We took the family away to Camp Bestival this summer (as we do most years) and as we have three young children we took a festival trolley with us to help move the youngest child and associated paraphernalia around with us. Each year we try to decorate the trolley a little bit to brighten it up and this year I thought I would use a 1 m strip of 144 NeoPixels I had at work which were sat around not being used!
Having used these in class before I knew that they were sometimes a tricky beast to get working with a Raspberry Pi, but also having recently completed a chapter in my book using a similar DotStar strip to create a LED matrix across the front of a laptop bag; I felt sure that I could get a portable solution up and running for the NeoPixels and a Raspberry Pi. Now this solution is perhaps more involved than how you could get things going in the lab; but to get it working for our festival trolley the whole solution needed to be portable and powered from battery packs.
