 I'm on park and it's time for JP's product pick of the week. Thanks for tuning in. Here we are. And when I say we, I mean, well me and you, the viewers who are probably hanging out in one of our chats, that's the segue, the chat. Go over to the Adafruit Discord if you want a chat. I'm also checking out the YouTube chat. I'm not over in Twitch and some of the other places. So if you're wondering where people are talking away with their fingers, it's probably in Discord and you can get there by going to adafruit.it slash discord and head over to the live broadcast channel. And there you'll see such lovely people as Dr. C Grover, Mr. Certainly, S-Riggs. Hello, hello, hello, everybody. Nice to see you all. Hey, Hutton, Hutto Dan. Nice to see you. The YouTube chat, we've got Anthony, Hi Anthony, Dave, Gary, welcome Patrick, hello, hello. So let's see. One thing that I want to do right away before I forget is send you to the place where the discounts live. So you can get that kind of discount by pointing your camera at that thing down there or this URL here. And that's going to take you to our product page for this week's product pick of the week. And if I refresh that, cross fingers, we should see, hey, it's half off. So a 50% discount. This product has never been this inexpensive before. So head over there. But before I get too out of order, what I'd like to do is invite Lady Aida to tell us a little bit about this product pick, and this one has a little bit of history. So we're going to go through a couple of stages of it leading up to today. So please take it away, Lady Aida. This is the MP3 feather wing. It's a music maker feather wing because it actually does more than play MP3s. It can play waves. It can play on Vorbis files. It can play like WMAs or some other format. Mostly people play, or AAC, mostly people play MP3s. That's what people know it as. This chipset does all the decoding for you. So while you can do native decoding on some chips if they have enough power, you have to kind of spend all your time just playing music. What's nice about this chip is it does all of the work for you. You can basically pipe data from the SD card, pipe it to the chip, and audio comes out. This one has a headphone jack. There may be in the future a version with an amplifier output. It's not out yet. Don't ask. That's it. You're jamming. And that's it. But of course the code on here, you tell it what file you want to play, and you can pause it, and you can change the bass and the treble and the volume, and you can do all sorts of digital controls. So it's great if you just want to have a feather that has some sound effects. This makes it very, very easy to do. So it's very powerful. Again, it can decode a wide variety of different formats. And it even comes with an SD card holder. Or of course you can stream it over Wi-Fi if you have a Wi-Fi feather wing. And then you can also, as a bonus, it doesn't have microphone input, but you can use it as a MIDI synthesizer. Oh. It's a little bit weird. It's not, I don't know exactly, I guess they just had one chip and they used it for both. But if you don't want to use it for MP3 decoding, if you solder a header, solder a jumper on the bottom, you can put it into MIDI control mode. And then you send it MIDI messages. And it has like 100 built-in synthesizer effects. You can play audio as a synthesizer, not like a file. Yeah. So if you want to have just a music effect, like it has, like my favorite is Ocarina. There's an Ocarina. So it sounds like an Ocarina. There's piano, of course, and a couple drum machines all built into this. But yeah, right now it's just playing the MP3. So you can do a couple different things. And I think it's great if people want to add audio. It will basically make a music maker shrunken down to a feather wing. It is an update, well, a revision of the music maker feather wing. This time instead of headphone out, it has an amplifier built in. And so you can just connect speakers directly. There's some four-ohm speakers. And it will bump some tunes for you. It works with all of our feathers, which is really nice. Even the ESP8266 or the NR52, it's all been tested. And you get MP3, Augvorbis, even wave playback. And again, you have the amplifier built in. So it's really good for projects where you want to do some audio playback and you don't want to have a separate amplifier. You just want to have speakers directly. My entire music collection is an Augvorbis Lediata. I took my fedora to you. I'm not surprised. And I have a demo even. So for example, here is the feather wing on top of a 328 or 324. We made this music. So YouTube don't content ideas. Yeah. You have a physical album. We made this music. So drive some speakers very nicely. And it's not very loud because it wanted to overwhelm. But you can get pretty loud, three watts per channel. And just make sure that your battery or your USB connector can supply the current. But pretty handy. And how loud it is? It's so loud that when Lady Aida has her door closed and doing engineering far away from me, and I'm trying to sleep, I can still hear it. All lies. All right. Very loud. But yeah, do you want to do music, playback, edit to your feather? Who knows what you want to do, like Bluetooth? It's a little too loud. What? It's OK. It's good loud. Yeah, good loud. Good loud. Good loud. By the way, I love digging back into the archives of Ask an Engineer, New, New, New section to play some of those older videos of Phil and the Moor because it's just fun. It's fun to see them in their banter. So let's see. Really cool board. