During the two day ‘hackathon’ style workshop at Makernow last week, part of the All Makers Now conference, I helped one of the groups realise their project that involved triggering sound samples when symbolic items were placed into the centre of the piece. Due to the timescale, we had to use components and materials that we had available in the lab. As the project would be taken up to Trelissick House for the pop-up gallery exhibition, we needed small and unobtrusive hardware. We have a bunch of old PCs lying around, but they’re big and noisy and heavy – not ideal. An Arduino would be nice, but sound playback requires additional hardware and the tiny microprocessors aren’t really tasks like this.
Enter the Raspberry Pi – a nice linux development environement we can begin hacking away on immediately in high level languages like Python or Node.js. It has a built-in soundcard that will be perfectly adequate for the job. And it fits in the palm of your hand. Perfect.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!
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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 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!