Light painting is an artistic photographic technique combining long exposure times with lights in motion. Traditionally these images have been hand-painted with a penlight…but more recently, affordable microcontrollers and addressable RGB LEDs have brought a new high-tech twist to the idea.

A few such projects have been featured on tech blogs, most notably the LightScythe by Gavin “The Mechatronics Guy,” which uses an Arduino and a two meter bar of LEDs. The resulting photos, with their intense colors and mid-air suspended images, have been super popular, and rightfully so.
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…

This guide was first published on Aug 10, 2012. It was last updated on Mar 08, 2024.

This page (Overview) was last updated on Aug 09, 2012.

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