Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Adafruit Circuit Playground First Hour

The Adafruit Circuit Playground arrive a few days ago. I remember seeing it for the first time at PyCon 2016 when Tony D. had a demo board and I was really impressed by it. Imagine a board not much bigger than a regular US quarter PACKED with sensors.

Here are two quick demos with playing some sound on the board:





Source: https://www.adafruit.com/



  • 10 x mini NeoPixels, each one can display any rainbow color
  • 1 x Motion sensor (LIS3DH triple-axis accelerometer with tap detection, free-fall detection)
  • 1 x Temperature sensor (thermistor)
  • 1 x Light sensor (phototransistor)
  • 1 x Sound sensor (MEMS microphone)
  • 1 x Mini speaker (magnetic buzzer)
  • 2 x Push buttons, left and right
  • 1 x Slide switch
  • 8 x alligator-clip friendly input/output pins
    Includes I2C, UART, and 4 pins that can do analog inputs/PWM output
  • All 8 pads can act as capacitive touch inputs
  • Green "ON" LED so you know its powered
  • Red "#13" LED for basic blinking
  • Reset button

No soldering required, just plug it in, setup and off you go with your prototype!

I just had some time to play with it enough to set up the environment and get a few program going. Below are some useful links and screenshots. I was able to go thru the two sound tutorials:

1. Get the latest Arduino software.
2. Here is the Adafruit Getting Started with Circuit Playground instructions.
3. Circuit Playground Intro
4. Make sure you can see the serial port:

MacBook-Air:~ echou$ ls /dev/cu*
/dev/cu.Bluetooth-Incoming-Port    /dev/cu.usbmodem1411

MacBook-Air:~ echou$ 

5. Setup screenshots:





6. I was able to get to these three tutorials:

- Playground Speaker

- Circuit Playground Library:

- The sound of music:


The only thing that I found for the sound of music tutorial is that extra library is needed besides pitches.h: 



I am really looking forward to tinker with it more, the idea really is to integrate this with Raspberry Pi and Python to make some interesting project! 

Happy Coding! 




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