“Fail Quickly” is a term I learned almost a year ago. It’s a great two-word mantra to keep in you mind, and describes a philosophy of design that states that you need to prototype early, and find all the problems you didn’t think about initially. Then you can iterate quickly, and get closer to the ideal solution. For me personally, I will have a new sub-bullet below Fail Quickly, and that will be: Fail Quickly on representative hardware. One other thing that’s great about this term is that it reminds you that you shouldn’t be afraid to fail. In fact, it tells you to go out and fail! But do it quickly, so you can get those failures out of the way early in your design cycle and move on to successes!
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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, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, 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.
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