The Adafruit Metro ESP32-S2 guide has been updated to add instructions for using the ESP32-S2’s WiFi module with Arduino or CircuitPython.
What’s Metro shaped and has an ESP32-S2 WiFi module? What has a STEMMA QT connector for I2C devices, and a Lipoly charger circuit? That’s right – its the new Adafruit Metro ESP32-S2!
A new guide in the Adafruit Learning System: Adafruit Grayscale 1.5″ 128×128 OLED Display.
This OLED goes out to all the fans who want more pixels! Normally our 128×64 OLEDs are the biggest ones we’ve stocked that can use I2C. This one is a whopping 128×128 pixels and it even has an extra bonus – it can do grayscale pixels! Yep, you get the same crispness of a monochrome OLED but with 16 levels of gray.
This display is a petite 1.5″ diagonal, but very readable due to the high contrast of an OLED display. This display is made of 128×128 individual grayscale OLED pixels, each one is turned on or off by the controller chip. Because the display makes its own light, no backlight is required. This reduces the power required to run the OLED and is why the display has such high contrast; we really like these miniature displays for their crispness!
The Arduino Starter Kit provides an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It contains all of the essential components required to start programming with the Arduino Uno board, and a guidebook featuring 15 different projects, which are designed to evolve the user from beginner to professional level. The starter kit has been developed together with a series of video tutorials hosted by Arduino co-founder Massimo Banzi.
This kit features 15 simple projects that show you how to use Arduino to turn an idea into reality. More importantly, it provides the basic knowledge and tools that can bring out your inner genius and fuel your creativity forever.
You’ll see it doesn’t take a lot of complicated mechanics or electronics to make something fun, to make things respond to the world around them, or to spark people’s imagination. All that is called for is this kit, a few everyday items, and your own unique ideas. Because great interactive projects need more than just wires and components – they need smart makers, like you.
Projects you can make:
Once you’ve mastered this, you’ll have a palette of software and circuits that you can use to create something beautiful and make someone smile with what you invent. Then build it, hack it, and share it! You can easily find the Arduino code for all these projects within the Arduino IDE, click on File / Examples / 10.StarterKit.
Take a look at these video tutorials for a project by project walk-through.
Great synth from DIY SynthWorks:
We can’t really use a signal for every key so we use an alogorithm for generating 8 Saw waves and distribute those among the keys played on the keyboard.
Joey Hagedorn (@joeyhagedorn on Twitter) posts some neat upgrades to the Mighty Ohm Geiger Counter kit. They include adding a Particle Argon processor, LiPo battery, and Adafruit OLED Display to provide information.
I added an Adafruit 128×64 graphical OLED display, Particle Argon WiFi μC, LiPo battery pack, and tube voltage monitoring circuit. It features an AD8244 high-input-impedance buffer and a 1 GΩ/3.9 MΩ voltage divider to connect to an ADC pin on the Argon.
I converted some classic Mac fonts to use with the Adafruit_GFX (graphics display) library—Espy Sans, Chicago, and Geneva—for the ultimate UI bitmap font style.
Read more in the Twitter thread here. Nice work!
Robert sent his project over to us! If you have a blog tip let us know via our contact us page ! Robert say:
Hello Adafruit!
I made this car based on the design of one of my favorite YouTubers, Colin
Furze. This is a scaled down version of his 100 mph bumper car, and is
controlled via bluetooth. The Arduino inside can, and was coded to, be
controlled by a WiiFit board and a PS4 controller. The shell was 3D printed,
so everything but the electronics was custom-designed by me.
See more on Roberts Youtube Channel!
UPDATED GUIDES on the Adafruit Learning System: Adafruit MatrixPortal M4 and Protomatter RGB Matrix Library
With the release of MatrixPortal M4, there’s a rush of projects using this new LED-matrix-centric development board. The introductory guide’s been updated with explanations of the MatrixPortal (for CircuitPython) and Adafruit_Protomatter (for Arduino) libraries. The latter guide and example code have been refreshed to better explain their use for first-timers.
