To many people, a penny isn’t worth the time that it takes to pick it up—but not for DIY enthusiast Tonya Tooners. After gathering and sorting a staggering 13,000 pennies ($130), she arranged them into a stunning design on a floor in her home. From afar, you wouldn’t realize they were coins—Tooners’ attention to detail and patterning give them the appearance of tile.
The decor project was a tedious undertaking. “I started by measuring the area [of the room] and finding the center,” Tooners described on Imgur. Afterwards, she drew an axis as a guide and started gluing the coins in a diamond shape—purposely using different-colored pennies (alternating between heads and tails) to provide a striking visual contrast. Once Tooners got to the edge, she created a border—an addition that gives it a distinctly vintage feel. Aside from the pennies, Tooners used 10 bottles of Elmer’s glue, grout, wood filler, and “expensive epoxy” to make her dream a reality.
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, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, 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.
