Working with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices can be challenging, especially when you need to manage multiple devices simultaneously with robust connection handling. That’s why I created the Bartolome BLE Toolkit – a modular Go library. I used it to hack into the Columbus Video Pens and Timeular activity trackers, so their signal can be used to build your own applications. The library comes with extensible support for any BLE device.
[Read More]Using Timeular Tracker to display dice rolls on the Cosmic Unicorn
Have you ever wanted to create a physical display that responds to real-world interactions? In this tutorial, we’ll build a fascinating IoT project that combines Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), WiFi, and LED matrix displays to create a responsive system where rotating a physical device instantly updates a display. You need a timeular tracker and a cosmic unicorn 32x32 matrix to actually be able to build this. But even if you do not own any of these components you can still learn how to setup a web server on a Raspberry PI Pico w and how to use the bartolome-ble-toolkit to connect to bluetooth periphals.
[Read More]Building a Real-Time Ray Marching Renderer for the Cosmic Unicorn
How I brought 3D ray-traced graphics to a tiny 32×32 LED matrix
The Challenge: 3D Graphics on a Microcontroller
🤖 Disclaimer: AI has been involved in writing this article
When I first laid eyes on Pimoroni’s Cosmic Unicorn — a gorgeous 32×32 RGB LED matrix powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico W — I knew I had to push its limits. Sure, scrolling text and simple animations are fun, but what about real 3D graphics? What about ray tracing?
The problem was obvious: ray tracing is computationally expensive, and the Pico W, while capable, isn’t exactly a GPU powerhouse. But that’s where the fun begins.
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