I joined the Reading Hackspace shortly before Christmas and wanted a project that would expose me to some of the tools and expertise I now had access to. Some of the projects that drew my eye were those using Neopixels, and one or two people were doing projects using the ESP8266. I had done some Arduino prototyping before, mainly on breadboard or stripboard, so I wanted to use that knowledge and expand it. I was encouraged to try and create my first PCB as part of the project.
I came up with the idea of creating a neopixel clock, where each neopixel shone into some frosted acrylic, red signifies hours, blue minutes and green seconds. The colours are mixed as they overlap creating a bit of art as well as being able to display the time. If you want to see it in action take a look at the video. The use of acrylic would expose me to some 2D CAD and laser cutting.
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.
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