 All right, Lady Aida, what is it? Hey everybody, and welcome to Show and Tag. I got special guest, Jepler, sometimes on the other side of the screen, now on this side of the screen. Our first guest on Show and Tell and Ask an Engineer in over a year. Fully vaccinated. Yeah. Fully vaccinated. That's right. And tagged, and released back in the wild. We got a fun half an hour for you today. We've got people from around the world and from the Aidaford community coming by showing off what they're working on. We also got some special guests. We're gonna start off with Kevin and we're gonna go to Randy from Instructibles. We have an author interview this week. We have some stuff from Digi-Key and we have some of our team and then we have folks from the community. So let's kick it off with Kevin. Hey, Kevin, how you doing? Hey, I'm doing good. How are you guys? What's going on? It's good to see you guys having company again. That's right. You wouldn't believe it but things are feeling a little more normal. Maybe not everywhere in the country, but it's good to see. Well, I'll say this for folks who are watching and wondering, it is possible to resume some of the things in life. We just need folks to get vaccinated. Exactly. We can all do this again. So anyways, it's great to have a guest and I'm glad I did it, Jeff. I agree. So something really exciting. I got some information now on AidaBox 20. Not gonna release it. Don't worry if so. Not gonna say anything, but... Send it to TMZ. But it is going to be epic. You guys are gonna love it and you'll be pretty excited. But Halloween's coming up. I just wanna remind everybody about our little Hackfest contest with Hackaday and Aida Fruit. You have until October 11th to submit your creepy, crawly, gooey projects onto the Hackaday website and we will judge it. And we have some of these posters that we think are pretty cool. So hopefully there'll be one hanging in your office soon. Yeah, I was gonna say, can you send us one of those posters? I actually sent you a bunch of them. Oh, good. Okay. I just got mine today. So you should be getting yours. And should folks use Aida Fruit stuff in their intrusive designs? Will that help them? I know it's a good thing you asked that because it actually, as a matter of fact, yes, Aida Fruit products will help in your contest. If you win, the prize is doubled. Oh, whoa. Yeah. That's great. Two times. By using an Aida Fruit product, you will be doubled your winnings. Yeah. I know our code will probably be using a lot of them and then we'll see how many projects. I have a feeling there's a number of them. There's pretty cool stuff I've seen. Even a 95 cent button. Okay. Hey, that is what it is. Right on. So if folks want to get more information about the contest, they just go to Hackaday and check out the contest rules and more. That's absolutely correct. Hackaday's got everything you need and happy Halloween Hackfest. Okay, cool. Halloween starts in September. Yeah. And if you send us those posters, thank you in advance and we'll display them here proudly. Sounds good. Then you will have them very shortly. All right. Thank you so much, Kevin. Thank you, Kevin. All right. Next up. Next up, let's go to... Randy. Hey, Randy. How's it going? It's going all right. So Randy's kind of a maker fixture, I guess. I've known of and Randy's worked for a while. Instructables, I guess, is where a lot of folks know you from. So you just wrote a book and that's what you're going to hear and you're going to talk about today, right? I wrote a book called Homemade Robots. I'll start again. And basically it's an introductory book for robotics for people who just want to kind of get, sort of dip their toe into the robotic waters. And this is stuff that they probably have around their house. I think one of the coolest projects I remember, because back before Adafruit was a company company, I was a little lady to put some of her projects on Instructables. But I remember you had a really cool CD-ROM robot that you made. It was like, I think out of a CD-ROM container or CDs or the wheels or something. Yeah. It was a telephone handset and has two CDs and they kind of rotate at kind of 45 degree angles which lifts the legs and kind of makes it walk around. Cool. All right. So what type of things can they build? Oh, actually, one other thing. The technical reviewer of this is Becky Stern. I work with Becky at Make and also here at Adafruit. So that was good on you getting an excellent technical reviewer of your book. Yeah, she's great. I've known her since college for, I guess it's a very long time though. Yeah, same here, I've known Becky forever. None of it, we're in this matrix simulation and it's the same people, same 20 people. So what are the type of things that people can build with the stuff around the house that are robotic? So you have a tool section. Right, so. When I made the book, I purposefully only shop at Ace Hardware in the local dollar store. So it's basically a lot of hand tools you'll find around your home. So like sort of a basic toolbox for your driver's hammers whatnot. Oh, I should also mention Radio Shack when that was still more of a thing. That's where I got this from. We had the new Radio Shack owner, we did an interview with him. It was Tai Lopez. He owns like a bunch of like brands that kind of died. So we'll see, maybe it'll come back, maybe not. Yeah, I saw the website the other day. We still have like a couple of their like staple electronics. Yeah, I'm gonna email them. I wanna ask them how they're doing. Okay, cool. So you should pull apart servers and then is each. So this is one of the bots, wobble. Fun. Right, so yeah, that's the most basic. I have one here actually. Okay. Just falling apart. The good news is you can put it back together. Like if it's made from stuff around the house, it probably. Yeah, this one is like 10 years old. So the wheel pulls up sometimes I just jam it back on. So that's the