5.2 KiB
Plasma
The Plasma library is intended to drive APA102 / DotStar™ or WS2812 / NeoPixel™ LEDs on the Plasma 2040 board, though it can be used with your own custom pins/wiring.
Notes On PIO Limitations
The WS2812 and APA102 drivers use the PIO hardware on the RP2040. There are only two PIOs with four state machines each, placing a hard limit on how many separate LED strips you can drive.
In most cases you'll use 0
for PIO and 0
for PIO state-machine, but you should change these if you plan on running different strand types together, or if you're using something else that uses PIO.
WS2812
Getting Started
Construct a new WS2812
instance, specifying the number of LEDs, PIO, PIO state-machine and GPIO pin.
import plasma
LEDS = 30
FPS = 60
led_strip = plasma.WS2812(LEDS, 0, 0, 15)
Start the LED strip by calling start
. This sets up a timer which tells the RP2040 to DMA the pixel data into the PIO (a fast, asyncronous memory->peripheral copy) at the specified framerate.
led_strip.start(FPS)
RGBW and Setting Colour Order
Some WS2812-style LED strips have varying colour orders and support an additional white element. Two keyword arguments are supplied to configure this:
import plasma
LEDS = 30
FPS = 60
led_strip = plasma.WS2812(LEDS, 0, 0, 15, rgbw=True, color_order=plasma.COLOR_ORDER_GRB)
The available orders are defined as constants in plasma
:
COLOR_ORDER_RGB
COLOR_ORDER_RBG
COLOR_ORDER_GRB
COLOR_ORDER_GBR
COLOR_ORDER_BRG
COLOR_ORDER_BGR
Set An LED
You can set the colour of an LED in either the RGB colourspace, or HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value). HSV is useful for creating rainbow patterns.
RGB
Set the first LED - 0
- to Purple 255, 0, 255
:
led_strip.set_led(0, 255, 0, 255)
HSV
Set the first LED - 0
- to Red 0.0
:
led_strip.set_hsv(0, 0.0, 1.0, 1.0)
Set Brightness
APA102 pixels support global brightness, allowing their brightness to be specified independent of their colour. You can set the overall brightness of your strip by calling:
led_strip.set_brightness(15)
You can set brightness from 0
to 31
. This directly maps to the 5-bit brightness value sent to the APA102 LEDs.
APA102
Getting Started
Construct a new APA102
instance, specifying the number of LEDs, PIO, PIO state-machine and GPIO data/clock pins.
import plasma
LEDS = 30
FPS = 60
led_strip = plasma.APA102(LEDS, 0, 0, 15, 14)
Start the LED strip by calling start
. This sets up a timer which tells the RP2040 to DMA the pixel data into the PIO (a fast, asyncronous memory->peripheral copy) at the specified framerate.
led_strip.start(FPS)
Set An LED
You can set the colour of an LED in either the RGB colourspace, or HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value). HSV is useful for creating rainbow patterns.
RGB
Set the first LED - 0
- to Purple 255, 0, 255
:
led_strip.set_led(0, 255, 0, 255)
HSV
Set the first LED - 0
- to Red 0.0
:
led_strip.set_hsv(0, 0.0, 1.0, 1.0)
Using the Buttons & RGB LED
The pimoroni
module contains Button
and RGBLED
classes to simplify button debounce, auto-repeat and PWM'ing an RGB LED.
Button(button, invert=True, repeat_time=200, hold_time=1000)
RGBLED(r, g, b, invert=True)
The plasma
module contains constants for the LED and button pins:
plasma.PIN_LED_R
= 16plasma.PIN_LED_G
= 17plasma.PIN_LED_B
= 18plasma.PIN_BUTTON_A
= 12plasma.PIN_BUTTON_B
= 13
Buttons
Import the Button
class from the pimoroni
module and the pin constants for the buttons:
from pimoroni import Button
from plasma import PIN_BUTTON_A, PIN_BUTTON_B
Set up an instance of Button
for each button:
button_a = Button(PIN_BUTTON_A)
button_b = Button(PIN_BUTTON_B)
To get the button state, call .read()
. If the button is held down, then this will return True
at the interval specified by repeat_time
until hold_time
is reached, at which point it will return True
every hold_time / 3
milliseconds. This is useful for rapidly increasing/decreasing values such as hue:
state = button_a.read()
RGBLED
Import the RGBLED
class from pimoroni
and the pin constants for the buttons:
from pimoroni import RGBLED
from plasma import PIN_LED_R, PIN_LED_G, PIN_LED_B
And set up an instance of RGBLED
for the LED:
led = RGBLED(PIN_LED_R, PIN_LED_G, PIN_LED_B)
To set the LED colour, call .set_rgb(r, g, b)
. Each value should be between 0 and 255:
led.set_rgb(255, 0, 0) # Full red
led.set_rgb(0, 255, 0) # Full green
led.set_rgb(0, 0, 255) # Full blue