Hi and welcome back to the Circuit Playground Express tutorial. In this section, we're going to learn, how to power and connect our Circuit Playground Express to the PC.

So, if we look at the board we have a micro USB port on the top side of the board, which is what we use to connect to the computer. It's important to note that some micro USB cords out there are just used for powering and don't have data lines in them, so make sure that your micro USB is a full micro USB and can transmit data. So, to connect we just plug it into the board and it will pop up on our computer as a new Drive, CPLAYBOOT is what it's called. When all the lights are green it would if we have a program that we want to run on the board already and we don't want it to connect immediately we can hit the reset button to exit bootloader mode, but we'll go over that more in the next section.

So, if we don't want to power from a USB cord the other options that we have is a battery pack. So, if we want to take a battery pack to power our board, there's a GST dash pH connector on the bottom of the board. We can plug in two AA or three AAA batteries, to that or we can power it off of a 3.7 volts lithium-ion battery, but I really recommend the double A or triple a battery pack because they're safer, you don't need to worry about recharging them and they're just easy to use and there's a built-in power regulator on the board, so it will accept anything between 3.5 and 6.5 volts, so anything over that and you might damage the board and anything under it won't be enough to run the board properly. So that's quite a bit of range though and it allows you to power from a variety of sources, which is nice.

So, in the next section, we'll talk about how to load our first code onto our Circuit Playground Express.