Circuit Playground Express + Displayio

by Adafruit

Image of Board

Extend and expand your Circuit Playground projects with a bolt on TFT Gizmo that lets you add a lovely color display in a sturdy and reliable fashion. This PCB looks just like a round TFT breakout but has permanently affixed M3 standoffs that act as mechanical and electrical connections.

Once attached you’ll get a 1.54” 240x240 IPS display with backlight control, two 3-pin STEMMA connectors for attaching NeoPixel strips or servos, and a Class D audio amplifier with a Molex PicoBlade connector that can plug one of our lil speakers.

This is a great companion for our Circuit Playground Express or Bluefruit boards thanks to their fast SPI hardware speeds, and works in Arduino and CircuitPython. You can use it with the Circuit Playground Classic but it won’t be very fast, as you have to bitbang the SPI - and the display has a lot of pixels - so it’s not recommended.

Comes with a PCB that has pre-soldered standoffs attached, and 12x M3 screws for attachment. Fits all Circuit Playgrounds but like we mentioned earlier, the Express and Bluefruit are recommended.

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CircuitPython 9.0.1

This is the latest stable release of CircuitPython that will work with the Circuit Playground Express + Displayio.

Use this release if you are new to CircuitPython.

Release Notes for 9.0.1

Built-in modules available: analogio, array, audiobusio, audiocore, audioio, board, builtins, busdisplay, busio, busio.SPI, busio.UART, codeop, collections, digitalio, displayio, epaperdisplay, errno, fontio, fourwire, i2cdisplaybus, locale, math, microcontroller, neopixel_write, nvm, onewireio, os, pulseio, pwmio, rainbowio, random, storage, struct, supervisor, sys, terminalio, time, touchio, usb_cdc, usb_hid, warnings

Included frozen(?) modules: adafruit_circuitplayground, adafruit_lis3dh, adafruit_thermistor, 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.

DOWNLOAD UPDATER UF2