 and happy Valentine's Day. Welcome everybody to this week's JP's product pick of the week. And thank you so much for your patience with me while everything crashed and then I restarted everything and now knock wood. We seem to be on the right track. So first of all, I want to say if you are wondering where the chat is, head on over to adafruit.it slash discord. And you can jump into our live broadcast chat channel, which is this do Hickey right here. Oh, hey, look, yeah, happy Valentine's Day. There's some Valentine's Day cards. Oh my goodness. Thank you, DJ Devon 3. That is weird. Very proud. Very honored. So the other thing I want to do is tell you if you want to watch the show inside the product page and get yourself a big humongous discount on this week's product pick, then you can head over there to that QR code or to this URL listed right here at the bottom. And you will find this video is embedded in there. The product is I'm going to double check myself at a 50% discount. And actually, we're going to have multiple products this week. This is one of these sort of the thing and its accessories type of deals, which I think is a lot of fun. And I think you will appreciate it if you're looking to get one of these. But before I get ahead of myself, before I tell you about it, I'm going to have Lady Aida jump back in time just a little bit to the year 2016 and then a recent update and tell us about this week's product pick. So please take it away, Lady Aida from the past and present. IS-31 FL-3731 PWM-LED I-squared-C driver. Okay. So what is this thing? This is a chip that you can control over I-squared-C. So you can use it with any microcontroller, microcomputer, use it with a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino or Beaglebone or like a ESPH-66, whatever. And what it can do is it can control a grid of 16, is it 16 by 9 LEDs in a Charlie Plex matrix and it can individually dim any of the LEDs with 8-bit PWM. So it not only is a full Charlie Plexing, it does it so fast it can also do LED dimming. So you can have really beautiful lighting effects because you don't have just the LED on or off, you can have it dim or have like variations in color, so in brightness. So we have the driver and this is just the driver. You connect over I-squared-C, you can have four of them on I-squared-C bus and it has the A1 through A9 and then B1 through B9 on the top and bottom and those are the pins that you connect to your Charlie Plex matrix. And so you can DIY your own matrix, just follow the schematic in the data sheet. I mean it's just like a ridiculous matrix, but you can do it or you can pick up one of our ready-to-go LED matrices. So we pick and placed, you know, it's basically exactly the same size. We actually made the LED matrix first with the, you know, the 06 or 3 LEDs and then we made the backpack so it fits perfectly on the back. So we have it in red. Yeah, and I got these videos. This is just a swirl. So it shows you that it can dim the LEDs, which is very rare. Usually with an LED matrix, it cannot dim individual LEDs. You can either have them on or off or dim the entire thing on or off. So this is like a kind of a big deal. I've never seen a driver that does this. This is a big deal. Green, beautiful green and we've got, this is a nice again, in green. And then we have blue, lovely blue and then white, which is super bright. So you have dimmable white. Yeah. And I also have, yeah, we're going to go to the overhead. I'll definitely go to the overhead. So this is, I made this version of the demo. So this is that chip. So it's a 0.4 millimeter chip. But yeah, I've, and you can change the brightness with changing Rx, but by default, I think it's like six milliamps. You can make it even brighter if you want. And we brought out all the pins. It's three and five volt compatible. So use it with whatever microcontroller you like. And then let me connect this up, plug this in, reset that. And then I have all the different LED matrices. So this is just the, you know, I put sockets in this to make it easy, but you can solder it directly. So this is showing a little demo with some text showing lines and graphics and scrolling text capabilities. So that's yellow. And then I'll show, this is going to be white. So white's very bright. That's cool. So yeah, very bright, very nice, but perfect for if you want to make an animation or a little display and you want to have individual LEDs. And the thing that this chip can do, which is really neat, which I haven't taken advantage of is you can have eight frames of buffer memory. So you can do double buffering or like quad or doubling, you know, buffering if you want, you basically can write to individual memory and then tell it to swap it out. So you can get instant updates. So if you want to do very smooth animations, you can do that. So it's red. This is the green. I really like this green. This is a nice in-depth green, not the low voltage green, but the 3.4 volt green. So let's wait till it changes and I'll swap it out. So you can see it's like, you know, it's bright and then like dimmer, it can do a dimness with drawings. You can set the color basically. And then this is going to be blue. So we have basically five colors that I think are worth having. Any other LEDs are not worth having. But you actually got these a long time ago and finally got around to finishing it up. But when you make this, you would solder it together into this little backpack so you don't have to have socket headers. You just solder it directly. And you can have wires instead of header, but I just like to have it plug into a breadboard. And then yeah, I just use our library to draw pixels or draw text. Yeah. Okay. We've got an updated product. This is the IS-31FL 3731 PWM LED Matrix Driver. So this is our Charlie Plex Driver. It can drive nine by 16 LEDs because it Charlie Plexes them. We sell the grids as well, like LED grids with SMT LEDs. This is the driver board. Also handy if you're just driving like a gigantic LED matrix. This is a very inexpensive way to drive all those LEDs. We've updated it by adding Stem and QT connectors because it's all iSquared C controllable. So it's otherwise the same pinouts on the top and the left. We just had a little spot on the right. Add in those iSquared C ports. And we also updated the silkscreen. All right. Yes, indeed. Let me jump