• 1
    Assembling the Hardware

    Solder the wires (or JST connectors) to the Pi Picos. The red wire should go to VBUS, white one to GND, and green one to GP28 (pins 40, 38, 34 respectively).

    For the moss, just place the LED matrix on a surface and connect it to one of the Picos. Optionally add diffuser.

    The tree is a little bit more complicated, but the general idea is to have the LED rings connected starting from the biggest one to the smallest one. We used a paper cup as a base for the 35LED ring, pulled some cardboard through the center, and then attached the rest.

    Flash the Raspberry Pi Picos with CircuitPython.

  • 2
    Programming the Raspberry Pi Pico

    The code for the tree is in the drzewo subdirectory.

    The code for the moss is in the mech subdirectory.

    Drzewo and mech are Polish for tree and moss.

    The code is written in CircuitPython and uses some additional libraries. The easiest way to install them is with circup

    For the moss controller run:

    circup install -r mech/requirements.txt

    For the tree controller run:

    circup install -r tree/requirements.txt

    After that, install smolmidi by copying it to the lib directory on your Picos.

    Finally, copy the code.py from both subdirectories onto the respective Picos.

  • 3
    Installing Ableton

    This project requires you to have Ableton installed on your machine. Free 90-day trial is available that lets you play and experiment, but you won't be able to save any changes to your project.

    On MacOS, you can get it with brew install ableton-live-standard.

    In Ableton Live (Standard or Suite, Lite does not have MIDI out), select Live->Preferences on Mac (Options->Preferences on Windows).

    Find the MIDI tab and make sure Pi Pico has a checkmark next to the output device.

    Ableton MIDI configuration