Adafruit CPX (Circuit Playground Express)
Posted: Sat Oct 21, 2017 11:52 am
Dunno if anyone here has already tried this trinket, but I just received mine, and am really impressed...
It has an incredible lot of stuff built-in for a 5cm diameter round board :
two user buttons (with pullups), plus reset, a two-mode slide switch, green (power) and red (addressable) LEDs, battery connector, 10 NeoPixels, 14 pads (7 usable as capacitive touch pads), light/temp/motions sensors, speaker/mike, send/receive IR, etc.
It also manages to be even more user-friendly than the original pyboard : instant reboot, instant 2MB USB drive for user code (also detects uf2 packages with auto update and reset), and finally, Windows USB serial drivers which work without fuss
It can be programmed in Arduino/C++, MakeCode/JS and CircuitPython (Adafruit fork of micropython).
Of course I tried it with CircuitPython (2.1.0 came out the same day .
The documentation, as always, is superb.
There is a board-specific library bundle with plenty of modules to get you started.
Most notably, there is a HID keyboard & mouse module, which is a much cleaner implementation of all the stuff I had to do from scratch last year on the pyboard (and documented on the Wiki here).
This is still a WIP at this time though, a given functionality may be available in one language but not another (e.g. IR stuff is not supported in python yet).
A favourite of mine is that low-tech slide-switch, which does strictly nothing by itself except let you read its state in code...
It means you could have a main.py that just imports main0.py or main1.py according to the switch state... so your CPX can run two totally different programs just by flipping that switch ! Simple but genius
Interestingly, the CPX also manages to come out 12€ cheaper than the existing pyboard, even as bought from Pimoroni, with shipping to continental Europe and pound-to-euro conversion...
My point here is : I don't know what Damien has in mind for his oft-delayed pyboard2, but there is strong competition already !
It has an incredible lot of stuff built-in for a 5cm diameter round board :
two user buttons (with pullups), plus reset, a two-mode slide switch, green (power) and red (addressable) LEDs, battery connector, 10 NeoPixels, 14 pads (7 usable as capacitive touch pads), light/temp/motions sensors, speaker/mike, send/receive IR, etc.
It also manages to be even more user-friendly than the original pyboard : instant reboot, instant 2MB USB drive for user code (also detects uf2 packages with auto update and reset), and finally, Windows USB serial drivers which work without fuss
It can be programmed in Arduino/C++, MakeCode/JS and CircuitPython (Adafruit fork of micropython).
Of course I tried it with CircuitPython (2.1.0 came out the same day .
The documentation, as always, is superb.
There is a board-specific library bundle with plenty of modules to get you started.
Most notably, there is a HID keyboard & mouse module, which is a much cleaner implementation of all the stuff I had to do from scratch last year on the pyboard (and documented on the Wiki here).
This is still a WIP at this time though, a given functionality may be available in one language but not another (e.g. IR stuff is not supported in python yet).
A favourite of mine is that low-tech slide-switch, which does strictly nothing by itself except let you read its state in code...
It means you could have a main.py that just imports main0.py or main1.py according to the switch state... so your CPX can run two totally different programs just by flipping that switch ! Simple but genius
Interestingly, the CPX also manages to come out 12€ cheaper than the existing pyboard, even as bought from Pimoroni, with shipping to continental Europe and pound-to-euro conversion...
My point here is : I don't know what Damien has in mind for his oft-delayed pyboard2, but there is strong competition already !