Hey guys, Aidan here from Core Electronics. Today we're going to take a look at Circuit Playground, one of the newer boards from Adafruit. Adafruit has decided to step away from the microcontrollers with this one and loaded the board up with sensors, LEDs, light, and capacitive touch sensing pads that go around the outside of this circular board. It's a portable and versatile board, serving as an entire playground for anyone interested in electronics to explore and experiment with its different features.

Let's start by taking a quick look at the sensors and a definitive list of what's on board. At the centre of the board, we've got the ATmega32U4 processor, an 8-bit microcontroller commonly seen in Arduino boards. The board features two big push-to-make switches, a slide switch, and a reset switch. The circular board design is unique, with features at every angle, including a micro USB port for power and programming, alligator clip-friendly pads, and capacitive touch sensing.

Moving around the board, we find pin labeling, ground pins, battery pins, TX and RX pins, clock pin, and data pin for I2C. The bottom of the board features a JST connector for a LiPo battery and a voltage regulator for on-the-go project power. Diving into the board's features, we find 10 mini neopixel LEDs, a temperature sensing resistor, a sound sensor, a speaker, a light sensor, and a little accelerometer.

Adafruit offers all these features for just $30, providing a cost-effective way to access a wide range of sensors and functionalities. Let's jump into setting it up so you can start making and inventing. The first step is setting up the circuit playground in the IDE, which involves downloading drivers from our tutorial or the provided download link.

Next, we'll move to the IDE and add the Adafruit boards library. In the preferences section, you'll add the Adafruit boards manager URL and then proceed to the boards manager to download the required information. After installing the AVR boards by Adafruit, you'll include the circuit playground library, ensuring that you've downloaded and installed the necessary drivers.

When working with the circuit playground, it's important to use a micro USB cable for data transfer, not just for charging. Additionally, if using a laptop, consider the power requirements of the circuit playground and use a powered USB bank if necessary. Once the setup is complete, you can open an example code and start experimenting with the circuit playground's features.Today, I'm going to take a look at the demo for the Adafruit Circuit Playground. The library includes the Circuit Playground library, wire, and SPH library. The setup includes serial begin, circuit playground test, and begin circuit playground. This sets everything up for us to proceed.

The demo starts with testing the red LED by blinking it on and off. The capacitance of the touchpads around the board is displayed in the serial output. The slide switch returns a Boolean true or false value, indicating its position. The circuit playground set pixel colour allows setting the pixel number and colour in RGB format. The pixels can also be cleared using circuit playground dot clear pixel.

The left and right buttons, light sensor, sound sensor, accelerometer, and thermistor are all tested and their values are displayed in the serial monitor.

The accelerometer can measure tapping and free fall detection. Additionally, the board can be used as a mouse or as a VU meter, reacting to sound.

The Circuit Playground offers a wide range of possibilities, and I encourage you to experiment with it and share your projects with us. Thank you for watching, and I look forward to hearing about your Circuit Playground creations.