Adafruit Circuit Playground

Draft

Introduction

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

Components and layouts

AdaFruit Circuit Playground Express'. Source: Flickr of AdaFruit

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)