'Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
This flower changes color,
To show its love for you.'
Load this on a Gemma M0 running CircuitPython and it will smoothly animate the DotStar LED between different color hues. Touch the D0 pad and it will cause the pixel to pulse like a heart beat. You might need to also attach a wire to the ground pin to ensure capacitive touch sensing can work on battery power. For example strip the insulation from a wire and solder it to ground, then solder a wire (with the insulation still attached) to D0, and wrap both wires around the stem of a flower like a double-helix. When you touch the wires you'll ground yourself (touching the bare ground wire) and cause enough capacitance in the D0 wire (even though it's still insulated) to trigger the heartbeat. Or just leave D0 unconnected to have a nicely animated lit-up flower!
Note that on power-up the flower will wait about 5 seconds before turning on the LED. During this time the board's red LED will flash and this is an indication that it's waiting to power on. Place the flower down so nothing is touching it and then pick it up again after the DotStar LED starts animating. This will ensure the capacitive touch sensing isn't accidentally calibrated with your body touching it (making it less accurate).
The main.py version of the code depends on the following external modules to also be loaded on the board:
- Adafruit CircuitPython DotStar: https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_CircuitPython_DotStar
- Adafruit CircuitPython FancyLED: https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_CircuitPython_FancyLED
You must have both adafruit_dotstar.mpy and the adafruit_fancyled folder and files within it on your board for this code to work! If you run into trouble or can't get the dependencies see the main_simple.py code as an alternative that has no dependencies but slightly more complex code.