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go grab one out of my mystery cabinet full of drawers of wonderment and joy. And then I'm going to show you some demos and talk about the product a little bit, show you some code. Hang on while I head over there. Hey, I'm back. Yeah, so that is our product pick of the week. It is the Music Maker feather wing with built-in amplifier. So as you saw, there's actually two versions of this that we have. One has a headphone out, so that's a lower level. This one actually has a stereo 3-watt amp on it, so you can plug it into speakers, which I'll show you a demo of. And actually, I have the other one, so I'll show you that one just because it was convenient for doing a demo of the MIDI stuff. But this can play back a whole bunch of different types of music formats with decoding built onto the chip. It's the VS-1053 chip. And it can play back Vorbis MP3, AAC, Wave. Might be a couple of others in there. And like we said, it also has a general MIDI synthesizer built onto it with 127 different voices that you can pick from. And I'll show you how you do that. So we can dive into a couple of demos. How about it? So let's jump to my overhead for a second here. And what you'll see is I've got a little demo built here where I have a feather. I'm actually just using a feather M0. And then I have my Music Maker feather wing. And I have an SD card in it that has three MP3s on it that I placed onto there. And then you can see I'm just running one speaker, but you can do two. You can do stereo. You can do a little stereo separation. And this particular Music Maker feather wing is really great when you want to do a compact project that is sort of self-contained and has its own sound source. So it's got the amp. It's got some speakers on it. Great for props, great for cosplay types of things. So let's take a look actually. What I'm going to do is I'll pull my microphone over to the speaker on there while I play so you can hear it. One second, oops, lost a window. There it is. All right, so I'll put this mic back. So you can see we get some decent sound out of that. Hopefully you could hear that well enough with the mic up. And I've got my air conditioning running so it's actually a little hard to hear. I wonder if that tape is going to hold. We'll see. Come on, Gaffer tape, do your job. So what you'll see that I was doing there is actually, you can see the code here. I'm running this in Arduino. Unfortunately, we don't have this running in Circuit Python. There are some complexities involving timing and interrupts and things that means that this is Arduino only for the most part. I think you can do the sine wave sound off of it. It can generate its own sine wave as far as music playback. You can definitely use it as a MIDI synth using Circuit Python. And I'll show you a bit about that. So that half of it, we've got it covered. But as far as music playback right now, you're going to want to use Arduino for this. And sorry, I'm nervous about this mic falling. So what you can see here is I've got the VS1053 library being brought in here in Arduino. And then we're setting some pins that are going to talk to the board, talk to the chip, creating the object for the file player, calling it music player. And then we do a little bit of serial setup. And then we go ahead and play a sine test. So that's the first thing you'll hear when you restart this is it'll play a little sine test so you know things are working. Then we go and check for a SD card. And there's a little code at the bottom of this that is a function for checking the file system and seeing if we've got files on there that we can play. You set the volume here. Lower is higher. You set some interrupts if you've got them. And then we start playing one of the files here. So this says beepbox.mp3. So what I'm going to do is if you watch the serial output there, I'm going to restart the board by just hitting reset on it. And so you can see there it played its sound, its little sine test. Then it checked the SD card. It actually tells me the name of the files that are on there, which is convenient because then you can go and ask for them by name in your code. And then what I have it doing is actually it starts playing files and it'll play them through but you can also interrupt them, which is great. So if you want to do things like fast forward or make sound effects if you're making a little sound board you can do that pretty easily. The way I'm triggering it rather than using a button or something like that in here is just with some serial commands. So you can see here if I press A it's going to play that first song. I can pause by hitting P. I can start playing again from where I was and then I set it up for B and C to be the other songs. So that's something you could do with buttons and dials and selector switches and things like that. I just happen to have it set up for demonstration purposes inside of the serial console. And let's see. Next thing I want to do is actually talk about using the synthesizer for this. So I'm going to set this demo off to the side and bring something else in here. So here you'll see the bottom of the board, there's a little solder blob there actually not so little that I used to bridge two pads. And when those are bridged it puts the chip into its synthesizer, midi-synthesizer mode. You could use a switch for that if you wanted to be able to go back and forth between the two. But it's essentially in one mode or the other when it starts up so you're not going to switch that on the fly. It's not going to be both a synth and a music playback as far as I know. Maybe it's possible but I'm not using it that way. So you can see here there are a couple of ways you could use this. One would be to actually stack it on top of a feather or set it side by side on a feather with a little feather doubler like you saw or a little feather tripler like you saw here. And then what you'd be