The Adafruit Sparkle Motion is the flagship in our series of “Sparkle Motion” boards, that are our attempt to make the best small WLED-friendly smart LED driving board in the whole world. Our resident mermaid, firepixie makes a lot of projects with WLED and she loves it!
The Adafruit Sparkle Motion guide has everything you need to get started with this Sparkle Motion. There’s pages for overview, pinouts, connecting LEDs, WLED, CircuitPython, Arduino, and resources for download.
Read more at Adafruit Sparkle Motion
It’s JOHN PARK’S WORKSHOP — LIVE! — Coming up at 4pm ET / 1pm PT Today! LIVE TEXT CHAT IS HERE in the Adafruit Discord chat!
The live video will be on Youtube LIVE, Twitch, Periscope (Twitter) and Facebook.
Join maker John Park in his workshop each week as he builds, demos, hacks, and mods projects live on air! “John Park’s Workshop — LIVE” is the place to see creative projects come to life, as John uses a wide variety of tools and techniques to make everything from video game controllers to synthesizer to drink robots, using digital fabrication, hand and power tools, microcontrollers, and more. Come on into the chat to participate in the fun! Every Thursday @ 4pm ET/1pm PT!
What’s old is new again. Time to revisit this guide from the Adafruit learn system!
Back in the early Macintosh computer days, when the Earth’s crust was still cooling, getting photos and artwork to look presentable on these computers’ 1-bit monochrome displays was something of an art form.
Much of that know-how has fallen by the wayside as screens improved…but with wafer-thin, ultra-low-power E-Ink displays appearing everywhere now, a refresher in those techniques is suddenly relevant again.
A couple of software options are shown in this guide. ImageMagick (a free command-line tool) and Photoshop(not free, but many folks already have it). Check out the full guide in the Adafruit Learn System!
Electron’s are elementary particles, not made of something else. Are they particles, wave functions, fuzzy blobs? Dive in with PBS Space Time!
What does an electron really look like? I mean, if we zoom in all the way. Is it a sizeless speck of charge? Is it a multidimensional vortex of quantum strangeness? Is it the boundary of a tiny universe with universe-electrons of its own? Let’s find out.
Not feeling the romance? This Valentine’s Day do like Ayesha Iftiqhar on Hackster.io and MAKE yourself flowers. This custom PCB lights up and changes color with the help of NeoPixels and Circuit Playground!
As I was listening to Miley Cyrus’s ‘I Can Buy Myself Flowers’ on repeat, it suddenly dawned on me – why not build our very own flowers? The timing couldn’t have been more perfect, with the workshop scheduled during the week of Valentine’s Day. I had a fun idea: let each young maker participating in the workshop program their personalized flower as a token of self-love and empowerment. It was exciting to spread positivity with some pretty PCBs, code and colorful LEDs.
Use the code AdaHeart for 15% off in stock items from our 2025 Valentine’s Day Gift Guide from Tuesday, January 21st – Monday, February 17th at 11:59 PM EST.
Cyril Engmann brings nostalgia to life with this neat Magic GPT8 Ball. They shared the details of their project on hackster.io!
We’ve got the New nEw NEW for you right here
NewProducts 1/22/25 Featuring Adafruit Sparkle Motions
This week we debuted 5 New Products.
Visit www.adafruit.com/new for more info.
Want to get new products info beamed straight into your inbox? New nEw NEWs From Adafruit is an email newsletter sent once a week to subscribers only. It features new products, special offers, exciting original content, and more. Sign-up for the Adafruit weekly Newsletter here: https://www.adafruit.com/newsletter
New nEw NEWs From Adafruit is an email newsletter sent out once a week to subscribers only. It features new products, special offers, exciting original content, and more. Sign-up NOW for the Adafruit weekly Newsletter here: https://www.adafruit.com/newsletter
Shared by WU DIY on Maker World:
Soldering Flux Booster (Weixiu Lao Lead-Free No-Clean Soldering Flux),
The solder tin diameter is approximately 18.8MM,
Use your own M2*10 or M2*12 self-tapping screws,
Minimal supports are needed; refer to the image for placement.
