Moving head donkey toy – As seen on Show and Tell!
As seen on Show and Tell! Thanks to Virgil for sharing his project on show and tell! Read the full tutorial for the build here.
In 1978, I bought a wind-up donkey for my daughter, then an infant. The donkey moved its head while playing “Donkey Serenade.” I figured that I could replicate that with an Arduino, a motor, sound on an SD card, and a speaker. It took me 10 weeks, but I did it. Here’s the story.
I got sidetracked for a while doing my Halloween Candy Cauldron, which came out of this one. While I was working on the donkey, learning about playing sound with an Arduino, I began seeing lots of Halloween projects on Adafruit shows, so I decided to try my hand on Halloween sounds.
This was an incredibly rewarding project that was challenging, fun, interesting, and educational—all the reasons I wanted to start with Arduino in the first place!
Adafruit Pro Trinket – 3V 12MHz: Trinket’s got a big sister in town – the Pro Trinket 3V! Pro Trinket combines everything you love about Trinket with the familiarity of the core Arduino chip, the ATmega328. It’s like an Arduino Pro Mini with more pins and USB tossed in.
Trinket’s a year old now, and while its been great to see tons of tiny projects, sometimes you just need more pins, more FLASH, and more RAM. That’s why we designed Pro Trinket, with 18 GPIO, 2 extra analog inputs, 28K of flash, and 2K of RAM. Read more.
Adafruit 16-Channel 12-bit PWM/Servo Driver – I2C interface – PCA9685: You want to make a cool robot, maybe a hexapod walker, or maybe just a piece of art with a lot of moving parts. Or maybe you want to drive a lot of LEDs with precise PWM output. Then you realize that your microcontroller has a limited number of PWM outputs! What now? You could give up OR you could just get this handy PWM and Servo driver breakout. Read more.
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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.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!
Python for Microcontrollers – Adafruit Daily — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: New Python Releases, an ESP32+MicroPython IDE and Much More! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
EYE on NPI – Adafruit Daily — EYE on NPI Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey
