Cosmic Unicorn

 Pimoroni's Cosmic Unicorn is one of their range of Pico W Aboard products and comprises a 32 x 32 smart RGB LED matrix. 

There is a complete Pico W attached to the back of the board. The use of a complete Pico W means that you can use the existing certification of the board, which means you can bring Wifi powered products to market quicker as you do not need to get your product certified, it is all off the shelf.

There are four general purpose buttons, a pair of volume up/down buttons, a pair of brightness buttons, a Sleep button and a Reset button (to save wear and tear on the USB socket). There are two STEMMA/QWIIC sockets for I2C breakout board and a speaker.

There is a hanger at the op, four holes in the corners and two holes to take a stand.

Out of the box there is a simple demo application. It suggests you press one of the four buttons (but does not tell you where they are or what they do). The four options were a fire simulator, a supercomputer style display, a rainbow and a calendar (requiring WiFi credentials).

This was a simple UI upgrade, listing the options and tracing the location of the relevant button.

As you might of noticed the options displayed do not reflect that list, but include a clock.

Pimoroni have developed a graphics library that works across a range of display devices. 

The original work on the clock was for an Inky Frame eInk display board. As this seven colour display takes thirty seconds to update the display, the development took place on a LCD Display Pack.

It was very easy to port the code to the Cosmic Unicorn.

Integrating it into the supplied program required some minor changes - which will be detailed later.

Three of the original effects are still available.

The fire effect display.