Connection

Plug in the power on the Now Playing Gizmo, and open the Bluetooth setting on your iOS device.

Once the Gizmo starts up, you'll see a BLE connection icon on the display. With Bluetooth turned on on the iOS device, you will see the Now Playing Gizmo pop up in the Other Devices list. Go ahead and click it.

Note: the device may have a name like CIRCUITPY939d the first time you connect.

The Gizmo will switch to the loading screen while it prepares the font glyphs for display and does some other setup.

You'll then see a Bluetooth Pairing Request dialog box pop up on the iOS device. Go ahead and press Pair.

The Now Playing Gizmo will show up in your My Devices list as Connected.

Get Track Info

Go ahead and launch a media player app, such as Spotify, shown here.

You'll see that the Now Playing Gizmo displays the track title, artist, and album names in the track info box.

There's also a line at the bottom of the display that tells you if the player is paused or playing, and the name of the player.

Change the song on your iOS device, and it will update on the Now Playing Gizmo!

Send Media Control Commands

You can also send the player commands from the Now Playing Gizmo.

Press the B button (on the right) of the Circuit Playground Bluefruit to skip to the next track.

Or, flip the slide switch to the left, and now the B button will skip backwards a track.

Play/Pause

At any time, you can use the A button to toggle the pause/play of the player.

When you do, not only will the player react, but it will also send the ams.playing and ams.paused values so the text on the Now Playing Gizmo will update accordingly.

Switch Apps

When you start playing media from a different app, such as Apple's default iOS player Music (formerly iTunes) or Podcast, the Now Playing Gizmo updates automatically!