Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Quick Look: The Adafruit CLUE Board”.
Welcome to make workshop, where we check out tools, toys and tech built for makers today we’re going to explore the adafruit clue development board. This is pretty exciting and i think you’ll like it here it is. This is the adafruit clue now this is a development board. Let’S start really broad here, if you’re new to electronics or new to this whole world of microcontrollers, this is the kind of thing that would be the brains of the operation. Let’S say you were to make a blaster from the old school halo. This board would serve as the display, but also the whole central brain that would control the lights whenever you hit the trigger and if you had a motor in there to move it or something like that or let’s say you were to do you know an iron Man costume: this is the kind of thing either this or an arduino or a adafruit feather, or something like that, along with some other bits and pieces would control your motors and your lights, and things like that. So this specific one has a few cool features. Let’S jump into if you’re already in the world of electronics, you’ll notice that this looks a lot like a micro bit. It has the same form factor as the micro bit and it will work on the same slot in accessories from the micro bit. However, the similarities kind of in there, let’s look at the spec sheet on the clue, the specs on the website list this as having the nordic nrf52840 bluetooth le processor. It’S got one mega flash 256 k of ram.
It’S a 64 megahertz cortex m4 processor. The screen here is going to be 1.3 inches 240 by 240 pixels color ips tft display. That means you can show color graphics on this. It comes with two buttons and tons of sensors. For example, it has nine degrees of motion accelerometer.
So we can tell when you’re tipping it in different directions. It has sensors for proximity the amount of light in the air. It’S got a color sensor.
It can detect humidity altitude barometric pressure on the back. Here. It has an rgb neopixel. That’S an rgb led that you can control. It’S got two megabytes of internal storage. So if, if you’re kind of getting started in this, that’s plenty of space for most beginner projects, there’s a buzzer for playing simple tones, two white leds on the front for detecting color and lighting up stuff.
And then, if we look at the connectors here, we can see that, like many of the adafruit stuff items that are available now, it’s got battery management built in and it has the ability to plug into some other accessories in the stema line. Here you can program this using circuit python or the adafruit environment. I’M personally excited about the circuit python. That means that you can plug this into your computer and it shows up as a usb storage device, and you can simply write a text file and drop it on there and it works circuit.
Python is easy to learn for beginners easy to experiment with, and the fact that you can just drop it on like it’s. A usb storage device means that you can do it from any computer. You don’t have to have the software installed to do the programming and compiling you can just plug it into a computer, edit, a text file and off you go so, let’s plug this in and look at it a little bit. One quick note be sure whenever you are using these devices that you don’t end up with a charging only cable, it will give you headaches and it’s one of the most common problems that people have with these devices, this one’s a data cable, this one’s a charging.
Only cable and there’s really no elegant way to tell you can’t really look at the pins and tell whether it has data or not if you plug it in and your computer doesn’t see it whenever you do. The right sequence of button presses try another cable. First, okay: let’s plug this sucker in and see what we’ve got so this is a demo code, that’s running on it right now and what we can see here on the screen.
It’S saying file system not found, i’m not sure what that’s about, but it’s probably in the documentation on the adafruit website. They have great documentation, sensors found, we have a list of sensors and we have a list of readouts here. It says it’s 21 degrees celsius in here barometric pressure of 989 989.66 hpa. I should know how barometric pressure is measured, but i don’t i’ll google it later humidity, 36 percent light 155 we’ll have to look up what it’s actually using for measurement of light right now. I don’t know if that’s lumens or what, but if i cover up the sensor here with my finger, you can see that drop down to one and then shoot right back up to 180, something so uh and then back down.
It’S equalizing, there’s acceleration. If i move it, we can see that well, i can see the numbers they’re – probably not showing up on camera very well. We can see the numbers change as i move it because of the acceleration there’s a gyroscope. We can move it tilt it and see that magnometer magnetometer, which is like a compass, tells us which way we’re facing and a microphone which we can see bouncing all over the place, because i’m talking right now check this out here.
This is an example that you can download and copy, and paste in this is a level, so we can see the internal mechanisms that work here on this level kind of a neat little toy, and this was just code i copied and pasted off of their website. They’Ve got a bunch of examples that you can use to get to know this and, of course you would run this off of a battery if you were going to take it away from your computer. Let’S look at another example. I literally just copied and pasted that in there i didn’t have to compile anything.
It’S wonderful circuit python is so cool and we can see here it’s 23.7 degrees celsius here in the studio and 31 humidity. The buttons don’t do anything in this example. Now, having a screen on here and buttons means that you could do a lot of projects with this board without even having to add other things, but like any development board, you have access to all these different pads here, where you can program things, you know servos And motors and lights and sensors and stuff like that, so you can’t expand on it, but as it is, it is pretty fully featured. So that is the adafruit clue.
I think this thing is pretty awesome. I wish these existed when i was getting into electronics. That would have made things a lot more interesting and a lot easier.
You can find more information about this at adafruit.com. There will be a link below directly to this product on their site. This board is 29.95 they’re sold out at the time that i’m making this video, but from what i understand, they’re going to have more in stock soon, so you can get your hands on one. That’S the adafruit clue board, really a cool piece of tech. Thank you for joining us.
I hope you enjoyed it. I think the adafruit clue board is a pretty cool piece of hardware. I’M excited to play with it myself be sure to like this video and subscribe to this website. So you don’t miss any of the cool stuff.
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