New Guide: Rainbow Fairy Light Bottle Lamp for Ada Lovelace Day
Check out the newest tutorial from Erin St. Blaine – just in time for Ada Lovelace Day! Make a lovely glowing bottle lamp with a Circuit Playground Express and a strand of warm white fairy lights. Choose colors or light animations using Microsoft MakeCode, and decorate with your favorite stickers.
This is a perfect first project for kids who are interested in learning to make things light up. It’s easy enough for kids as young as 8 or 9 to make by themselves, and younger kids will love to help out, choosing colors and animations and stickers.
This kit was designed for the Autumn Lights Festival, a fundraiser in Oakland, CA for Lake Merritt Gardens — the garden that inspired the game Pokemon Go! The festival is on October 16-18, 2020, and will be taking place online, so anyone with an internet connection can attend. There will be lots of wonderful featured artists (including Adafruit’s own Erin St. Blaine) showing off their LED and glowing artwork. Adafruit is one of the festival’s sponsors and is proud to offer this kit as a reward for donations to help keep the garden open and free to visitors year round. We’re hoping it will inspire a lot of young makers to create their own glowing artwork.
From the guide:
Make a beautiful rainbow colored glowing bottle lamp with fairy lights inside. You don’t need to catch actual fairies, or chase down a real rainbow, but it will look as though you did! Decorate it with your favorite stickers and place it on your windowsill, and I guarantee you it will attract both rainbows and fairies into your life.
We decorated ours with an Ada Lovelace sticker. Ada Lovelace is famous for being the world’s first computer programmer – she wrote computer programs before computers even existed! I think she deserves to have some art made for her.
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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 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!
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