doing in code is using CircuitPython in classic midi mode or UART midi so it's just sending midi over its TX pin. And that lines up with the midi pin so the TX pin on a feather lines up with the midi pin you'll see there's a pin labeled midi under here. And as long as we've got power to the board and a shared ground then we can send midi from any device in the case I'm describing a feather but it could be any device that can send midi. And then this chip is going to play the midi sounds it'll accept the bank select or program change to change to the different sounds and it even has a couple of sort of hard coded midi CC numbers that you can use to change the reverb and the volume and two or three other things. And so what I've got set up here is actually instead of stacking it on a feather someone had actually asked this question a little while ago could you use this essentially as a stand-alone synthesizer. And the answer is yes you just need to like I said provide power ground and a midi signal over UART or over TX which is what a classic midi device if you go find a keyboard from 1983 that outputs midi it would work with this. So you can see this one happens to be the not the amplifier version that I have over here it's just what I had. So I've got a output going to a powered speaker over here and then to run it we've got options. So you could run it with like I said a traditional midi synthesizer so something something like this but with real midi output would be ideal I've actually got USB midi out on this and if I have time to show the demo I've got another box that converts that to sort of the classic midi so I'm going a few directions with that signal. But for this demo right here what I've got is my midi tester that I showed before which was originally just for USB but I decided to update it to send out classic UART over the TX cable and I'm using actually the I squared C stem acute cable to do that so I'm getting power and ground transmit and receive although this isn't sending anything the other way around. So let's see I'm gonna so you can hear I'll put the volume up a little so I'm just testing this is a chromatic keyboard so things I play on it probably won't sound so great but what I can do is I can change the patches and it's polyphonic you can send multiple notes at once. Let's see Lady Aida said she likes the Ocarina sound and I'm gonna show you how I know this but that is actually sound number 80 and that's because this is a standard that was created along with the midi standard back in the 1980s of the preset sounds okay so that's the Ocarina sound and then there's a bunch of them in here weird one okay and that's the top one that's the as far as it goes. Now the interesting thing actually one other thing I want to show you is that when we're talking midi we have these channels that midi can be sent over so you could typically have like three pieces of gear and send from one keyboard to channel one to one piece of gear channel two for another maybe channel three is going to a drum machine and actually when it's drum machines typically that's channel 10 again just a sort of convention so what I'm gonna do is I've updated this so that I can pick a channel and now if I send things over channel 10 instead of acting as like a pitch based midi keyboard this is gonna trigger drum sounds that again are in sort of preset places move that speaker closer it's crackling sorry okay I'm not much of a finger drummer but you can see there again this little versatile chip on here can do the full drum side of midi which is pretty cool in fact someone just shared over in the chat so I wanted to show this if we head to the product page down in the bottom of the product page we have technical details click on that it'll take you to the main guide for the music maker featherwing and this pertains to both the headphone out version and the amplifier out version that you can see there if we take a look at the downloads section one of the downloads is the datasheet for this chip so this tells you all the different formats of music that it can decode which is really cool a lot of details on the implementation and you will also see there's info about the use of playing sine waves and the midi implementation if I look I'm going to search in here if I look at just search for the word midi see it shows up 35 times let's get to the chart hopefully I've passed it haven't I oh Todd what page was that on you have it pulled up over on the over in the chat scroll a little bit this is also something you can find just by googling for the general midi implementation chart I'll tell you what the different patches are there they are so as I was scrolling through back over on channel one whoops channel one there we go so patch 43 right here that is a cello if we look at the beginning of those a lot of pianos in there you can get some more effects kinds of things in the later numbers here this will be a clarinet let's go tinker bell on 113 that ooh fun so the that's the midi implementation in a nut shell again like I said the cool thing is this is a really versatile chip that can do both the playback switch cameras here both the playback of sounds in one mode and that's like I said pretty much geared towards arduino right now I know there are some attempts being made to get that driver to work under circuit python but there are challenges so for now you'd want to use this like someone said in the chat you could use this to build an open source mp3 player which is really cool you could use it for triggering sounds and props and actually one thing I'm hopeful of is that with a little bit just a little bit more work this should run on the feather rp2040 which is really interesting because the feather rp2040 on its own is not going