ASquare bought an Arduino starter pack before christmas and has wasted no time becoming a hardware-hacking geek.
Not only is his new blog totally awesome but he’s also got an impressive initial project!
The monome is a gorgeous, minimalist, open-source light-and-button pad used primarily by musicians as a controller. The folks over at SparkFun Electronics, inspired by the monome, released their own button pads and circuit boards, only they designed theirs to be able to hold RGB LEDs. They made this nifty Tetris game with their parts. Looking at it, though, I noticed something: they only seemed to use a limited palette, in particular, they only appeared to have red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, yellow, and white, corresponding to channels being fully on or fully off. I wanted to see if I could get colour mixing, wherein channels were on partially in order to blend colours smoothly.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
