 Add custom NeoPixel animations to your light-up project with the free and open-source WLED software and control them with an infrared remote. This tutorial will show you how to use a Qtipy Pico with a NeoPixel BFF and infrared sensor to add sophisticated animations to your project with no coding required. Control the lights with an infrared remote. Choose between your custom animations with the push of a button. First we'll solder headers to the BFF and Qtipy. The easiest way to get the headers aligned is to use a solderless breadboard to hold them in place. I'm using short female headers on the BFF. Trim them to length. We need seven slots on each side. If you're new to soldering headers, check out the Adafruit Learning System for a whole tutorial on how to do it. Make sure you've got the headers aligned correctly. The BFF and Pico go together back-to-back according to the helpful text on the back of the BFF. So be sure to attach the female headers on the bottom of the board. Once you're sure it's right, solder the female headers in place. I find it easiest to use a little blue tape on my table to hold the board steady. Now let's prep the IR sensor. Trim the yellow wire off the Stem-a-Connector. Trim the sensor legs to about half their length and slip the legs into the Stem-a-Connector ports. With the sensor bump facing you, the red wire goes on the rightmost pin, the black wire to the middle pin, and the blue wire to the left pin. Slide a piece of heat shrink over the pins and squeeze in a little hot glue before you shrink it down. Make sure the sensor head is still exposed. Now we can plug our sensor directly into the Pico via the Stem-a-port. Let's upload the code. Plug your Qtipi into your computer via the USB port and head to install.wled.me. You may need to update the driver for the chip first. Check the Adafruit tutorial page if you're having trouble. Select your board and follow the prompts to install the software. Enter your Wi-Fi credentials and connect to the board. Let's plug our Neopixel strip into the Pico so that we can tell when it's working. Click Config and go to the LED setup page. We'll change the length number to reflect the number of LEDs in our project. Mine has 62. Then change GPIO to 15, which corresponds to analog 3 on the Pico. Change the IR GPIO to 22, which corresponds to that blue wire that we connected to the Stem-a connector. Choose the remote you want to use from the dropdown. I'm using a 44 key RGB remote I found on Amazon. Click Save and your light should come on. Go back to Config and choose Wi-Fi setup. Change the assigned DNS to something easy to remember. I'm calling mine Pico. Click Save and then navigate to pico.local in any web browser to connect to your LED strip. Finally, we'll make a couple pretty animations for our LED strip and assign them to the buttons on the remote. Choose a color palette and an effect and then save it as a preset. This preset's being saved to ID number one. So I'm going to push DIY button number one on my remote to activate it. Let's do one more. Now we've got animations in slots number one and number two. So when we push buttons DIY number one and DIY number two on this 44 key remote, we should get our beautiful animations up and running. You need to push the auto button first in order to switch into animation mode, but oh look at that, it works. Have fun exploring all the different color animations and effects you can create with WLED and an Adafruit cutie pie. See the full build tutorial on the Adafruit learning system and remember to subscribe for more fun Adafruit tutorial videos.