Adafruit Circuit Playground
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
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
- 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.