New addons: Colourtail, colourstar, glowbugs (RGB LEDs)

[mikerr]

Seems some new codebug addons are imminent for codebug

Colour Tail & Colour Star

Colour Tails are plugged into CodeBug using the black Extension connector at the bottom of CodeBug.

They give your CodeBug easy control of colourful lights in interesting shapes. The LED lights on Colour Tails are RGB (Red Green Blue) so they can produce any colour you can think of, by mixing different brightnesses of the Red Green and Blue light.
http://www.codebug.org.uk/learn/activit ... lour-tail/

Glowbugs


Create amazing light up projects with GlowBugs in minutes. GlowBugs are full colour LEDs (with over 16 million possible colours!). They are really easy to control and use in your projects and this activity will show you how to use them with a couple of simple blocks.
http://www.codebug.org.uk/learn/activit ... s/#step447

...and a new block to control them:



Keep an eye on http://www.codebug.org.uk/shop/ - they should be appearing today

[BMS Doug]

Great addition to their product!

Do you think they are straight WS2811 or WS2812 5V LEDs?

[BMS Doug]

They are available in their store now!

[mikerr]

Not bad prices:

£7.50 for the extention header connected ColourTail (renamed ColourStar)

£7.50 for 5x glowbugs & 15 croc clips

(and various packages)

£13 for 10x glowbugs &15 croc clips
http://www.codebug.org.uk/shop/

and cases too (at cpc/farnell)

@ £2.39
http://cpc.farnell.com/webapp/wcs/store ... sults=true


https://vine.co/v/iZKLxidgZnj

[mikerr]

Although the ColourStar connects via the header - it still leaves I2C free for tethering:



https://twitter.com/_codebug/status/675456516317683712

[BMS Doug]

Yup, that was expensive, I bought a bunch of the add-ons on Friday, £69 gone.

I hope they arrive in time to be part of the Christmas Present.

[pigraham]

I just tested the colourstar / glowbugs blocks with a string of 52 standard WS2812 neopixels. Works fine from CS pin on the expansion header (tail mode) or from leg 3 (bug mode) Seems to work with any number of LEDs. Presumably it would work a treat with those fairy light strings of WS2812s as well. Potential to animate your tree! It would also be possible to arrange LEDs in 5x5 and duplicate the codebug array patterns on the coloured LEDs. That would allow you to use the fonts and scrolling on a colour array. It would be a Unicorn Hat for CodeBug.

Video here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR2bSDlFdko

CodeBlocks here

http://www.codebug.org.uk/explore/codeb ... ail-cylon/

[BMS Doug]

My colourstars and glowbugs arrived today, I'll play with them tomorrow.

[katman]

Hi all,

Newbie question coming up. I just bought a CodeBug for my son as a Christmas Present and thought I would have a play around with the programming tool on the website to familiarise myself with it.

Does the hardware have to be connected to the PC before you can do anything ?
I folowed the first step of the Glowbug tutorial and selected Colourtail and 5 Glowbugs but was unable to progress to step two as there was no Colourtail Menu to click on. Tried IE11, Chrome and Firefox and got identical results in all cases.

Im really looking forward to playing with him and Codebug when he comes over on Boxing Day but I appear to have failed at the first hurdle.

Thanks in advance

Keith

[mikerr]

Just checked, and its missing in the tutorial here too.

The colourtail menu is there in the normal create window though.