Making at Seeed: My Humble Beginning with Raspberry Pi and LED Lighting

Making & tinkering is the DNA of Seeed. Apart from our internal hackathons, some Seeeders are also embracing parts and bits off hours by our own when we get inspirations. To share our tinkering with the community, here we are: a new column Making at Seeed is live.

The projects we’ll share in this new column might be really entry-level, but we just want to share to learn. So please don’t hesitate to leave comments or suggestions as your inputs and feedbacks will help us do better.

So, let’s welcome the the first sharing from Alice, a team member or our Customer Service Team, who will introduce us about her first Raspberry Pi Project Raspark!

Hey community, This is Alice from Seeed. As a member of Seeed Customer Service Team, answering inquiries from our customers are quite common for me. I could reply the inquiries about orders and shipping info on my own. However, the technical questions are always so frustrating for someone like me from a non-tech background that I need to turn to the Tech Support Team to take over.

In order to learn more basics of open source hardwares and also to have more topics to catch up with our customers, I decided to push myself to get hands dirty with some of our products.

I got the inspiration for my first project from my little niece who loves sparkles. And she is quite addicted to phone games for her age. In order to show her that phones are mare than playing games, I think using phone to control a light might be a good distraction for her.

I started with Raspberry Pi, as it is friendly for beginners to get started and create demos even by watching some tutorial articles. However, it took me 3 hours to download Raspbian –an Operation system of Raspberry Pi, which was a quite frustrating start. So I turned to Seeed Tech Support Team for help and found that I had “luckily” downloaded a wrong Source File.

To get Pi controlled by a PC and mobile, I chose VNC instead of SSH as the latter does not have APP version. I downloaded VNC Server in Raspberry Pi System and VNC Viewer on the laptop and my phone.

After setting up all configurations, I started to write python and try to run it in Raspberry Pi system. It also took me a lot of time to debug as the lighting was not turned on. I simplified and connected only one lighting with 300ohm resistor to PIN12 and PIN 6 to GND, I was glad that it finally worked.

And after working on and off, here finally comes my first project Raspark!. Running on a Raspberry Pi, it is a simple sparkle lighting scene of a park remotely controlled by phone/PC.

When I got quite close to wind up, I also asked my niece to pick up some adorable components from her toy box to decorate and turn the lighting box into a park scene. We had a great time tinkering together, and she did WOW out when I lit up the led through the phone.