 Welcome to the show. It's me, John Park. It's time for this week's episode of JP's Product Pick of the Week. Thanks so much for stopping by. We've got some people over in our, presumably people, over in our Discord chat, as well as our YouTube chat. So if you are somewhere else wondering where the chat is, you can head on over to our Discord. That's a great place for it. It looks like this. There it is. That is our Discord. It's at a-to-fru.it Look for the live broadcast chat channel. That's where this is happening. And what I'll also tell you is the place to be besides Discord or maybe the YouTube chat is this right here. This is this week's Product Pick page. And if you head to that QR code or that URL, you can watch this show inside the product page and you will be primed and ready to make your decision. If you think you might want to buy one of these, it's a terrific 50% off discount this week on this Product Pick. And we have about 100, I think, that we threw into the stock. Maybe a few more than that. I think there were maybe 65 available before the show as well as the 100. So there should be plenty. Plenty to go around. That is where you want to be. Head on over there. There's no discount code needed, no coupon code needed. It's just going to be a discounted price just for the duration of this show. So the next 20 minutes or so is the time to do it. And then after the show, the price goes back up to the normal retail price. So head on over there. But as is custom around here, before I say any more, I'm going to have Lady Aida tell us all about this week's Product Pick. So please take it away, Lady Aida. Yay, the Metro RP2040 is finally in the shop. We talked about it a few weeks ago, but it wasn't here. But now it's available. You can buy it and you can even get to use discount code. So we love the Metro shape and series. It's basically allows you use Arduino shields with new chipsets that Arduino may not have made boards for. In particular, this is for the RP2040. So you've got your dual 130 MHz Cortex M0 plus in there. I pair it with 16 megabytes of flash. So plenty of storage for files and images and firmware. All the GPIO, I tried to make them as compatible with the classic Arduino pinout. So pins two through 13 on the top, the UART RX and TX pins on the top right area there, I squared C, SPI. And then there aren't six analog pins. So there's four analog pins A0 through A4 and then GPIO 24 and 25 are where normally you'd have A4 and A5. And then of course the power supply, you can give it 6 to 12 volts DC. And there's a linear regulator that gives you five volts and 3.3 volts. One of the nice things about having the Metro layout is it's kind of big so you get to fit a lot of stuff in it. Like the feather and the QE pie are designed to be very small, but these are bigger boards. And so there's space for an SWD debug port and also a Pico probe port. There's a neopixel on there. There is both DC and USB power. There's a stem of QT port and there's even micro SD card slot. What's going on? Yeah, there's a lot there because I was like, well, you might as well just kind of pile it on with all sorts of goodies. It's very affordable. The RP2040 chip is a lot less expensive than the SAMD21 or the SAMD51. And so you can get close to like SAMD51 performance and definitely better than SAMD21 and definitely better than any of the 8-bit mega chip speeds from this board, but the pricing is 15 bucks. So the stem of QT port, boot port, boot button, the micro SD, the micro SD is also wired up that you could use it for SDIL, even though that's not kind of officially supported in CircuitPython or Arduino. There is some example code out there and we verified that it works, but we don't really have SDIL support. And then the RX and TX pins are on a flippy switch. So you can swap whether RX and TX are going to 0-1. So either you have the numerical pins going 0-5. That one, yeah. So, you know, on the top right, the logical order is RX and TX, but the numerical order would be 1 and 0. And so, like, if you want the numbers to be in order 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, up to 13, because you want to use those pins in order that flip the switch one way if you want it so that the hardware serial port is on the pins that it's expected to be on, you flip the switch the other way. So altogether, kind of like a jam-packed board, a really great DevKit for the RP2040. Everything's maxed out, you know, so you can design, debug, and then if you want to shrink the design later, use KB2040. Yeah, for the folks who are like, I'm going to use RP2040. We've seen a lot of people do that. They'll use a Metro, they'll design something, and then they'll shrink it down with all the stuff they don't need later. And you can do that because we publish all the files. Hey, that's right. We do all of that and more on this week's product pick, it is the Metro RP2040. Look at that. Look at that beautiful silk screen there with our Metro theming, subway map theming. This is a heck of a board. Let me show it up nice close right there while I talk about it a little bit. This is a Arduino Uno sized and format and compatibility as much as possible board. So if you go back to something like a Duomila Nove or an Arduino