Micro:bit Lightbox

Preparing the box

(a) Depending on the type of box, the flap might have to be removed. Ideally, it should look like the picture.

Materials

1 x box

Preparing the sleeve

(a) Cut a strip of tracing paper the width of your box. It needs to be long enough to wrap around the box to make a translucent sleeve.

Materials

1 x tracing paper

Making the sleeve

(a) Make a crisp fold around the corners and fold the tracing paper around to make the sleeve.

(b) Glue/Tape overlapping ends together.

Lightbox?

(a) Line the back of the box with aluminium foil to let the light reflect off.

Materials

• aluminium foil

Inserting the light strip

(a) Make a hole on one side of the box big enough for the NeoPixel strip, ring or compatible LED strip and thread it through. Let the female leads dangle outside the box.

Materials

1 x Neopixel light strip

Plugging in
(a) Plug in the neopixel strip to pin0 of the breakout board

Materials

• 1 x Breakout board
• 1 x Micro:bit

Coding it up

(a) Go to the microbit makecode editor

(b) Add the NeoPixel library to the project.

Coding it

(a) Drag and drop 'set strip to neopixel....' block into the start block. Change the pin to PIN0 (or whichever pin you've plug the light strip to) and change the number of light pixels

(b) Drag a show rainbow into onstart block

(c) Add a pause block inside onstart

(d) In a forever block, drag in a "rotate pixels by 1" to cycle through the rainbow colors