 Welcome to the show, it's me JP, it's time for JP's product pick of the week. That's what that song means, I love that song. That was written by our very own Tom, you may know him as Bartlebeats at Adafruit. So check it out, let's get to it. We've got a really cool product pick this week, it's actually a whole slew of product picks. There's many flavors, seven in fact of this one, but if you head to that QR code or this URL, you will land on the first one. I'll take us over to that page in a little bit, but I don't want to ruin the surprise for those of you who are waiting to see what it is, but head on over there and you'll see that it is now a tremendous 50% off, huge, huge discount during this show only. So there's no coupon code needed, just put them in your cart, check out and you'll get them for that delicious Hungry Hungry Hippo price of half off. And before I go any further talking about this, let's have Lady Aida jump back just briefly in time, it's a pretty new product, and tell us all about it, take it away, Lady Aida. Okay, we've got, actually this week is all JP's favorite products, JP's recommended a couple items for us. This is like Hal's children. Yeah, well JP really likes old synthesizers and these are, these are step switches. They're very evocative of the TR-808 and other synthesizers and drum machines, they use these kinds of step switches. We have them now in packs of three. What's cool about them is they're hinged, they've got a great tactile feel, and of course they've got that three millimeter red LED built into them. On the bottom, so actually let's go through the colors, shall we also add them? Yeah, we have a bunch of colors. Here with red LED, we have yellow with red LED, and we have blue with red LED. All right, do you want me to just show the different colors? Well, yeah, but then at the last photo just stop. Which one? This one? Yeah. So all of them on the bottom, you can check this out from the data sheet that we have linked. So the top two pads up there are, you know, the ones that say that there's like a negative and plus next to it. That's the LED. LEDs are red LED, it's a standard two volt forward voltage, 10 to 200 milliamp LED. It does not come with a resistor, so whatever you're pairing it with, you'll want to have a resistor in line if you don't have constant current. And then there's four pads, four pins below. And this is an SPDT switch, which is a little confusing. Most momentary switches are SPST, either they're open or closed. This one, those pins at the middle are the single throw, and then the two pins at the bottom are the, sorry, the single pole and the bottom are the double throw. So one of those pins, I think the one on the left is connected normally and the one on the right is not connected normally, and they alternate so the middle pin switches between the two. Basically it just means that like no matter what you're hooked up, you know, chances are you can use the switch, you can also use it to switch between two signals if needed. And then I have a little demo I can show, so the LED and the switches are separated, they're not connected together. Show them again. And we'll have more colors, we just got only half of them in so far. So this demo is really simple, I just have this hooked up to three volts, and then I have the switch hooked up in series with the LED. The LED and the switch again are totally separate, but in this case I connected them together so that when I press this switch, the LED lights, it lights up nice and bright. But it's a nice little indicator, and of course you can PWM the LED, you can have it be sequenced separately, and it's very nice and clicky. I'm going to bring it next to the microphone to get the clicky effect. Yeah, so imagine, hear that, that's going on there. That's the click. Okay, okay. Step switches. Some of the things we were showing off last week, we've got more colors of these. These step switches, like the TR-808, we have the other video of course, it also covers these. They have a single pole double throw switch, they have a beautiful clicky connector, and we've got the multiple colors with a red LED. So again, often used in like step sequencers in the 80s, but I think it'd be pretty cool for some projects you want to build now. They do work, JP report, they worked in Perf board, you know, things are on a 0.1 inch boundary, but they're not easily used in a breadboard where there's like lines for each row, they're best used in like a gridded proto board where you can kind of free wire them, but you get a couple per pack, and like, yeah, multiple colors, red LED, a great little input, and they're very, very clicky. All right, yes, that is sort of abruptly. Let me jump down to my down shooter and grab some of these to look at right here. Ah, yes indeed. So this is my product pick of the week. It is the step switches with LEDs, clicky, clicky, clicky, blinky, blinky, blinky. I love these. So these are a SPDT single pole dual throw, that means that you have a common and then you have a normally open and a normally closed. You can use either side of the switch, they're momentary, but you can in software have them be a toggle. And when you use them as a toggle, you get to use that LED to indicate toggle state, which is super, super cool. As Lady Aida mentioned, I was inspired to look for these because of my great love of the Roland TR-808 drum computer or rhythm computer and other similar synths, sequencers and keyboards of the era, particularly from Roland, but others have used these. And I decided to call them step switches. They don't really have a good universal name, so that's what I'm calling them. I hope you enjoy calling them that too. They are like I mentioned, and as Lady Aida mentioned, not something that you're going to use on a breadboard directly. And that's because of that arrangement. So if you look at the bottom of one of these here, I'm going to pop that onto the overhead actually. You will see that we have, grab something, a point with what I have, grab a knife. We have these are the common, these two side by side here, and they are vertically right above their normally closed and normally open switches. So those can't be on a typical breadboard or proto board where the pads are linked. So you'll use a perf board, so not strip board, but a perf board will work well for it. These two are for the LEDs here. And you can see here, because of the spacing, there's a couple of little plastic pegs here as well as the legs that all fit on something like this type of perf board. I've got this one kind of upside down at the moment. But this works well, same with these really nice proto boards that Aida Fruit has. You can solder them just for sort of the mechanical stability of it, those will live there nicely. And then you can free wire it or use some enamel wire, magnet wire, a bodge wire, that type of wire will work. You can see from an example here where I've put one together, I'm using