Uno, you've used these forever and ever, right? These are fantastic boards. It's a fun form factor. We have a lot of shields, the add-ons that go on top, the peripheral add-ons that go on top in our collections, a lot of us do. But why not? Modernized to a super fancy board. Fancy is definitely a word that was used over in our chat, DJ Devon 3. That is the word for this. Boy, it's fancy. It's fast. It's sophisticated. It has things like the PIO state machines, eight of them. We have 16 megabytes of RAM on this. It's a dual Cortex M0 Plus. It's running at, I think, 133 megahertz for those two processors. There are two cores. There are 264K of RAM. And what else? We've got the DC in, which is terrific. If you just want to run this off of some AA batteries, it's a great way to go if you get like a 6 AA battery pack. It'll take anywhere from 6 to 12 volts, makes it a nice and easy prototyping setup if you don't want to be running your power over USB for some reason. That also gives you access to this on-off switch, which is great. It has a lot of really nice quality of life conveniences on it. So for example, we've got the boot button here and the reset button for going into bootloader mode. Reset button here is a, in fact, both of those are sort of a side mounted. One really nice thing about that is if you plug into the note USB-C there, very modern, if you're plugged into the USB-C and you go to unplug it, you almost naturally press the reset button before you unplug, which is actually how we're supposed to be doing this. And most of the time I don't, at least. But the proper way to disconnect this is actually first press reset and then unplug. And this encourages you to do that because the reset button is right there on the edge, which is really neat. Like you can see here, we've got the SD card, a micro SD card for storing all kinds of files and added assets. We've got a number of different connectors here. So there's a Stem-AQT connector right here at the top, and that's for your I2C peripherals, all sorts of add-ons and sensors and other boards. There's a debug port here. There's the SWD. There's also a, let me look, what's the other one? We've got the Pico Probe available on this. There is a switch for going between zero and one order or one and zero order for these last two GPIO pins, which is really cool. Normally this RXTX order would give you one zero, but you can flip that switch right there. And now you'll have one, zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13 for these digital in-out pins. By the way, the board allows, I think, something like 16 PWM pins. So you can do sort of that pseudo analog or run buzzers and piezos and things off of a whole slew of pins there. There are four analog pins, so that's fewer than we're used to on a lot of these boards, just to keep in mind. So a lot of boards will have six analog pins. This chipset only has four analog ends, these ADCs. So keep that in mind. There are two extra pins here that are digital pins pulled out, 24 and 25. This is a three-volt logic board, not five volts, which means you may have some modification to do if you're going to use really old-fashioned shields, old-fashioned Arduino shields, which expected five-volt logic. And I'll show you in a second a little mod I did to a very, very old shield in order to use it. What else? I think that covers most of the specs on this. And then, like any RP2040-based board, we've got two different I2C ports, two SPI, two UARTs. And so you've got a ton and ton of connectivity here. You can use this for prototyping sort of old-fashioned learning types of Arduino learning style lessons. And you can run this in Arduino or in Circuit Python, which I have running on this board right here right now. This is a classic configuration. If you look at any of the sort of learning Arduino books out there and websites, we've got our board, our little metro here. I've got some hookup wire and a little breadboard. And I'm doing things like lighting up an LED. I'm reading an analog pin to read this potentiometer here. I'm actually using PWM to adjust the brightness of this LED here. And I'm also reading an input switch. You can see I've got one of our little step switches there, and that's lighting up an LED based on software there that's reading the state of that switch. So these types of basic exercises and learning and prototyping, really great to do with this board. I'll also show you, before I go any further, let's take a look at the main page for this. So here is Metro RP2040 page. And my goodness, it is $7.48 right now. That's outrageous. How can we possibly sell it that cheaply? Like Lamora said, it's an inexpensive chip, much less expensive to get this RP2040 chip on a board versus some of our other chips. So you can see we're passing that saving on to you with the price of it, normally $14.95 for this board. But right now it's $7.48 during the show. The main page here has a bunch of the specs and info that I just rattled off. If you scroll down a little further, you will get to the link for the learn guide, primary guide right here, which I have pulled up. This gives you everything from the pinouts to the, here's a really nice pinout chart that'll show you all the different uses for those