From the Forums: Adafruit-Blinging a Flashy Pinewood Derby Car
eagleeye2e shared a how-to for bringing some Adafruit interactive bling to his son’s Pinewood Derby car on the Adafruit Forums:
We decided to add a little high-tech flash to my son’s Pinewood Derby car this year. This project involved several Adafruit products including a 3.3v Trinket, a NeoPixel stick, a FLORA Accelerometer/Compass Sensor, and a Lithium Ion Polymer Battery. All of these components were chosen for their size and their light weight. The idea was to have a subtle yellow glowing effect under the car while it was at rest and while the car was in motion going down the track the pixels scroll from front to back with a brighter, different, color. The faster the car goes, the faster the pixels scroll. In addition, every time the car goes from scroll to rest, the color of the scrolling pixels changes to a new color for the next race. The car received many complements and oooh’s and ahhh’s. Thank you Adafruit for all of the great products that allowed us to add something fun and unique to our Pinewood Derby experience!
Adafruit Trinket – Mini Microcontroller – 3.3V Logic: Trinket may be small, but do not be fooled by its size! It’s a tiny microcontroller board, built around the Atmel ATtiny85, a little chip with a lot of power. We wanted to design a microcontroller board that was small enough to fit into any project, and low cost enough to use without hesitation. Perfect for when you don’t want to give up your expensive dev-board and you aren’t willing to take apart the project you worked so hard to design. It’s our lowest-cost arduino-IDE programmable board! (read more)
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.
