Pi-Hut Christmas Tree

My son was fortunate enough to receive a Pi-Hut Christmas tree for an early Christmas present. He’s only eight, so I wanted to supervise his soldering, but I needn’t have worried – the only problem encountered was when I fitted a missing LED, fitted it to the wrong side, removed it and broke the leg. Fortunately, I had a spare lying around in the shed so it was an easy fix.

The Christmas tree is a lovely kit. Gold plating means that the soldering is effortless and the edges have also been guilded for a bit of luxury. The whole board sits rather neatly on top of a Pi Zero W. I’ve been logging in remotely with SSH, but a development I’d like to try is to use BlueDot to remote control it from a phone.

There is a set of instructions for installing the gpiozero software, although I’m unfamiliar with this – I’ve always used rpi.GPIO in the past with good success. One thing I found missing was a map of all of the LEDs. They’re all numbered, but that doesn’t relate to anything on the pin connections. Mapping the outputs (BCM or Board number) was a bit of a mission but I think I’ve succeeded.

LED	Output (BCM)	Output (Pin)
Star	2	3
1	4	7
2	15	10
3	13	33
4	21	40
5	25	22
6	8	24
7	5	29
8	10	15
9	16	36
10	17	11
11	27	13
12	26	37
13	24	18
14	9	21
15	12	32
16	6	31
17	20	38
18	19	35
19	14	8
20	18	12
21	11	23
22	7	26
23	23	16
24	22	15

The next step I’d like to try is to run this from ScratchGPIO, possibly using SID as a starter so that I can run Scratch on a laptop and transfer it over later. For the meantime, I’ve just got a couple of alternative python programs to play with.

All-in-all, this has been a lovely kit that uses loads of outputs on the PiZero. Soldering is effortless and programming with the standard program supplied was easy. One day I’ll read the docs for GPIOzero, but for now, I’ll be teaching with Scratch.

Merry Christmas and a Happy 2018 to everyone!

 

 

 

 

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