pins. They're configurable and software to tell them what you want them to do. We've got examples of getting Circuit Python up and running on it and some essentials that you can use on here, some example code, as well as the Arduino IDE setup, I believe using the Philhauer core. And then there are some other downloads, the board files, if you need to see those, datasheet on the chip, CAD files, and so on. Also a little info there on doing a factory reset on this, and I think also on updating the boot loader, you have two. So there's some basics on there. The shields I was talking about. So really fun and exciting to go back in time a little bit. I actually ended up on this page. If anyone remembers Arduino Shieldlist, shieldlist.org, this attempted at one point to be complete. There were 317 shields available. This probably goes back 10 years or more. And you could find out about shields that were made by different manufacturers and go find the info on them, download open source files, software, buy them if there was something that was for sale. The board I have actually that I want to show, I've got a few things on here, but one I want to show, actually let's show this one first. So here is a, I don't know if we still sell this or not. This was an Adafruit power boost shield, I believe it was called. Power boost shield, 5 volt, 500 milliamp output, LiPo charger, 3.2 volt low battery LED. Those were the specs on that right there. So you can see it is shield shaped. It has the stacky headers soldered on there. So we could put a big huge LiPo battery there. This is what, 2200, yeah, 2000 milliamp hour battery I've got there. And then I can take that and plug that right into my, let me go to the overhead for this actually so you can see what I'm doing right there. So here's a typical shield that plugs right into these ports on your metro. Oh, these are little flexy pins. See if to make sure they're actually connected. Alright, so squish that down onto there. And now we have a power switch to run this board from a LiPo battery. It's got a charger on there, a USB micro B charger on there. And all the pins are still broken out so we can still stack other shields on top of it or just plug pins or wires into their jumper cables into there to use that. So there's a example of a board. I don't know if that's still manufactured. If anyone wants to look it up on the Adafruit site, it's, let's see, do we have the PID on here? Not sure. Maybe it's 1608, but that might just be some other number. Anyway, this was the power boost shield. But I'm going to go back even older to this thing right here. This was the Zacokin Danger Shield. So it's huge, but you can see it still has the standard Arduino style pin out. You will notice, however, I bent one pin back and that was the 5 volt. This was meant to run off of 5 volt logic, but we have a 3 volt logic board here. So I've bent that pin and just jumpered up here to the 3 volt. So everything on here is running off of 3 volt power and logic. And what I'll do is plug this into here. And what I've done, you can see this is just a sort of smorgasbord shield that has a bunch of different fun input and output to play around with and learn, practice your coding. What I've done is just looked up the pin outs or the pin number for the shield and switched this over to Circuit Python. This was originally meant for Arduino exploration. So now I can plug in my Metro RP2040 to USB-C. So now I've got power and data over USB. And you can see now I've got some faders here. They've got LEDs in the fader stems. I've got some LEDs lit up. I have, if you can hear that, I'll hold it up to my microphone for a second. So I'm adjusting a little buzzer pitch with these little faders that are on here, lighting them up based on button presses. So if you want to see this code, actually, I'll show you real briefly. It is in Circuit Python. Here's my code about Pi. I've just written down what some of those pins are. One I didn't get around to trying to make work was the little seven-segment display here using this little shift register chip that's on here. I didn't figure that out in time. But you can see what I have here, a little digital IO, analog IO. I'm using debouncer. So this is much, much more modern and updated than going back as many years as this was. You can see I started to think, hey, yeah, I'll use that shift register and then ran out of time. That was the shift register chip there for this little tiny seven-segment display. But I'm setting up some button pins on here for these three buttons. As a debouncer, set of debouncer pins. I've got these faders as three analog inputs. And in fact, if I, let me open up my, oh, let me make sure, can you see that? Yeah, you can see that. I'm going to open up my REPL view so you can see the serial output one second. That's not a feather. That's a metro. There we go. Okay, so now we're connected and you can see I'll be able to read the different faders output as I change them. I'm actually setting those to a range of 0 to 1024. But there's the three different buttons being pressed there and then they play the simple IO tones for me. And that's funny. PenPengu said, I don't think I've ever seen anyone say I really like the Uno form factor. Yeah, it's a weird