Playing with Adafruit Circuit Playground BlueFruit

It is always a moment of excitement (perhaps I need to get a life) when the Adafruit Adabox arrives, this time is no exception with the arrival of the Adabox014. Inside there was a great mixture of things for making snow globes based around two devices TFT Gizmo and the Circuit Playground Bluefruit; this post is considered with an initial play with the Bluefruit.

Bluefruit is a small Circuit playground with the addition of Bluetooth or more accurately Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). If you have played with the Playground express it is very similar. To experiment I wanted to play with the neopixels on the board through Circuit Python,

The starting point https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-circuit-playground-bluefruit/overview to get a bit of background and then to follow the links to how to get it all happening with Circuit.

Task I wanted was to use it, using circuitpython on the Mu editor to control random colours cycling through all the neopixels and in reverse order turn off (the code used is near the end of the post- please feel free to use it, if it is of use. A video at the end show the board in action.

Adafruit have provided a great starting point with the post at https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-circuit-playground-bluefruit/circuitpython-neopixel, in fact, I am using part of the code for the initial cycling through the pixels for my solution and modified version to turn the pixels off in reverse order. You will need to add neopixel,mpy available from https://circuitpython.org/libraries to lib folder on the Bluefruit but that is just a drag and drop exercise, name the routine code.py save with the board attached and that is really it.

In summary, this is a cool little board, very much in-line with the previous Circuit Playground boards and I looking forward to playing with it a bit more. The fact it can be programmed in different languages (as could the other boards) including the friendly MakeCode makes it interesting.

All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with. Twitter @scottturneruon

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