Updated 20250109, added M3*8 countersunk screws
>Download the files and learn more
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
It’s JOHN PARK’S WORKSHOP — LIVE! — Coming up at 4pm ET / 1pm PT Today! LIVE TEXT CHAT IS HERE in the Adafruit Discord chat!
The live video will be on Youtube LIVE, Twitch, Periscope (Twitter) and Facebook.
Join maker John Park in his workshop each week as he builds, demos, hacks, and mods projects live on air! “John Park’s Workshop — LIVE” is the place to see creative projects come to life, as John uses a wide variety of tools and techniques to make everything from video game controllers to synthesizer to drink robots, using digital fabrication, hand and power tools, microcontrollers, and more. Come on into the chat to participate in the fun! Every Thursday @ 4pm ET/1pm PT!
Ready to put your heart on your sleeve (or maybe just around your neck)? Get ready for Valentine’s Day with this wearable heart from the Ruiz Brothers.
In this project we’re building an LED heart with NeoPixels. This uses Black LED acrylic to diffuse the NeoPixels inside a 3D printed case. The heart is made from pieces of strips that are daisy chained to create a custom matrix.
Use the code AdaHeart for 15% off in stock items from our 2025 Valentine’s Day Gift Guide from Tuesday, January 21st – Monday, February 17th at 11:59 PM EST.
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!
We’ve got so much happening here at Adafruit that it’s not always easy to keep up! Don’t fret, we’ve got you covered. Each week we’ll be posting a handy round-up of what we’ve been up to, ranging from learn guides to blog articles, videos, and more.
Thank you for #CircuitPython2025!
Icicle Crown with Pebble Pixels & WLED
Adafruit Hits 800 OSHWA Certifications
Catch up with us on the blog, in the Adafruit Learning System, and on YouTube.
New nEw NEWs From Adafruit is an email newsletter sent out once a week to subscribers only. It features new products, special offers, exciting original content, and more. Sign-up NOW for the Adafruit weekly Newsletter here: https://www.adafruit.com/newsletter
PacMan in 3D, Tom Verdure has been busy working on this cubed PacMan project based on a LED Matrix Cube. Follow along on Twitter and Mastodon!
Cube 2 hasn’t been completely finished but LED panels for cube 3 have already arrived. They’re 128x128mm instead of 160×160 which makes a huge difference. This one will have a custom controller PCB with audio, sensors and Bluetooth/Wifi.
You can craft your own DIY LED Video Cube with the Adafruit Learning System. And if pocket size is more your style there is the Tiny LED WiFi Companion Cube
We’ve got the New nEw NEW for you right here
New Products 1/15/25 Feat. Adafruit Mini Sparkle Motion – WLED-friendly ESP32 NeoPixel LED Driver
This week we debuted 4 New Products.
Visit www.adafruit.com/new for more info.
Want to get new products info beamed straight into your inbox? New nEw NEWs From Adafruit is an email newsletter sent once a week to subscribers only. It features new products, special offers, exciting original content, and more. Sign-up for the Adafruit weekly Newsletter here: https://www.adafruit.com/newsletter
New nEw NEWs From Adafruit is an email newsletter sent out once a week to subscribers only. It features new products, special offers, exciting original content, and more. Sign-up NOW for the Adafruit weekly Newsletter here: https://www.adafruit.com/newsletter
Back in August, biologist Santiago Monroy and producer José Álvarez trekked through the Colombian forests with parabolic microphones, recorders, cameras and field gear. After a 600 mile journey, the duo was able to gather enough audio to recreate the Colombian national anthem with some of the oldest inhabitants of the country – birds. Smithsonian shares the details.
