Proximity Trinkey - SAMD21
by Adafruit
It’s half USB Key, half Adafruit Trinket M0, half APDS9960 breakout…it’s Proximity Trinkey, the circuit board with a Trinket M0 heart, APDS9960 Proximity, Light, RGB, and Gesture Sensor, and two RGB NeoPixels for a customizable glow. We wanted to make it super-easy to add one of our most popular combination-sensors to any computer with a USB port and this one is ready to go in an instant.
The PCB is designed to slip into any USB A port on a computer or laptop. There’s an ATSAMD21 microcontroller on board with just enough circuitry to keep it happy. One pin of the microcontroller connects to the two NeoPixel LEDs. Two other pins are used as capacitive touch inputs on the end - if you look carefully you can see the slotted end has left and right touch pads. A reset button lets you enter bootloader mode if necessary. That’s it!
The SAMD21 can run CircuitPython or Arduino very nicely - both have existing APDS9960, NeoPixel and our FreeTouch (capacitive touch) libraries. Over the USB connection, you can have serial, MIDI, or HID connectivity. The Proximity Trinkey is perfect for simple projects that want to use motion, light or color sensing as an input to make fun and intuitive user experiences.
The star of this Trinkey is the APDS9960 from Avago Technologies, which has a few different capabilities thanks to integrated IR LED, photodiodes, and RGB sensing:
- Proximity sensing up to about 6” away by bouncing IR light off an object
- RGB color sensing can detect color when light refects off of an object - good for bright colorful items like LEGO bricks
- Ambient light sensing - how dark or bright is it in the room?
- Basic gesture sensing using 4 cardinal locations of photodiodes - this sensor is a little tough to use but it does work with practice
- Configurable interrupt pin that can fire when a certain proximity threshold is broken, or when a color sensor breaks a certain threshold.
We think it’s just an adorable little board, small and durable and inexpensive enough that it could be a first microcontroller board or inspiration for advanced developers to make something simple and fun.
Technical details
- ATSAMD21E18 32-bit Cortex M0+ - 48 MHz 32 bit processor with 256 KB Flash and 32 KB RAM
- Native USB supported by every OS - can be used in Arduino or CircuitPython as USB serial console, MIDI, Keyboard/Mouse HID, even a little disk drive for storing Python scripts.
- Can be used with Arduino IDE or CircuitPython
- 2 RGB NeoPixel LEDs
- 2 Capacitive Touchpads
- APDS9960 Light/Color/Proximity/Gesture sensor
- Reset switch for starting your project code over or entering bootloader mode
- Slim and cute, keychain-friendly!
Purchase
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CircuitPython 9.2.1
This is the latest stable release of CircuitPython that will work with the Proximity Trinkey - SAMD21.
Use this release if you are new to CircuitPython.
Built-in modules available: adafruit_bus_device, adafruit_pixelbuf, array, board, builtins, busio, collections, digitalio, math, microcontroller, neopixel_write, nvm, os, rainbowio, random, storage, struct, supervisor, sys, time, touchio, usb_cdc, usb_hid, usb_midi
Included frozen(?) modules: adafruit_apds9960, neopixel
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.
Update UF2 Bootloader
Latest version: v3.15.0
The bootloader allows you to load CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino programs. The bootloader is not CircuitPython. You can check the current version of your bootloader by looking in the INFO_UF2.TXT file when the BOOT drive is visible (FEATHERBOOT, CPLAYBOOT, etc.).
It is not necessary to update your bootloader if it is working fine. Read the release notes on GitHub to see what has been changed. In general, we recommend you not update the bootloader unless you know there is a problem with it or a support person has asked you to try updating it.
To update, first save the contents of CIRCUITPY, just in case. Then double-click the reset button to show the BOOT drive. Drag the update-bootloader .uf2 file to the BOOT drive. Wait a few tens of seconds for the bootloader to update; the BOOT drive will reappear. After you update, check INFO_UF2.TXT to verify that the bootloader version has been updated. Then you will need to reload CircuitPython.