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Welcome to the Moving Rainbow Website!

About the Moving Rainbow Project

Moving Rainbow is a way to learn the basics of programming using fun LED strips.
<<<<<<< HEAD We use low-cost components so you can build entire projects and costumes with 100s of LEDs for under $10. Since 2014 we have been building low-cost kits that teach all the concepts of Computational Thinking. ======= We use low-cost components so you can build entire projects and costumes with 100s of colorful LEDs for under $10. Since 2014 we have been designing and programming low-cost kits that teach the concepts of Computational Thinking.

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Getting Started

Our getting started guide has several parts:

  1. About Moving Rainbow
  2. Sample Hardware Kits
  3. Lessons
  4. Building Your Own Kits from Parts
  5. Desktop Setup

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Raspberry Pi Pico

The Raspberry Pi Pico cost only $4 and runs Python. All our labs use this processor.

Breadboards

In our projects we use 1/2 sized breadboard with 400 tie points.

Mode Buttons

A "mode" is a way of having a single Arduino program run multiple patterns on the LED strip. Each mode has a number associated with it starting with 0 and continuing to the number of patterns we have in our program.

In this section we will add two mode buttons. One button will make the pattern mode go to the next mode. The other button will go to the previous mode.

Note

We are no longer accepting pull requests for Arduino C code. Because we can get Raspberry Pi Pico processors for $4 that run Python we have moved all our Moving Rainbow code over to Python.

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Other Resources

See our Teachers Guide for anyone teaching students about computational thinking.

See our incredible Glossary for over 200 terms and examples of how we use these terms in this course.

Note

We are no longer accepting pull requests for Arduino C code. Because we can get Raspberry Pi Pico processors for $4 that run Python we have moved all our Moving Rainbow code over to Python.