Adafruit Sparkle Motion by Adafruit
The Adafruit Sparkle Motion Stick is part of our series of “Sparkle Motion” boards, which 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 powerful enough to drive advanced LED projects that need a compact design?
This version includes both the Sparkle Motion Stick and the enclosure, which is great if you want to protect your USB dongle from everyday usage, but note that it is not waterproof or weatherproof. There are three pieces: two snap over the PCB to capture it in place, and one can be used as a USB A port cap. We also like there’s a button lever - by default in WLED pin 0 is an on/off mode switcher, but you can program it to do other stuff.
The USB Stick version of the Sparkle Motion is a simpler version of our full-featured Sparkle Motion. It even fits into a low cost off-the-shelf case for protection.
- Power via USB Type A for up to 5V 2A input - you can use off-the-shelf USB battery packs for portable operation.
- 2 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 outputs are level shifted to 5V.
- Built-in I2S microphone for audio-reactive projects
- Built-in Infrared receiver on GPIO 10 for easy remote control integration
- User button on GPIO 0 which you can press even when its in the snap-on case
- Red built-in LED on pin 4
- Small built-in NeoPixel on pin 18
- Screw terminal blocks for no-solder connectivity
Compared to our larger Sparkle Motion board, this only supports 5V and doesn’t have a reset button, there are fewer outputs, and no breakout pads of I2C/GPIO connections for external accessories. Compared to our Sparkle Motion Mini, this has a USB A port so it’s 2A max power. It does have IR and built-in terminal blocks but does not have GPIO breakout pads.
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.
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CircuitPython 10.0.0-alpha.7
This is the latest development release of CircuitPython that will work with the Adafruit Sparkle Motion.
Alpha development releases are early releases. They are unfinished, are likely to have bugs, and the features they provide may change. Beta releases may have some bugs and unfinished features, but should be suitable for many uses. A Release Candidate (rc) release is considered done and will become the next stable release, assuming no further issues are found.
Please try alpha, beta, and rc releases if you are able. Your testing is invaluable: it helps us uncover and find issues quickly.
Release Notes for 10.0.0-alpha.7
Modules included in this download
_asyncio _pixelmap adafruit_bus_device adafruit_pixelbuf aesio alarm analogbufio analogio array atexit audiobusio audiocore audioio 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 lvfontio 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 tilepalettemapper time touchio traceback ulab usb vectorio warnings watchdog wifi zlibFeatures: Bluetooth/BTLE, Wi-Fi
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.