Pico Scroll Pack

by Pimoroni

A sparkly 17x7 grid of snugly packed, individually controllable white LEDs to bling up your Raspberry Pi Pico, accompanied by a quartet of useful buttons.

Stop scrolling! And take a moment to appreciate the simplicity and elegance of a bright white LED, so often overlooked next to its flashy RGB cousins. Pico Scroll Pack incorporates 119 white LEDs in a tidy 17x7 matrix, along with four tactile buttons for interacting with your Pico-based contraption. OK, you can start scrolling again.

The brightness of each LED is individually controllable, and it's very nice for displaying graphs, scrolling messages, soothing snowfall animations or for visualising cellular automata. Shiny.

A Raspberry Pi Pico is not included - click here if you'd like to buy one!

Your Pico will need to have male headers soldered to it (with the pins pointing downwards) to attach to our add-on boards.

Features

  • 17x7 matrix of white LEDs (119 total)
  • Individual PWM brightness control of each LED
  • IS31FL3731 LED matrix driver chip, I2C address: 0x74
  • 4x tactile buttons
  • Pre-soldered female headers for attaching to Pico
  • Compatible with Raspberry Pi Pico.
  • Fully assembled
  • No soldering required (as long as your Pico has header pins attached).
  • Dimensions: approx 65mm x 25mm x 10mm (L x W x H, including headers and buttons)
  • C/C++ and MicroPython libraries

Getting started

The labels on the underside of Pico Scroll Pack will show you which way round to plug it into your Pico - just match up the USB port with the markings on the board.

The easiest way to get started is by downloading and copying our custom MicroPython uf2 to your Pico, it includes all the libraries you'll need to use our add-ons. Click here for our beginner friendly tutorial!

You can find C examples here and MicroPython examples here.

Pinout

Pico Scroll Pack talks to the IS31FL3731 LED driver chip over I2C requiring only SDA and SCL pins.

The four switches are wired up as SW_A, SW_B, SW_X, and SW_Y.

Power is supplied through VSYS meaning that you can use Pico Scroll Pack both on USB power and from external supplies (so long as they can supply 3V+) making it ideal for battery powered projects.

This leaves the majority of pins on your Pico free for other uses!

About Raspberry Pi Pico

Raspberry Pi Pico is a flexible, low cost microcontroller development board from the folks at Raspberry Pi, based on their very own chip - the RP2040. It's easily programmable over USB with C/C++ or MicroPython, and ideal for using in all sorts of physical computing projects, devices and inventions - we're so excited to see what you make with it!

We've called our Pico-sized add-ons packs, as they're designed to attach to the back of your Pico as if it were wearing a very stylish backpack (or a miniature jet pack, if you prefer). We've also got Pico bases (larger add-on boards with a space to mount your Pico on top) and some other boards that let you do interesting hackerly things like using multiple packs at once - click here to view them all!