Serial to NeoPixel bridge

I’m hacking on a project to hook a NeoPixel ring up to the internet. I don’t have a good reason why, but it’s a good excuse to work with OpenWrt, TURN servers, and some blinking lights.

NeoPixels are fairly hard to drive as they use a single wire, 800 kHz, non-return-to-zero protocol which needs precise timing. I decided to push the problem off into a

Olimex ATTINY85 board that takes serial data on one side and updates the ring on the other.

Here’s a video of a two chasers with a little bit of tail blur. The main loop is written in Python, which renders the chasers and writes them out at 57600 baud:

Next step is to get approval to release the source code.