It has been a long time since I connected with the Cheerlights system, and as we’re heading towards the winter season and Christmas, it seemed appropriate to see what could be done with a WiFi connected Raspberry Pi Pico. Cheerlights is connected to Twitter, and anyone from around the world can send a Twitter message which contains a colour name. Any device can then access this and use it in a number of ways. The current colour is shown on this webpage.
Once again, I’m working with the MicroBlocks programming language and I had noticed that they have a library for connecting to WiFi as well as functions for setting up an HTTP client.
Once the WiFi connection is made, it regularly reads the colour from this link into a variable and then uses that to light up pixels n a NeoPixel grid. To make it more interesting, I flash a random pixel at 100% brightness and then revert to 20% brightness. The current colour is read every 10 seconds or so. I’ve put a video on Twitter so that you can see its sparkly goodness.
The latest version of my program is shown below, and there is a download link at the end of this article.
The Cheerlights program can be downloaded from this link (right click and save to your own computer):
rPi Kitchen 