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 http://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”