A - Starting Lights

Sparkles are very useful - they are LEDs, just like the red/green LED from before, but much cleverer!

They have small chips inside them, which allow you to control many LEDs using just one output. If you look really closely you might be able to see them.

They are also three LEDs in one - there is a red, green and blue LED in every sparkle.

We can control these three internal LEDs separately, and mix them together to create any colour!

Build up your robot like the picture.

Plug the sparkle module into P0.

To use Sparkles with the micro:bit, we need to add another package called Neopixels (this is just another name for Sparkles).

Click the Add Package button at the bottom of the advanced menu.

In the box that appears, click on neopixel.

You should now have a Neopixel light blue menu in your editor!

All the blocks we need for sparkles are in the new neopixels menu. Click on it and have a look at all the new blocks you can use.

For now, let's test the sparkles by building the simple program in the picture - hopefully they all turn red when you program your robot!

Don't forget to change the number of LEDs to 9.

Don't stare at the sparkle board for too long - it's very bright!

It's really easy to control the red, green and blue LEDs separately to make any colour we like.

Click on the colour name to bring up the colours list - try a few different ones and see how they look!

To get colours not on the list, we can put in the values for red, green and blue directly.

From the more menu, drag in a red, green, blue block.

Drag this into the show colour block like the picture and try changing the 3 numbers, to see what colours you can make.

The sparkles use quite a lot of power on full brightness - switch off your board when you aren't using it to save battery life.

Remember, we can also control each sparkle individually!

Use a set pixel colour block from the more menu to do this.

You can also use the set pixel block with red, green and blue values, like before, to get any colour you like!

Whenever you set pixel colour individually, you also need to update the strip as it isn't done automatically - use a show block to do this, like in the picture. If you don't use this block, the sparkle won't change!

In programming numbers start from 0, not 1 - so for three sparkles, the first is 0, the second is 1 and the third is sparkle 2.

Use three of the individual set pixel colour blocks to set the first three sparkles to different colours.

Let's make a set of starting lights for a race across the planet surface.

Check out the F1 starting lights in the video - can you put together a program using sparkle and wait blocks to make your own?

The lights should turn red 3 at a time, then all go green at the same time.