Featuring 16 super-bright RGB LEDs, Pimoroni’s Mote ‘stick’ light strips (£8.50 each) are ideal for under-shelf/cabinet mood lighting, among other applications, and can be used to create some impressive effects. Until now, a Mote Host has been required to control the sticks, plugging into any computer – including the Pi – via USB.

The full article can be found in The MagPi 53 and was written by Phil King.

For a far more compact and convenient setup, the Mote pHAT does the same job. Its pHAT form-factor matches that of the Pi Zero perfectly, so you can tuck it discreetly away out of sight. You will need to solder the female GPIO header onto the Mote pHAT first, although at least this does give you the option of using a stacking header to use it alongside other add-on boards: you could get Mote sticks to display sensor readings from an Enviro pHAT, for example, or control them with buttons or switches.

As with the Mote Host, there are four output channels via micro USB ports for controlling up to four Mote sticks independently of each other. A Python library is provided, along with a few examples to get you started. These include an impressive rainbow effect, colour cycling, and CheerLights web control via Twitter. The library itself is easy to use, enabling you to set each individual RGB pixel on each of the four channels. They are triggered with a show command, and clear is used to turn them off. Using a for loop, we soon managed to create a simple chase lights effect – handily, if you exceed the highest pixel number, it wraps round to the start of the strip again. Since the LEDs are APA102 standard (aka DotStar) with a fast data rate, there are none of the timing issues you might get with NeoPixels and they respond almost instantaneously.

You can even control them from your phone or from a web browser by setting up a Flask API. Pimoroni’s step-by-step tutorial shows how to use HomeKit to control the lights from an iPhone, using Siri voice commands to turn them on and off and to set the colour – a good way to impress friends! The same result should be possible using Google Assistant or Alexa, too.

Final word

4/5

The Mote sticks are excellent, even better than NeoPixels, and the new Mote pHAT offers a compact, discreet way of controlling them without the need to connect to the USB port of a laptop or Pi. At just £5 it’s great value, although of course you’ll still need to buy sticks (and cables) to use with it