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.
Make a robot friend with Adafruit’s CRICKIT – A Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit. It’s an add-on to our popular Circuit Playground Express, FEATHER and other platforms to make and program robots with CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. Start controlling motors, servos, solenoids. You also get signal pins, capacitive touch sensors, a NeoPixel driver and amplified speaker output. It complements & extends your boards so you can still use all the goodies on the microcontroller, now you have a robotics playground as well.
