STEAMCamp

Circuit Playground


The Circuit Playground board is built on an ATmega32u4 (at 8MHz) and comes loaded with ten programmable sensors/components. To power the Circuit Playground use a micro-USB cable, a AAA battery pack, or a 3.7V LiPo. The board has a voltage regulator to step up to 5V.

The Circuit Palyaground

  • 10 Mini NeoPixel LEDs
  • 1 LIS3DH Triple-Axis Accelerometer
  • 1 Thermistor for Temperature Sensing
  • 1 Phototransistor for Light Sensing
  • 1 MEMS microphone for Sound Sensing
  • 1 Mini Speaker for playing tones
  • 2 Push Buttons
  • 1 Slide Switch
  • Eight alligator-clip friendly IO pins - all enabled for capacitive sensing
  • Reset Switch, Power LED and Pin 13 LED.

GPIO + Capacitive Touch Pads

All 8 non-power pads around the circuit playground have the ability to act as capacitive touch pads. Each pad has a 1Mohm resistor between it and digital pin #30. You can toggle this pin to control whether the resistor is a pullup or pulldown or floating. Note that this means that all the pads have a 2Mohm resistance between them.
You can also of course just use those pads for GPIO, we expose the hardware Serial (TX + RX), hardware I2C (SDA + SCL) and 4 gpio pins that can also do analog readings. They are the same exact pins as those on the Flora
NeoPixels


Each Circuit Playground comes with 10 'NeoPixels' (technically, SK6812-3535 chips). These are connected to digital pin #17 and are powered by the 3.3V regulator. This is technically undervolting but we test them at this voltage and they work fine, if slightly tinted
Pushbuttons


There are three tactile pushbutton switches. One is the Reset button. Press this button once to reset, double-click to enter the bootloader manually.
The other two buttons are the Left and Right buttons, connected to digital #4 (Left) and #19 (Right) each. These have pull-down resistors installed so are, by default, LOW and when pressed read HIGH. This is to make if-then logic a little easier to read for beginners
Slide Switch


There is a single slide switch near the center of the Circuit Playground. It is connected to digital #21 and will read LOW when slid to the left, and HIGH when in the right hand position
Light Sensor


There is an analog light sensor, part number ALS-PT19, in the top left part of the board. This can be used to detect ambient light, with similar spectral response to the human eye.
This sensor is connect to analog pin #A5 and will read between 0 and 1023 with higher values corresponding to higher light levels. A reading of about 300 is common for most indoor light levels.
Temperature Sensor


There is an NTC thermistor (Murata NCP15XH103F03RC) that we use for temperature sensing. While it isn't an all-in-one temperature sensor, with linear output, it's easy to calculate the temperature based on the analog voltage on analog pin #A0. There's a 10K resistor connected to it as a pull down.
Speaker Buzzer


You can make your circuit playground sing with the built in buzzer. This is a miniature magnetic speaker connected to digital pin #5 with a transistor driver. You can use PWM at varying frequencies to make basic tones.
Microphone Audio Sensor

A MEMS microphone can be used to detect audio levels and even perform basic FFT functions. You can read the analog voltage corresponding to the audio on analog pin #A4. Note that this is the raw analog audio waveform! When it's silent there will be a reading of ~330 and when loud the audio will read between 0 and 800 or so. Averaging and smoothing must be done to convert this to sound-pressure-level.
Triple-Axis Accelerometer

A LIS3DH 3-axis XYZ accelerometer is in the dead center of the board and you can use it to detect tilt, gravity, motion, as well as 'tap' and 'double tap' strikes on the board. The LIS3DH is connected to the hardware SPI pins (to leave the I2C pins free) and has the CS pin on digital pin #8 and an optional interrupt output on digital pin #7 (also known as IRQ #4)


Follow this setup for Window driver installation

Mac and Linux do not require drivers
With the latest Arduino IDE version you can add 3rd party boards directly from the IDE.

Start the IDE and navigate to the Preferences menu. You can access it from the File menu in Windows or Linux, or the Arduino menu on OS X.


Here is the link to add:
https://adafruit.github.io/arduino-board-index/package_adafruit_index.json
Adding the link to the Adafruit board support package does not actually install anything, it only tells the Arduino IDE where to find the software.

Now that you have added the appropriate URLs to the Arduino IDE preferences, you can open the Boards Manager by navigating to the Tools→Board menu.
Once the Board Manager opens, click on the category drop down menu on the top left hand side of the window and select Contributed. You will then be able to select and install the boards supplied by the URLs added to the prefrences. In the example below, we are installing support for Adafruit AVR Boards, but the same applies to all boards installed with the Board Manager.
Next, quit and reopen the Arduino IDE to ensure that all of the boards are properly installed. You should now be able to see the new boards listed in the Tools→Board menu.
Finally follow the steps below for your platform to finish the installation - basically installing drivers and permissions management
For Circuit Playground, Adafruit provides a number of handy functions to use all the goodies on the board - all wrapped up into a library called CircuitPlayground.
Source:adafruit.com