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Sparky the Blue Smoke Monster Automaton
Talking Sparky guides you when you are wiring things up
by Dano Wall
This project for CRICKIT and Circuit Playground Express teaches basic CircuitPython programming skills and can be adapted into an automaton that performs multiple functions.
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Automation with Crickit and Capsela
Use vintage toys as modern fun with Crickit!
by Mike Barela
Capsela was a staple of childhood creativity in the mid-80's-90's. Motorized, you could build many things. Capsela and other toys can take on new lives by controlling their classic motors with modern, inexpensive robotics controllers such as Adafruit Crickit.
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LED Glowing Slime
Make some sticky LED throwies!
by Ruiz Brothers
3D print a coin cell battery holder for making reusable LED throwies.
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Rotary Encoder in CircuitPython
How to use a rotary encoder in your CircuitPython projects!
by Kattni Rembor
Learn how to use a rotary encoder with CircuitPython! Encoders are great when a potentiometer is the wrong fit. You can programmatically make this knob do your bidding.
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Crickit Controlled Animatronic Eyeball
Build a robot eye that looks in any direction!
by John Park
Using two servos, the Crickit robotics platform, Circuit Playground Express, with cardboard and a ping pong ball, you can build an interactive all-seeing eye!
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Introducing Adafruit ItsyBitsy M4
Choo choo! ItsyBitsy M4 Comin' Thru!
by lady ada
What's smaller than a Feather but larger than a Trinket? It's an Adafruit ItsyBitsy M4 Express featuring the Microchip ATSAMD51! Small, powerful, with a ultra fast ATSAMD51 Cortex M4 processor running at 120 MHz - this microcontroller board is perfect when you want something very compact, with a ton of horsepower and a bunch of pins. This Itsy is like a bullet train, with it's 120MHz Cortex M4 with floating point support and 512KB Flash and 192KB RAM. Your code will zig and zag and zoom, and with a bunch of extra peripherals for support, this will for sure be your favorite new chipset.
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Proximity Based Lighting
Have lights react when something gets close. Useful or spooky? You decide.
by Dave Astels
Using a TrinketM0, NeoPixels, a distance sensor breakout, and some CircuitPython code, make a small board that will control lighting based on how close something is.
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Welcome to Adafruit IO
Want to connect your project to the Internet? Start Here!
by Brent Rubell
This guide will get you up and running with Adafruit IO - the easiest way to get your project on the web. Learn what hardware is compatible with IO, how to interact with your data, troubleshooting your IO project, available client libraries, and about taking your project to the next-level with IO Plus.
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Crickit Carnival Bumper Bot
Make a bumper car that navigates by sense of touch. When it hits an object, it backs up, turns, and drives on!
by John Park
Crickit and Circuit Playground Express control and drive this cardboard chassis, tail-dragger robot car. The accelerometer built into the CPX senses bumps, and the MakeCode program you'll create tells it to react and drive around things!
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Welcome to CircuitPython!
New to CircuitPython? This is the place to start.
by Kattni Rembor
You may have seen CircuitPython mentioned on the Adafruit site or on Discord. What is it? Why would you use it? Once you have a CircuitPython board, what do you do next? This guide has you covered from the moment you plug in your new board. Check it out!
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Glowing Slime Lunchbox
Make glowy slime for fun projects!
by Ruiz Brothers
Learn how to whip up a batch of slime and make them glow with Circuit Playground Express.
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LED Matrix Sand Toy
LED physics on a Pi powered Matrix
by Ruiz Brothers
Use a Pi Zero, RGB Matrix Bonnet and the LIS3DH to create simulated LED sand!
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Crickit Collapsible House with MakeCode
Huff and Puff and Blow this House Down!
by Dano Wall
An animated house that can be blown over, only to pop right back up. Different setting allow the user to adjust how hard you have to blow to knock the house down. Great prop for re-telling the tale of the three little pigs, and a good introduction to programming in MakeCode.
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Circuit Playground: N is for Noise
Learn about electrical noise with Adabot & Minerva!
by C. Cunningham
You can't see it or hear it, but it sure can effect your electronics! Adabot and Minerva set out to solve the mystery of electrical noise … and maybe even watch a movie together.
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Microcontroller Compatible Audio File Conversion
Ensure your audio clips are playable by your favorite boards!
by Mike Barela
Sound in every project! We search our libraries and the Internet for the perfect project sound. But is that particular sound file ready to be used by your microcontroller? How do we even know? This tutorial will help you check your files and ensure they are ready for action.
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Using Cutting Machines for Projects
Make Blinka, Minerva, Crickit and Adabot!
by Ruiz Brothers
Learn how to use a vinyal cutter to create papercrafts for electronics and more!
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CircuitPython Made Easy on Circuit Playground Express
Get started with just a few lines of code!
by Kattni Rembor
New to CircuitPython? Looking for an easy way to get started? We've written a library for the Circuit Playground Express that makes it super simple to begin using all the sensors, switches and lights. This guide will show you all the features of this library and how to use each one. Let's get coding!
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Cam Follower Automaton
You can make this fun automaton that jumps up and down with cardboard, Crickit, Circuit Playground Express, and MakeCode!
by John Park
Cams and followers are fundamental mechanisms to convert rotation to linear motion with interesting patterns. Different cam shapes produce different results!
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Soil Moisture Sensor with Circuit Playground Express and MakeCode
Allows your plants to let you know when they need a drink.
by Mike Barela
This project uses the Circuit Playground Express to sense the moisture in a plant bed. The moisture content changes the value read from the analog input. The Circuit Playground Express lights indicate the percentage soil moisture.
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Stumble-Bot
A simple walking robot that teaches basic programming skills
by Dano Wall
This robot can be made out of any wide, flat cardboard box. It uses household materials, two servo motors, 3 AA batteries, and CRICKIT for Circuit Playground Express to control its stumbling gait.
