complete of Solderless male headers) for RPi Zero. This to avoid any soldering to place XMAS pre-soldered version on
the RPi Zero. To cut the lateral arm of the XMAS tree I have used a nail clipper.
In about 5 min I have completed the assembly job and following the instructions ( The Pi Hut) I have tested the XMAS tree with the about 8 rows of its python code example. The result was an artistic sound of red lights around an alone yellow star.”
“Great piece of kit, works like a charm. I opted for the pre-soldered kit as my soldering isn't up to much. Just having fun trying to turn it into an Advent calendar.”
