Best way to program Circuit Playground Classic on Chromebook

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stareyes
 
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Joined: Wed Apr 30, 2014 1:13 am

Best way to program Circuit Playground Classic on Chromebook

Post by stareyes »

Hi,
I'm looking for good ways for students to program the Circuit Playground Classic on their Chromebooks. Arduino IDE doesn't appear to support the Circuit Playground (am I wrong)?

We had been using codebender (in fact, paying for a subscription), but the code bender edu page (https://edu.codebender.cc/) appears to have expired this week - error messages are up and the url we had been paying for was suddenly defunct.

Any ideas? We can pay for limited subscriptions. We are working with 550 students in 16 high school classrooms (already have all the supplies, the curriculum, etc.). Some have Arduino on desktop computers, but many classrooms only have Chromebooks, so we need a web-based option.

Thanks for your help!

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danhalbert
 
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Joined: Tue Aug 08, 2017 12:37 pm

Re: Best way to program Circuit Playground Classic on Chrome

Post by danhalbert »

I don't know what to say about codebender.cc. I checked their Twitter feed and there's no indication they've gone defunct. Have you contacted their support folks?

https://create.arduino.cc is an online version of the Arduino IDE, but there's a $0.99/month subscription for Chromebooks. The blog post announcing it talks about upcoming education pricing, but I haven't been able to find further definitive information: https://blog.arduino.cc/2017/07/17/ardu ... s-devices/

Another common way to use CP Classic with Chromebooks is to use the code.org app: https://code.org/circuitplayground. (Also see https://support.code.org/hc/en-us/artic ... up-Support). A program called Firmata runs on the CP and takes commands from the block-style programming app in code.org. So it does not run disconnected from the Chromebook.

The regular Arduino IDE does indeed support the Circuit Playground Classic. It's under "Arduino AVR boards" in the Tools->Board menu. But it was added to the basic Arduino IDE within the past couple of years, so you might need to upgrade to a newer version of Arduino. You can also find it in the Boards menu under "Adafruit Boards" if you install the Adafruit AVR board support package.

Another Chromebook option is this: https://embeditelectronics.com/blog/pro ... layground/, which I hadn't heard of before now.

You probably already know about Circuit Playground Express, which works with makecode.org, Arduino, and CircuitPython. But since you have lots of CP Classics, replacing those may not be an option.

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