Adafruit makes really great prototyping boards, and especially their “Feather” series of boards is great. The pinout is actually designed, with a lot of thought put into it, and the boards are all top quality. They also contain a lot of stuff on them already, just in case you need it: LEDs, battery charger, debugging interface, STEMMA connectors, prototyping area, you name it. It means that while you are prototyping and you suddenly need any of this, it’s there for you already and you don’t have to go out of your way to find it. And the documentation is great as well, not to mention all the work that went into developing CircuitPython and a million libraries. But it comes at a price.
When you finish your project, and it turns out you don’t need all those extra things in the end, it feels like a waste to leave that awesome (and relatively expensive) board in your project. That’s why I’m making the Fluff. It has the same pinout as the feathers, but it literally only has five components on it — everything non-essential has been removed. Functionally it’s a Trinket M0 with more pins and without the diodes. It’s the cheapest possible Feather-compatible board that runs CircuitPython.
I’m making this for my own use, and I don’t plan on selling it, but as usual all the design files are available, so you can make your own if you want to.
Read more on Hackaday.io (which includes the gerber files and Fritzing design) and on Twitter.
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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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