 Welcome to the show. It's me, John Park, and it's time for John Park's workshop. Thanks everyone for stopping by. Here you all are over in Discord land. Look, there's the people in Discord. If you're wondering where the chat is, if you're over in Twitch, perhaps, or Facebook, or watching on Periscope, and you're wondering, who's he talking to? Who are these people who are asking questions? How does that all work? Well, that's how it all works. Also, I've got an eyeball over on YouTube, so if you're over there, I may see that, but your best bet for chat is in our Discord, and you can get there by going to adafru.it-discord. You'll get an instant link, and you can join the conversation with such people as Susan, who just waved her little kitten paw in the chat there, and our good friend Steve. Okay, you're on. Hey, Steve, nice to see you. Thanks for coming by. Xenia, Shania, Translinux, Foxgirl. I don't know how to pronounce her first name, so let us know. Hey, the cron job. And ooh, all right. Cgrover says that the mic audio is peaking at negative 3 dB and no clipping. This is my second triumph of the day, the first being that we got bleeps and bloops heading out when I played the song. But I have done a major overhaul on my streaming system, and so you will hopefully, crossing fingers, have a very nice streaming experience today. I've got different audio interface running. I've updated operating systems. I've upgraded a newer version of the streaming software. A whole lot of cool stuff going on. And why don't we get to it? Let's get to the show, shall we? Let's see. First thing I want to do, hey, first thing I actually want to do is see, can I clean up the chroma key that this thing is doing in real time? Because you'll notice I got my green screen hooked up there, and it's doing a little bit of a funny thing in the background. So let's give me a moment and see if I can tweak those settings a little. Let's see. That works. Yeah, that's better. I think that really drifted far from the color that it was originally set at. All right, I think that's going to work. And we'll check this one too. Yeah, that one's solid. Okay, so as you may guess from all that, I'm going to be doing some stuff related to the green screen today. Okay, that one's not perfect, but it's pretty far away from the light source, so I'll let it be. That's going to be my project that I work on a little later in the show, but first we have some other housekeeping details to get to. So first one is to mention that Etabox is coming. Coming soon. Coming soon to a mailbox near you. If you were a subscriber to this Etabox, then you are going to want to head to your computer to watch next Wednesday evening. It's going to be an Etabox unboxing takeover of the Ask an Engineer show. So normally that show is 8pm and it's Lady Aida and Mr. Lady Aida. But I'm going to be doing an unboxing next Wednesday. So that is something that I'm involved with right now is doing some filming. That's actually why I've got the green screen up. Filming for the non-live section of it. It's going to be followed by the live part of the unboxing and we'll go over all the goodies in there and talk about how they're used and some projects you can do with them. If you didn't sign up for that one, I'll say it now. Go ahead and sign up for Etabox 19, which is going to be coming out later in the summer. It's going to be a great one. Aren't they all great? The Etaboxes are really terrific. So the cron job says they got theirs today. No spoilers. All right, yeah, they are, I know 18. Mr. Certainly, can you believe that? 18 Etaboxes we've put out. That's four a year for four plus years. Quite amazing, I think. That's my math right? Yeah. Let's see. So yeah, so head over there. Etabox is going to be played on YouTube. That's where you'll be able to watch it live and then you can pick up the video later afterwards. So that's next Wednesday, the 19th at 8 p.m. Eastern time. Let's see. Next up, we've got our jobs board. And if you head on over to jobs.atafruit.com. This is what you're going to see. This over here in the side, let me move that. That got there. Oops. Shoot that over there. That's a little better. That's the Etabox site. If you head to jobs.atafruit.com, you will see we've got a whole bunch of jobs that are posted by people in the community and companies looking to hire people, as well as people posting their own info if they're looking to be found. Here's a new ish one shop supervisor and lead technician at Micro in Brooklyn, New York. That's a full time position. So if you're in Brooklyn or surrounding area and that looks interesting to you, go check it out. That's at jobs.atafruit.com. All right. Let's see. Next up, the product pick of the week. So I have a show on Tuesdays at this same time. So one o'clock Pacific, four o'clock Eastern time. It looks something like this. It is JP's product pick of the week. And each week I pick a new product to check out about 15 minutes of demoing it, talking about the product, looking at the specs on it. And then I do a little one minute recap. So here's