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* Excludes a few products that require courier shipping such as very large items and bare batteries.

Plasma 2040

by Pimoroni

Swathe everything in rainbows with this all-in-one, USB-C powered controller for WS2812/Neopixel and APA102/Dotstar addressable LED strip.

Plasma 2040 is a RP2040-based driver board for addressable LED strip (also known as magical rainbows by the metre). It's designed to make rigging up bits of custom, programmable lighting as straightforward as possible - perfect for whipping up some quick under-cupboard illumination, dramatically underlighting your sofa or providing some atmospheric mood-lighting for your workspace, PC or vivarium.

Plasma 2040 is powered and programmable by USB-C and, because USB-C is capable of drawing up to 3A of power, that's enough to power a healthy chunk of LEDs. There's three useful buttons that you could use for turning the lights on and off or to switch between colours or effects, plus a reset button and an eternally popular onboard RGB LED.

We've also popped a QW/ST connector on there, to make it super easy to plug in Qwiic or STEMMA QT breakouts - how about hooking up an RGB potentiometer to adjust the speed or hue of your lights, an air quality sensor to make your desk lighting into a giant thermometer or tell you when you should crack a window or a light sensor to turn them on automatically when it gets dark?

Features

  • Powered by RP2040 (Dual Arm Cortex M0+ running at up to 133Mhz with 264kB of SRAM)
  • 2MB of QSPI flash supporting XiP
  • Compatible with 5V WS2812/Neopixel/SK6812 and APA102/Dotstar/SK9822 LEDs
  • Screw terminals for attaching your LED strip.
  • USB-C connector for power and programming (3A max)
  • Qw/ST (Qwiic/STEMMA QT) connector
  • Low side current sensing (accessible via ADC3)
  • Reset, BOOT and two user buttons (the BOOT button can also be used as a user button)
  • RGB LED
  • Fully-assembled (no soldering required)
  • Measurements: approx 50 x 28 x 12mm (L x W x H, including connectors)
  • C++/MicroPython libraries
  • Schematic
  • Dimensions

LED strip and connectors are sold separately, check out the extras tab for some options!

Software

You can program Plasma 2040 with C/C++ or MicroPython in the same way as you would a Raspberry Pi Pico. You'll get best performance using C++, but if you're a beginner we'd recommend using our batteries included MicroPython build for ease of getting started.

You can also use CircuitPython on your Plasma 2040! CircuitPython is an easy to use, well-established ecosystem with lots of example code and drivers for interfacing with different kinds of hardware.

Connecting Breakouts

If your breakout has a QW/ST connector on board, you can plug it straight in with a JST-SH to JST-SH cable, or you can easily connect any of our I2C breakouts with a JST-SH to JST-SH cable coupled with a Qw/ST to Breakout Garden adaptor.

We've also broken out a set of I2C pins, analog pins and debug pins so you can solder things like breakouts or analog potentiometers directly to them (or solder on a strip of header and plug the whole shebang into a breadboard).

Notes

  • Our C++/MicroPython software uses the RP2040's PIO state machines to drive each strip separately - this board only has one set of LED strip connectors, but if you're up for some inventive wiring it's possible to drive multiple strips simultaneously, even if they're of different types!
  • If you're curious about how much current your LEDs are consuming, we've incorporated some current sensing circuitry onto this board, which you can measure by reading ADC3. You could use this in your code to do things like adjusting the brightness of your LEDs based on available power!

About RP2040

Raspberry Pi's RP2040 microcontroller is a dual core ARM Cortex M0+ running at up to 133Mhz. It bundles in 264kB of SRAM, 30 multifunction GPIO pins (including a four channel 12-bit ADC), a heap of standard peripherals (I2C, SPI, UART, PWM, clocks, etc), and USB support.

One very exciting feature of RP2040 is the programmable IOs which allow you to execute custom programs that can manipulate GPIO pins and transfer data between peripherals - they can offload tasks that require high data transfer rates or precise timing that traditionally would have required a lot of heavy lifting from the CPU.

49 customer reviews

7 months ago
Such a great device! Current sensing is great to ensure that the power source is not overloaded, important for driving long LED strips. Hoping to develop some Python skill- this is the “Rainbow” example provided by Pimoroni.
by David about Plasma 2040 via REVIEWS.io
7 months ago
I bought this to try and run some old ws2801 leds bought years ago. They require a clock line and a data line rather than just data and this has a 4th terminal marked clk. I installed circuit Python so I could easily make use of adafruit’s ws2801 libraries. After some trial and error I got the onboard led to colour cycle and the board to control a string of 40+ leds. So everything is working well as far as I’m concerned.
by Anonymous about Plasma 2040 via REVIEWS.io
9 months ago
Easy to connect the lighting strips and programming the controller is a doddle with the pimoroni micro python implementation
by Keith about Plasma 2040 via REVIEWS.io
9 months ago
Worked right out of the box, very easy to get started using microPython and the three user-definable buttons will come in handy. I also appreciate the USB-C connector.
by Johannes about Plasma 2040 via REVIEWS.io
a year ago
Any pico is great for neopixel type projects but the additionla screw terminals make this easy to connect & the PICOW means that controlling via a web page is easy.
by alister about Plasma 2040 via REVIEWS.io
a year ago
Just seems to work straght off out of the box. The info to get started is clear and the sample software wirks well.
by Anonymous about Plasma 2040 via REVIEWS.io
a year ago
Great for learning how to develop for the Pico with loads of example code to get you going. Word of caution, the Pimoroni default constructor for the APA102 object runs the clock at 20Mhz! The resulting waveform is pretty ugly and unreliable, with many glitching LEDs. Luckily, you can override this default in the constructor. Setting to 2Mhz gives a perfect clock signal and will run hundreds of LEDs flawlessly. Add the 2000000 as an additional parameter when calling the object constructor: APA102 led_strip(N_LEDS, pio0, 0, plasma2040::DAT, plasma2040::CLK, 2000000); You can see the difference in the scope traces
by Richard about Plasma 2040 via REVIEWS.io
a year ago
A compact, self-contained board that really simplifies the hardware side of driving WS2812 strips. The documentation could be a bit less cryptic but the schematic helps. With the USB C input supplying 3A it should be all we need for lighting a small model railway diorama. A couple more pin connections for external input buttons would have helped us but overall I am really impressed by the design.
by David about Plasma 2040 via REVIEWS.io
a year ago
works quite well. Would be better if it had bluetooth/wifi
by Thiago about Plasma 2040 via REVIEWS.io

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