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Ringo Educational Guide Rev04.1 ~ Plum Geek
Using Ringo’s Color Lights
Ringo is fitted with six color lights. They are called "RGB" lights,
which stands for "Red, Green, and Blue". Each light actually
contains three small colored lights inside. You guess it - they are
red, green, and blue. It turns out you can create any color you can
think of by mixing different amounts of these three primary colors.
Your TV screen creates colors in the same way.
The RGB Lights in Ringo were made popular by Adafruit Industries, coining the
name “NeoPixels”. We owe them a huge high-five for writing the code required to
communicate with these awesome little lights.
Each light can have each of its red, green, and blue LEDs set to any level between
0 and 255. When set to 0, the given color is off, and when set to 255, the given
color is on at max brightness. The NeoPixel lights are extremely bright, so a value
from 100 to 150 is still plenty bright.
As stated, Ringo has six of these color lights. Computers like to number things
beginning with 0. So the lights are actually numbered 0 through 5 (not 1 through 6
as you may expect). This address number of each light is printed next to it on the
circuit board for easy reference. Check out the graphics below showing each light
with its address.
2
1
5
4
3
0