that recap from this week. Check it out. It is the I squared C QT Rotary Encoder Breakout with NeoPixel. You can plug this in over the stem of QT cables, add a rotary encoder to it. So this plugs right into here. But by adding this board, you get a really convenient way to add a rotary encoder to your project. So I've plugged this into one, two, three and four of our Rotary Encoder Breakouts. And then you can see we're getting an update on the encoder values of three of them. That's just what fit in the in the code here over I squared C. So these have up to eight of them chainable on a single I squared C port because they have different address jumpers on the bottom side of them. That's my product pick of the week. It is the I squared C QT Rotary Encoder Stemma QT with NeoPixel Breakout Board. Wanted to mention someone mentioned this in the chat. They got their Aida box and they have not yet seen the tutorials online. That's because they are not yet up. We're waiting to publish them. I think we published later today. So if you head to the Aida Fruit Learn system and check the Aida box 18 Learn guide, it should be up later today. Don't look at it if you don't want spoilers because it'll tell you everything that's in there. All right, let's see. What's next? What have we got next? So, oh, before I forget, I wanted to say that it really is, it takes a community. It takes a village to do the things that we do. And I wanted to thank one of our community members, C Grover in our chat, who helped me figure out some of these audio settings that are making this sound better, hopefully, today. And I appreciate that because we did a little temporary live stream and went over about four or five different permutations of equipment plugged into other equipment to arrive at what we've got working today. So thank you so much, C Grover, really helpful to be able to do that, not in a vacuum, but with someone else listening on the other end. So I appreciate that. Stuart Riggs asks over in the YouTube chat, it says, extra sharp video, what type of camera are you using? I should do a new studio tour here sometime, maybe later in the summer, to give you an idea of what I'm working with. But the short version of it is, I have an iMac Pro, which is what I'm using for this, all the broadcasting, all the video feeds and things are going into audio. This is the camera that's built into it that you're seeing right now. It's actually a really nice camera. It's pretty much the nicest one in a Mac that I've seen my laptop. I have a very new laptop from well from last year. Terrible camera. It's a MacBook Pro, very expensive laptop, super great features, crummy camera in it. This one actually has a pretty nice camera. And then I use a couple of Micro Four Thirds, mirrorless Sony Alpha Series cameras for both my main cam, this one here, which has got a manual focus on it, so it's not going to focus on me right now. And same with that down shooter, that one, those are both mirrorless Micro Four Thirds. And they are all going through some very nice conversion boxes video that takes HDMI, which is what the camera's put out, and converts that to USB 3. And part of the solution, part of what I've fixed recently to deal with some of the crashes that we had going back a couple of weeks, I think one of the things that seems to have fixed stuff is I'm going through a really nice Thunderbolt dock now that is, I think it's got a 20 volt DC9 amp power supply, so I have a lot of stuff on the USB buses, and now it's handled neatly by that powered hub instead of plugging straight back into the machine. Oh yeah, Mr. Certainly says that the Mac M1 will be getting a boost on the web cam, so I figured when I got a new MacBook that didn't have a very good camera in it, they were holding off so that that would be a feature for them to tout on the next ones, which is a bummer, but what you're going to do. All right, so let's see the next thing. Oh, let's get ready for our next segment, and part of that is me finding some windows that I've buried here, even though I got three monitors plugged in, it's still easy to lose some windows. So here we go, get ready for this one. Yes, it's the Circuit Python Parsec, and for the Circuit Python Parsec today, I wanted to talk about reading an analog input on a Circuit Python device. So here I have an itsy-bitsy M0, and plugged into it is an analog input. This is a soft potentiometer, but the things I'm doing would be the same if you were using a regular potentiometer, a force-sense resistor, anything that is an analog input. And let's demo first what's going on. So you can see I have a plotter here. And oh, that plotter is not updating. Hold on one second. Let's try. Well, that's too bad. We don't get to see the plotter. How about that? So what you can see right now, I'll show the code in a second, but what you see right now is I have a power and a ground pin connected to this soft pot. And in the center is the signal pin, which is actually acting as a voltage divider. So it sends out varying voltage as I touch this soft pot. And then I'm