Light Painting Ring Created with Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi ARM computer is one of those small (literally) projects that didn't fall into oblivion, even after the initial hype, and now we get to see it in action again.

The folks at Adafruit learning system have used the small, credit card-sized gadget to design a light painting contraption.

As if that wasn't noteworthy enough on its own, Adafruit even published the tutorial, and it doesn't appear to be all that complicated.

Sure, there was some special code involved, but Adafruit very thoughtfully added the whole section on their website.

“Large, colorful images require a lot of memory... and that’s one area where we'll need more memory than an Arduino can provide. We had a hunch that the Raspberry Pi could make this process easier. But even we weren’t prepared for what a cakewalk this would be,” Phillip Burgess wrote.

In addition to the basic electronic components, the people who made this idea reality made use of some PVC pipes, a hula hoop, a ribbon of LEDs and a bike.

The bike (if it can even be called that) was used in the final stages of “spreading” the light at night.


“Handheld, straight LED bars have been done. With the code so quickly out of the way, we wanted to take this to the next level. First, the light bar would be replaced with a circle, in order to give the finished pictures an interesting three-dimensional quality. Second, it would be attached to a bicycle to provide smooth motion and to cover much longer distances,” the walktrhough explains.


Check out the photos below to see just some of the things possible to achieve with the Raspberry Pi light ring.

“These first images were cobbled together pretty quickly, and we didn’t go out of our way for a good, dark location. With some planning and refinement the results can potentially be much nicer than this.”