What is it?

This is an 18mm square PCB with two rings of RGB LEDs and a single pixel in the middle. They have three solder pads: 5-volt, ground, and signal. You can wire these boards up to your Arduino and use the awesome Adafruit Neopixel library to light things up.

The OoberLights Micro boards are compatible with Arduino boards and the Raspberry Pi.

NOTE: I'm finishing up remixing a Raspberry Pi case on Thingiverse.

Why did you make it?

More than a decade ago, I thought it would be fun to replace the num lock, caps lock, and scroll lock lights with rings of LEDs similar to a dekatron. I mentioned this idea to a friend a while back, and he suggested we use RGB LEDs. And not just a ring of LEDs, but as many concentric rings as we could fit.

The big OoberLights boards are standalone units with their own microcontroller and Wi-Fi. We're not nearly ready to ship those.

Then my friend Jeremy Cook sent me some prototypes of his JC Pro Macro Pad, and I noticed that he had plenty of pins broken out where I could plug some basic OoberLights.

The micro versions of the OoberLights don't have brains. They're just tiny 2x2mm WS2812 LEDs and a couple of capacitors on a PCB. You need to supply your own brains, like the brains of the Pro Micro board on Jeremy's macro pad.

What makes it special?

I wanted to fit these on an 18x18mm board, because that's about the size of a keycap on your keyboard. I'd like to see if I can 3D print a Cherry-compatible keycap to stick one of these in, but I haven't attempted this yet.

The plan is to use the OoberLights as indicators of various server and PC information:

• Spin an LED around to indicate network traffic (This is working!)
• Light up an arc of LEDs around the edge like a pie graph to show disk utilization percentage

Why you SHOULDN'T you buy these?!

In my opinion, the thing that will make the full-size OoberLights boards unique is the software. I want to be able to send simple commands that mean things like "set up a red spinner at 15 RPM" or "give me a bar graph that is 15% red, 15% yellow, 30% green, and 40% blue."

There's nothing high level about these boards today, but I am making some progress. Unfortunately, I am a slow coder, but you can still at the pixels yourself directly with the Adafruit library.

What else should I know?!

I only ordered a batch of 20. That was enough to get them to a reasonable price per board for the PCB assembly, but not so many that I would have been disappointed if 100 dud boards showed up on my porch.

If you're looking for a nifty set of LEDs in this particular form factor, I think this is an awesome little board. The manufacturer did a good job assembling these for us. They look clean. The PCBs are black, because I thought that would match keyboards like the JC Pro Macro.

Where do I get technical support?!

There's really not all that much to know. There are three relevant solder pads on the back of the board. The square pad is ground, the middle pad is 5 volts, and the remaining pad is the NeoPixel data input pad.

If you'd like to chat with us, the PCB designer and I are both active on the Butter, What?! Discord server.

Note about shipping!

I'm going to allow for the expensive, overpriced (especially for a tiny 1.4 gram board!) USPS Priority Mail shipping in a box, but this seems like such overkill.

These are so tiny. I think I can just print out a letter telling you how awesome you are for placing your order, tape a PCB or three to the letter, put it all in a plain old envelope, lick a stamp or two, and send it out.

So far, this has been confirmed successful once, and I have yet to hear complaints from the other few customers. So far, I am taking that as a good sign!