one, right? But for some reason, I really grew up on it. It was the Arduino Diece Milanova and Diece Milanova were the kind of first two microcontrollers I really dealt with. So let's see. Yeah, so that's the simple sort of code that I have going on here. But that's just one example. I've got lots of old shields. I found a little drawer and here was the Jimmy Rogers LOL shield, which was a Charlie Plexed, let me go back to this view, a Charlie Plexed LED shield. It's actually the shield my daughter and son learned to solder on 12 years ago or something like that. But that's a bunch of LEDs you can plug in to the Metro RP2040. Here was an old Adafruit character display with some buttons on that and a backlight, early motor shields. So you can use these on any Metro, but this RP2040 is a really nice modern one. And of course, you can do things like run some shield like this and be outputting MIDI, do synth IO, really modern kinds of stuff because this is a very fast and capable board. So let's see what else. Let me know if there's any questions in the chat. For some reason, my, I don't know if my YouTube chat is working. So I'm just checking the Discord and something went kooky with the YouTube chat. Let me just try to re, see if that'll reopen. Restore chat. Pop open chat. Live chat. Oh, there it is. Hi, everyone. Yes, sorry, I wasn't seeing messages at all. Let's see. Dave Davodesa, Tackle the World, Gary T, Cecil Omar, Jerry. Yes, 16 megs of flash, Tackle the World says, wow, that is a ton, right? Really useful if you're doing things with displays and bitmaps or wave files for sound samples. David Dykes says it was product 2078. So that was the, I think the boost, the battery boost. That looks dangerous. That is a very dangerous looking shield, isn't it? And can you use an airlift shield? I believe you can. I don't, I haven't tested that. So you'd maybe want to dig around a little on the forums or in our Help with Circuit Python, if you're trying to use it with Circuit Python or Help with Arduino, if you're trying to use it with Arduino to check and see. But the pinout is really close to any Metro or any Arduino, with the exception maybe of a couple of analog pins here, but you should be able to use your airlift shield on here to get Wi-Fi for sure. So I will say with 90% confidence, probably you can. Unless there's a known thing with RP2040 not working with that shield, that would be the main thing to look at. All right, if there aren't any other questions, let's see. I think that just about does it. So don't forget, you can head here to that URL, if you are wanting to go get one. Remember the price is only good during the show. So after the show, we're going to bring that price back up to $14.95, which is still a real bargain for what all is on this dev board. It's super capable. One thing I wanted to show actually, since I alluded to it, but didn't show it, is here's something like, this is a 9 volt battery pack with a bunch of, what is it, 6 AA's. DC power connector right there, flip the power switch, and we're up and running. So really a lot of ways to use this, a billion accessories and add-ons and shields and things over the years for this form factor. So you can do a ton. Oh, PenPangu actually, yeah, yes, good question, or they asked a good question. Why go with something this big, right? We could use a PicoW, then you'd have wireless, absolutely. You can use something like a QDPI, same chip, RP2040. Part of it is really all of the ease of development without worrying about space constraints and peripheral constraints. You got a ton of memory on there, more so than some of these other boards. You have a lot of interface options and a lot of extras on there. So you can use this to develop and then say, okay, the features I want, I can fit that down onto a Feather, I can fit that onto a Pico, or I can fit that onto a QDPI, no problem. I don't know of a board that's a RP2040 and it has an SD card on it and it has this DC power input. So you may find it's not the board for you, but it's a pretty good one to have around. A lot of the time when I start a project, I'll grab a Metro just because it's big and easy, and I don't tend to put socket headers on my feathers or my Picos, but if I just want to plug wire into the board to quickly figure something out on a breadboard, that works well for me. It means I'm not plopping Feather or Pico down onto the breadboard, I'm just hanging it off to the side. So I do find them to be pretty convenient, but it may or may not be the board for you. So for sure, for sure, look into seeing which ones work best for you. We also have some TFT displays that are shields that plop on top, which is kind of nice if you're trying to do a little sort of mobile-ish device that doesn't have to be super small. And again, you can run it off of LiPo battery with that power shield. You can run it off of USB power. You can run it off of DC power. So there you go. I think that's going to do it. So thanks everyone for coming by. Here is our last little glimpse of this beauty. It is the product pick of the week this week. It is the Metro RP 2040. All right, for Adafruit Industries, I'm John Park. This has been JP's product pick of the week, and I will see you next time. Bye-bye.