I used a Raspberry Pi to re-invent my old 1960’s wall box as a controller for my wireless home media system (SONOS). It looks wonderful in my kitchen with its chrome and warm lights. Everyone loves dropping in a quarter, seeing the credits light up, and hearing it clunk and whirr as it selects a song.
The RPi is housed inside the wall box and runs a program that polls the GPIO for pulses from the wallbox. It decodes the pulses into a song selection and using UPnP protocols over my home wi-fi, adds the song to the SONOS queue.
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.
