Fidget spinners are fun little toys that spin around on a bearing and make surprisingly addictive stress relievers. With a flick of your finger you can set a spinner into a rapid spin and watch as it slowly comes to a stop from the forces of friction. You can even make spinning a competition with friends–see who can flick their spinner the hardest to get it spinning the fastest! But wouldn’t it be cool to measure how fast a spinner is spinning? It turns out with an Adafruit Circuit Playground board you can build a simple tachometer that measures the speed of a spinning fidget spinner!
This project will show you how to use a Circuit Playground Classic or Circuit Playground Express board to build a fidget spinner tachometer that measures the speed of a spinner. Circuit Playground is Adafruit’s all-in-one electronics learning board that has all the necessary components for this project, specifically a light sensor, NeoPixel LEDs, and the brains of an Arduino, built in to it so you can get started immediately with no soldering or other hardware setup. Even better you can build this project using either Arduino or CircuitPython code. If you’re new to Python this is a good example of how a project can be converted from Arduino to Python code.
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 7:30pm 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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