Hi,
I plug the blinkt directly to Pi 3 GPIO pins & all works fine.
Because I want to position the Blinkt a short distance from the Pi, I attach breadboard wires between 3V, GND 23, 24 on the Pi GPIO pins to the equivalent pin positions on the Blinkt.
The Blinkt stays dark.
The Blinkt Pinout only mentions 23 & 23 but I assume it needs a voltage too & assume it to be 3V.
Is it 5V or have I missed something else important?
Thanks
Best regards
David
have shied away from attaching 5V in case it doesnt survive.
If there is better documentation than https://pinout.xyz/pinout/blinkt, I shall be happy to use it instead.
Thanks for any insight.
Best regards
David
OK I slept on it & decided to give it a try & using 5V line to power the Blinkt worked.
Best regards
David
Now I have it working with the Adafruit capacitative touch board MPR121
The Blinkt worked for a while at 3V supplied from the touch board, although the red LED wouldn’t light,
however I suspected I had botched soldering pins 23/24 on the touch board but apparently it was voltage all along.
I would recommend a Pimoroni cabin boy add a bit more to the documentation - that would have been useful - or just adding to
https://pinout.xyz/pinout/blinkt that its powered from 5V? Also a single blinkt would be useful with a nice diffuser cover and an edge so it could be mounted to a box alongside a biutton - or even better a tactile button with a Blinkt mounted - that can use the same library would be extremely useful.
Mind you, there was a bit of adrenaline a few minutes ago when I made a little smoke & ruined a Blinkt by connecting 5V/GND to GND/5V on the Blinkt
fortunately the touch board & Pi are fine & nothing else caught fire.
So I’m down to my last Blinkt & will be more careful! Will definitey add some more to my next order.
Small changes to my software to reintegrate Blinkt & on to preparing the wooden box enclosure.
:)
Regards
David
I had a bit of trouble wiring my Blinkt up with jumper jerky, mainly the connection between the jerky and the Blinkt wasn’t great so I kept losing some LEDs.
I asked Pimoroni to provide more precise minimum pinout requirement on pinout.xyz, especially to mention witch ground pin is connected (not all are to avoid some shortcut if put reverse way on the Pi). And to specify what power voltage are required…
The thing is that to make thinks more readable, pinout.xyz does not advertise Power and Ground as needed pin.
Also, I have frequently noticed that trying to distance the Blinkt! from the Pi give poor result. It might be my cable however… but try to keep it on the GPIO pin directly attach.
pin2 is power
pin6 is ground
… just to clarify, while it is true both @gadgetoid and myself do work for Pimoroni, pinout.xyz is not strictly associated with any company in any other sense.
That’s not to say they aren’t supportive of it, far from it, but any shortcomings of the site is down to us and no one else - and that’s mostly the result of lack of spare time… in other words it’s a labour of love.
That said your request is very much something for which we have plans for, and many boards have the metadata embedded in their overlay already. So, one day in the not too distinct future, yes ;-)
Ideally a bit more doc info with blinkt from Pimoroni is the answer.
Not much and not fancy - just basic info in a data sheet would have saved time.
Your labour of love is very much appreciated!
With your help I have my blinkt working very well showing the status of Interactions with Amazon Alexa Voice Services. The blinkt is about 3" away through wooden box lid inside a plastic, frosted dome to diffuse it. Working great.
Thank you.
Regards
David
Hi
Thanks pi_dummy, my blinkt is now working very well - about 3" away from the Pi connected via the breakout pins on an Adafruit capacitative touch board that is plugged into Pi GPIO.
I don’t seem to be having the same issues you report, perhaps lucky with quality of wire and fit of the pins. I am now very pleased with how it’s all working.
Best regards
David