Circuit Playground Bluefruit is the third board in the Circuit Playground series, another step towards a perfect introduction to electronics and programming.
Adafruit have taken the popular Circuit Playground Express and made it even better! Now the main chip is an nRF52840 microcontroller which is not only more powerful, but also comes with Bluetooth Low Energy support for wireless connectivity.
The board is round and has alligator-clip pads around it so you don't have to solder or sew to make it work. You can power it from USB, a AAA battery pack, or with a Lipoly battery (for advanced users). Circuit Playground Bluefruit has built-in USB support. Built in USB means you plug it in to program it and it just shows up, no special cable or adapter required. Just program your code into the board then take it on the go!
Here's some of the great goodies baked in to each Circuit Playground Bluefruit:
- 1 x nRF52840 Cortex M4 processor with Bluetooth Low Energy support
- 10 x mini NeoPixels, each one can display any color
- 1 x Motion sensor (LIS3DH triple-axis accelerometer with tap detection, free-fall detection)
- 1 x Temperature sensor (thermistor)
- 1 x Light sensor (phototransistor). Can also act as a color sensor and pulse sensor.
- 1 x Sound sensor (MEMS microphone)
- 1 x Mini speaker with class D amplifier (7.5mm magnetic speaker/buzzer)
- 2 x Push buttons, labeled A and B
- 1 x Slide switch
- 8 x alligator-clip friendly input/output pins
- Includes I2C, UART, 6 pins that can do analog inputs, multiple PWM outputs
- Green "ON" LED so you know its powered
- Red "#13" LED for basic blinking
- Reset button
- 2 MB of SPI Flash storage, used primarily with CircuitPython to store code and libraries.
- MicroUSB port for programming and debugging
- USB port can act like serial port, keyboard, mouse, joystick or MIDI!
TECHNICAL DETAILS
- Outer Diameter: ~50.6mm / ~2.0"
- Weight: 8.9g
Revision History:
- As of Nov 22, 2019 Adafruit updated this design from Alpha to release. The antenna design changed slightly, and they added a pin that allows the user to turn off power to the NeoPixels, microphone, and temperature/light sensor so only the accelerometer is active, for low power usage!