Back in my day, we used to have these big chunky PC joysticks that would plug into the back of your PC. No, not through USB, they had a DE-15 port and they’d go into the Game Port your sound effects card. Now, of course, we have tons of USB ports and quality audio is built into every computer. But what if you want to re-live your Commander Keen days?
This board has a 15 pin D-Sub socket port, that you can plug any classic PC joystick into. Onboard is a ATtiny816 helper chip that acts as a I2C peripheral using our ‘seesaw’ library. Two STEMMA QT ports mean you can plug this board in using a 4-pin JST SH cable to any microcontroller or microcomputer with I2C support and read the joystick X & Y plus the two buttons, even if your main chip doesn’t have analog inputs. There’s even a 5V power generator on-board since joysticks are expecting that voltage.
Great for converting old controllers without needing to cut any cables. We have example code for Arduino and CircuitPython / Python to make your next pew pew project a breeze.
Choo! Choo! This is the RP2040 Metro Line, making all station stops at “Dual Cortex M0+ mountain”, “264K RAM round-about” and “16 Megabytes of Flash town”. This train is pile high with hardware that complements the Raspberry Pi RP2040 chip to make it an excellent development board for projects that want Arduino-shape-compatibility or just need the extra space and debugging ports.
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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.
