The CircuitPlayground and CircuitPlayground Express are great boards for learning with. This is largely due to the abundance of sensors and actuators built into the design.
While there is a pile of builtin hardware, it doesn’t include everything. Fortunately it does have several useful connections run out to the alligator clip pads around the edge of the board. That means you can connect to it using alligator clip jumpers, like one of these:
This can be great for a quick & dirty test, but isn’t very robust. I got to thinking about how I could deal with this and took some inspiration from some Micro:bit products I’ve seen. My solution: a series of shields that bolt on through the clip holes.
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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.
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