Toucan 8 x APA102 RGB LED

Just purchased the Toucan 8 x APA102 RGB LED

Looks great

Unfortunately, absolutely no info comes with it. It’d be nice to know, for instance, which GPIO pins to use?

Description also states that there is “A Python Library” - again, it’d be nice to know where this library is or what it’s called

Not a major complaint, however, the product is totally unusable without such information

Hey jeromanda,

Thank you for bringing this to our attention, I’ve checked with the team and they’ve confirmed that:

The Clock Line is on Pin 16 (GPIO23) and Data Line is on Pin 18 (GPIO24).

As for python libraries, a library that drives APA102 should work: apa102 · PyPI
Or the blinkt library: GitHub - pimoroni/blinkt: Python Library for Blinkt; 8 APA102 LEDs for your Raspberry Pi
If you’re using an arduino: APA102 - Arduino Libraries

Cheers,
Cherie

According to the blinkt library

DAT = 23
CLK = 24

Now I’m a little concerned

Hi jaromanda,

Our Toucan board is fully compatible with the pimoroni libraries.

There are two GPIO libraries that are commenly used on the raspberry pi. One defines the pins by there physical location (i.e. pin 16 and pin18) while the other refers to them by there cpu GPIO position (i.e. gpio 23 and gpio 24) the pimoroni library uses the name system by CPU GPIO position. I can reassure you that pin 16 is infact gpio23 and pin 18 is gpio24.

I hope that clears it up.

Thanks, Lewis

Sure … I do know the difference between physical pin numbers and GPIO numbers

Look again at what Cherie said, and what the Blinkt library says

Cherie: Clock line is … (GPIO23) and Data line is … (GPIO24) (I removed the pin numbers in her statement for clarity)
blinkt library says DAT(data?) is GPIO23 and CLK(clock?) is GPIO24

That’s the other way around - regardless of physical pin numbers which I never asked for

Sorry, we got our numbers mixed up…

Data on our board is gpio23
Clock on our board is gpio23

Same as in the pimoroni library

Thanks,
Lewis

Hey jaromanda,

Apologies, I was just told it seems the schematic was mislabelled so the numbers given were mixed up.

To confirm, the pinout is the same as in the pimoroni library:

The Clock Line is on Pin 18 (GPIO24) and Data Line is on Pin 16 (GPIO23).

Please let us know how you go and if it works out on your end.

If there is anything else we can do to assist you, please don’t hesitate to get in contact.

Cheers,
Cherie

Yep, using those for APA102 library works great

Thanks all

Not really a response to the original post, but since this is the only post about the Toucan I thought I’d just comment here rather than starting a whole new thread -

I’ve shared a few Toucan8 hello world scripts in python (using APA102) that might be useful if you were just getting started: https://github.com/cheshrkat/toucan8

(Obviously jaromanda doesn’t need this but perhaps useful to someone else :slight_smile:)

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