Months before Álvarez and Monroy found themselves traversing Colombia’s landscape, Sura, an insurance company sponsor of COP16, allied with McCann Colombia, an advertising agency, to create something meaningful for the summit. Sura and McCann were looking for an idea that would transcend COP16. They wanted to create something new that would show off the host country’s biodiversity.
Fun story from Yale senior senior Jason Nuttle on his path to engineering and art. Nuttle combines servos, motors and gears to give life to art. Via Yale University on YouTube
Yale College senior Jason Nuttle combines skills in engineering with an artistic flair to create ingenious contraptions; specifically, he designs mechanical devices known as automatons, which perform a sequence of predetermined actions independently. In this video, Nuttle shares a few of his creations, including a computer keyboard that types on its own, a songbird trapped in a cycle of dying, and a robotic arm that performs random (occasionally unexpected) gestures.
His artwork was recently exhibited at Yale’s Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM), where he was a studio fellow last year.
The Adafruit CRICKIT is a custom built board for creative robotics so you can jump right in and start crafting your own automatons; like this Sparky the Blue Smoke Monster Automaton!
Andrew Plotkin just released a tool handy for anyone looking through Zork files: The Visible Zorker.
The left pane is regular old Parchment, the Z-code interpreter, playing Zork 1. You type commands; the game responds.
Just regular old Parchment? Not quite! This is Parchment exposed. The upper right pane shows the stack trace for the current turn. That’s all the ZIL functions called, and all the text printed, when executing the most recent command.
And the bottom right pane shows the ZIL source code — the original text, written by Infocom folks in the 1980s. Click on any function or printed string; it’ll show you that code in context.
nfocom’s games are among the best-researched works in videogame history. The Z-machine format has long since been documented. The games have been disassembled and analyzed. And then, in 2019, we got their original ZIL source code.
But most players have never read this stuff. What if I built a way to visualize the Z-machine as it executed? I think of it as a kind of exploratory programming. It’s on the code-reading side rather than code-writing — but reading code is so much of software development!
Read more in the post here.
The Raspberry Pi 5 is the newest Raspberry Pi computer, and the Pi Foundation knows you can always make a good thing better! And what could make the Pi 5 better than the 4? How about a faster processor, USB 3.0 ports, and an updated Gigabit Ethernet chip with PoE capability? Good guess – that’s exactly what they did!
The Raspberry Pi 5 is the latest product in the Raspberry Pi range, boasting 64-bit quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 processor running at 2.4GHz with built-in metal heatsink, USB 3 ports, dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless LAN, faster Gigabit Ethernet, and PoE capability via a separate PoE HAT.
This version comes with 16GB of RAM, but we also carry the 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB, if you like.
Featuring a 64-bit quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 processor running at 2.4GHz, Raspberry Pi 5 delivers a 2–3× increase in CPU performance relative to Raspberry Pi 4. Alongside a substantial uplift in graphics performance from an 800MHz VideoCore VII GPU; dual 4Kp60 display output over HDMI; and state-of-the-art camera support from a rearchitected Raspberry Pi Image Signal Processor, it provides a smooth desktop experience for consumers, and opens the door to new applications for industrial customers.
For the first time, this is a full-size Raspberry Pi computer using silicon built in-house at Raspberry Pi. The RP1 “southbridge” provides the bulk of the I/O capabilities for Raspberry Pi 5 and delivers a step change in peripheral performance and functionality. Aggregate USB bandwidth is more than doubled, yielding faster transfer speeds to external UAS drives and other high-speed peripherals; the dedicated two-lane 1Gbps MIPI camera and display interfaces present on earlier models have been replaced by a pair of four-lane 1.5Gbps MIPI transceivers, tripling total bandwidth, and supporting any combination of up to two cameras or displays; peak SD card performance is doubled, through support for the SDR104 high-speed mode; and for the first time. the platform exposes a single-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface, providing support for high-bandwidth peripherals.
Please note the Pi 5 is a significant redesign, and Raspberry Pi 4 cases will not fit.