cool thing about making things out of junk. They're like really easy to fix. And if the part breaks, just replace it with some. Oh, cool. I think this is a CD bot that I saw. Yeah, I mean, I was saying before the show when we were looking at this, I need to learn more of this mechanical stuff. And you know, I know the software side really well, but creating a robotic physical thing is still something I'm less familiar with. So this looks great. Yeah, one of the things I want to do is take kind of some of these more complex motions and simplify it such that you could look at them easily understand like, oh, this is a concentric pivot on a wheel. You know, we always get asked this question and it's a hard question. But what is this, what's the age group for this? I always say like kids are way more advanced than you think. So it's hard to say, but we... I think a lot of these, you know, eight year old, but probably with an adult helping out, right? I mean, it seems like there's some, you know, kids can be very creative, but you still need a little bit of a dexterity to screw parts together. What's the age range you're thinking? Yeah, let's say like a very advanced 10 year old, possibly, I try to make it with the seven year old wants to make up board and I was saying... Yeah, it's just boredom. They're like, I got other stuff to do. Yeah, so I think if they're old enough to use tools and if they have maybe some adult help, they probably 10 and up. All right, cool. Those books are great. All right, so where can people pick up this book? I think you have from no start website or Amazon. I think in bookstores, people go to stores at the moment, I don't know. Yeah, I haven't been to a bookstore in over a year. So it's hard for me to say it for sure on that, but basically anywhere books are sold. All right, we'll check this out. Maybe we can find the parts if we have them in stock. We can tell people, hey, here's the parts to get so you can get the made-of-fruit, get the book from you, put stuff together, be creative. Yeah, thanks. Awesome. All right, well, thank you so much, Randy. Thank you, Randy. It's good to see you. Next up, let's go to JP. JP, what you got going on this week? Hey, so I got a couple of things I wanted to show. One is, I can start with this thing that we see right here. For my product pick of the week, I was working with the prop maker wing. And one little technique that I used on this that I wanted to show that I thought was neat is if you can see our good friend Lars back there, when I click this red button, he gets a little laser dot on him there. And I'm not threatening him or anything. That's just for fun. Lars and I like to kid around. And you'll see that laser go on and off. And that's just this little laser pointer I got right here. The technique I wanted to show is that I realized that our little kale sockets for mechanical keyswitches make a really neat, easy way to wire up a switch, particularly when you have to deal with an enclosure. So if you're gonna build a prop, let's say a ray gun or a lightsaber or something like that, it's nice to keep interconnects on things so you can fit parts into small areas and then click them together. And so by soldering to our little kale socketed switch there, we can then just pop the keyswitch in later and then we have a nice little toggle switch. I'm using it. Nice. So that was just a fun little kind of happy thing I played around with the other day and wanted to show off. And then the other thing is I was showing on my show last week, I put together one of our aviation connectors on USB cable. And I'm writing a guide on that now that shows you all of the gory details of getting that put together. But I just wanted to show the sort of nice clean end result we get with one of our standard fabric covered USB cables. And this is the nice little core conductor connector, which then you just orient it and click it together. And now you've got a nice stable connection. It still works. It still works, yeah. Yay, good work. That's the hardest part, getting everything lined up. For sure. All right, good fun here. All right, thanks so much, Shopee. And you'll be on tomorrow, right? Right on, yeah, come on by the workshop, we'll make stuff. And more. Okay, thank you, JB. Next up, ain't your dragon, what you doing? Oh, hello. What's going on? What's happening? I got a macro pad thing going on, macro pad. It's still relevant. Someone had made a feature request. They wanted media control keys, like volume and brightness and next track and stuff. And I was like, oh, that's like, the code is totally like keyboard focused. It's like, I don't know how to do that without like breaking compatibility. And then there was another feature request. Someone wanted like mouse input, like buttons and moving the mouse, I think for Minecraft, that would still be useful on a macro pad. And I'm like, I can't do that. That's gonna break everything. But I had this idea and I, let me switch cameras here to the overhead. There it is. So I did an experiment and I was able to make a thing that does not break compatibility with the existing configuration, the macro files. But you can still do volume control and brightness. So you can do both keyboard stuff and media stuff. And mouse control is in there. And that's one of the existing macros is the number pad. And just as long as I was going nuts, adding audio feedback to macros. I don't know if you can hear it, but you can get little beeps out of these. And you can mix all of these in one macro. So if you need keys and mouse and some audio feedback, it can do all of them. So I have not merged this code yet because it's kind of atrocious. And I was waiting for some feedback on a couple of people to see if it's worth the atrocious syntax in order to get these extra features or I'm just kind of just going off the deep end here with too much zaniness. Okay, cool. All right, well, maybe post the Discord where people