Adafruit Circuit Playground

Draft

Introduction

AdaFruit Circuit Playground Express'. Source: Flickr of AdaFruit

Circuit Playground Express is a board of the Adafruit FLORA line of of e-textile products. This board is beginner friendly since it can (also) be programmed with MakeCode and since it includes both sensor, LEDs and a loudspeaker.

The board is rather large and heavy compared to Adafruit's FLORA and GEMMA. However, this is compensated by it's feature rich design and ease of use.

• 50.6mm / ~2.0"
• Weight: 8.9g

The board can be bought in three packaging variants:

• Circuit Playground Express $25, includes just the board
• Circuit Playground Express - Base Kit, $30, includes a battery and USB cable.
• Circuit Playground Express Advanced Pack, $100, includes 2 Playground express, threads, needles, alligator clips, a servo motor, NeoPixels, etc.

For a class, it's probably best to buy Based Kits, and either a few Advanced Packs or other FLORA extension elements.

Extras

• Enclosure

See also:

• Adafruit FLORA

The board

AdaFruit Circuit Playground Express'. Photo source: [Adafruit Flickr]

Components and layouts

According to the product page (retrieved Aug 26, 2019), this board includes the following elements which are explained in detail in the guided tour.

Processor and basics

• ATSAMD21 ARM Cortex M0 Processor, running at 3.3V and 48MHz
• 2 MB of SPI Flash storage (i.e. a tiny disk drive), used primarily with CircuitPython to store code and libraries.
• A JST battery connector (alternatively, the board also can take power from the USB connector).
• Green "ON" LED so you know its powered (top left)
• Red "#13" LED for basic blinking
• Reset button (in the middle)
• A total of input/output pads ("the holes")

Connectivity:

• MicroUSB port for programming and debugging. It can act like a serial port, keyboard, mouse, joystick or MIDI!
• Infrared receiver and transmitter - can receive and transmit any remote control codes, as well as send messages between Circuit Playground Expresses. Can also act as a proximity sensor.
• 14 "alligator clip pads: a wide range of power pins, I2C, UART, Analog In, Digital In/Out, PWM, and Analog Out.

Output:

• 10 x mini NeoPixels. These programmable LEDs can display any color. They are also used for some status information: when the bootloader is running they will turn green, or if it failed to initialize USB when connected to a computer, they will turn red).
• 1 Mini speaker with class D amplifier (7.5mm magnetic speaker/buzzer). It is connected to to the A0 analog output pin.

Input and sensors:

• 1 Temperature sensor
• 1 Light sensor. Can also act as a color sensor and pulse sensor.
• 1 Sound sensor (MEMS microphone)
• 1 Motion sensor, i.e. a LIS3DH triple-axis accelerometer with tap detection, free-fall detection.
• 2 x Push buttons, labeled A and B
• 1 x Slide switch
• 7 of the 8 GPIO pads have capacitive touch (A1.A2, A3, A4, A5, A6, A7)

General Purpose Input Ouput (GPIO) pads

• All the 8 GPIO pads (A0 to A7) can be used as digital inputs, digital outputs, for LEDs, buttons and switches. In addition, all can be used as analog inputs (12-bit ADC).

Power pads

• There are 6 power pads

Notice: I have to figure out what some of the various pins/pads really do (this is my first electronics experience....)

Programming the board

(to do)

Links

Official tutorials

Adafruit Circuit Playground Express documentation

• Adafruit Circuit Playground Express (several pages)
• Adafruit Circuit Playground Express (in one HTML page)
• Adafruit Circuit Playground Express (all-in-one PDF file]

Acknowledgement

Pictures, as well as some text was reproduced from https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-circuit-playground-express?view=all . So far (Aug 26, 2019), the copyright / license situation is not clear.