converting that into some PWM values for that big LED there. So you can see its brightness is changing as I touch the soft pot. If I stop touching it goes to its center value. And you can also just kind of tap it places, which is sort of neat. And if we take a look at the code here, I'll open up Adam. So what's going on when you want to use an analog input, we're importing the most important things are boards. So we get pin definitions for some of these analog pins, and the analog IO. Then I'm setting up this soft pot object. It's a variable that is the analog IO on board a five, which is where I have this plugged in. Then I'm setting up some LED stuff so that we can drive its brightness. And then in my true loop here, you can see I am reading that soft pot value, and just giving that a nice neat name. So analog value is whatever soft pot dot value is. And then I print that in my serial monitor. And I'm also then driving the LED duty cycle from that. And so that is how you can read the analog value of a potentiometer, a soft pot or other analog device in circuit Python on an analog to digital conversion pin. And that is your circuit Python parsec. Now just for fun, I am going to try to get this plotter working. Let's see what, what, what causes that to not show up? That's weird, because the one I'm looking at is showing up, right? Ah, I have two of them open, I think. Where is that one coming from? All right, let's, let's try to fix this one second, if you'll bear with me, serial plotter. Yeah. And how about go grab a new window? Let's add a screen capture. This is very dangerous. Fiddle with this, but I can't help it. Okay, let's go and grab a window. Arduino. There we go. That's a nice big, huge serial monitor. Make that a little smaller and set that down here. Yeah, I don't know what happened there. I should have just used move, but I decided to get fancy and use this plotter and it runs a little faster, I think. And now you can see it in action. I'll put this back here in the background. So here you can see as I adjust the the position on this soft pot, where I'm pressing down on its little resistive material, I am changing the analog output voltage that it's sending, which is being read by the analog input on the itsy bitsy. And then we get a nice smooth graph there, which you can see is correlated to the LED brightness. And you can bet I'm going to go ahead and edit that into the circuit Python parsec, as if it all happened perfectly. That's the magic of editing, the little recaps a little later, magic of editing. All right, let's see, let me grab the discord chat. Oh, there's a bear waving at us. What's this bear? Who's this bear? I bear. I like that bear. All right. Let's see. So next thing I wanted to do is jump into the project that I'm working on this week, or something that I cooked up. And let's see the best, I think the best way we can explore this is I'm going to show you this really cool gizmo here. So move some things out of the way. This is the Game Bueno Dazzler. And I'll show you this things arranged. I'll show you this in the overhead view. And you know what, since I'm not showing that bright LED anymore, I can fix this exposure. It's a little better. And if my cables will allow it, what you can see here is that we have a feather m4 express plugged into this carrier board. And then we have the GD 3x Dazzler from Game Bueno. And this is sort of a, essentially a graphics chip set that you can communicate to from some other boards as an Arduino that'll work with it. There's this feather m4. I think a teensy that'll work with it. And the Pico, I believe, or maybe it's one of the Raspberry Pis, but in fact, let me show you this on our site. Let's jump into a Chrome window here for a second. So this is it the game. I'm sorry, Game Dueno. I called it Game Bueno. That's I think that's a different thing. There's a lot of names like that. Sorry about that. So the Game Dueno 3x Dazzler for Feather M4 by X Camera Labs. Very cool demo here of some alpha channeled transparent background bitmaps being transformed really nicely and smoothly. And this has an HDMI out on it. So you can run this into a TV or a monitor that has HDMI. In my case, I'm actually running it through video capture card. And that's what this graphic that you're seeing behind me is right now, just this text. So I've modified the Hello World example. And I'll show you that and some other examples of this. If you check this out, there's some links to the documentation. Here is some setup and installation. There's a community bundle that you'll download. And then you can grab the driver or libraries that you need for the Circuit Python device. But this is really cool because it allows you to code in Circuit Python. And then all the really fast stuff for the graphics is happening over on the Dazzler board itself. And then there's some sample code from the examples in the bundle. And then there's the main documentation. And there's also a blog post. This contains the info as well as a download for doing that particular Blinka example. So I'm going to be