It’s our birthday! Happy birthday to us. We’re a leap-year baby, so while today marks only the third time our official birth date of 29 February has rolled around, we’re actually twelve years old. We have been informed that we don’t get double the presents just because we are simultaneously turning three and twelve, alas.

Anyway, our Maker in Residence, Toby, made us a cake and a card this year, so naturally the former isn’t edible and the latter is paperless and unsigned. However, they’re both full of LEDs and powered by Raspberry Pi, so we’ll let him off.

Our illustrator Sam designed the lovely graphic above, featuring the number 12 surrounded by Raspberry Pi hardware and the iconic architecture of our home town of Cambridge, UK. Toby imported it into Lightburn then etched it onto an acrylic birthday card with a laser cutter. He designed the birthday cake in Fusion 360 and Lightburn; individually laser-cut acrylic pieces are glued together between two red rings to form the sides of the cake, with a laser-etched disc forming the top.

Custom raspberry red filament

All the red bits you see on both the card and the cake were designed in Fusion 360 and 3D printed in the custom raspberry red filament made by our friends at Micro Center.

Sparkly lights

Lighting the birthday card is a strip of NeoPixels running along the bottom edge of the acrylic panel. When you turn them on, the light floods upwards through the clear panel and is diffused by the etched design, picking out the elements of the drawing. The lights in the cake are hiding at the top and bottom behind the red rings.

Toby used Adafruit’s NeoPixel strips in these builds — one strip in the birthday card and two inside the cake. He likes them because they’re individually addressable, so you can control every LED separately, rather than having the whole strip change colour as one.

This means Toby was able to select several colours to diffuse through his birthday builds. The strip lighting up the birthday card is set to “rainbow”: all the colours of the rainbow flow left to right across the panel. The cake’s LED strips are set to “sparkle”, and twinkle in the closest colour he could get to raspberry red. It’s pretty pinky, but we’ll let him off.

RP2040 power

A Raspberry Pi Pico W aboard Pimoroni’s Plasma Stick 2040 W runs the light show for each build. Toby is using a USB battery pack plugged directly into the Plasma Stick for power, so they’re both portable and can be toted around our party guests.

Come to our birthday party!

Which reminds us: if you’re coming along to our birthday bash on Saturday, you’ll be able to see these in person, along with loads of other Raspberry Pi-powered gadgets from the Pi Towers Maker Lab. CamJam is hosting us at the William Gates Building in Cambridge, UK, from 10am – 5pm on Saturday 1 March. Our CEO Eben Upton will be there, and he’s taking part in a Q&A panel at 2.20pm together with Gordon Hollingworth (CTO – Software) and James Adams (CTO – Hardware). Come along if you’d like the chance to ask them (almost) anything.

Visit the event listing for more info and remember to scroll to the bottom and click through to CamJam’s site to register your attendance. Don’t forget to wish us a happy third and/or twelfth birthday in the comments before you go. Be nice. We love you.