Another key attraction in the Supercon swag bag was a HalloWing from Adafruit. Not just the module, a complete package: in order to make sure Supercon attendees can immediately start playing with it, a battery is included. Plus a lanyard to make sure we can wear it for others to see and start conversations about this Adafruit product. It's exactly the kind of thing we'd expect as a sponsorship item in the swag bag. Adafruit has produced a lot of products that appeal to this exact audience, along with a ton of tutorials and useful reference information that have helped me in my own explorations.

The Supercon edition of HalloWing came with a custom firmware running through a simple slide show. It cycles through a few bitmap images of event sponsor logos: Adafruit logo, Hackaday logo, Digi-Key, etc. But that barely scratches the capability of this module.

Reading Adafruit's product information page, it looks like one signature attraction of the HalloWing is that it's one of the boards with support for CircuitPython. A recent addition to Adafruit's grand plan to make electronics more approachable to more people, it is hoped that Python would be even easier for beginners to pick up than Arduino.

As my first experiment, I tried to modify the slide show. I translated each animation frame of Nyan Cat into 128x128 bitmap files and loaded them onto my HalloWing. By editing slide show parameters like removing transition effects and shortening time between slides, I had hoped that I can turn the slide show into a crude animation of Nyan Cat in action. Sadly I took a wrong turn somewhere, and my HalloWing no longer boots up. I suspect I skipped a critical step for updating slide show program's CircuitPython source code and managed to corrupt storage.

Fortunately it was easy to reset the HalloWing with a fresh copy of its firmware. Standard (non-Supercon) HalloWing purchased from Adafruit comes with "spooky eyes" firmware that displays an eyeball that randomly looks around. I followed instructions and my HalloWing is back up and running with an eyeball. Side bonus, it looked cooler than a slide show.

This is just a start. I look forward to digging more into this board's possibilities in the near future. CircuitPython, Arduino, and at the center of it all? A SAM D21 chip, part of the line I just learned about at Supercon.

I foresee a lot of fun with this new toy.

[UPDATE: I started simple with a cardboard companion minion.]