Circuits

I have been wanting to play around with an ESP32-based micro for a while. Once I became comfortable with Adafruit’s microcontrollers and CircuitPython, I thought I’d try out some of their ESP32 offerings. I bought a few Airlift (ESP32) Featherwings to use with the Feather RP2040 boards I was experimenting with.

Looking back at one of the first real projects I attempted which combined 3D printing and microprocessors. I received an Creality Ender 3 V2 a year ago and after playing around with some test prints, I wanted to try building some more interesting and complex projects. I came across this fiber optic LED lamp project via Instructables. It was just the right amount of 3D printing, microprocessors, and coding I was looking for at the time.

I’ve been playing around with some WS2818 / NeoPixel LED 8x8 grids and CircuitPython. The CircuitPython ecosystem is really rich and Adafruit makes some very handy support libraries. I was using the LED Animation library to create some patterns on the neopixel grid, but wanted to try adding more capabilities. The time-slicing approach made it nice to add other code without blocking the program executing while the animations were happening.