The Shield Plus Package EN

The Shield

The Coding Unicorn Shield was designed to be attached to the Raspberry Pi in order to create the basis for many fun and interesting projects. You simply can use Jumper Cables for this. More Information cw42.de/uce. To begin, you need to attach the shield to the GPIO Pins on your Raspberry Pi so that the head is in the direction of the USB Connectors. On the following pages we will show you how to install the Python library and begin utilizing it to create programs and projects on your own. Altogether you have 9 Pixels on the Shield, also called WS2812B (Red), 2 white 5mm LEDs on the eyes (Green), a brightness sensor (blue) on the Nose and a push button on the ear (dark blue). Because the GPIO Pins aren't capable of reading analog values,we used a little hack and added the capacitor (orange) in order to properly utilize the brightness sensor. You can find out more on: cw42.de/adce

Install the library

Before we get started with the Unicorn shield, we first need to install the necessary libraries and change some settings. When using the Pixels/WS2812B it is important that we have PWM functionality configured on our Raspberry Pi. Once you have activated that, you can't use the the build in audio connector anymore. To make sure that this is deactivated we can use the raspi-config. First use the following terminal command: sudo raspi-config then make the following options: 7 Advanced Options -> A4 Audio -> 2 Force HDMI -> Ok.

You will need an internet connection for the following steps:

sudo apt-get install python-dev
python-setuptools

And now download the library:

git clone https://github.com/
        coding-world/unicorn-shield-python

cd unicorn-shield-python/

cd rpi-ws281x

sudo python3 setup.py install

cd ..

cd UnicornShield

sudo python3 setup.py install

cd ..