Moose408 on instructables shared this cool clock. It features the Adafruit PCF8523 Real Time Clock Assembled Breakout Board.
I enjoy designing and building interesting clocks and am always looking at unique ways to display the time. This clock uses 4 vertical slides that contain the numbers. Four stepper motors position the slides so that correct time is shown in the display area of the clock.
The steppers are controlled using an Arduino Uno with a CNC Shield. It uses an Adafruit PCF8523 RTC board to keep the time. The case and mechanical aspects are all 3D printed and the slides displaying the numbers are made of wood with laser engraved numbers.
I used 3d printed rack and pinion gears mounted on the back of the wood slides to move the slides up and down. The rack and pinion system was derived from this linear motion device made by Trigubovich on Thingiverse.
If you’re looking to make a new way to keep track of time, read more about the project here.
The FacelessTech blog automates Animal Crossing on the Nintendo Switch using an Arduino Pro Micro:
I’ve been playing a lot of animal crossing and as anyone that’s played it it’s quite rare to get a meteor shower. To wish upon a star, you need to press A when you see one without anything in your hand. This got me thinking about setting up a servo to physically press the button, but then I had a better idea.
See the video below and more on the build here.
This new Metro features the USB/WiFi/PSRAM capable ESP32 module – we are testing it with Arduino (there’s a branch for ESP32S2 support and it seems to work OK!) This Metro has built-in LiPoly battery support, STEMMA QT connector, and its ‘Arduino UNO’ shaped so our shields can be tested as well. Here we’re trying out our 2.8″ TFT Shield, the SPI is incredibly fast zooom. You can sign up to be notified when these are in the shop and ready to buy here – https://www.adafruit.com/product/4775
Michael Ang set up a fist bump machine, which can be triggered remotely over a simple web page.
It’s amazing how much just a tiny amount of physical touch does for providing a sense of physical connection.
The communications uses MQTT, a lightweight protocol for connecting to small devices. The machine is controlled by an ESP32 microcontroller running Arduino code with a small servo. The Arduino connects to an MQTT server (I’m using shiftr.io) and receives messages that are sent from a web page to the MQTT server. The latency is very low – send a fist bump and the motor moves within milliseconds.
See the video below, the GitHub repo for the code, and the blog post for more.
I was watching a film and seen someone using a magic 8 ball, I thought to myself wouldn’t it be cool to make a digital one. So I went to my parts draws and to see if I had anything on hand to make it, since the current pandemic, I didn’t want to order anything unnecessarily. I pulled out a 3 axis gyro, a Nokia 5110 screen and an Arduino pro mini and got to work.
My first idea was to make a magic 8 ball but I thought I might as well add a few more apps. I made a dice app which randomly picks between 1 – 6. I made a YES NO app for when you can decide on what to do.
See the video below and details on the blog.
This would be a great upgrade for the Trouble board game.
via CJA3D on instructables
Here is a great weekend project to undertake, if you plan on playing any board/dice related games. To build the project you will need a continuous rotation servo, an arcade button and a arduino nano or ESP8266 board, in addition you will need a 3D printer.
You have a couple of options, you can either use the arcade button to drive the continuous servo to roll the dice, or you can use a web app hosted on the ESP8266 NodeMCU.The web app has 4 buttons, which spin the servos at various speeds..
Store some information on wood!
via jbumstead
I wanted to demonstrate how information storing devices work by building a large scale disc playing machine. Instead of being based on light interference like CD players, the device I built plays wooden discs with holes and “non-holes” that either pass or block a laser beam. These holes and non-holes correspond to 1’s and 0’s in binary data that code a text message, like song lyrics or a quote. The binary information is read off the disc, stored on an Arduino, and decoded to display the text message on an LED matrix on the front of the device. As the data is being read, the LED matrix is populated to visualize the binary information. A MIDI note is also played when a high bit is read. The music produced may sound random, but it symbolizes a series of 1’s and 0’s that actually hold meaningful information.
via vishnu_ on instructables
I was very curious about all these kind of stuff so that i had started building this project couple of months before. well i thought i can draw the school records using this great 2D machine. This instructable will cover almost all the area to build a high quality cnc machine.