down to this down shooter here. Hey, there it is right there. This is my product pick of the week. This week it is the 16 by 9 Charlie Plex PWM LED Driver Board. And we also have five different colors of the 16 by 9 LED boards themselves that you can pick one of to pair up nicely with your board. So these are really, really cool. These allow you to easily now with Stem and QT connect up to your microcontroller and in other Arduino or in Circle Python, you can send very easy pixel commands and brightness commands to decide which pixels you're lighting up, which of these kind of pixels you're lighting up. These are single color LEDs, as well as their brightness on an individual level. So you can do some really nice gradient effects and other things like that. So let's see. First of all, let me jump to a down shooter view here. You can see a little demo I put together in Circle Python. So you can see the kind of brightness variations that we can get on there. So here you can see I have just a little pretty simple, I'll show you the code in a second, pretty simple code that is sending some a little heart pattern. And as it builds that pattern, it's doing some PWM brightness thing. So you can see it kind of fade vertically. And then I'm wiping across horizontally, again, with altering that brightness level as I go. This is through a little bit of diffusion LED acrylic. You can see the bare LEDs there. They're very, very bright. I think I have these at about maybe one third brightness, not very bright. And I'm using the default levels for the resistor value. I've also got one of these little pieces of diffusion filter, a photo filter, a lighting filter, like a little leaf filter. So I like to use this as a purple one, but this is good for making stuff really pop when it's these kinds of LEDs, so that you're essentially hiding all of the white, unlit LEDs. And instead, you really just can focus on the beautiful lit LEDs themselves. This is really, really smooth in real life, by the way. I will say you do get some sort of frame jittering or frame drops, I think, in the video. But in live, this is really, really smooth. You can do really nice smooth gradient effects with this. Let's take a look over at the, let's grab the learn page for this. And let me pull that up. So here you go. So here's the learn guide. And this is this IS-31FL3731 chip, which rolls off your tongue, unbelievably easy to remember that and say it real, real fast. Everyone loves that. This is designed to control up to 144 LEDs, or actually specifically 144 in the 16 by 9 grid. And if you take a look at the pinouts here, it will show you it is essentially a set of B1 through 9 and A1 through 9 top and bottom rows there that your matrix can go on. The way our matrix is built, it's symmetrical, so you can put it on either way. This has an address jumper, so you can pick up to four addresses on the chip. So if you wanted to daisy chain four of these drivers and LED boards together on a single microcontroller, I squared C, chain, you could do it. Also, if you had multiple buses, you could probably do that on an RP2040. I think you have two, so you could maybe get eight of them. I'm not sure if that'll work in our library, but that would technically feasibly work as far as your I squared C addresses. And then on top of those pins, there are the, so we have the matrix pins, the I squared C pins, which are also available through the stem of QT ports. And then there's some special little pins here. I think Lady Aida mentioned being able to set up a buffer of up to eight images and flip through them as well as use audio for dimming. You can use that audio pin that you'll see. Let me scroll down here in the learn guide. Right here, other control pins you see here, this one right here that's labeled audio. There is, I believe support, I haven't tried it, but I believe there's support in the Circuit Python library to be able to enable that audio, so to read that audio pin like a DAC so that you can, or an ADC, so that it'll be able to read audio signals. If you wire up your headphone out or something like that from a MP3 player, then it can adjust the dimming value or the brightness value based on your audio. I think it also can flip between the buffered images using that audio, but I haven't tried those things. If you're curious about some of that stuff, you can head to the main page and if you scroll down to, let's see, do we have it linked here? Yeah, you know it might be easier to link, just go up to the tab, but in the downloads page of the learn guide, there's a link to this data sheet, and in the data sheet you can see it mentions some of the effects that you can get with using that audio input pin and some of the other pins, so more information there for how to use audio modulation on that, and they say, I believe they say these are kind of designed to be used as displays in phones and other things, so I'm sure you've run across these in the real world, but now we've got it on a chip so that you can talk to it yourself in your favorite Arduino or circuit python code, and on top of having the driver board, we've got all of these colors, so I didn't know we had the warm white, but okay, so I thought we had five, maybe we have six. We've got red, blue, yellow, green, a cool white, and a warm white, apparently. How about that? That's news to me, and I've got the red one hooked up here, as you can see. I didn't do what Lady Aida did in her demo, which was socketed, which allows you to drop on a different matrix on top of the driver board, which is pretty cool, but you can see here this is just STEMI QT connected to my feather, so easy to pop these in and out without doing any wiring to the board, or requiring a permaproto or breadboard if you want. You can just connect that using the I2C STEMI QT cable. Before I do, I have a bad idea that I want to try out before we go, but first, while things are still working, before I ruin everything, I'll show you some of the code that I'm using here. Let me grab my coding window here. The key thing here that I'm doing is I have this right here, and this is from our sample code from that Learn Guide page, and you can see this driver chip in library can be used in a bunch of different hardware form factors, so I'm in this case because there's a feather wing and there's a bonnet for Raspberry Pi. This is the