Adorable Neo Trinkey Redefines USB Flash
Adafruit's SAM D21 board features four NeoPixels and a keychain-friendly design.
When you think of "USB Flash Drive," you probably think of a storage device. Adafruit's new Neo Trinkey gives "flash" a new meaning thanks to its four RGB NeoPixels and compact size.
We were inspired by some USB key flashlight boards that would turn any battery pack into an LED torch. So we thought, hey what if we made something like that but with fully programmable color NeoPixels? And this is what we came up with!
The keychain-friendly board plugs into a computer's USB port. Neo Trinkey only has a handful, or finger-full, of components on-board.
The most striking component is the four RGB NeoPixels. If you are not familiar with NeoPixels, they are addressable RGB LEDs. Each LED package contains three elements (red, green, and blue) and a shift register. On a board like this one, they are chained together with commands sent by a microcontroller.
Running Neo Trinkey is a SAM D21 with an Arm Cortex M0+ core running at 48 MHz with 32 kilobytes of RAM and 256 kilobytes of flash. This processor is a popular choice for 32-bit Arduino boards. Extensive library and code support is available for both the Arduino IDE and Adafruit's CircuitPython.
Other components include a regulator, reset button, and two capacitive touchpoints. Adafruit designed these points into the edge of Neo Trinkey's PCB. (Far away, the edge looks like continuous copper. However, there is a small gap forming the two pads.) A quick and simple demonstration is changing the NeoPixels' brightness with the pads. Of course, you can program the buttons to do other tasks and have the NeoPixels display information instead of just a beautiful rainbow pattern.
Big ideas are no problem for such a small board. Adafruit has examples of how to interface with the capacitive touch buttons, make beautiful patterns on the RGB NeoPixels, and make the SAM D21 act as native USB devices.
The form factor makes Neo Trinkey an adorable keychain accessory. A functional project idea would be acting as a USB keyboard that performs a macro when one of the buttons is touched. Another possibility is using the four RGB NeoPixels to act as a notifier for an application running on the PC. Yet another option is to use the Neo Trinkey as a compact platform to learn CircuitPython!
To dive into the details or to pick one up, Neo Trinkey is available on Adafruit's store for $6.95.