can check out this PR, so make a PR and then have people take a look at it. Yeah, I'll do that. Okay, you'll get some good feedback from the community. Okay, all right. Thanks so much, Lovie. Okay, next up, knowing Pedro, whatcha printin'? Hey folks. So this week we have a collab project with Liz Clark. A couple of weeks ago, she had an idea for a BLE HID gesture mouse. So we put together this little case for it and I got a little demo video. It's kind of hard to demo the movements of the mouse. So it's using the feather sense. It has a built-in accelerometer and a proximity sensor. So the little case here houses the feather sense and you tilt it up to move your mouse up. You tilt it left, you tilt it right. It goes left and right. And then it also has the ability to use the proximity sensor. So when you put your finger over the hole, you can control the mouse scrolling. And right there, I was showing the user switch can be used as the left mouse button. And here I'm showing the demo for scrolling because it'd be hard to demo that. So I got some video of it. But yeah, we were able to get the learn guide out so it's out now and there's the inside of the case. And here's the case in Reels. In Reels here. Oh, it's good. Yeah, so check it out. I like the slim designs, cool. It's like, you know, people can modify this how they want with different sensors and such. It looks good. Yeah, definitely check it out. We have 3D models of all of the eight of the feather boards, the battery and the switch and folks seem to be using those in their projects. It's really nice to see folks using those. All right, nice work. Then Pedro, check out that guide coming. It's at the guide's out and then video's out next week, right? Yeah, maybe Friday. Tomorrow Friday. Okay. All right. Thanks folks. Bye. Next up, Liz. You were mentioned, I think they said your name five times. So you matured a lot. Yeah, that's how it works. Their case makes it. But last week I was talking about, I sent off a fuzz pedal to fab. So the PCBs came in. So that's the silk looking like a fuzzy white noise TV. And then I have it all populated and everything. The only thing is I wired the jacks wrong. So I need to fix that. But based on some other testing I was doing, it should be working. So hopefully maybe I can have some fuzzy sounds next week. And the other thing for fun I was working on was, Ascatone has a new synth kit called the Scout. And it actually has an at mega through 28 on it. And as the PCB suggests, you can hack it as the FTDI header and some other pins broken out. So I'm hoping to do some fun synthy things on top of the already really cool sounds. You can get out of it. Squeaky. Yeah. All right, it's fun to stay home and do synths. Yes, definitely. All right, well, good work on the BLE air mouse. If you wanna check out that guide, very hackable project. Yes, definitely. All right, thanks so much, Liz. Next up, let's go to Fummy Guy. Now, did you want me to do that? Hello. Hello. Now it works. All right. So this week I made a digital etch-a-sketch. So here's the real device. And then I have a picture pulled up of the inside of it. It's made out of a pie portal and a couple of a rotary encoder, the Stemma connector ones. Unlike the real etch-a-sketch though, we're not bound by the hardware, the physical hardware, right? So we can do things like pin up and pin down. So like right now I can move the cursor around. It's not actually drawing. If I press one of the buttons, then I'll actually be drawing because the pin went down. We can also do stuff like change the size. So there's a menu built in. If you press this one, there's a couple of different pin sizes, a couple of different step sizes. And then there's also a clear menu option. And then the last thing that I was excited to get in there last night was a accelerometer. So if you shake it up, it will prompt you to clear it. So you can hit the button there and it will clear it out and go back to letting you draw some more. It's so cute. Yeah, thank you. I was really pleased with the way it came out. All right, well you can make art a plenty. Yes. Good work. Thanks. All right. Thanks so much, Tim. All right, and then one more person. Hello, Gabriel. Hey there. Hello, how are you doing? What's up, man? So me and my father made another project for Christmas. It is a very simple project. It only has these LED lights and it is really printed. It still is not completed, but it's like there is like some lights and we will put them like Christmas tree maybe or in the door. Cool. And it only shines and it's programmed in a very tiny microcontroller. It's like Arduino light here, if you can see here. It is a bit ugly, but I'm sorry. We still did not separate the proper time to make the whole case, but we will do it soon. I am trying to find a way to make a case and still make the letters appear outside, not stay. Yeah. Maybe not a hole, so that is it. That looks great. You have plenty of time before Christmas to work on a project. It's good to make it earlier because sometimes the duties at the university makes me not do everything and I have to not do it in the proper time so it's better to do so. So I have no problems in the future, me and my father. It's a good thing to learn as engineer. Congratulations on getting ahead of your project. Okay, bye-bye. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Okay. All right, everybody, that's our show and tell. This week, finishing right on time, so we have a couple of minutes to set up for show and tell and more. Special thanks to Digikey and to Randy. Randy's book, Homemade Robots, is out. Big up. Ten simple bots to build with stuff around the house and also a special thanks to Jeff being a guest on Show and Tell, first guest of the year in person. Yay. This is my show and tell project. Yeah. Don't I look realistic? Yes. All right, thanks everybody. All right, we'll see everybody on Ask an Engineer in about 10 minutes. Bye-bye.