Cover image for Facebot

Facebot

A Cute 8x8 LED Robot

 3 September 2023   |     1 minute read   |   By Kevin McAleer   |   Share this article on

Page last updated 22 November 2024

Video

For every project I create, I often make a corresponding YouTube video. Sometimes, there might be more than one video for a single project. You can find these videos in this section.

Explore more through this this dedicated video.

Facebot is a cute desktop robot that features a small 8x8 LED Display matrix. It is powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico W, which means we can control this robot using Wifi and/or Bluetooth.

The 8x8 LED Matrix I2C display is useful for scrolling text, and displaying fun icons and simple animations.

Bill of Materials

Item Description Qty Price
Pico Raspberry Pi Pico / Pico W (either will do) 1 £6.50
HT16K33 Display KeyStudio 8x8 LED Matrix Display with driver 1 £9.00
Wire Red, Black, Green, Blue Dupont cable 1 £0.50
2x M5 Screws 2 M5 Screws 2 £0.10
    Total £16.20

MicroPython Code

The code for Facebot is available in the Pico SMARS 2 library:

https://www.github.com/kevinmcaleer/picosmars2

The library contains the icon images as well as a 5x5 font named ‘Jonny Five’.

Icon Maker

A useful tool for creating your own icons is available with this library - a program called icon_maker.py will help you create icons for displaying on your 8x8 Matrix LED screen.

Icon Maker UI

To use the icon maker you will need to setup a virtual environment with the tk library installed:

  1. From the command line type:

     python3 -m venv venv

  2. Activate the virtual environment:

     source venv/bin/activate

  3. Install tk:

     pip install tk

  4. Run icon_maker:

    python3 icon_maker.py

Wiring

Facebot Wiring

STL Files

Facebot is made up of 3 parts:

Facebot Construction

Construction

Facebot Construction

Code

View Code Repository on GitHub - https://www.github.com/kevinmcaleer/picosmars2

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