Not content with just 583 RGB LEDs from Galactic Unicorn, UK Raspberry Pi reseller Pimoroni has announced cosmic unicorn It displays 1,024 RGB LEDs on an 8-inch square grid. All of this is powered by our favorite microcontroller, the Raspberry Pi Pico W.
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Cosmic unicorns differ from galactic unicorns in several key areas. First is the shape. Gone is the long “diamond” shape in favor of an 8 x 8 inch square (204 x 204 x 10.2 mm) packed with a grid of 32 x 32 RGB LEDs. For those who know the math, 32 x 32 is 1,024, which is the number of RGB LEDs we can use in commands. This is an increase of 441 LEDs over the Galactic Unicorn.
Powering the light show is a surface mount Raspberry Pi Pico W soldered to the back of the board. Using Pico W’s PIO (Programmable IO), these LEDs are updated at 300 fps with 14-bit precision. what do you mean? Now you can show off your Cosmic Unicorn in your videos without strobes or lighting issues. Other RGB LEDs can wreak havoc on carefully choreographed videos.
Rotate the board to reveal an amazing silkscreen of a whale. Dotted around it are the programs that run on the board, as well as buttons that control brightness, sleep, and volume. Following Galactic Unicorn, Cosmic has an amplifier and speaker for basic bee and chip tune. There are also some experimental firmwares for Bluetooth functionality if you want to be on the cutting edge.and Blunicorn firmwareboth Cosmic Unicorns and Galactic Unicorns become music visualizers.
If you want to use the Cosmic Unicorn as part of your experiment, for example collecting air quality or temperature data, you can use the onboard QW/ST (Stemma QT, Qwiic connector) to connect a number of sensors .
Cosmic Unicorn just went on sale from Pimoroni for £80 ($75) and will be doing a review soon.
