This week on the Adafruit Learning System, we published a couple new guides, updated a few more, and have a couple new product guides. Learn how to make a FunHouse Parking Assistant, create a Discord and Slack Connected Smart Plant, and more!
Getting Started with the Basics
Getting started with electronics can be a daunting task. It can seem like there is just too much to learn before you would be able to make anything fun. Thankfully Adafruit has you covered. We have curated a bunch of guides that we think should help get you started on your electronics journey. Learn the basics like how to solder, or what individual electronic components do and how they work.
Build your electronics foundation or expand your skills on the Adafruit Learning System.
Favorite New Guide
This weeks favorite new guide teaches you how make a Discord or Slack Connected Smart Plant
Always on the computer with no time to water your plants? Build an internet-enabled planter to send notifications over a Slack or Discord channel when it needs water.
In this project, you’ll build an IoT planter using the Raspberry Pi Pico RP2040 and the STEMMA Soil Sensor. Then, you’ll add an AirLift breakout board to connect it to the internet and send sensor data to Adafruit IO. Finally, you’ll use Adafruit IO’s reactive trigger features to send webhook notifications about your planter to a Discord or Slack server.
For this project, you can use Slack or Discord. While it is possible to do both, this guide won’t go into that.
ALS Deep Cut
With so many guides on the Adafruit Learning System, some amazing guides of years past get buried and lost. ALS Deep Cuts brings these guides back up to the surface. This week’s guide is from back in 2014.
Learn all about Breadboards and Perfboards with Collin
A circuit can live in many forms – most of them being ‘board’ forms. Likely the two most important for DIYers are the easily-modifiable breadboard and resilient yet still versatile perfboard. Taking a design from schematic to breadboard, and subsequently perfboard, is a vital process to the electronics maker – learn it, live it, love it!
New Product Guides
This week we also published a couple new product guides.
It’s half USB Key, half Adafruit Trinket, half rotary encoder…it’s Rotary Trinkey, the circuit board with a Trinket M0 heart, a NeoPixel glow, and a rotary encoder body. We were inspired by this project from TodBot where a rotary encoder was soldered onto a QT Py. So we thought, hey what if we made something like that that plugs right into your computer’s USB port, with a fully programmable color NeoPixel? And this is what we came up with!
The Adafruit BME280 Humidity + Barometric Pressure + Temperature Sensor Breakout
Bosch has stepped up their game with their new BME280 sensor, an environmental sensor with temperature, barometric pressure and humidity! This sensor is great for all sorts of weather/environmental sensing and can even be used in both I2C and SPI!
This precision sensor from Bosch is the best low-cost sensing solution for measuring humidity with ±3% accuracy, barometric pressure with ±1 hPa absolute accuraccy, and temperature with ±1.0°C accuracy. Because pressure changes with altitude, and the pressure measurements are so good, you can also use it as an altimeter with ±1 meter accuracy!