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

https://learn.adafruit.com/circuit-playground-music/using-the-circuit-playground-speaker

- Circuit Playground Library:

https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_CircuitPlayground

- The sound of music:

https://learn.adafruit.com/circuit-playground-music/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!