Wanna show off to your living room audience or livestream viewers while you shred wild licks on your guitar? Noice. You can put on an RGB color light show that shows which frets you're tapping, as well as other inputs such as strum bar direction, whammy bar level, and even tilt to engage star power!
Santroller has support for NeoPixels (WS2812) and DotStars (APA102) so you can mod your guitar with internal LEDs, or make a wearable light show with a flexible LED strip mounted to your guitar strap.
Heat Shrink
You can slide a ~4cm length of heat shrink tubing over the JST PH socket cable's wires to keep them neat.
Solder Socket
You'll solder on a JST PH socket cable to the Feather RP2040 USB Host so that it's easy to plug and unplug the NeoPixel strip.
These are the connections:
- black wire to GND
- red wire to 3V
- white wire to SCK
Encase It
Feed the socket cable through the opening in the bottom of the snap-on enclosure for Feather RP2040 USB Host, then seat the Feather into place.
Snap on the lid and you're ready to plug in the NeoPixels.
USB Connection
Plug in the USB data/power cable to your computer and the Feather's USB C port so we can upadate the firmwares settings. Plug the guitar USB A cable into the Feather's host port.
Launch Santroller Configurator
Launch Santroller Configurator and select the Feather from the Device to program drop-down menu. It should have the name "Santroller -Raspberry PI Pico - Guitar Hero Guitar".
Then, click the Configure button.
LED Settings
Expand the LED Settings section.
Use these settings:
- LED Type is WS2812 - GRB (you can pick different pixel driver types and color orders if using different LEDS)
- LED Count is 30
- WS2812 Data Pin is GP14 (this pin is labelled SCK on the Feather board)
- Turn off LEDs after inactivity leave this at 0 to disable
LED Mapping
Here's the really fun part -- mapping LED activity to inputs on the guitar controller.
Expand the USB Host Inputs section. Here you'll see all of the controller buttons (this is where we tested inputs before). You'll notice a new section that says "Selected LEDs on WS2812" and that there are now 30 buttons to represent the NeoPixels.
Fret Colors
Scroll down to the Green Fret settings of USB Host Inputs.
Let's light up four NeoPixels as green when this button is pressed.
Click to toggle on 2, 3, 4, 5.
Pick the color swatch for Pressed LED color and set it to a dark green color (this keeps the brightness at a reasonable, non-blinding level!).
To test it out the first time, click Save Settings to write the firmware to the Feather. Then, press the green fret and watch them light up!
Remember to press Save Settings to write the firmware to the Feather when you make changes.
The Rest of the Frets (a free band name)
Set the rest of the frets to their numbers and colors as shown here.
You can see we're skipping every fifth NeoPixel so we can assign those to the whammy bar later.
A Guy Walks Into a Strum Bar...
Set up the two strum bar directions the same way -- these are listed as D-pad Up and D-pad Down.
Set the up strum to NeoPixels 26 & 27 and down strum to 28 & 29. All can be any color you like, I picked a cool teal.
Whammy Bar
Head to the Whammy Bar section and select these LEDs 1, 6, 11, 16, 21, 28 as these are the remaining NeoPixel positions that fill in the blanks.
This one is an analog input and the NeoPixels will fade from the released color (black to begin with) to the pressed color (I picked white).
You can also set a different color for the Released position of any button or input so that some LEDs are always lit and just color shift when activated.
Light the Strap
We'll go punk rock here and use safety pins to connect the NeoPixel strip to the strap. The silicone sheath works great for this, just keep away from any contacts on the underside of the strip.
Feather Connection
You can strap the Feather case to the strap with some velcro or elastic waistband material seen here.
Fabulousness Option
You could get a bit fancy with it and cover the strip with a light permissive material! This 1-3/4" waistband elastic would work well. Stitch this to the strap and remove the safety pins if you want a more permanent solution.
Page last edited April 22, 2025
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