There are 2 ways for the "spirits" to get their messages into the device: dynamically via AdafruitIO, or preloaded into a text file on the CIRCUITPY drive. The code provided by the project will attempt to fetch messages from AdafruitIO first, and if that doesn't succeed it will look for the spirit_messages.txt file locally to read messages from.
AdafruitIO Setup
To fetch messages from AdafruitIO, you need to add your WiFi details to settings.toml if you haven't already, and set up a SpiritBoard feed on AdafruitIO.
This guide page shows the process of creating and adding the necessary WiFi details plus AdafruitIO username and token to the settings.toml file. If you don't already have those in your settings.toml file from other projects then follow along with that page before returning here.
The environment variable names expected by this project are:
CIRCUITPY_WIFI_SSID
CIRCUITPY_WIFI_PASSWORD
AIO_USERNAME
AIO_KEY
Open your browser to adafruit.io and login. Click the feeds link at the top. Next, click the 'New Feed' button near the top left. Enter the name "SpiritBoard" and optionally a description.
Local File
If you don't want to use WiFi, you can instead load your messages one per line into a file called spirit_messages.txt and put it at the root directory (\) of your CIRCUITPY drive. An empty spirit_messages.txt file is included in the project bundle so you be able to jump right into editing it (in any text editor) if you loaded the files from the bundle.
Example spirit_messages.txt contents:
hello world spirits are near i <3 circuitpython goodbye
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