checking that later. Oops, let's jump back over to the main view here. And I'm going to throw my Adam view up. Let me make that a little smaller for a second. And let's grab Adam. Okay, so here is this main example. And I might have to do a little bit of a restart here to get this talking to that device. But I think it's the only, only device. Okay, yeah, so we saw it restart right there. And I'm going to make that a little smaller so you can see it and I can see it. So I'm just going to change a I'll just comment out a couple of these lines of code here. Oops, I had a whole line picked when I did that. And if I just hit Resave, it's going to save that code .py file to the device. And boom, you can see it very quickly updates. Now it's just saying FeatherM4 at the top. And then I want to grab this demo here. This one's really cool. And then I'll head over to that main camera. And this is why I built this thing because now that I have this very cool retro reflective display for doing green screen or blue screen or any kind of chroma key that you want to do. Then the question is, what are you putting behind it? So you can, if you're doing a pre recorded thing, and then editing later, I tend to edit in Premiere or to do some more advanced compositing in something like Nuke or After Effects. You can put any background you want behind the sort of later. But in the case of real time, so here I am, I'm doing a real time chroma key pull off of that screen. And I want something interesting behind me, you need some kind of a graphics generator. So more more like an old school television station graphics generator. What are you putting behind you? You could do this with software on your computer, but your methods of feeding that into the broadcast software may vary. And if you're doing anything, particularly graphics intensive, you start to have a bit of a conflict there between trying to run all of the broadcast software and also trying to run this graphics generator. So in this case, the all of the graphics generation, all the hard stuff is being done by the Dazzler and it's being convinced of what to do by the feather running circuit Python. But then that's just running as HDMI into my computer. So I'm using I'll show you in a second on the website, I'm using a little device that converts HDMI to USB three. It's how I pretty much do all of the camera capture that I do on the show. And now I can set that camera input as a layer under other camera inputs. In fact, I might show you it'll be a bit of a hall of mirrors, but I might show you what that looks like in the in the software in a second here. So if I head on over here and adjust this, I'm just going to make the graphics you can you can see they're really nice and smooth. I'm just going to make one little adjustment that's going to speed them up. So if we head over here, and I can even put myself in the corner here, there you can see that's the green screen is actually kind of looking a little teal in this color correction, but the camera is seeing it as a pure enough green to chroma key. So let's let's up this frame rate and hit save. And I've noticed sometimes I need to unplug and replug the HDMI cable. I think it's not the game we Game D we know Dazzler's fault. I think it's my capture card needs to be convinced that there's a signal still. So if we if we head over here now, again, you can see we've got this spectacular game of quicks going on in the background. And it's doing a really nice job, you know, integrating between a chroma key and that this is kind of a stress test for your chroma key because black is going to show off any artifacts. So you can see as I as I move my arms close to my body, sometimes you'll see a little bit of a green haloing there or almost just like a white haloing. But otherwise, yes, it's a pretty impressive key. And I got these great graphics back here. So a couple of other demos just because to be honest, I haven't had any time to learn about coding this thing yet other than these examples. And so I'm just going to show you some of the cool examples that came with, rather than try to do anything, all that fancy myself. So here is, yeah, it's going to need a little jiggle of my USB port. Look at that one, huh? And as you can see, I've got that working on a few different of my camera views there. So I can I can be in my main view, I just didn't chroma key out this this upper one here. But I can be in my main view and I'm getting that that little display back there, which is, which is pretty cool. And I should probably just have that running all the time, because that's not gonna, that's not going to drive you bonkers or anything, right? So let's see, to show you a little bit about how how this is working behind the scenes, let me let me do a screen share of my main application window, how about it's a good one, we'll see, we'll see what happens here, how about screen capture new screen capture. And this can take a second, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna share the broadcast software itself. So it'll be a little bit of a hollow