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Building a micro:bit gesture controlled lamp

Recently I attended the hacker camp Chaos Communication Camp which really got me motivated to get creative again with building side projects and specifically ones which GLOW because what’s the point of a hardware project if it doesn’t glow? I decided on building myself a lamp using the BBC micro:bit as it’s this super simple microcontroller made for children and comes jam packed with a bunch of sensors and best of all - can be programmed using MicroPython.

Hardware
- 1x BBC micro:bit used for super simple gesture controls. The programming of the micro:bit is unbelievably simple and has a whole bunch of sensors built in for future upgrades I could possibly make to this project.
- 1x ATMEGA328 5V 16MHz Arduino (basically a knockoff Arduino Pro Mini) used for controlling the neopixels as the micro:bit cannot run regular Arduino code with third party libraries so a simple arduino was needed to act as an interface between the micro:bit and Neopixels.
- 8x NeoPixel Sticks & 1x NeoPixel Ring for providing super high quality LEDs to the project. It’s worth noting that I started off using a knockoff NeoPixel Ring on the top and noticed a pretty big difference in the quality to the official Adafruit Pixel Sticks. I’d really recommend sticking to the official Adafruit LEDs for this project, it’s worth it!
- 1x 3D printed lamp from Thingiverse.”

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