Glowing Pumpkin Project Refresh

Posted: August 30, 2023 | Categories: Internet of Things (IoT), ESP32

Years ago I published a several Glowing Pumpkin projects: Arduino Glowing Pumpkin and Arduino Glowing Pumpkin (Adafruit Feather). Both projects used Arduino compatible devices plus either one of the Adafruit multi-NeoPixel devices or a NeoPixel shield. The shield approach was easy because I just had to solder some male and female headers to the boards and press them together into a unit. My first project used the NeoPixel Ring which required soldering wires and running them into an enclosure where the Arduino device resides.

I always wanted to redo this project, especially using some of the smaller ESP32 devices like the Seeed Studio Xaio series of microcontrollers. A while back I was perusing the Adafruit site looking for new products when I noticed the Adafruit 5x5 NeoPixel Grid BFF Add-On for QT Py and Xiao; it's a super tiny device, designed to attach back to back with a Seeed Xiao board. This combination gives me an opportunity to do a super small reboot of the glowing pumpkin here.

Here's the project in action

And here's the original project (on the right) and the latest version on the left. See how much smaller the new version is? And its much easier to assemble.

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Header image: Photo by Robin Glauser on Unsplash.