Christmas may have come and gone but winter is still holding strong. Keep some cheer going with this GIF-mas ornament shared by mars91 on Instructables. Uses a custom pcb and some Adafruit gear including the Adafruit QT Py ESP32, microSD Card BFF Add-On, MiniBoost 5V @ 1A – TPS61023 and more!
A customizable Christmas ornament that plays GIFs! This ornament plays a jingle, shows family photos, and plays holiday GIFs. I made a few for family presents this year and was surprised at how much my family liked it, especially when I used their own pictures.
See the full guide and build your own!
If you are looking to play longer clips you could try out The Ruiz Brothers Video Playing 2.1″ Round Ornament TFT. Explore even more ornaments on the Adafruit Learning System
Every new year I like to think further out about what I want to do in the coming year. 2025 is going to be shaped by lots of bonding time with my second child. They were born at the end of October and I took four weeks off then. This year I plan on taking eight more weeks completely off and then working part time when they nap until they go to daycare when they turn 1. So, like 2022, I’ll be away from CircuitPython for a good chunk of the year. My hope is that I’ll be able to reconnect to CircuitPython and the community when working part time. I truly enjoy working for Adafruit on CircuitPython.
I didn’t really know what 2025 would bring for CircuitPython until Ladyada asked me if there was something we could do to make supporting new chipsets easier. We’d also been thinking about using a real time operating system (RTOS) in CircuitPython to better manage display and audio “background” tasks. Much of my 2024 was spent finishing BLE support of ESP32 chips. It was the third time we’d added BLE support (nRF SD, BLE HCI and now nimble for ESP32). At the end of the year I worked on CircuitMatter. CircuitMatter would benefit from Thread support in CircuitPython too. Thread could also fall into the multiple implementation trap that BLE did too.
So, I proposed that we move CircuitPython onto Zephyr. Zephyr is a real time operating system with a large number of supported chipsets and networking protocols (BLE, Thread, WiFi). Zephyr knows what compiler to use, the compiler flags, the memory layout and attached devices (like flash memory) for many boards. It makes it very easy to get CircuitPython basics going on any Zephyr supported board. In particular, the upcoming Nordic nRF54 and Renesas RA8’s microcontrollers are pretty interesting. After moving to Zephyr, CircuitPython’s build system won’t need to manage basic differences between microcontrollers.
Zephyr’s strong protocol support means we only (fingers crossed) need to add BLE, WiFi, Ethernet and Thread support for Zephyr and then all boards will be supported. The nRF54 in particular supports BLE with Nordic’s Zephyr based SDK. Our existing Nordic BLE support wouldn’t work on it.
The bigger challenge with Zephyr is its reliance on compile time configuration. CircuitPython is very dynamic for pin configuration. Zephyr expects these to be setup at runtime normally. We may need to continue implementing things like `busio` per vendor to keep being dynamic. We already do this today when working with vendor specific SDKs, so it won’t be new work.
Zephyr also supports additional things that we don’t currently in CircuitPython. I mentioned Thread earlier as one of those things. Another is more advanced flash devices like octal spi and (maybe) nand flash. It also supports SDRAM, an inexpensive way of adding MB of more RAM! MIPI-DSI displays, Ethernet, cellular connectivity and I3C are also interesting.
So, my goal in 2025 is to bring more boards to CircuitPython using a new Zephyr port. Throughout 2025 I’ll work to add functionality to the Zephyr port so that it can match the feature set of other ports. Once it does, we can replace the non-Zephyr version with the Zephyr based one. (Hopefully folks won’t miss any functionality.) This should set us up to move to Zephyr everywhere in 2026.
In case you missed it, Ladyada and I discussed CircuitPython2025 on video. I’ve got a bit of the busy parent look in the video even though it was just the toddler and I.
#CircuitPython2025 is our annual reflection on the state of CircuitPython. We’d love to hear from you too! See the kick-off post for all of the details. Please post by January 14th and email circuitpython2025@adafruit.com to let us know so we can link to it.
