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!

This is the same way pixels in your computer screen work - have a look at the chart to see all the possible colours we can make.

Build up your robot like the picture.

Sparkles must always be plugged into d1 - this is very important as otherwise they won't work!

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 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.

The three numbers in the invent.setAllSparkles() function set the red, green and blue levels of the LEDs - they can be any number from 0-255

Try changing the numbers and see what colours you can create!

Remember, we can also control each sparkle individually!

We can use invent.setSparkle to set the colours of individual sparkles. This function needs 4 numbers - the number of the sparkle to set, and the r,g and b values as before.

In programming numbers start from 0, not 1 - so for nine sparkles, the first is 0, the second is 1 and the last is sparkle 8.

Use three of the individual sparkle set blocks to set three sparkles to a different colour.

It can be difficult to know what to set the red, green and blue to to get a specific colour!

Try this online colour picking tool - you can pick any colour you like, and it will give you the red, green and blue values you need.

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 1 at a time, then all go green at the same time.