Mini Sparkle Motion – WLED-friendly ESP32 NeoPixel LED Driver

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, 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 outputs 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 2 x 3 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 analogue/digital input JST port for analogue input, potentiometer, microphone or external IR receiver on pin 13
• Compact enough that you can use it for wearable projects – 1.2’x0.8′ / 30mm x 20mm size with mounting holes

While we recommend it for use with WLED, it will also work just fine as a compact ESP32 board for use with Arduino, ESP-IDF, MicroPython, CircuitPython or any other ESP32-supported codebase.

Note that, unlike the classic Sparkle Motion board, we don’t include terminal blocks pre-soldered to keep the board very slim;  We do stock the matching blocks if you want them, a small amount of soldering is required to attach them. Or, if soldering isn’t your thing, we sell a version with the terminal blocks pre-soldered.

Also, unlike the bigger version, we dropped the on-board IR receiver; however, it is easy to add one by plugging in a JST SH 3-pin socket cable and slotting in an IR receiver module.

Specifications

• Dimensions: 31.6mm x 19.8mm x 7.3mm
• Weight: 3.1g