Firstly I will step into building the mechanical setup of the cnc machine. I had used Fusion 360 to express my idea into reality in making this project. Since i am using Fusion 360 for first time, I took lots of time in designing some of the parts. I have given the resultant model below.
From the Adafruit Forums, user jim_lee posts a wonderful project on Star Trek Day today!
The original 19970’s text-based Star Trek game on an Arduino-programmed handheld! It used to take a small minicomputer to run this!
The build:
Teensy 3.2 processor. https://www.adafruit.com/product/2756
Adafruit 1947 display. https://www.adafruit.com/product/1947
Adafruit 500C lipo charger. https://www.adafruit.com/product/1944
About the game : http://www.catb.org/~esr/super-star-trek/sst-doc.html#idm95
The Arduino Gigs thread that started this : https://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=701820.0
If you have a Teensy. There is an example version that runs on serial monitor on my GitHub: https://github.com/leftCoast/starTrekArduino
Jim says:
I used to play this in the early ’70s running on an HP2000 mainframe. My friends and I found it, rooting around in the Hewlett Packard library listings when I was supposed to be doing computer generated math problems. Good times!
Ed note: I was basically let go from my student job in the college computer center for figuring out the password locking the copies of Star Trek on the campus HP3000 computer. Fun times!
Love this project from ccooper on hackster.io:
When the pandemic started, I decided that I needed to ensure that I kept myself occupied during lock down, so I mentioned to my parents that I was thinking about restarting my childhood hobby of electronics.
As soon as I mentioned this, my mother said “Would you build us a Cribbage Board?”
Easily add a gorgeous 128×64 OLED to your Feather project!
This is the FeatherWing 128×64 OLED: it adds a gorgeous 128×64 monochrome OLED plus 3 user buttons to any Feather main board.
These displays are small, only about 1.3″ diagonal, but very readable due to the high contrast of an OLED display. This screen is made of 128×64 individual white OLED pixels and because the display makes its own light, no backlight is required. This reduces the power required to run the OLED and is why the display has such high contrast; we really like this miniature display for its crispness! We also toss on a reset button and three mini tactile buttons called A B and C, so you can add a mini user interface to your feather.
The Adafruit 128×64 OLED FeatherWing guide covers everything you need to know to get started with this lovely display. There are Overview, Pinouts, Assembly, Arduino usage (there is no CircuitPython support at this time), and Downloads resources pages. It’s all the information you need to get started using this display in your project!
Check out the full guide here: Adafruit 128×64 OLED FeatherWing!
If you love Made in NYC this Friday Snō Build from AloriumTech on YouTube is for you!
Snō boards have been selling like crazy the last couple of months as more customers start integrating them into their system designs. So, it’s time to build more inventory for our distributors.
Since we have transitioned to manufacturing our boards in-house, we can now get some great behind-the-scenes footage of the process.
Learn more about the FPGA-powered, Arduino-compatible Snō board and see more on YouTube
The PM2.5 Air Quality Sensor guide originally included both Arduino and CircuitPython examples. However, the examples were complicated and ran standalone. Enter the Adafruit PM25AQI and Adafruit CircuitPython PM25 libraries!
We created libraries for both Arduino and CircuitPython to make reading data from this sensor much simpler. Each library comes with an example. We updated the guide to include how to install the new libraries, and where to find the new examples! If you picked up one of these sensors but wanted a simpler way to read the data, this guide has you covered.
Check out the full guide: PM2.5 Air Quality Sensor!
