The Adafruit Sparkle Motion Mini is part of our series of "Sparkle Motion" boards, that 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 that will be powerful enough to drive advanced LED projects that need a compact design?
The Mini version of the Sparkle Motion is a simpler version of our full-featured Sparkle Motion, we give up the high voltage support and built in IR receiver, in order to make it under 1 square inch in size! By using a 4-layer board and double-sided assembly we've put together this feature set:
- Power via USB Type C for up to 5V 4A input - you can use off-the-shelf USB battery packs for portable operation.
- 4 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 output are level shifted to 5V. These are on 0.1" spaced breakout pads. To keep the design slim we don't include terminal blocks pre-soldered, but we do stock the matching blocks if you want them
- Extra 2x3 0.1" breakout pads with 4 more GPIO plus 3V power and ground.
- Built-in I2S microphone
- Stemma QT I2C port to connect external sensors/OLED/etc
- User button on GPIO 0 plus Reset button
- Red built-in LED on pin 12
- Small built-in NeoPixel on pin 18
- Separate analog/digital input JST port for analog input, potentiometer, microphone or external IR receiver on pin 13
- Compact enough you can use it for wearable projects - 1.2"x0.8" / 30mm x 20mm size with mounting holes