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Adafruit NeoPXL8 FeatherWing and Library
NeoPixels to the max!
by Phillip Burgess
NeoPXL8 is a hardware-and-software combo that works around usual NeoPixel limitations to bring buttery smooth animation to large-scale projects.
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Adafruit Motor Shield
Control servos, steppers and DC motors with an Arduino!
by lady ada
Arduino is a great starting point for electronics, and with a motor shield it can also be a nice tidy platform for robotics and mechatronics. Here is a design for a full-featured motor shield that will be able to power many simple to medium-complexity projects. Build the kit, and learn how to use it with these detailed instructions.
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Cardboard Box for Circuit Playground Express
Make a project enclosure out of cardboard!
by Ruiz Brothers
Use a paper template to create a cardboard housing for a micro servo, Circuit Playground Express, 3xAAA battery
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Tightrope Unicycle Bot
Step right up and build a robot that rides a unicycle on a tightrope!
by John Park
Crickit and Circuit Playground Express drive a motor that rides the line! With a cardboard chassis designed to keep the pulley wheel right over the center of gravity, your circus robot will soar overhead with ease.
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StarFlower Neopixel Strand with MakeCode
Clip 3d printed flowers onto an addressable Neopixel strand
by Erin St Blaine
Model and print clip-on neopixel diffuser covers in Fusion360 and make them glow using MakeCode and Circuit Playground. Customizing is a breeze, with no coding or software setup required. Great beginner project!
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Digital Circuits 7: MCUs... how do they work?
Inside the ATMega238: a guided tour of a classic Microcontroller
by Dave Astels
We look at the ATMega328, one of the most prolific 8-bit MCUs. The '328 can be found in the Arduino UNO and various other microcontroller boards. To better understand MCUs, and be able to work with them more effectively, we need to go inside and understand what's in there and how it all works.
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BeagleBone
Tutorials for the TI embedded Linux board
by lady ada
New from the fine people who have brought us the Beagle Board, we now have a smaller, lighter, but powerful single board linux computer, Beagle Bone! We like this move to a more compact and integrated SBC. For example, there is onboard Ethernet and USB host, as well as a USB client interface (a FTDI chip for shell access). It even comes preloaded with Angstrom Linux on the 4 GB microSD card! Here are some tips and tricks to get your BeagleBone up and running.
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Spinning Logo
Build a paper craft hack a day logo powered by Circuit Playground!
by Ruiz Brothers
Animate logos with paper, a servo and a Circuit Playground Express!
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Introducing ItsyBitsy M0 Express
What's smaller than a Feather but larger than a Trinket? It's an ItsyBitsy!
by lady ada
ItsyBitsy M0 Express is only 1.4" long by 0.7" wide, but has 6 power pins, 23 digital GPIO pins (12 of which can be analog in, 1x analog out, and 13x PWM out). It's the same chip as the Arduino Zero and packs much of the same capability as an Adafruit Metro M0 Express or Feather M0 Express but really really small. So it's great once you've finished up a prototype on a Metro M0 or Feather M0, and want to make the project much smaller. It even comes with 2MB of SPI Flash built in, for data logging, file storage, or CircuitPython code.
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Trash Panda
Adorable Hugging Panda Friend
by Dano Wall
An animal panda you can build out of a scrap Amazon box. Demonstrates how to use CRICKIT paired with Circuit Playground Express to control multiple motors at once.
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Controlling a Classic Nintendo R.O.B. Robot Using Circuit Playground Express
Forget finding an old CRT, R.O.B. the Robot can be controlled by you!
by Mike Barela
Nintendo released the R.O.B with the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) back in 1985. Only two games ever used R.O.B.s capabilities and Nintendo shipped later units without R.O.B. Dust off your R.O.B. and control him with wirelessly with a simple CircuitPython program.
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Debugging CircuitPython On SAMD w/Atmel Studio 7
Un-Constricted CircuitPython Debugging in a Windows Environment!
by M. Schroeder
This guide will help you to start debugging CircuitPython on the SAMD21 or SAMD51, using Windows and Atmel Studio 7. Take the squeeze off virtual environments and do some work in your native operating system!
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Adafruit pIRkey
A Python Programmable InfraRed USB Adapter
by lady ada
The pIRkey adds an IR remote receiver to any computer, laptop, tablet...any computer or device with a USB port that can use a keyboard. This little board slides into any USB A port, and shows up as an every-day USB keyboard. The onboard ATSAMD21 microcontroller listens for IR remote signals and converts them to keypresses, mouse movements, or even USB serial output.
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Installing Microsoft MakeCode for Adafruit
A quick overview of installing MakeCode for local use or development.
by Brennen Bearnes
Microsoft MakeCode for Adafruit is a web-based code editor for physical computing. It provides a block editor, similar to Scratch or Code.org, and also a JavaScript editor for more advanced users. It can be installed on a desktop system, VM, or server system.
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Animatronic Hand
Build a cardboard animatronic hand with independent finger control using CRICKIT robotics controller board!
by John Park
Use the CRICKIT board with your Circuit Playground Express to control a cardboard animatroinc hand. Four servo motors pull the fingers into position using cable drive systems made from cord and straw guides. Program it all with CircuitPython to actuate as you press the capacitive touch controllers. You'll also learn to use the CRICKIT as an audio-animatronic controller with pre-programmed sounds and motions, such as counting in binary!
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All About Batteries
Everything you ever wanted to know about batteries!
by lady ada
This article is about batteries (if you couldn't tell) - and how to decide which batteries will run your project best! I'll cover both rechargeable and "one-shot" batteries, trying to cover everything I've learned.