The Lofi Girl Shadowbox is backlit with the latest color of CheerLights. It’s always changing based on what people set the color to on Twitter and Discord.

Parts

• Lofi Girl poster – I am a 1 A.M person
• Shadowbox
• Black foam board
• Foam block
• Pimoroni Plasma Stick 2040 W (based on the Raspberry Pi Pico W)
• LED string lights
• Micro USB cord and power supply
• Other things: utility knife, straightedge, hot glue gun, and repositionable glue squares

Assembly

The poster that I got from the Lofi Girl shop was 30cm x 45cm and on really thin paper. I used the repositionable glue squares to stick the poster on the black foam board. This gives the poster some structure. I cut a hole in the back of the shadowbox and feed the USB cable through. I cut out a rough shape of the Pimoroni Plasma Stick 2040 W and wrapped the string lights around the foam block.

Programming

The best part of the whole project is that CheerLights is baked into the Pimoroni Plasma Stick 2040 W. All you need to do is program the device with your Wi-Fi settings. Open Thonny and open the WIFI_CONFIG.py file. Change SSID to your wireless network name, PSK to your password, and COUNTRY to your country code like US or GB. Click Save.

Pimoroni has an excellent tutorial on getting Thonny installed and an explanation of the Pimoroni Plasma Stick 2040 W kit. I have also written a tutorial on the CheerLights blog.

Chill

Now that you’ve done all of the hard work, it’s time to chill and enjoy the Lo-Fi vibes tuned to CheerLights. While I was making this project today, I had Lofi Girl on YouTube, and the lights were just bright enough to see what I was doing without cutting myself. I am looking for a wall to permanently install my Lofi Girl Shadowbox. I am seriously thinking of drilling a hole in the wall to hide the USB power adapter.

CheerLights is a fun way to get started with IoT, microcontrollers, and LED lights. If you know how to make CheerLights work, you can build some other awesome IoT projects. To make a Halloween-inspired project, you can take the CheerLights color and illuminate a pumpkin or even a… skull from Pimoroni.

Check out other Halloween CheerLights projects over at the CheerLights blog. Have fun with the idea and build something spooky and help spread the… fear.