Adafruit CRICKIT for Feather

A friends to help you creating robots with the Feathers microcontroler boards

If you want to create your own robot friends then you are on the right page. Crickit is here to transform you favorite programming plateform into a robotic enabled plateform!

If you are wanting a companion, consider creating your own Johnny 5 robot. Robot are fun to program and open to your creativity (they will not complaint about the color used to paint him).

Adafruit designed Crickit to as a Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit and this one is the perfect add-on to the popular Feather ecosystem to create your friend by using MakeCode, Arduino or CircuitPython.

Plug any Feather into the Crickit connector and start controlling motors, servos, solenoids. Crickit also offers signal pins, a NeoPixel driver, several capacitive touch sensors and amplified output to wire a speaker. The crickit extends the functionnalities of your Feather, you can still use all the features of your Feather but now, woaw... you also get a lot of robotic oriented features.

Under the hood, the crickit is powered by SeeSaw, an I2C multifunctionnal board created by Adafruit. Thanks to I2C, only 2 lines of signals are needed to control all the features of the Crickit board. The Seesaw on the Crickit board is like a co-processor handling the PWMs, sensors, timers, etc.

Remark: The only thing that is not managed by seesaw is the audio output (sound have to be generated by the Feather's microcontroler). The board have a jumper that can be soldered to connect the audio amplifier to the first analog pin. Note that the Feather M0 have a DAC (true analog output) and it can play sound, small audio clip with Arduino code or CircuitPython. Other Feathers may not have a DAC and you will have to solder the a wire to a PWM enabled pin. PWM Pin can be used with tone() instruction to generate sounds.

With Crickit, you get:

• 4x Digital Servo control - or Analog PWM output (with precision 16-bit timers)
• 2x DC motor control - Bi-directional , 1 Amp max each, speed control (with 8-bit PWM).
  The two output can be used to control one stepper.
• 4x High current output - using Darlington transistor to drive up 500mA with fly-back protection diode.
  Ideal for solenoids, relays, large LEDs or to control one uni-polar stepper.
• 4x Capacitive touch input with large hole to connect alligator clips.
• 8x Signal pins - those pins can be used either as digital in/out, either as analog inputs
• 1x NeoPixel output - a special driver to lebel up the NeoPixel signal to 5V. The LEDs are buffered by the seesaw.
• 1x audio amplifier - a Class D amplifier to drive 4-8 ohms speaker (3W max).
  The audio input pin is made available but not connected to the Feather connector. Solder a wire on the PAD for your configuration. Connect it to the Feather M0 DAC or Feather PWM output as suited to get sound.
• All those goodness without the need to solder

5 Volts based board

All the feature are powered with 5V DC power supply. So this board can be used to propel 5V servos, 5V DC motors, steppers, 5V solenoids, 5V relays and so on.
There is no voltage mixing so this board is made to avoids fatal mistake. So remember 5V only (do not use with 9V or 12V robotic components).

eFuse protected board

Adafruit designed the board with a solid power supply system to minimize risk of damages.
So the Crickit can drive high-current devices safely.

The Crickit power supply have an 'eFuse' management chip that will automatically turn off:

• if the voltage goes above 5.5V
• If the voltage falls under 3V
• If the current goes over 4A (over-current protection @ 4A).

Every motor driver also have a fly-back protection diode.

Content

For each order, you will receive the Crickit completely assembled and tested.

To use this board, you will need additionnal component like:

• one Feather : any Feather powered with ATmega328p, ATmega32u4, ESP8266, ESP32, WICED, nRF52, ATSAMD21, ATSAMD51, etc. All Feathers works, even those having external hardware like Feather with SD cards, WiFi, LoRa radios, Bluetooth LE module, etc (the seesaw used on the Crickit use the I2C bus that van be shared between several peripherals. All the Feather also have the I2C bus at the same location on the board).
• one 5V power supply: A 5V 2 Amp power supply will do the job.

We recommend a 5V 4A power supply if you are planning to work with large motors or large servos.

You can also find motors, servos, solenoids and other goodies on our shop.