Please note that this page has now been superseded by the Bright Pi Quickstart and FAQ page.

When you purchased your Bright Pi v1.0 kit, you should have received an anti-static bag with some components in it which will require soldering together in order to get the Bright Pi up and running and connected to your Raspberry Pi (or other single board computer or I2C enabled microcontroller). Below we have put together some simple assembly instructions to get you up and running with the Bright Pi v1.0.

Kit contents

Inside the anti-static bag you should have received the following items:

• 1 x Bright Pi PCB (with LED driver chip pre-assembled)
• 4 x bright white LEDs in small ziploc bag (high quality Cree LEDs)
• 8 x bright IR LEDs (high quality LITEON LEDs)
• 1 x right angle header
• 1 x 4 way header cable, 20cm length
• 3 x M2 x 12mm nylon bolts
• 12 x M2 nylon nuts (to use as spacers as well)
• 3 x stickers
• 1 x info card

There are only three types of component that need to be soldered to the board – the bright white LEDs, the bright IR LEDs and the right angle 4 pin header connector. The location of the LEDs on the PCB is marked out with black circular arrows. The cathode of the LEDs (short leg) needs to be on the same side as the arrows point to on the PCB. As noted above, the four LEDs in a separate bag are the bright white ones, these are intended to go in the four corner spots around the edge (bottom left, top left, top right, bottom right). All of the other 8 LED locations should be filled with the IR LEDs. We would recommend soldering the IR LEDs first (as they are in the centre) and then the white ones around the edge last.

If you mix up which are the bright white and IR LEDs at any point, it is quite easy to tell the different between the two by simply looking down the centre of the LED from the top. As in the below picture you will notice that the white LEDs at each corner have a slight yellow tinge in the centre of the LED:

You can solder the header connector on whichever side you wish to on the board, however we recommend soldering the connector the opposite way to the LEDs (i.e. perform the soldering on the top side of the board, as shown in the above picture).

The soldering of this board is fairly straightforward, there are just a fair few components to solder so if you are an absolute beginner at soldering it may take you up to half an hour to complete. Experienced soldering gurus could easily complete the entire job in under 10 minutes. Please be careful when soldering the bottom middle IR LEDs not to touch any of the joints of the small surface mount resistor or LED driver chip as this could damage the operation of the board.

Once you have finished soldering the board you are ready to connect the board up to the Raspberry Pi (or other I2C enabled main board) in order to start using the Bright Pi in your project. On the picture above you will see a square black mark on the PCB. That is the GND pin, which connects to physical pin 6 on the Raspberry Pi (this is the same for model A, B or B+). Moving along the header connector the next connector is the 5V feed which you should connect to physical pin 4 on the Raspberry Pi. The next pin along is the SCL pin for I2C communications which connects to physical pin 5 on the Raspberry Pi and finally the last pin on the header connector is the SDA pin for I2C communications which connects to physical pin 3 on the Raspberry Pi. The full pinout can also be seen on the image below (but please note this is a BOTTOM view of the Bright Pi (i.e. from the side with the LED driver chip and surface mount resistors mounted):

For information on how to use the Bright Pi once soldered, please visit the code examples page and to purchase the Bright Pi you can visit the product page here. In the pictures above the Bright Pi is mounted on a Pimoroni Raspberry Pi Camera Mount which is the perfect addition to the kit.