A weekend of hacking projects with the Adafruit Edge Badge #Adafruit #CircuitPython @alexwhittemore

Alex Whittemore posts about post-Hackaday Superconference 2019 thoughts and relates them to Adafruit and CircuitPython:

Supercon 2019 just wrapped up last night, and this one was even better than last year. It seems to be one of the highest-value conferences on the calendar for good conversations, and it’s almost shamefully worth leaving the talks for week-after youtubing to maximize time spend talking and hacking. Shamefully, because they’re always just great. Luckily, I feel like I struck that balance this year. Besides a lot of valuable business cards, I also managed to check off a couple projects on my list of “decently fast stuff I really want to try but can’t find time for”.

Also lucky, Adafruit had great conference presence in the form of hardware, actual humans, and killer rapid-prototyping software with hyper-extensive documentation (mostly but not exclusively, I mean CircuitPython).

Projects highlighted

A CO2 Dosimeter/Logger using the new Adafruit Edge Badge and the grove-breakout of the Sensirion SCD30.

…the Edge Badge comes with a grove-compatible i2c connector right on it. I was further delighted to find that a MicroPython library for the SCD30 wasn’t too difficult to port to CircuitPython.

Light Commands Google Home Activator

We did a whole bunch more testing on the PyBadge, using the analog output MEMS mic, other badges hacked into oscilloscopes and spectrum analyzers, and so on and so forth, but it really wasn’t necessary at all. Implementing this takes literally two components, and one is just a connector for convenience.

Plug a laser diode into the speaker port, and it basically just works. Audio quality of the original recording you use does matter, since the laser distorts that quite a bit, but listening to the mems-mic-demodulated result yourself, it sounds totally understandable and google agrees.

See the whole post for code and details and musings. Great work!