In Game Application

• Entering a portal, reading invisible ink, scaring monsters, creating personalized wearables, etc. 

LED stands for “Light Emitting Diode”. Basically, it’s a device that lights up when electricity goes through it. An LED strip basically is a bunch of LED’s all attached together.

You can use the micro:bit to control all the LEDs on the strip at the same time. So for instance, this LED strip has 20 LEDs. Using the micro:bit, I can tell them all to turn on or off at the same time.

Demonstration of turning all the LEDs on at the same time by pressing the A button.

But there’s more to it than that. This particular LED strip is an “addressable RGB” strip. The “addressable” part means you can control each of the LED’s individually. So for instance, what if I don’t want to turn all of them on at the same time, but I only want to turn half of them on?

Demonstration of turning on every other LED by pressing the B button.

The “RGB” part stands for “Red Green Blue”. What that means is the LED combines those three colors in one--so it can create those colors or any combination of those colors.

Demonstration of rainbow LEDs by pressing A+B buttons together.

For this first class, we’re going to learn to make the LED turn the color of our choice.