A while ago now I bought an ItsyBitsy M4 Express, and two of their NeoPixel Jewel LED boards from AdaFruit to create eyes for a plastic skull halloween decoration. Until this last weekend, I haven’t had time to play with it much though. Beyond soldering the headers on the board (the two sides, not the end one), and adding some patch wiring to the NeoPixel boards too so I could build up the electronics part on a breadboard to experiment with.
Looking on the AdaFruit site I discovered two things about this board that are going to make the project easier:
- The board runs CircuitPython out of the box (although an older version the I needed to upgrade)
- There is a CircuitPython for Jupyter Notebooks, which is a very powerful way of prototyping Python code straight from a browser.