02 4058 2818

Core Electronics Forum

Triggering LEDs and light bulbs with Piezo elements and Adafruit Playground circuit HELP

#1

Hello everyone,

I recently purchased the Adafruit circuit playground and some piezo elements in hopes of powering LEDs or light bulbs using the vibrations from individual drum heads on a drum kit for one of my University projects.

However, as somebody with absolutely no understanding of circuits or how to best go about doing this I am stuck in where to connect the Piezos and the lights on the Adafruit circuit playground.

What I have so far is: 1 x Adafruit Circuit Playground
10 x Piezo Elements
and a handful of crocodile clips.

Any help would be gladly appreciated! im only in the intial stages of this project but would love to at least get the piezo’s working with the circuit playground.

#2

Hi Adisorn,

I’d be happy to help you with this! So I can best help you out, what programming language would you like to use? For the Circuit Playground Express you can use MakeCode, CircuitPython or Arduino.

I’ll show you how to do it once you’ve made a choice!

#3

Hi there Stephen,

Thankyou so much for replying!

I’m absolutely clueless about programming and programming languages, so I think I was hoping for a more direct/physical approach but I am open to suggestions.

I am in the testing phase at the moment, so I haven’t acquired any LEDs yet if that helps?

Warm regards,

  • Andrew
#4

Andrew,

I should have asked before, are we talking about the “Circuit Playground” or the “Circuit Playground Express”?

#5

Hi Stephen,

its just the circuit playground!

Cheers,

  • Andrew
#6

Great! You won’t be able to just hook it up and have it work, it will need to be programmed. The good news is that the program is mostly written. Here is a good place to start: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/Knock

If you search around you may be able to find your exact project all written in code already!

This one written for a different device but that doesn’t matter. You just need to connect to appropriate pins on the Circuit Playground and change the pin in the code to match. For example, connect to pin #10 on the Circuit Playground and change the code from pin A0 as to A10.

You can find information about setting up your circuit playground here: https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-circuit-playground/windows-driver-installation

If you need a little more time familiarizing yourself with how things on the Circuit Playground work, then check out these Tutorials: https://learn.adafruit.com/search?q=circuit%20playground

Many of them require no additional parts and they get you more familiar with how the device and the code works.

Let me know if you need a little more direction!

#7

Ahhh I see,

As somebody with absolutely zero programming experience, is it difficult to program it to do what I’m hoping?

I’m just a little lost on the whole process, as I have no experience with electronics at all.

Would I just connect the piezo to the respective pins and reprogram it as such?

Do I need a resistor and a capacitor as well?

Regards,

  • Andrew