Please see my website Code Club Adventures for more coding materials.

For details of the inspiration of this project, see pico-interactive-originals

This project is what controlled the majority of the Halloween 2024 project and will continue to drive the majority of the Halloween 2025 project but I plan to migrate to my newer framework (cptkip) over time.

The first interactive display to make use of this project will be Halloween 2024. For more information on that project, see pico-interactive-halloween.

This project brings together the ideas behind three projects created in 2023 into a single common (easily extensible) framework that can be used with a range of CircuitPython boards (though originally designed for Raspberry Pi Pico). The framework is designed to be used for single board projects used in Coding Clubs up to larger interactive display installations that consist of many boards each performing in isolation or coordinated over network connections. The framework has been tested and works with a range of microcontroller boards. See the README.md in the circuitpython directory for a full list of supported boards and CircuitPython versions.

The basic structure of this project is:

• circuitpython contains the exact builds of CircuitPython that have been tested with this project along with the libraries that are used extracted out into the circuitpython/lib directory.
• demo contains demonstration and test interactive displays that are used to test the functionality of this project on a range of boards.
• docs contains the documentation for the interactive and coordinator directories.
• hardware contains information on the boards that have been designed for use with this framework and interactive displays.
• interactive contains the base framework code which provides the basic functionality that operates on a supported board. This code is configurable and extensible, allowing the individual nodes in an interactive display to use whichever functionality they need, whilst also providing their own customisation code. All nodes will make use of the interactive framework.
• tests contains the tests for the code contained in the interactive directory as well as on_device tests that can be used to verify against a particular hardware device.

All work in this project are provided under a permissive license to allow this code to be used in a range of educational and personal settings. See the end of this readme for more information about the license.

This project has been developed using the PyCharm IDE with a VENV for python as well as using Blnika (see Blinka) to easily test the interaction with a CircuitPython board. The other libraries that are used and need to be installed into the Virtual Environment are:

• pytest (see pytest for more information)

Use the Adafruit resources at CircuitPython Libraries on any Computer with Raspberry Pi Pico to setup Blinka. Once setup it'll make it much easier to test CircuitPython code and will be an invaluable tool when building your own CircuitPython software. Once Blinka is setup, it is trivial to then run CircuitPython programs directly from within PyCharm IDE.

Once Blinka is setup and you are running your CircuitPython code from PyCharm, you will need to add the appropriate libraries into your venv. In the project covered here it includes:

adafruit-circuitpython-busdevice  
adafruit-circuitpython-connectionmanager
adafruit-circuitpython-debouncer
adafruit-circuitpython-framebuf
adafruit-circuitpython-hcsr04
adafruit-circuitpython-httpserver
adafruit-circuitpython-led-animation
adafruit-circuitpython-logging
adafruit-circuitpython-neopixel
adafruit-circuitpython-pixelbuf
adafruit-circuitpython-pixel-framebuf
adafruit-circuitpython-pixelmap
adafruit-circuitpython-requests
adafruit-circuitpython-ticks
adafruit-circuitpython-typing

Beware that there are some limitations with Blinka that means it cannot be used to test everything. All of your application code will still need to be tested on the device that you want to run on to make sure it works in that environment. So far, the main issues that I have found with Blinka are:

• It is significantly slower that running on the device itself. This is not because your computer is slow, it's because of the overhead of calculating and transferring data to and from the device. Running your application code on the device is always much faster.
• More than one strand of Neopixels will not work properly. If you are running a single strand of Neopixels then Blinka works absolutely fine (although it is slower to update than running on the device). If however you run multiple strands from different pins then What seems to happen is they get combined and output on a single strand. Running your code on the device will work fine though (this was infuriating when building the skull path nodes).
• Ultrasonic sensors do not give good results. This is possibly related to the speed issue but when testing Ultrasonic sensors, I did not get anything like sensible or consistent values. Running on the device worked fine though.
• Audio support seems to be unavailable as I was unable to find the appropriate library to add to the virtual environment. I did not invest much time into solving this issue as the audio is largely handled by CircuitPython and the pico-interactive code is little more than a thin layer around it.

For details of the planned set of changes, please see roadmap.md.

• Update to newest CircuitPython library bundle from 6th December 2024.
• Added adafruit-pixelbuf to support grids of NeoPixels.

• Validated support for CircuitPython 9.1.4 and 9.2.1 on Pico boards.

• Generic task runner that handles task completion, task exceptions and support task restarts.
• Support for logging in both Desktop and CircuitPython environments.
• Button support for single, double and long-presses.
• Buzzer support for playing tones.
• Migrated Song in music.py from originals/christmas to buzzer.py as Melody.
• Migrated SongSequence in music.py from originals/christmas to buzzer.py as MelodySequence.
• Migrated Flicker from originals/christmas and originals/light_jars to pixel.py as Flicker.
• NeoPixel support, including animations.
• LED support, including animations.
• Ultrasonic sensor support.
• Audio support with MP3 files.
• Wi-Fi support using adafruit_httpserver (see roadmap for planned migration to alternative).
  • Support for network node information page: index, inspect, cpu-information.
  • Support for standard messages: alive, name, role, blink, led on/off, restart, trigger.
  • Support for network directory via coordinator node (PC/Raspberry Pi) (register/unregister, heartbeat etc.).

All materials provided in this project is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.

In summary, this means that you are free to:

• Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format.
• Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material.

Provided you follow these terms:

• Attribution — You must give appropriate credit , provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
• NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
• ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.