 and welcome to the show. It's me, John Park, and I've turned on my microphone. It's Thursday. It's time for John Park's workshop. And I'm glad to see you all. Thanks for stopping by. Hi, Dave Odessa over in YouTube land and everyone else over in Discord. Hello, hello, hello. Yannis Goosey, Grover, Andy Calloway, Hugo. Who else is here? Okay, you're on. Hey, Steve. Gary Z. Welcome. Hope I didn't miss anyone. And let's do this. Let's get the show going. First of all, that's the biggest piece of gaffer tape I could have possibly used to put this microphone on. Gonna go a little smaller next time. Let's see. Let's mix up the order of things a little bit here just because I meant to show this and I forgot a couple of weeks ago, not this. I'm gonna drink water. Delicious water. But the thing I wanted to show that I forgot a couple of weeks ago is a little bit of a gear report thing and that is, you may have seen this on my bench before, this is little parts tray, silicone rubber parts tray. I've got a couple of these now and I love them for putting little parts when you're assembling something, if you're getting some pieces and parts together for something you're soldering. If you're taking screws out of something and wanna set them down, I like this. This is a neat one. I'm sure there are others like it but this one I got from County Comm. I think they're out of stock right now so I'm not gonna throw their website up there but they're like $7 or something like that and you may be able to find them elsewhere. I've used ice cube trays and things before but this is the first time I've gotten sort of a real specific hold your parts thing. I've also had some of these metal ones around over the years. I don't know where they've all gone right now. Here's one. These are nice for screws. These sort of magnetic parts trays has a big, it's metal has a big magnet in the bottom but anyway that's sort of a product pick gear report type of thing. Check it out. County Comm COMM sells them but they're out of stock right now so I won't flash up their webpage but you might find them elsewhere. Just look for a silicone parts tray. Pretty neat, eh? All right, I'll leave that there. Let's see, what else is up? Questions, got a question over in the YouTube chat from Charles Burnford. Hey John, can you recommend a 3D printing service? I cannot, I haven't used any other than Shapeways many years ago. I used Shapeways a couple times and I recommend them if you're doing advanced materials and printing technologies because they have all sorts of fantastic like fused laser deposition models and things like that, big giant expensive machines. So depending on the type of thing you're trying to but as far as if you're asking about sort of FFD regular old 3D printer type of printing, I don't know. So I'm curious if anyone over in the chat either in the YouTube chat or in the Discord chat has any recommendations. In fact, let me pop up the Discord chat. There you are, hey Discord chat. And let me know, does anyone have anyone have the recommendations for 3D printing service? Hugo said I'm featuring products that are already out of stock rather than having them sell out while I talk about them. Yeah, I don't know if that's any better or not. Sorry about that. But those guys, County Comm, they tend to bring things back so you can sign up if you click on their little alert me thing on the email. They'll let you know when that's back. Yeah, so that's it. Yeah, any suggestions on 3D printing services? We'd be interested to know. I know there used to be some things like, what was it called, a thousand garages where it was a hub, 3D hubs I think was one that connect a bunch of people with either laser cutters or 3D printers who are local to use. You could get one made nearish by and then have it shipped or even dropped off or picked up. All right, so we'll keep an eye on the chat in case anyone has suggestions about that. And then let's get on with some other business help wanted sign. Hey, we've got a jobs board. It's jobs.atafruit.com. If you head there, you'll see things like this. Look, it's our good friends at Macinspires Makerspace and they are looking for a Makerspace manager. So that's in their Chelsea location. It's full time, education and teaching category. And there's a bunch of info there about responsibilities of the position as well as qualifications. So if you're looking for something like that, that's an interesting posting. So go check that out, won't you? It's free to post. It's free to post your info as well. If you're looking to hire someone, if you're looking to get hired, that's all at jobs.atafruit.com. So go check that out. All right, let's see. Next thing, another delicious drink of water. Mmm. There's one answer to Charles' question about three printing