During Pimoroni’s recent 7th birthday, I won a £50 gift voucher to spend on their site.
After a lot of thought and wonder, I finally opted for the Pimoroni Mote (shown above). This is a full kit that contains 4 strips of 14 RGB LED “pixels” or lights and a USB control board. Each LED pixel is individually controllable using Python and the provided example code and Python Library.
This kit can be ran on any computer or micro-controller, but for my testing, I am running it from a Raspberry Pi and the standard Python library.
Getting it set up was a breeze and took no time at all, and in less time than it takes to boil an egg, I had lights flashing and fading and changing colours. Looking at the included examples I found a rather handy API script had already been written. This allows you to control the LED strips using any software that can pass in the required API commands.
I opted to use HA Bridge that was already running controlling other parts of my “Smart Home” and set about adding in the API calls to allow me to control my Mote using my voice and an Amazon Alexa device and you can see the outcome in the video below (volume up).
If you have HA Bridge and a Mote, you can set yours up to work as well with a few simple steps.
SSH or connect to your Raspberry Pi using your prefered method and in the command window, run the following:
python Pimoroni/mote/examples/mote-api.py &This will start the API code running in the background, then add the following code to your HA Bridge as a new device
Once you have done all of this, save it as a new device and ask Alexa to discover devices and then you can talk to her and change colours, brightness etc.
Let me know in the comments if you have any issues, or use the contact form to ask questions, or find me on Twitter or Facebook.