Galactic Unicorn Graphical Workout

Just a short introduction to Pimoroni's new Galactic Unicorn Matrix board with 583 RGB LEDs arranged in 53 columns of 11. There is a Raspberry Pi Pico W built into the back, a speaker and amplifier, two I2C STEMMA/QT sockets for sensors, a light sensor facing front and loads of control buttons. It all arrives in a neat and useful storage box with a USB cable and a pair of legs/stands. You can power it from a computer, Lipo battery or from a 5V USB power pack.

Galactic Unicorn

Thonny editor

Optional: AHT20 STEMMA/QT sensor from Adafruit

Play the video to see what this board can do. Download the code to see how to program the board. There are plenty of comments so that you can see what is going on.

I was a little disappointed with the built-in font so added another - more normal, extended font (with math & Greek characters) and provided some routines for showing stationary, centred and scrolling text. If you start to run out of memory you can remove the extended characters to free up some space.

If you do not have access to the AHT20 sensor (I quite like this one) then comment out the section near the end.

The sound capabilities of this board are pretty good. I've not yet got my head how that all works yet. The documentation from Pimoroni is excellent and easy to follow. Remember that the Pico W has WiFi so can connect directly to the WWW and download information for display.

I hope you liked the demo. Have fun.

Feedback welcome.