services. Some, Hugo says in the Discord chat, some Makerspaces and libraries have services you can use for a nominal fee. I used to go to a Makerspace here in Los Angeles that did that. They were Makerspace. You could be a member, but you could also just walk in and get stuff printed as a service. That's a good tip to search maybe for your local 3D or your local Hackerspaces and Makerspaces. See if anyone's doing any 3D printing. All right, so on Tuesdays I do a show that is the JP's product pick of the week show. And this week I did not pick Jane and Todd's most delicious sweet Swiss meringue buttercream. That was just a fake out for the real thing. Here's the real thing. It is the SCD-30 CO2 sensor in STEMIQT format. There you can see there's my CO2 parts per million. So I've got a, this is, the workshop is pretty well ventilated. This is really, I think one of the best demos is Breathe on it, right? So there you can see I have significantly increased the amount of carbon dioxide in that area. It's a really cool sensor. Like Lady Aida said, this one is really doing the proper calculation for CO2. It's not just guessing based on other particulate matter and volatile organic gases in the air. This one is straight up CO2 sensing. That is my product pick of the week. It is the SCD-30 CO2 sensor. By the way, if you're wondering how that image came to be, I was talking to my friend Todd. I was chatting with him while I was working on my thumbnail for that. And he sent me a picture of this delicious, set of cupcakes he and his daughter Jane were making. I got really hungry for them. And so I decided to use that picture in my blurred out version, the teaser photo. Seemed appropriate. Boy, those look good. All right, what else? The next thing, what's the next thing? Let's see. So this is a fun one. A little bit first about April Fool's Day. I think in general, most people are of the same mind that we don't really want to be faked out today this year. Enough weird stuff has gone on that we don't really want a lot of April Fool's pranks and fake product announcements. However, one exception I'll make is this, let me open it up in my web browser. This is the game changer for black people box by 1010 music. Let's see, let me open it up. Yeah, that'll work. This, the reason I make the exception is that they created this terrific sort of fake ad for adding gameplay and capabilities to this hardware sampler. It's a sequencer and sampler. And they said, hey, happy April Fool's. But what they did was they actually released the firmware. So it's not really a prank. They really ported a shareware version of Doom to run on the black box. And the black box is based on a STM32F4, I think. I have some notes here. Where did I write that down? Yeah, it's an STM32F4 as the processor under there. It's got this nice big touchscreen. So Aaron Higgins and the gang over at 1010 music actually got this running. They uploaded the code, the sort of binary firmware update so that you can flash your machine with this. And not only does it play Doom, but it also lets you access all of the Doom sound effects using a MIDI controller. So I had to try it. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna run over to my workbench there. And that's it. That's my black box running Doom underneath it. There I have the, a little MIDI sequencer and keyboard. You've seen me show this before. This is by our good friend, Steve, who's in our chat, is okay, you're on. And this is a MIDI and CV keyboard and sequencer. And I'm gonna go show you what this is capable of because it's kind of hilarious and kind of awesome. Let's take a look at this. So here you can see, first of all, if I turn up the sound, all right, you can hear that, right? I'm not using a mixer or anything. I'm just playing it on a little monitor here for myself. So here you can see, I can zoom in on this in fact, try to focus a bit. So here you can see the buttons that are usually used on this machine for making music now act as a sort of WASD keys, strafing, turning. We can open this door. There's some demons there. We can, all right, let's run. I've bumped into the door. Oh, that's not good. Woo, all right, let's turn around. Let's get out of there. It is not easy to play it this way. I will admit. But then check this out. Let's get out of there. If we use our little MIDI keyboard here, there's a good, I don't know, three octaves worth of sound effects from the game. Pretty much I think all of the normally accessible sound effects in the game, you can access with your MIDI keyboard. So they're a bunch of awesome upsetting sounds. My favorite is there's, I forget who does it, but this is kind of, I call it squircle, squircle. Let's see, is this it? That's it. That's such a good sound. Can you hear that? How awesome is that? And then