Since its conception in the mid 1970s, the boombox portable cassette player has become a symbol for urban communities, youth culture, and the unifying power of music. New York City based photographer and filmmaker Lyle Owerko started The Boombox Project in the wake of September 11th terrorist attacks, hoping to focus on the constructive and prolific products of humanity. His original photo series posed a collection of Boombox portraits, exhibiting models of these cultural relics spanning from the late 70s and early 80s. The project was published into a book in 2010 called The Boombox Project: The Machines, the Music, and the Urban Underground, a hardcover visual timeline of the proverbial ghetto blaster’s evolution, with a foreword penned by Spike Lee himself, and a collection of personal anecdotes from Hip-Hop icons like LL Cool J and Fab 5 Freddy.
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.
