Flora+NeoPixel LED Skateboard Upgrade

Program the FLORA

In our project, we used the sample sketch "goggles" that is included with Adafruit's Arduino app. There are a few demo sketches available that you can load onto the FLORA to display awesome LED animations. Check out the FLORA getting started guide to get familiar with programming the FLORA. Have to programming chops to wire your own animation? Check out the NeoPixel guide and get familiar with the Arduino Library.

Accelerometer + Other Sensors

Here's an idea! Use an accelerometer to sense when you carve while your skate to trigger effects. The FLORA can power extra sensors to trigger the NeoPixels. You can get a jump start on this idea with help from the steam punk goggles tutorial.

Measure, Cut + Solder!

On our longboard, we cut the NeoPixel strip into two even pieces and placed one on each side on the bottom of the deck. Make sure to position the strip with leads closer to the enclosure so that you don't access wires hanging out. With all of the components in place, measure and cut the wires needed to connect the NeoPixel stripes together and to the FLORA. You can tuck the wires connecting the two strips under the trucks. Now you will need to solder all of the components together as shown in the circuit diagram.

This guide was first published on Oct 30, 2013. It was last updated on Oct 30, 2013.

This page (Circuit Diagram) was last updated on May 16, 2021.