of course, the temptation here is to not just play stuff on the keyboard, but to sequence it. So the OMEX 27 here is a sequencer, besides being a keyboard. So if I move it into sequencer mode and pick a sequence, let's see, do I have anything that I set up? Let's try this. Oh, there's my squircle. Oh, and you can do that while you're playing too. There's your soundtrack for your game. All right, so that's absolutely absurd and it is my favorite thing. You can of course put the black box back to its normal duties as a sequencer and sampler, sampler playback machine. It's a fantastic instrument. I love it, but it's just a quick flash on an SD card to turn it into a very, very weird doom-playing machine. So big ups to 1010 Music. Erin and Christine, thanks for sharing that with the world. It's pretty great. Oh yeah, Todd Bodd says in the chats an instant Halloween soundboard, for sure. Put it back up there. Look at that, isn't that cool? It's a great screen on there too. So the doom just looks awesome on there, the resolution, that's a pretty high resolution screen. I don't know what the, it's like 800 by 600 or what the resolution was of doom in those shareware versions, but it looks fantastic on that screen. And they say they're not gonna do any updates. If you check it out, I had their webpage up here. Let me bring that back up. There's the firmware download on their forums. They give some info about, it's based on some, excuse me, it makes use of doom open source code that's on GitHub and there's a link, chocolate doom. I don't know what that is. It might be like chocolate rain. Chocolate doom for the STM32F4 discovery board, which is a sort of dev kit for the STM32F4 and the 1.8 shareware edition for publicly available game levels. So yeah, they said they're not gonna be updating it so don't send them bug reports. Don't ask to add a mouse or anything like that. It's not gonna happen. They've got more pressing things to do. But there you go. That's doom. You know, there's always been this joke of porting doom to things, porting it to refrigerators and cameras. I've never played doom on a weird device. This is actually the first time I've done it. I've always heard of that, but I've never gone out of my way to play doom on a weird thing. Now I have, I feel better. So thanks, thanks for that. All right. Excuse me. And moving along, let me check out what's going on in the chat. Yeah, Chen Danielli also says sounds would make a nice Halloween soundboard for sure. What else? Let me scroll back a little bit and see if we have in our Discord any other chatter. Anyone any 3D printing advice? Places to get stuff 3D printed? That's right. Mr. Certainly said it reminds me of ThinkGeek who advertised a Tauntaun sleeping bag for April 1st. It was so popular, I decided to make it. That's my kind of April 1st thing is, because you know, April Fool's, the product release thing of fake products, it kind of has a nasty element of like, ha ha, we made you think this thing was cool and now you're looking dumb. So I respect when you say, all right, we'll make the thing. That's a good move. What else? Squircle, squircle, squircle. That's a good sound. All right, yeah, bucket list. I can check that off. I've played Doom on something that isn't a general purpose computer. Yeah. All right, so now what I wanted to do is move on to a project of the week and you can see it written right down there. It says Feather RP2040 Cricket Touchlight. What is that? I will show you. Let me switch over to this camera and I'm just gonna demonstrate this. Yeah, okay, that'll work right there. So probably the focus isn't great. Let me focus that. I've got manual focus set up on this one right now. There it was, looks focused-ish, I think. So what I've got here, this is my little sort of cutaway demo wall. I've shown this before. And on the cutaway demo wall, I have an AC outlet switch and a bulb socket for a bulb. This is all running off of wall power, 120 volt AC. And you may recall a few years ago, I made a project that used an NRF52840 based Feather to use Bluetooth LE as a remote light switch. And I've had that hooked up here in my shop ever since. I use it all the time. But what I wanted to do was check out the NRF, or rather the RP2040 based, so the Raspberry Pi Foundation chip, a RP2040 based Feather using this same Cricut, make sure that their Cricut libraries work on it and then instead of doing a remote thing, because I don't wanna then plug in a Bluetooth module, I want to try out using some capacitive touch. So there is capacitive touch on the RP2040 itself. It requires you to hook up a, I think it's a one mega ohm resistor per pin, but you can get like 20 something, I think 21 pins or something like that of CapTouch. Allegedly, I haven't tried it. As I was thinking about doing