Make Robot Friend with and Adafruit Crickit & a Particle Xenon @roboweek #NationalRoboticsWeek #RoboWeek #MakeRobotFriend

April 6-14 2019 is National Robotics Week! In celebration we will be sharing fun robot stories and projects on the Adafruit Blog everyday.
Brandon Satrom shared his experiments with Cricket and Particle Xenon on the Particle blog!

Since Particle started shipping new Particle Mesh hardware, I’ve been spending a lot of time exploring the new devices, Mesh networking, and the new world of add-ons that our Feather-compatible form-factor unlocks. In this post, I’ll share how you can use Particle Mesh devices with the Adafruit CRICKIT robotics platform.

I’ve written in the past about how the new Feather footprint on Particle Mesh devices opens up a world of plug-and-play capabilities with the rest of the Adafruit Feather ecosystem. With over 50 FeatherWings to choose from, there are a ton of options for your next project.

One FeatherWing that I’ve been playing with lately is the Adafruit CRICKIT FeatherWing. It’s a powerful, octagonal board that you can use to, as Adafruit likes to say, #MakeRobotFriend.

For my first set of experiments, I decided to play with a DC Motor, Servo, Neopixels, and the Capacitive Touch sensors. Read on to learn how you can use CRICKIT with Particle’s new Mesh hardware.

USING THE PARTICLE XENON WITH THE ADAFRUIT CRICKIT

Since all three new Particle Mesh devices–the Argon, Boron, and Xenon–are Adafruit Feather-compatible, you can use any device with the CRICKIT platform. The device just pops right in, and since our devices are pin-compatible, it will work as any other Feather microcontroller would. On the firmware side, nearly every popular Adafruit device with a library is supported on the Particle platform, so you should have no trouble jumping in with FeatherWing displays, sensors, and more.

See more!

Cricket stands for Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit. It’s an add-on to our popular Feather ecosystem that lets you #MakeRobotFriend using CircuitPython, MakeCode (coming soon), or Arduino.

Plug in any Feather mainboard you want into the center, and you’re good to go! The Crickit is powered by seesaw, our I2C-to-whatever bridge firmware. So you only need to use two I2C data pins to control the huge number of inputs and outputs on the Crickit. All those timers, PWMs, sensors are offloaded to the co-processor. Get yours here!