 This month on Maker Update, a Python-powered camera slider, two new Pi portals, iOS notifications for your circuit playground, goggles, baubles, and thermal vision for your projects. Hello and welcome to the first Adafruit edition of Maker Update for our dark and cyberpunk year of 2020. I'm Tyler Weingarner. I'm still waiting for my cyber deck, but we've got an awesome show jam-packed with projects, tips, and tools to help get your year started off right. So let's jack right in to the project of the month. By the time they're ready for the world, a lot of Maker projects still very much look like works in progress. But this motorized camera slider, designed by the Ruiz brothers and coded by Liz Clark, looks like a great example of polished engineering. The frame is made of 2020 aluminum extrusion used in a lot of 3D printer builds, and the slider itself is made of a 15mm slide bearing. Aside from the motors and pulleys, everything else is 3D printed. The brains of the build are based on the Feather platform, and M4 Express handles all the circuit Python code, while the Feather wing drives the stepper motor, and the mini TFT display with joystick is the perfect choice to provide the UI. You can set the slide duration from 5 minutes to up to an hour, and when the motion is completed, you can opt to return to the main menu or repeat the program in the opposite direction. I've said before that any Maker and videographer almost inevitably tackles this sort of project, and it makes sense, the commercial versions of this can set you back several hundred dollars. But this one looks robust enough for everyday use, and with an additional panning head, you can get some really sophisticated movement. More than that, the design is really a testament to the level of engineering we can achieve with a really solid design. Time for the news. PyPortal, the IoT magic screen for circuit Python, now has a family. There's two new PyPortal products. The Ambigant Titano, and the pint-sized Pint. Titano measures in at 3.5 inches, with double the pixel density, and is powered by a SAMD 51J20 processor. It's fully compatible with the original, but before you go hacking the Gibson, you'll need to update your graphics code to account for the new pixel density. Pint is the newer, smaller version of the PyPortal. It's just 2.4 inches on the diagonal, but everything else is the same as its bigger sisters. Both of the new portals do without the temperature sensor, so if your projects need it, go for the original. Jeremy Williams over at Tested, gave a nice mention to Adafruit and Circuit Playground in his Favorite Things of 2019 video. He recommended it as the best place to begin if you want to start building projects with microcontrollers. He celebrated the huge amount of sensors and outputs available on the board, as well as the spectrum of languages you can use to program it. I have to agree, I'm constantly blown away by the amount of power at your fingertips in such a tiny package. It's like we're living in the future. And finally, there are now over 200 libraries written for Circuit Python to help you use anything from touch sensors to light our modules. It's a huge milestone for the language. You can browse through them or download the entire pack over on the Adafruit blog. Time for more projects. We've seen a lot of cool stuff built with the TFT Gizmo lately, but John Park takes it to the next level with this Notifier display for his iPhone. Built on the Circuit Playground Bluefruit, it taps into the Apple Notification Service Center to display the corresponding app icon when a new notification comes in. Clear the notification on your phone and it disappears from the Gizmo. It's probably obvious from the name, but the Apple Notification Service Center isn't supported on Android. And it's a safe bet that the project isn't coming to that platform anytime soon. Still, it's pretty cool to see projects like this working within the walled garden. Cosplay and replica props rank up there with some of my favorite projects, and these Sister Night goggles from HBO's Watchmen series by their Ruiz brothers are fantastic. They fitted a pair of 16x Neopixel rings to these costume goggles, and then added a rotary switch to select the different modes. A Trinket M0 runs the code, and some 3D printed parts make up the rest of the build. If you need a prop for all tomorrow's parties, this one looks like a great place to get started. We've still got a little bit of a holiday hangover here, and there were some really festive projects from the past few weeks that deserve some spotlight. John Park used the Circuit Playground Bluefruit to make ornaments that are part of a Christmas Day treasure hunt. Pluck it off the tree, and you can use it to find the hidden presents. The closer it is to the gift, the more LEDs light up. It's a great idea, and a cool reveal for that one more thing gift for your loved ones. Liz Clark from the Adafrit community not only wrote the code for our project of the month, she also created this Neopixel-powered Christmas tree display. The project combines some clever 3D printed parts, Circuit Python, electronics, and some really good onomatopoeia. Swoomp it all together. Swoomp is a technical term, which means to hold tightly and snugly with a satisfying fit. The project is also one of Liz's first forays into woodworking. So if you're intimidated by all the master woodworkers on YouTube and want to get started with the basics, this is a great project and a fun result. Time for some tips and tools. Last month we talked about the FT232H breakout that adds I2C, SPI, GPIO, and all the other microcontroller goodness to your desktop computer. Now there's a full set of tutorials to get them to work with Jupyter Notebooks, so you can use these breakouts to interact with sensors and graph the results in real time. There's a few other breakout boards that work with Jupyter Notebooks, and they support Circuit Python, so you'll have access to all the different libraries to help get your project going. The Adafruit Blue Fruit app has been making it easy to interact with their Bluetooth hardware for some time now. But there's a new version out now, specifically for the Circuit Playground Blue Fruit. It's just out for iOS devices for the time being, but there's modules to control the Neopixels, get real-time data from the accelerometer and light sensor, use the Tone Generator to make music, and more. You'll need to load a specific firmware onto your Circuit Playground to use it, but it's easy to swap back and forth. Go check it out in the App Store. There's really no shortage of soldering guides out there, but there are a few that are as comprehensive as this video from Leida Ada herself as part of the Circuit Playground video series. She covers the science of soldering, all of the tools you'll need to do it safely and easily, and the actual technique of soldering. It's easier than ever to get pretty far in learning electronics without ever needing to solder anything, but it's a great skill to have, and this kid-friendly video makes it easy for anyone to pick up. This month's Adafruit featured product is a bit of a mouthful, but the MLX90640 is a 32x24 pixel thermal camera, compatible with just about any project. In reality, it's just an array of thermal sensors with 110-degree field of view, but when you couple that array with a screen, you can see the output of those sensors in near real-time at 16 frames per second. It communicates over I2C, and while it does have some CPU requirements for your controller, it's fully compatible with M0 and M4 hardware. It reports on temperatures ranging from negative 40 to 300 degrees centigrade, but it concs out if the board itself gets above 85, so make sure to keep it cool in hot environments. It's amazing to see that we have tools like this at our fingertips. And that is going to do it for this month's show. I hope you've had a fantastic holiday and the past few weeks have been restful. If you've got something out of this show, give us a thumbs up or leave us a comment. We're going to be playing around with the scheduling of the show throughout the year, so maybe start looking for it towards the beginning of the week, or just hit subscribe so you don't miss the next one. As always, huge thanks to Adafruit for giving this show a home, and to you for watching. We'll see you in February.