Past posts:
dis module, Thonny and documentation.
micmey78 shares:
Say Goodbye to Stubborn Hair Stuck in Your Brush!
Introducing the Ultimate Hairbrush Cleaner – an ergonomic tool with 8 combs of varying lengths, designed to make cleaning your hairbrush a breeze. Its round shape ensures a perfect grip, while the thoughtfully crafted combs tackle even the toughest tangles with ease.
Loved by my wife and daughter, this handy tool is the ultimate game-changer for regular hairbrush care. (Sadly, I have too little hair to test it myself!
)
Effortless cleaning, every time. Keep your hairbrushes spotless and ready for action!
download the files on: https://makerworld.com/en/models/900743
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord
Adafruit on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adafruit
Shop for parts to build your own DIY projects http://adafru.it/3dprinting
3D Printing Projects Playlist:
3D Hangout Show Playlist:
Layer by Layer CAD Tutorials Playlist:
Timelapse Tuesday Playlist:
Connect with Noe and Pedro on Social Media:
Noe’s Twitter / Instagram: http://instagram.com/ecken
Pedro’s Twitter / Instagram: http://instagram.com/videopixil
Many developers know that the answer to “How do I debug this microcontroller” is either “JTAG” or “SWD”. But what does that mean, exactly? How do you get from “Wiggling wires” to “Programming a chip” and “Halting on breakpoints”?
This talk by Sean “xobs” Cross will cover how common debug protocols work starting from signals on physical wires, cover common mechanisms for managing embedded processors, and ending up at talking to various common microcontrollers.
See the video below and more here.
We don’t need any snow to build this awesome snowman with this guide from the Adafruit learn system!
We just need some foam balls, stiff wire, festive decorations, a Circuit Playground Express (CPX) with CRICKIT, a servo motor and some extra electronic goodies.
To make this snowman dance, just touch the top of his hat! This triggers a servo in his belly that moves his body around.
This guide will show how to program this groovy guy using Microsoft MakeCode, an easy to use block-based programming system.
At scale it’s hard for my tiny human brain to comprehend just how big, and small, the universe is. This video from Epic Spaceman does a great job giving a feel for how small things get down to the size of an atom. It’s almost tangible.
This is a journey into the microscopic world, we usually think about the Universe as planets, space and galaxies but so much of the scale of the Universe is in the world of the small. I’ve always wanted to understand it better, so I’ve spent the last few months trying to make this Micro Universe not just accessible but something that can be remembered.
Looking to do some diminutive development? Try out our line of QT Pys with projects like the Adafruit QT Py and NeoPixel LEDs
Sometimes the best inventions are the unintentional ones. Smithonsian shares how tinkerer Erwin Perzy I made the first snow globe when trying to make better lighting for operating rooms.
In the opening scene of the 1941 mystery Citizen Kane, the eponymous protagonist, played by Orson Welles, clenches a snow globe in his hand as he utters his last word: “rosebud.” The glass-encased spherical diorama of a snowy scene was a mere novelty at the time, but the film, in part, gave rise to its popularity.
Now, more than 80 years later, it’s hard to imagine the Christmas season without snow globes. A symbol of childhood nostalgia, the Austrian innovation has become beloved around the world.
Want to make your own snow globe? Check out some of our projects in the Adafruit learn system!
Track your punches with precision on Adafruit IO using this accelerometer-powered Boxing Glove tracker with an ESP32-S2 or ESP32-S3 TFT! In this guide we’ll just refer to the ESP32-S3 TFT.
This project allows you to build your custom Boxing Glove Tracker using a Feather ESP32-S3 TFT running CircuitPython with an ADXL345 accelerometer. The ESP32-S3 TFT reads accelerometer data to measure the force of punches you throw.
The data collected by the accelerometer will then be sent to Adafruit IO, where you can visualize and analyze your training performance over time.
