




I decided I needed a Circuit Playground and Circuit Playground Express render farm. Here’s the stand I made on the CNC machine.
I designed it in Fusion 360 and then milled it with the Othermill Pro. First, I ran a pocket clearing pass.
Next, I ran a pencil pass to clear out the scooped out slots for the curvature of the boards.
These rough passes left behind a bit of material, as you can see here.
The final cleanup was a parallel pass with a fairly tight stepover, I ran it at 90 degrees from the stock, so it followed the grooves and had longer runs.
Here it is with a Circuit Playground Express nestled in it lovingly.
Here you’ll see some purple prototype boards, and the new red Circuit Playground Classic Digi-Key will be selling as part of the “buy one , give one” donation program for Girls Who Code
Here’s the full set, ready for various tutorials I’m working on with MakeCode, Arduino, and Circuit Python!
I love Arduino! But the boards are so tiny that they can be difficult to hug. And not so easy to see, either, if you’re a student sitting at the back of a classroom. So why not solve both problems by building a really huge, fully-functioning Arduino that’s six times larger than real life?
By popular demand, I finally put together a tutorial for building your own not-so-micro microcontroller:
https://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-GRANDE-the-Huge-Microcontroller/?ALLSTEPS
Here’s a handy playlist of my Adafruit project video series:
I’m building an Overwatch prop gun — Lucio’s blaster — from scratch. Here are my videos for the first two parts of four(?) that I’m planning.
Painter of light, Thomas Kinkade, step aside! This is a long exposure photography light paintbrush I made using Circuit Playground. You can check out the video and guide if you please!
I built this conductive ink DJ controller made from a pizza box. You can build one too! Here’s the guide in the Adafruit Learning System. It’s a real DJ that you control by touch. It even blinks its colorful lights in time to the music!
Build your own DJ controller using a cardboard pizza box, conductive paint, and a Circuit Playground! The PZ-1 pizza box DJ controller uses a Circuit Playground, which senses your capacitive touch and speaks MIDI directly to your software, such as Traktor, Mixxx, and others. With a stencil and conductive paint you’ll create a delicious, functional controller layout. Inspired by a limited edition pizza box turntable from a famous pizza brand, now you can make your own!
Yay! I love World Maker Faire, it’s such a great site — the Corona Park / Hall of Science site in Queens is amazing. And the creative energy and enthusiasm there are palpable. Palpable, I say!
Besides walking around the Faire soaking up all the great exhibits and meeting makers, I’ll be giving a couple of talks — the first one is about building the Adafruit Happy Chewbacca Mask project on Saturday, 10/1 at 12:30pm on the Maker to Market Stage:
Join maker John Park as he demonstrates how you can hack the famous Happy Chewbacca Mask to make any sounds you like. John will perform a live mask teardown, demonstrate how to trigger audio files with switches, and talk about the joys of toy hacking.
My other talk will be on three of my Adafruit Circuit Playground projects, including the recently released PZ-1 Pizza Box DJ video, on Sunday, 10/2 at 12:15 on the Show-and-Tell Stage:
Maker John Park will show how he made his popular Adafruit Circuit Playground projects: the Class Scheduler, Password Vault, and Pizza Box DJ Controller. You’ll learn about Circuit Playground, a microcontroller platform with built-in LEDs and sensor designed to teach physical computing and coding.
I may even attempt, against my better judgment, some live DJ-ing with the pizza box controller. Please dance.
If you’re headed to Maker Faire please stop by and say hello.
I’m thrilled to announce that after a decade of moonlighting in the maker movement, I’m now officially a full-time maker and content creator! Starting this week, I’ll be working from my Southern California workshop, designing and building projects and videos for Adafruit Industries.
Adafruit is an open source hardware and electronics company founded by the awe-inspiring engineer Limor “Lady Ada” Fried, and co-run by the highest energy element on the the periodic table, Phil Torrone. I’ve know these wonderful people since the beginning of the maker movement, working together on Make: magazine, Maker Faires, and the Emmy-nominated Make: Television show on American Public Television. I’m proud to be joining them and the rest of the incredible team in our shared goal to encourage and enable anybody to build anything.
There are so many projects I’m excited to start building and sharing in videos and online tutorials. I’ll be making things to appeal to people with wide ranging passions, including cosplayers, home brewers, gamers, magicians, rock climbers, hot rodders, modernist chefs, lock pickers, kids, musicians, mixologists, Burners, escape room designers, aerialists, cyclists, teachers, animators, and coffee fiends, to name a few.
If you’ve got an idea for something you’d like to see me make, please drop me a note in the comments or on my Twitter @johnedgarpark.
You’ll be able to watch my Adafruit videos here, my Learning System tutorials here, my posts on the Adafruit blog. I look forward to meeting you in the Adafruit online hangouts. I’ll also be doing collaborations, speaking, teaching, and other maker activities, please follow my blog for updates — you can subscribe in the sidebar over there on the right.
You can fit 3.5mm parts on 0.1″ pitch (2.54mm) PCBs by simply turning them 45 degrees?! I just blew my own mind and am very happy about it. Was this a known thing?