The Adafruit Sparkle Motion Mini is part of our series of "Sparkle Motion" boards, which 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 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!

This version includes a pre-soldered terminal block, that means no soldering is required to get started: a small screwdriver will get you going instantly. However, the board is bulkier and the terminal block overlaps half of one of the breakout pads.

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 output are level shifted to 5V. These are on 0.1" spaced breakout pads.
Extra 2x3 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 analog/digital input JST port for analog input, potentiometer, microphone, or external IR receiver on pin 13
Compact enough 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 fine as a compact ESP32 board for use with Arduino, ESP-IDF, MicroPython, CircuitPython, or any other ESP32-supported codebase.

Comes as a fully assembled driver board with a 3.5mm terminal block

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