mirrors, but not the full screen, which happens sometimes. So give me a moment, it does the window I need here. So I'm gonna do a share of a window and that window is going to be this application itself sounds dangerous. Let's see, will it even let me? I don't know if it'll let me. I've actually never tried that. No, okay, so I'll keep that as a screen, a full monitor share. It really doesn't want me to cause the havoc that I want to cause. Okay, so yeah, so now you're seeing the application, let me see if I can crop in a little bit to make that a little easier to see one moment. And so you'll see here, I'm going into the layer controls themselves and I'm just making a bit of a crop of the windows that you're seeing. And then I'll scale this up. And I'll send that over there. Okay, so here you can see the if you can see this well enough, I'm not sure how good a demo this is. If I take something like this, this view here. Currently, that is one camera input, this FaceTime HD camera, the sort of yellow bar you see off to the left. And move this over a little bit. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a camera source. And that camera source is a video capture USB camera video. It's a little $30 gizmo. And so that is now the sort of full HDMI view of that camera, I'm going to shrink it down. And I'm going to layer it underneath me right here in the corner. I'll leave some of it visible. And then I'm going to take this view. Oh, actually, that's where I want to add it. This will work. This will work too. So what I'm going to do now is just add a chroma key on my little tiny view of me there and send that over. And now you can see we're poking through that view as well. So anywhere now that I have the green screen, we can do that. If I click my little green screen, gizmo and turn it into a blue screen, it might start to fail. Oh, no, weird. I don't know why that works. That's mysterious. Save that for another day. It's all smoking mirrors, isn't it? So I can get us out of that hall of mirrors now and back to here. And then this one in this view that we're looking at, I've actually, again, just like scaled that view a little smaller so that it sort of all fits in there. We can even adjust that further. Let's go here. And I can make a little baby HDMI display right there kind of behind me and off to the side. So now if I change that demo, let's go open up the atom here and I'm going to grab a different one. This one is a pretty cool one. This one shows the temperature of the CPU of the feather or the microcontroller. Again, I'm going to do a little wiggle of my HDMI port. So the capture device notices that it's there. And now you can see I've got this, go to the main cam, hide that there. Oh, look, my lamp is in the way. Let's move that. And now you can see it's 33.8 degrees. If I hold, I have a little aluminum screwdriver, aluminum handle screwdriver, I press that to the CPU, you should see it start to absorb some of that heat and drop. So this is a pretty cool demo on the dazzler there that shows the real time temperature. And that'll appear anywhere that we're showing it. So the devices that I mentioned here, let's bring Chrome back here. So this is this Game Dweeno 3x dazzler for Feather M4 by X camera. Labs, super awesome. There are six of them in stock. Actually, let's let's refresh, make sure that's still true. Five in stock, someone got one. Good, that helps us keep running this show and all the other free shows if you buy some some cool stuff. So I'm excited to dive into this thing. I really have have just just scratched the surface and just plugged it in for the first time today. And then the HDMI input here is this little gizmo. So this is a oh, this is to HD to USB to yeah, so it's working pretty well. It's it's converting the cameras HDMI out to USB to so not a super fast stream, but you can see it's it's plenty fast over there. In fact, let's throw there's a really kooky fast circles demo that if you thought the bubbles was wacky, then then check out this one. So I'm running the game Dweeno dazzler into that HDMI video capture device. And wooh, look at that thing go. I should probably not do that to you. I'm sorry. But it's addictive. Then this is the device that that I'm using to take that into the computer. So pretty much, these are great for any device. If you have a game system that has HDMI out, and you don't have a HDMI that you can use on your computer for whatever reason, you can go through USB 2.0 port for this one, it'll work just fine. So I think that does it let me let me go back to a nice calm demo. And I think this will be something I use in the future for some cool video backgrounds. So I'm glad to have this up and running and working. Now it's a it's a kind of nice neat way to provide some background graphics, when you're using something like a chroma key, or you can just use it for if you want to if you want to learn some graphics programming, some games programming. One of the cool things in fact about this little gizmo is the pair of we accessory plugs on it. So you could use something like a