Adafruit has a long history of great products and support for makers of all skill sets, and with the release of their PyPortal, we see their range of devices increase with something a little different. From what is the Adafruit PyPortal and its specs to how to use the Adafruit PyPortal, here’s a comprehensive PyPortal review!
PyPortal is an Internet of Things (IoT) device that is designed to live on your desk and provide you with information via a small 3.2” LCD touchscreen.
On the back of PyPortal we have a small speaker, light sensor temperature sensor, a single Neopixel (WS2812) LED, microSD card slot, and connections for I2C and analog/digital pins. Powering PyPortal is an ATMEL (Microchip) ATSAMD51J20, a 120 MHz CPU with 256KB of SRAM and for wireless connectivity and TLS/SSL support we have an Espressif ESP32. This packs plenty of processing power into such a tiny package. The SAMD51 chip also offers another bonus in that it offers native USB support. So by default, it can act as a disk drive (USB flash drive), or we can programme the board to act as a USB HID device. So a touchscreen computer that can emulate a keyboard, this means we can create shortcut keys, or game controllers using PyPortal. All with minimal coding required.
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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