APA102 Library

A simple library to drive APA102 pixels from the Raspberry Pi, or similar SBCs.

Uses either spidev or RPi.GPIO depending on the pins specified.

Pre-requisites

You must enable SPI:

• spi: sudo raspi-config nonint do_spi 0

You can optionally run sudo raspi-config or the graphical Raspberry Pi Configuration UI to enable interfaces.

Installing

Stable library from PyPi:

• Just run python3 -m pip install apa102

Latest/development library from GitHub:

• git clone https://github.com/pimoroni/apa102-python
• cd apa102-python
• sudo ./install.sh

Usage

The APA102 class will attempt to use spidev or RPi.GPIO depending on which pins you specify.

For example; three RGB LEDs connected to SPI pins 10 and 11 with chip-select 8 (CE0):

from apa102 import APA102
lights = APA102(3, 10, 11, 8)

You can then set individual pixels with set_pixel:

lights.set_pixel(0, 255, 0, 0)  # Pixel 1 to Red
lights.set_pixel(1, 0, 255, 0)  # Pixel 2 to Green
lights.set_pixel(2, 0, 0, 255)  # Pixel 3 to Blue

Pixels are zero-indexed and accept Red, Green and Blue colour values from 0 to 255.

To set the lights, after the colours were set as wanted, use the show method:

lights.show()

Without the show method, only the internal data is updated, the lights changes only after this function call.