some really thin wire as well as some silicone covered sheath wire or some resistors to do my connections to a Pico in this case. And in fact, let me do a little demo of this one. If I plug this one and you've seen me do some demos with this before, what I have with this code right now is that when it starts up, it does a couple of little blinks and then it waits for me to pick a mode. So if I pick the first mode, this is now in MIDI toggle mode, so I have four different MIDI CCs that I can toggle on and off. And that's all done in software. So there's no connection between the LED and the switch in the mechanism itself. You can decide in software how to respond to clicks or not using either a on off of the LED or a PWM if you want to fade them. And there are a couple other interesting things about these. So you can actually pull them apart pretty easily. You can sort of peel off the rocker cover there, which means you could potentially switch them out. If you've soldered one down, you could still change the color. This part's the same on all of them. Also the LED is just pressed right through. This is acting as a holder for the LED. And as long as you pay attention to which is the cathode and the anode side, you can swap that out with a different three millimeter LED. So here you can see a case where I've taken one of the green switches and I put a little blue LED in there just to try out the concept. Also I'll mention over in our chat, over in the Discord here, we've got our good friend DJ Devon 3. I think it was DJ Devon 3 who suggested looking for some three millimeter RGB LEDs that have four pins and possibly using those because there are actually four little holes there that you might be able to fit the LED legs through and do an RGB LED thing, which would be really neat. The ones we are selling with this are in red and we have them in seven different colors. So if you take a look here, there are our, let me pull my head off of there. There we go. There are the different colors that we have. So we've got a white, a gray, a black, blue, yellow, red and green. Only thing we're missing is orange if you want to do that classic 808 drum machine style look. Unfortunately we haven't been able to find them, at least not this manufacturer that we're sourcing them from, for some reason orange isn't out there or as popular. So let's see what else I will show you. Here's the page for them. So if you refresh this, you'll see we've got 50% off right now. There are 87 packs of the blue ones in stock, but we have all of these participating in today's great deal. So yellow, green, white, gray, red and black, all available there. And since, I'm not sure why. It might be because Lamor really likes waltzes or something. We're doing these in three packs. But if you think about drum sequencing, you might want to get maybe three packs of these, then you can do eight steps and have one spare to use for something else, but they're not just for music stuff. So certainly you can find other uses for them. They're a really great type of indicator switch. Let's see another thing I wanted to do is show you. I just published a learn guide on the sort of basics of getting going with these switch over to that tab. So this just went live this morning. This is the step switch party. So that shows you how to make this right here, pretty much this exact little setup using a Pico, some headers, some proto board and some resistors. Wire that up and then you can use it with the software that I've put up in the guide. If you go to this code, the step switch party section here, there's just one example code, but that has the four different modes. So when you start it up, depending on which button you press after startup, you can go to MIDI mode, desktop switching mode, item selection mode for things like games, I can use it for my camera switcher here on this piece of software and a copy paste mode that does, I think, select all cut copy paste as the buttons there. So it's great for HID, USB stuff and you can extend that to other uses pretty easily given that sample code. Another really cool example I wanted to show, this is our good friend Todd Bott over in the chat built a custom PCB. So he made an Eagle footprint so he could make CAD PCB designs using this exact switch. And that should be something he's putting up on the GitHub soon. But here's a nice demo of a custom PCB that uses the Pico, a little screen rotary encoder and eight switches to act as a MIDI step sequencer. So check out Todd's example here. Oops, take two. Check out that nice PWM fade effect, huh? Yeah, dig that, I want one. I think a lot of people do, the Twitter fans went bonkers when they saw that up the other day on Todd's, Todd bought Twitter page. So thanks for sharing that, Todd, really cool design using these. And you can imagine there's going to be a lot of different interesting fun uses that you can come up with for little step switches. Let's see, what else am I forgetting? They're clicky, three millimeter red LEDs in them through hole. Gives you both normally open, normally close. If you take the switch fully apart, you'll see it's actually a really durable mechanism. It uses a spring. The button housing has a little stem that presses a spring that essentially it's kind of like a buckle spring. If you think of how like an IBM Model M keyboard work, there's a spring under tension and it buckles when it gets pressed. And this is what pulls the little leaf mechanism that goes from normally closed to normally open contacts on either side of those two pins. So really durable. Not how the original 808 switches or the Juno or Jupiter switches worked from Roland. They were actually an Alps tacked switch with a separate through hole LED and then a special rocking cover that went on top of the little frame and cover that went on top of it. And they actually tend to break down and be a pain in the neck for people who are restoring vintage synths. So this is sort of an improved design to make it an all in one switch that seems like it'll have great durability, really, really nicely built. Super quicky. Let's see anything else. As you can tell, I'm excited about these. I love these switches and I am looking forward to building some more projects with them and seeing what you build with yours. So head on over right there to that URL or any of the other click around to any of their colors. Pick up, I think you can get up to 10 of them. 10 packs of three. So you can build a pretty big sequencer with that or who knows what per color. So you can make out like a bandit with that 50% off if you're interested. What else? That's going to do it, I think. So let me wrap this up by taking, I'll take these three here and bag those up for placing on the board. That's my product pick of the week. It is the Step Switch with LED pack of three. Thanks everyone for stopping by for Eight of Four Industries. I'm John Park. This has been JP's product pick of the week. Bye-bye.