K2-Pi0

What is it?

The K2-Pi0 is a cape for the Raspberry Pi Zero designed to drive ws2811 LED pixels. It has two local ports that can each drive 800 pixels (with power injection) at 40FPS.   Optimized for size and cost, this a “no frills” hat for the Pi Zero series and does not have space for an OLED, push buttons, RTC, or similar.   However, the Pixel ports are managed with eFuses and thus are completely disabled (no power to the pixels) when no output is necessary.   The eFuses also provide current monitoring and fuse trigger alerts.  Each port can provide up to 6A of power for the pixels.   The cape and the Pi can be powered from anything between 5V and 24V.

There is also a small header that provides a few GPIO pins for triggers as well as the i2c bus for things like RTC’s and gpio expanders.

Why did you make it?

Animated Christmas Light displays typically use ws2811 Pixels for things like house outlines, candy canes, tree’s, etc… The K2-Pi0 was designed to be very small and wireless (with a Pi0 W or W2) controller that can be mounted right near the props it controls.   Being very small, it’s feature set is limited compared to the more feature rich controllers, but it still runs FPP which provides a very large set of features for even a small controller.

What makes it special?

The two local ports providing 6A of power can handle many situations where a small controller is desirable.

The Raspberry Pi will be powered by the same power supply powering the pixels.

You WILL need:

• ws2811 pixels
• A good quality SD card with the latest FPP image installed on it. The latest FPP image can always be found at https://github.com/FalconChristmas/fpp/releases
• A Raspberry Pi (Zero W or Zero 2 W recommended)
• Nylon standoffs or similar to keep the K2-Pi0 from touching the various ports on the Pi