Adafruit Mini Sparkle Motion
by Adafruit
The Adafruit Sparkle Motion Mini is part of 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! So how can we make something that will be powerful enough to drive advanced LED projects that need a compact design?
The Mini version of the Sparkle Motion is a simpler version of our full-featured Sparkle Motion, we give up the high voltage support and built in IR receiver, in order to make it under 1 square inch in size! By using a 4-layer board and double-sided assembly we’ve put together this feature set:
- Power via USB Type C for up to 5V 4A input - you can use off-the-shelf USB battery packs for portable operation.
- 4 Amp resetting fuse to protect from over-current drive
- ESP32 mini module with built in antenna port - the classic ESP32 has the best WLED support even if we’d prefer the ‘S2 or ‘S3. Comes with 4 MB of flash, dual core 240MHz Tensilica, WiFi, Bluetooth LE and Bluetooth Classic support.
- USB-serial converter with auto-reset
- Two output signals plus 5V power and ground - both signal output are level shifted to 5V. These are on 0.1” spaced breakout pads. To keep the design slim we don’t include terminal blocks pre-soldered, but we do stock the matching blocks if you want them
- Extra 2x3 0.1” breakout pads with 4 more GPIO plus 3V power and ground.
- Built-in I2S microphone
- Stemma QT I2C port to connect external sensors/OLED/etc
- User button on GPIO 0 plus Reset button
- Red built-in LED on pin 12
- Small built-in NeoPixel on pin 18
- Separate analog/digital input JST port for analog input, potentiometer, microphone or external IR receiver on pin 13
- Compact enough you can use it for wearable projects - 1.2”x0.8” / 30mm x 20mm size with mounting holes
While we recommend it for use with WLED, it will also work just fine as a compact ESP32 board for use with Arduino, ESP-IDF, MicroPython, CircuitPython or any other ESP32 supported codebase.
Note that unlike the classic Sparkle Motion board, we don’t include terminal blocks pre-soldered to keep the board very slim. We do stock the matching blocks if you want them, a small amount of soldering is required to attach them. Also, unlike the bigger version, we dropped the on-board IR receiver - however its easy to add one by plugging in a JST SH 3-pin socket cable and slotting in an IR receiver module.
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CircuitPython 9.2.3
This is the latest stable release of CircuitPython that will work with the Adafruit Mini Sparkle Motion.
Use this release if you are new to CircuitPython.
Built-in modules available: _asyncio, _pixelmap, adafruit_bus_device, adafruit_pixelbuf, aesio, alarm, analogbufio, analogio, array, atexit, audiobusio, audiocore, audiomixer, audiomp3, binascii, bitbangio, bitmaptools, board, builtins, builtins.pow3, busdisplay, busio, busio.SPI, busio.UART, canio, codeop, collections, countio, digitalio, displayio, epaperdisplay, errno, espidf, espnow, espulp, fontio, fourwire, framebufferio, frequencyio, getpass, gifio, hashlib, i2cdisplaybus, io, ipaddress, jpegio, json, keypad, keypad.KeyMatrix, keypad.Keys, keypad.ShiftRegisterKeys, keypad_demux, keypad_demux.DemuxKeyMatrix, locale, math, max3421e, mdns, memorymap, microcontroller, msgpack, neopixel_write, nvm, onewireio, os, os.getenv, paralleldisplaybus, ps2io, pulseio, pwmio, rainbowio, random, re, rotaryio, rtc, sdcardio, select, sharpdisplay, socketpool, socketpool.socketpool.AF_INET6, ssl, storage, struct, supervisor, synthio, sys, terminalio, time, touchio, traceback, ulab, usb, vectorio, warnings, watchdog, wifi, zlib
Features: Bluetooth/BTLE, Wi-Fi, USB-C, STEMMA QT/QWIIC
Absolute Newest
Every time we commit new code to CircuitPython we automatically build binaries for each board and language. The binaries are stored on Amazon S3, organized by board, and then by language. These releases are even newer than the development release listed above. Try them if you want the absolute latest and are feeling daring or want to see if a problem has been fixed.
Previous Versions of CircuitPython
All previous releases of CircuitPython are available for download from Amazon S3 through the button below. For very old releases, look in the OLD/ folder for each board. Release notes for each release are available at GitHub button below.
Older releases are useful for testing if you something appears to be broken in a newer release but used to work, or if you have older code that depends on features only available in an older release. Otherwise we recommend using the latest stable release.