I started this project last October. In my spare time, I help organize a Python meetup in Orange County and we didn’t have a speaker lined up for the month. Being that it was the Halloween season, I offered to build something fit for a costume. Luckily, I had an LED ring and a CircuitPython board (an Adafruit Gemma M0) laying around, so I thought an Arc Reactor would be just perfect.
An Arc Reactors is a fictional power source in Marvel’s Comic Universe, famously used by Iron Man to keep him alive. It’s essentially a circular device that glows blue with a dim flickering light. The flicker is the key to making it seem like there’s actual nuclear power flowing through the arc reactor. You can read more about that here, if you’d like: Marvel Fandom: Arc Reactor.
Fast forward to present day:
My wife decides she needs it, but she’d also like a big, red button wired up to it and when the button is pressed, it changes the color from blue to pink (temporarily). This, she explained to me, would be a sort of doorbell for her cubicle at work. She often works with headphones on and is usually startled when co-workers “sneak up” behind her.
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.
