If you want a fun project to hack on over the upcoming holiday, pick up some NeoPixel RGB(W) LEDs for your Raspberry Pi-based Elixir/Nerves device and check out the latest release of blinkchain (formerly known as nerves_neopixel). It now supports commands to draw on a mutable 2D virtual canvas (e.g. composed of a bunch of strands or one or more Pimoroni Unicorn hats) instead of having to calculate the updated values for all LEDs manually each “frame.”

Check out the example and let me know what you think!