New Guide: Make Beautiful Luminary Lanterns with Bluetooth Control
Check out the latest guide by Erin St. Blaine: BlueFruit controllable luminary lanterns for your home. These lanterns are made using a vinyl cutter and have a Circuit Playground BlueFruit inside powering the animations. Control them with your phone or with “buttons” made from copper tape attached to the Circuit Playground’s capacitive touch pads. From the guide:
Design beautiful customizable luminary lanterns for your home or garden. Cut them out on a vinyl cutter or laser cutter, and fill them with light using a Circuit Playground Bluefruit Express and Adafruit’s NeoPixel rings. Add custom color animations and control the lanterns with Adafruit’s BlueFruit app.
We’ve also added capacitive touch control, so you can change color modes just by touching the lantern. Circuit Playground Express has all this functionality already built-in, so it’s easier than ever to create gorgeous controllable lights.
If you’re making just one lantern, this project doesn’t require any soldering at all! The Circuit Playground’s onboard lights will do the work. If you want to make multiple synchronized lanterns, it’s easy to solder NeoPixel rings to the Circuit Playground and string together as many lanterns as you’d like.
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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.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