that, this idea of doing Cricut things came along and sort of took over. The Cricut itself has four CapTouch pads. So I decided to just use those, make it easy. And what you can see, I've got an alligator clip hooked up to one of the CapTouch pads. And then I've run that to some copper tape up here. And now when I touch the copper tape, it does the on or the off, it kind of keeps track of state. One thing you'll notice is that I have, when the bulb is on, I have a green neopixel on the Feather board. And then when I turn it off, it goes to a red one, just in case you didn't notice the big bulb there, you also have the state showing right there. And that's it. So it's a pretty straightforward thing. If I zoom in here, let's see, it might be easier to, you know what I'll do is I'll tip that over and show it right here and zoom out just a little bit on that one. Bear with me, let me set up some cameras here. And I'm gonna tip this, this could be dangerous, let's see, I don't wanna squish any of my midi gear. Sequencers and things. Yeah, that should work, right? Let's have a look at that over there. So I can keep things plugged in while I do this. Whoa, I touched the, I touched the capacitive touch copper there and made it do its thing. All right, let's see how close we can zoom in. There, I might be able to adjust the camera. There we go. So here you can see it a little bit better. Here I have the Feather RP 2040. It plugs into this Cricut. This is the Featherwing Cricut. So we have a few different Cricuts. We have one where a circuit playground board, circuit playground express board will bolt onto it. I think circuit playground Bluetooth as well. The, there's one that you can use with a Raspberry Pi. I think it fits the Pi A. And then we have the Microbit one and this is the Feather one, this is the fourth of them. I think that's what we have. And if you're not familiar with the Cricut board is sort of a breakout board for robotics. It makes it easy because your microcontroller can just speak over general purpose IO pins or SPI, I think in some cases, to this Cricut board through the seesaw chip, which then takes care of all of this input and output. There's motor drivers on here. There's four servo outs. I think it's four. Yeah, there's a couple of motor outs. You can plug NeoPixels into it and it'll run them at five volts. So a whole bunch of cool stuff is done. This takes care of the power. You can see I've got a DC power jack plugged in here from the wall. You can also use batteries. And it's a really nice sort of beginning robotics platform. Takes care of a lot of the hard stuff for you. And you can see here, if I zoom out a little bit down there, I'll do it. It's self-calibrating. So as soon as I powered this up, it calibrated the capacitance of that antenna that we have there. So it doesn't go off just because it has a long line attached to it, which can happen sometimes. You can also use the capacitive touch on board. I actually set all four of them to do the same thing. So you can hit any of those pads right there. So this could be remote too. It could be a place where you can't access the switch very easily. Or if you have accessibility needs, you can make it easier for someone to just touch a body part to the copper. Should work through clothing too. I've got short sleeves on today, so it's not gonna work here. We'll use my shoulder. There you go. You can just bump that with your shoulder, even if you're wearing clothes, you don't actually have to have direct physical contact. It's not like a resistive switch where you have to hold ground or anything like that. It just works on your capacitance. You could probably even trigger it by being close. So I'm not even touching it here. I'm just getting close. Which means you can set that underneath things like a piece of glass or plastic or thin piece of wood, anything that isn't metal. You should be able to still, a millimeter or two thick slice of something, maybe an eighth inch. You can still get that capacitance. So it's kind of a practical thing. And it's also sort of a neat, interesting way to deal with a user interface issue and put it output. And I'll show you the code that I have for this. It's really rough because I hacked it together quickly this morning when I changed my mind about what I was building. So this was all made very quickly this morning. Let's see if I switch over to this atom here. Put a little me in the corner there and put that in the background. Hey look, you still see him. Here is my code. It's a bit overkill because the code I grabbed it from was doing something a little more complex than what I need this to do. But you can see here what's happening. I'm importing some libraries, including time so I can pause the board definition, board library for definitions