My First Real Project: LEDs Driven by an FFT

My first project, and the one that paved the road to the ATtiny85 handheld¹ four years later.

Back when I bought my first Raspberry Pi (a Raspberry Pi 1 Model A, to be exact), I had no idea what I was doing. After burning myself both figuratively and literally trying to drive a 12 V RGB LED strip, I understood how to wire up MOSFETs, and then how to control them with PWM. The obvious next step was to make the strip do something. I’d seen LED strips react to music before, and after stumbling upon an article on the FFT, which seemed thoroughly arcane to me at the time, I had all the building blocks.

Without quite meaning to, I’d started with a real full-stack application: I learnt about Ajax and XMLHttpRequests, got fascinated by CSS, and saw that programming is like magic in real life. I wish more kids got a similar first impression of programming, to have their curiosity for building sparked.