we nunchuck, or I'm guessing classic controller, guitar controllers, you could probably code pretty much any of those we accessory style controllers into those nunchuck ports. There's also a SD card on it. I imagine if you have some larger graphics that aren't going to fit on your microcontroller, you can you can place those on the SD card there. So that is going to do it for today. So thank you so much for stopping by. Like I mentioned before, if you want to check out the unboxing of Eight of Box 18, then come on by on this coming Wednesday at 8pm Eastern time. And we will be doing a bit of a takeover of the usual ask an engineer with our eight box 18 unboxing. If you're a subscriber, join us, grab a box, we'll open them up and take a look at the goodies inside. And if you're not a subscriber, like I've said, go and subscribe and go to eightbox.com and get in on eight of box 19 or subscribe someone else as a gift that that keeps on giving giving. All right, I will check in with our friends over in discord and see do you have any thoughts, comments, questions, feelings. I know there have not been any Lars sightings today. If I'd had the time I was going to involve Lars in this graphics generator, maybe we'll do that as a little bonus next week. Let me pop open my discord so I can see. Let's see. Xenia, you said how to pronounce it and I didn't read that. Where was it? I think that was it. I'm scrolling back. I'm scrolling back. Where did you say it? You set it up here. All right, say it again, how about because I'm not going to scroll up that far and find it apparently asked. I wonder if they have an RCA version. There are some, I believe converter boxes that you could stack. So let's see. I think HDMI to RCA. That's not the direction you want to go, but check HDMI to RCA again. Yeah, I don't know if there's an RCA to HDMI if that's what you're asking on Adafruit. There may be that you can just find one elsewhere and then go through this little converter. If that's the direction you're trying to go, if you're trying to get from the Dazzler to RCA, then there's probably a different converter for you. Stuart S. Riggs asks, what's the name of the cloth slash chroma in the back? That's a retro reflective fabric. And it's called Scotch light from 3M, but there are generic versions of it. And if you head to learn.adafruit.com and type in chroma key. Here is a project I did that shows you how to build it and it shows you where to source it. Easiest places on eBay. You could do searches elsewhere, but you can see here's a retro reflective get a yard or two of this stuff. It's not it's not that expensive. Here's $9 for a yard of 49 inch wide. I think that may be what I have up there right now. I didn't buy either of these I was given this role from a friend of mine who had done a similar project and had some extra so I can't I can't vouch for for those sellers but look around on eBay. I think it's the easiest place to get some. And some fabric stores may have it if you have sort of a garment district in your city with some larger fabric stores. This is used in clothing and accessories. So you can you can find that stuff a lot of places. Let's see other questions. Xenia. Thank you for clarifying that Xenia says I'm an RCA to USB like a RCA capture. Oh boy I used to have one of those a long time ago. So it was a sort of a capture card for PC went into PC slot. It must exist. There are ways. So if anyone has any tips I haven't done that in a while. I think the only remaining thing I have that does that is a mini DV cam quarter that has RCA in and I think a HDMI out. So you may you may find your way through by plugging the sort of chain of things together. Janiske says nice art in the background reminds little screensavers on Windows. Yeah this if you're a graphics programmer demo scene type of person this thing would be great for you. It's it's it's neat. It's small. It's totally flat on the back so you can screw that into something and just attach that to a projector or to a to a display. Really cool. I'd love to see some stuff people do with it. Does it do audio. It does. Yeah it sends both video and audio over the HDMI. I don't have any examples and I haven't tried it but the docs say it does. JP's evil laugh is such a joy to hear. Did I do an evil laugh. Todd by ass is this the thing that JP is using. Yes it is Todd. It's items four nine six nine. The three X. Dazzler. Did you buy it. Who done it. Who went and who went and bought one. That's what I want. All right. I think that's going to do it for today. Okay thank you so much for for playing playing with this fun stuff with me today. And I can't wait to see you all both next Tuesday for the next JP's product pick of the week and on Wednesday for the for the eight a box bring that back up again. Come on by Wednesday for the eight a box unboxing. Last thing I'm going to do is make that display back there super fast. Where did my code go. Let's let's speed that up a bit. And here we go. You ready. Gonna find out what's up with Mike jiggling the HDMI thing. Meow off it goes. Bye everyone.