of pins, digital IO, Neopixel, so I could change that Neopixel color, and then the Cricut library. So the Cricut library handles all these sort of motor libraries and servo libraries and things under the hood. So it's kind of a high level library that makes life easy. Set up my little onboard LED so I know what's powered up. Set a couple of colors for the Neopixels, red and green, create the Neopixel object, and then I've got some variables here. These I kind of needed to fine tune back when I did the original project for this little 3D printed servo bracket thing, the angles. So I was going to full up 180 degrees, neutrals at 120, down is only down to 95, and that works well with the switch and the servo. And then this is the setup, which I said is a little more involved than it needs to be because I actually had a project I did a while ago where I puppeteered, I think it was four fingers on a cardboard puppet back for the Adabox that included the Cricut, I believe it was. So this was just a lot of that code that I grabbed and ransacked. So I've created a couple of, I have these variables that check the state of those four different cap touch switches, I only really needed one. Then I have a couple of functions here that do the servo up and servo down. You can see them, instead of just straight going to a value, which happens very quickly, I'm instead stepping through it, so it's a little more gradual. It still seems pretty fast, but it allows me to do things like back, I kind of anticipate before I go, which gives me a little more oomph. I think when I was just trying to go there directly, it would get stuck, because it's a very tiny servo. So I actually kind of give myself some inertia and momentum by backing up and then flying into the switch there. Doesn't matter as much on this demo switch, because it's a nice, clean, easy switch. The one here in my workshop that I'm actually using is kind of crusty and old, it didn't turn too easily. And then this is the main loop of the program. I am checking those cap touch switches. If any of them gets a value, then I run the servo down function and I have a state called switched that I switch to false. If this is set to false, then I go up. If it's set to true, then I go down. So it's just flipping either way that it's gonna either the servo up or the servo down function gets called. And that's about it. So I can clean this code up, but you can, I hope you can see sort of the basic simplicity of using the Cricut along with the RP2040 to make this cool little light switch. He's got this guy back up here. And there you go. So now that's two different ways that you can do a light switch with that same setup. If you're wondering, I'm talking about this project. Let me open up a browser real quick and I'll show you that one. So if you go to the learn.adafruit.com, you can just type in, I think, light switch. There you go. BLE light switch with Feather NRF 52840 and Cricut. So this is, if you're interested, this will take you to the 3D printed model file if you wanna print that model, some info about how it works and then the code, essentially, I gutted all of the Bluetooth code that's in here, which simplifies it a ton. And then I also went to the cardboard hand, let's see, animatronic hand, I called it. I also went to this project into the code and grabbed some of my touch code. So go to the CPX and Cricut here, this puppeteering mode, there were a couple of modes, but in this puppeteering mode, I did all of the checking the states of those cap switches. So that should get you going if you're interested in this type of project. Let's see, John Edwards said in YouTube, if you haven't dedicated CapTouch hardware in your micro, the Fast Touch Library by Adrian Fried does the trick without any mega ohm resistors. Oh, interesting, or MPR 121 breakout. Hey, that's really cool, thanks for that tip, John. So I'll look that up, it's called the Fast Touch Library and that somehow a magic sits way past needing the one mega ohm resistor. That's terrific, thank you for that info. Let's see, I think that's gonna do it, yeah. So thank you for stopping by today and I'm glad we were able to get together and check out some projects. We'll be back on Tuesday with another JP's product pick of the week and I think next week I'm gonna be launching into some new projects on a new prototype board. I think you may have seen some, it's not out top secret stuff from LeMore on this board so I'll keep the suspense up and not tell you but we should be doing some cool new projects with some cool new hardware next week on this show and on Tuesday I'll be doing a new JP's product pick of the week. So thank you everyone for stopping by for Adafruit Industries, I'm John Park and this has been John Park's Workshop. Goodbye and no April Fools.