October 25, 1985*

*That’s the start date of the film, not this project. The only Raspberry Pis to be found were fruit based baked goods spelt slightly differently.

When it comes to fancy dress I either do just enough to get into the swing of things, or get ideas of grandeur and usually never achieve my plans.  It’s late August and I am taking my Explorer Scouts to Theme Park Camp in September; this year their fancy dress theme was “Backwards and Forwards in Time”.  The obvious train of thought goes to the ‘Back To The Future’ trilogy.

Adafruit Inspires
So with this in the back of my mind I was mooching around the learn.adafruit.com resource looking at the cool stuff they do and found the Deloran Time Circuit. It’s a build based on their LED backpacks, driven by an Arduino-esque device, having had a Raspberry Pi for over a year now I figured it was a good excuse to do something constructive with it!

Adafruit Delorean Time Circuit (Philip Burgess/Adafruit)

Caveat: I’m no Python programmer or electronics engineer, all instructions herein are used at your own discretion.  There may well be better, more efficient or more graceful ways of achieving the desired result. I successfully kept the magic smoke inside my Pi through great care; the rapidly diminishing hair on my head less so 🙂

Next…
If you can’t wait to get Back to the Future…

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