Adafruit Circuit Playground

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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:

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

Extras

See also:

The board

Components and layouts

According to the product page (retrieved Aug 26, 2019), this board includes:

  • 10 x mini NeoPixels. These programmable LEDs can display any color
  • 1 Motion sensor (LIS3DH triple-axis accelerometer with tap detection, free-fall detection)
  • 1 Temperature sensor
  • 1 Light sensor. Can also act as a color sensor and pulse sensor.
  • 1 Sound sensor (MEMS microphone)
  • 1 Mini speaker with class D amplifier (7.5mm magnetic speaker/buzzer)
  • 2 x Push buttons, labeled A and B
  • 1 x Slide switch
  • 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.
  • 8 x alligator-clip friendly input/output pins
  • Includes I2C, UART, 8 pins that can do analog inputs, multiple PWM output
  • 7 pads can act as capacitive touch inputs and the 1 remaining is a true analog output
  • Green "ON" LED so you know its powered
  • Red "#13" LED for basic blinking
  • Reset button
  • ATSAMD21 ARM Cortex M0 Processor, running at 3.3V and 48MHz
  • 2 MB of SPI Flash storage, used primarily with CircuitPython to store code and libraries.
  • MicroUSB port for programming and debugging
  • USB port can act like serial port, keyboard, mouse, joystick or MIDI!

Programming the board

(to do)

Links

Official tutorials

Adafruit Circuit Playground Express documentation

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.