PiGlow

The PiGlow is a small add on board for the Raspberry Pi that provides 18 individually controllable LEDs. You can use it for all sorts of things! And of course, it fits inside a Pibow!

Works just fine with all models of Raspberry Pi including the B+!

There are tons of things you can do with it:

• Mood lighting/ambience
• Showing current system load
• Notify you of events like mentions in tweets or incoming e-mail
• Feedback on the status of scripts/daemons running on your Pi
• Works great when VESA is mounted to provide a cast against a wall
• ...and pretty much anything else you can think of!

More detail

This board uses the SN3218 8-bit 18-channel PWM chip to drive 18 surface mount LEDs. Communication is done via I2C over the GPIO header with a bus address of 0x54 (Python example code provided). Each LED can be set to a PWM value of between 0 and 255.

• 18 LEDs (three each of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and white)
• Great to provide feedback if you're running your Pi headless
• PWM (dimming) control for each channel
• Fully assembled (no soldering required)
• Python code to access and control lighting provided

PiGlow sample code and other instructions

If you just want some Python code to start tinkering with please check out Pimoroni's GitHub repository which also includes the full datasheet for the IC used on PiGlow.

Gordon Henderson has added a PiGlow driver for wiringPi which you can find here: http://wiringpi.com/dev-lib/piglow/

Simon Walters has added PiGlow support for Scratch which is here: http://cymplecy.wordpress.com/

Jason Barnett has put together a great Python class and a load of samples: https://github.com/Boeeerb/PiGlow

Ben Lebherz has forked Jasons project and tidied up the code a bit while adding gamma correction: https://github.com/benleb/PyGlow

Manuel Ernst has created a Node.js library: https://github.com/zaphod1984/node-piglow

Falldeaf has put together a nice XBMC hack to use the PiGlow as a status indicator: http://falldeaf.com/2013/11/the-xbmc-piglow-information-display-addon/

Jonathan Stowe has created a module for the Perl divers among you: https://metacpan.org/release/JSTOWE/Device-PiGlow-1.0

Toon Schoenmakers has gone as far as making a library for Golang: https://github.com/schoentoon/piglow

Bruce Beisel has created a Java package (with GUI simulator and example applications): https://github.com/brucebeisel/PiGlow4J

Robert Peake has made a simple, mobile-friendly web-based interface, the PiGlow Web Controller, : https://github.com/cyberscribe/piglowweb

Joris Vervuurt has created a lightweight Node.js module: https://github.com/jorisvervuurt/jvspiglow