Obviously, I love LEDs and printing stuff, and thankfully, the kids love it too! They’re young, and I love how their interests are always changing. This gives me the opportunity to constantly make cool stuff for them. Today’s project was quick, but a fun idea nonetheless.

The ore blocks were easy to make: design a cube, cut out random square shapes to look like Minecraft ore, make a white cube in the middle to diffuse the colors, and wire them up (somehow).

I didn’t take any pictures during the wiring process, but inside those little blocks are blood, tears, anger, and lots of hot glue strings. Serious question: Am I using hot glue wrong? Every time I use that thing, it gets everywhere! Half of the cleanup process is detangling myself from a cocoon of glue webs. It’s like being attacked by a giant spider in Mordor that has a huge libido.

The original colors were red on the top ore and deep blue (0,0,255) on the bottom ore. I originally thought the contrast looked rad, plus I’m vaguely aware that red equals Redstone. So, I go and show this off to my kids, and my daughter says to me: “That’s not diamond. That’s Luddite [or whatever she said]. Diamond is blue, but not that dark.” She immediately pulls up diamond—because, of course, she’s currently playing Minecraft—and I trudge my old body back to the office to program it closer to light blueish-green.

The hardware and code was real straight forward. It consists of a Pimoroni RP2040 with updated firmware, and the most recent libraries from AdaFruit’s site. There’s a lot of libraries in the bundle, so make sure you scroll all the way to the end and pull in the neopixel.mpy.

main.py

import board
import neopixel

num_pixels = 6

pixels = neopixel.NeoPixel(board.GP7, num_pixels)
pixels.brightness = 0.5

DIAMOND = (0,0,0)       # I honestly forgot, but it's greenish-blue
RED = (255, 0, 0)

for i in range(0, 2):
    pixels[i] = DIAMOND
for j in range(3, 5):
    pixels[j]= RED

pixels.show()

It’ll be easy to fill their room with Minecraft stuff. Everything in that universe is so simple to design and build.

Discussion here: https://x.com/cmcwain/status/1832554457789559253