to be able to decode mp3 you'll notice some of our chips like the m4 chip can decode in the nrf52840 I believe they can decode mp3 on their own so you kind of don't need something like this but if you want to use the rp2040 I think with just a little bit of work will inside of arduino you'll be able to get that to play sounds for you as well as it's got the built-in amplifier which is really cool so let's see any other questions over in the chat let me know I'm looking over at the discord chat hey tall dark and weirdo nice to see you he said I feel like it's it's dying to become a concealed audio graffiti device that's cool yeah I like that and you can do a lot with it like I said plugged into a feather and and talking to it in arduino have it react to things based on sensors change its volume play snippets of things in random orders is a lot you can do programmatically then it also just has this other fun side of things where it can be a MIDI synthesizer and it doesn't even necessarily need to be plugged onto a feather you could you could plug anything that that talks classic serial MIDI to it that's kind of cool let's see what have I forgotten I've forgotten anything there's the there's a pretty picture of it right there you can see it's got the the holes in it for feather layout pins comes with some some pin headers to plug into there's actually a couple extra on one end you can snap off and save them for another day and it has these screw terminals which are nice for plugging in the speaker of your choice up there on the top you could of course also use other types of connectors on there or soldered directly to it depending on your use because these things sometimes can pull out those are in pretty good based on the type of wire that's there but that's not always the case with these like I said SD card for storing your files which again this is a M zero that I have on here not a lot of room to store stuff if you're doing native mp3 playback in circuit Python on it but if you were willing to go over to Arduino now you can have skies the limit on SD card storage I think this might be a 8 gigabyte card on there so I'm not gonna run out of space quickly with mp3s let's see any other thoughts or questions let me know in the chat oh okay so rich rich said has question what box do you use to convert the USB MIDI to normal MIDI so yeah let's go a little little over here if I can keep this working let me bring I won't demo it because I won't be able to plug it all in easily over there but what I'm using is a beautiful little box called the RK 006 from retro kits and you can see it has a on-the-go cable and for power and USB data so it can bring in USB MIDI it's a USB MIDI host so this dumb USB MIDI keyboard and these things are really dumb this dumb USB MIDI keyboard needs to be plugged into a host device that has the smarts so this little box here RKO 7 can host it and then it's got 10 outputs for serial MIDI for clock gate you can even sort of do CV over it PWM CV so the setup that I built here I actually have this gray cable going into a little TRS MIDI slot and that's going to the box there so that means this box is sending TRS MIDI over to this little gizmo and then this little gizmo sends out its audio from that there you can see why I didn't want to re-plug it in so that box converts the USB MIDI that's hosted into the classic MIDI lots of channels of it and then it also does a ton more you can program it to filter things to do weird shifts of octaves for you make its own arpeggios it can do a ton it's pretty cool so that's the retro kits RK 007 or 6 006 they have a 7 that's a DIY thingy so that's the box I'm using there are a few options out there of things that convert USB hosted MIDI into a TRS MIDI or classic MIDI DIN 5 signal alright other questions I think that's gonna do it this is a cool board I've used it before and props I think it's the one that I had in one of my earlier versions of the Lucio blaster gun for firing off sound effects it's it's really great for that sort of thing and the SD card slot is pretty cool compared to some of the other options out there if you need to just load a new sound pack onto a device and just order them in a certain way this is a great card or a great board to do it with alright so I think it's time to wrap it up don't forget if you head to that page right there during the show you're gonna get 50% off which is terrific deal we've never put this thing on such a deep discount before I don't think and there's a lot of tutorials on how to use it this is this was actually part of one of the eight of boxes I think eight of box six maybe had this in it's a lot of projects out there for for using this in all kinds of interesting ways including connecting up to Adafruit IO or web-based things Wi-Fi Bluetooth you can trigger it from all kinds of different feathers with different capabilities which is really cool alright so let's wrap it up thanks for coming by first of all and for Adafruit Industries I'm John Park this is my product pick of the week it is the music maker feather wing it plays back MP3s wave files and it's a MIDI synthesizer I'm gonna go ahead set that there on my product pick wall of goodness and thank you so much I'll be hanging out in the chat a little bit if you have further questions but go get yourself one of these or two or ten that's the most I think we'll sell at this price to one person and I want to hear about your plans if you're getting ten of them so that is gonna be available at this price just during the show so when I log off you've got a little bit of a grace period I think if it's in your cart to go ahead and buy it and otherwise it'll it'll jump back up to the regular price so thank you everyone and I will see you next time bye bye