Thanks Richard for sending this interesting project in! See more on Richard’s blog
The group wanted to come up with some ideas that could help firefighters while they fight forest fires. While many of the ideas were good, they all had one thing in common. They needed something high over the fire to help relay radio transmission, get a better image of what is going on with the fire, and to provide real time data to the ground crew. We thought that a robot blimp could do all of that rather well and set out to see if it was possible.
Adafruit Pro Trinket – 5V 16MHz : Trinket’s got a big sister in town – the Pro Trinket 5V! Pro Trinket combines everything you love about Trinket with the familiarity of the common core Arduino chip, the ATmega328. It’s like an Arduino Pro Mini with more pins and USB tossed in, so delicious.
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.
Like the Trinket, it has onboard USB bootloading support – we opted for a MicroUSB jack this time. We also added Optiboot support, so you can either program your Pro Trinket over USB or with a FTDI cable just like the Pro Mini and friends.
The Pro Trinket PCB measures only 1.5″ x 0.7″ x 0.2″ (without headers) but packs much of the same capability as an Arduino UNO. So it’s great once you’ve finished up a prototype on an official Arduino UNO and want to make the project smaller.
The Pro Trinket 5V uses the Atmega328P chip, which is the same core chip in the Arduino UNO/Duemilanove/Mini/etc. at the same speed and voltage. So you’ll be happy to hear that not only is Pro Trinket programmable using the Arduino IDE as you already set up, but 99% of Arduino projects will work out of the box!
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
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.