one that we're using right here, which I'm importing from IS31FL3731 import matrix as display. Then I set that up on I2C, and then to draw, you can see any of the code here, the kind of key thing is display.pixel, and then I give it an x coordinate, a y coordinate, and a brightness value, and so this is a little function I made for drawing that that wipe that goes across, and then here's this heart. I kind of did it just the manual way. I made myself a little list here of a little matrix of which LEDs to light up, and then I run through that in this draw heart function that I made, and I'm adjusting brightness as I go based on the y, so it gets dimmer. I'm subtracting some brightness from it as I go down there. So I'm just drawing heart, waiting a little bit, and drawing that fill of zero, and then running the little draw middle routine across there. So that's the type of coding you can do. There are other ways to talk to this, but this is a nice way is just specifying pixels and then wrapping those up inside of functions. So the really bad idea I had, let's actually, before I do that, let me just check questions, because it might be nice if this is still running while there's any questions. I'm going to actually flip over to bring up the discord window there. Let's see. Oh, here's a question. This is a neat one. Kayoshi asks, could you have three of these drivers, each with 16x9 LEDs, one red, one green, one blue, have them display an image together? I think there is no theoretical reason you couldn't, but I believe what you've just described is much closer to our RGB matrix you can buy, the Times Square style matrix and some of our different driver boards for that, just because it puts all three of the diodes on top of each other. So those might be a little, but it depends on what you want to do, and you don't have to use these particular little matrices. You could drive your own larger LEDs if you've put them together in some sort of a hand configured setup, absolutely. Let's see, what else? Yeah, 8-bit PWM on each LED, so you can individually control them. And Todd confirms, yeah, you can use multiple buses with the circuit Python Lyris, great. Kayoshi's getting some two red and one blue panel, all right, great. I don't know if all the panels are in stock. They were earlier, but I'm not sure how much we had of each of them, but I know we stashed a bunch of the driver boards, so you could at least get some of those. Let's see, so to my bad idea, the way that I put this together, let me jump to this view, so you can see here, I have soldered some header pins, there's some long headers, and then soldered basically on both sides. So these are just wedged together with pretty much minimal clearance. You could maybe get them a little closer, but that's fairly minimal closer, but that's fairly minimal clearance there. However, I didn't trim things yet because I definitely wanted to try out some of the audio tricks that you can do with that, so I left those pins, these are actually right here, these audio pins, and these are also ground and power pins there. However, I also didn't trim the tops, and so my bad idea is, I wonder what happens if I try to just pop this yellow matrix on top of there and just use the sort of friction fit of that and no solder, and I'll probably ruin everything because now I'm drawing double the current because I've just got both of them connected, and don't do this, but let's see what happens. Oh, I see a pixel trying to light up. There's one little, hey, the red ones are all good, the yellow ones, I think I just don't, I don't have a good enough connection there. Hey, yeah, we can make a mess. Yeah, I think there's just enough of them not touching that the matrix is desperately unhappy. Let's just try. Oh, let's see, I'm just going to keep pursuing this bad idea a little longer. Let me raise this up so I get more, I really wish I had like pogo pin jig for these, that would be a lot of fun. Yeah, no, this is a bad idea, confirmed. All right, but hey, look, it sort of came on there for a second, kind of thing. Yeah, it doesn't want to do it, I might have to bend those pins out to make it do that, but it's a bad idea, and so it's probably good it didn't work, but I didn't ruin anything it looks like, looks like the main heart and little wipe animation there are still working. So, whew, maybe try two red ones. They're lower voltage, yeah, so this is probably drawing more current than it wants to. All right, so it's bad idea on so many levels. However, I think that's a good moment to move on from that bad idea, and if we head back over here for a second, I'll show you, you can pick up the board itself, $2.98, they're half price, I think they're still in stock, yes, maximum of 10 per customer, and then you can pick up, I've got here the, there's some of the different LED boards that you can pick up for this, or roll your own if you want, for sure, and these are the little stem of QT cables, I was using these nice little short 50 millimeter ones, and yeah, it looks like we do have a cool white and a warm white, by the way, I had not reloaded these pictures since they went, or these pages since they went on half price, so some of them are in stock, some of them are out of stock, it looks like now, but they are all a half price as well. So, and thank you for product team, new products, Jelly, and everyone in that team for dealing with having all these pages be on a discount. All right, I think that is going to do it, so let's wrap this up, let me know if anyone has any other questions before we go, one is can I buy it in Brazil, says Washington Resende in YouTube, I am not sure, but I think we have a page, if you go to Adafruit.com slash shipping, I believe it talks about our shipping to different countries, and which are available, which are not, but look around a bit, I know we addressed that somewhere on the page, and if anyone knows, they can throw that in the YouTube chat, that would be awesome. All right, so let's wrap this up, I'm gonna, do I have, there's the bag that came in, so right there, that's my product pick of the week this week, it is the Charlie Plex 16 by 9 PWM LED Driver Board with Stemma QT, and it can do fun stuff like that, so happy Valentine's Day everybody, and for Adafruit Industries, I'm John Park, and this has been JP's product pick of the week, bye-bye.