 This month on Maker Update, a fully functioning MIDI instrument, Adafruit's response to COVID-19, an easy-to-sew face mask, dropping eggs, Morse code, and Circuit Python and Espanyol. Hello and welcome back to the Adafruit edition of Maker Update for April 2020. I'm Tyler Weingarder. I hope you're doing okay and staying safe. I'm guessing by now you're either Hawkeye for anything related to COVID-19, or you just want something to take your mind up the global pandemic. We're trying to do both here, so let's check out our project of the month. Liz Clark and the Ruiz brothers are on a tear of collaborative music-based projects for the past few months, but this might be their finest work yet. Their latest project is a MIDI guitar inspired after the controller for Guitar Hero, complete with MX mechanical keyboard switches, a strum bar, accelerometers, neopixels, and more. The guitar can interface with just about any digital audio workstation software via USB. The keys on the neck can play notes directly, or you can use the strum bar to play chords. There's a whammy bar and an accelerometer to modulate the notes, potentiometers to help shape the sound, and an eight-way switch to change the octave of the instrument. The brains of it is the Grand Central M4 Express, and the code is all written in Circuit Python. This might be one of the most impressive music instrument maker projects I've ever seen. They could have just harvested the strum bar and whammy bar controls from a discarded guitar hero or rock band controller, but instead they've engineered their own. Both from a hardware design and a software interface, this project is an incredible resource. Now for the news. You may have noticed that Adafruit has been a little quiet with regards to new products, but they've certainly been keeping busy. They've shifted much of their manufacturing over to the production of personal protective equipment for first responders. In doing so, they've established themselves as an essential manufacturing business and have kept every single one of their employees on the payroll. They've published their own facial design for anyone who wants to make them at home. If that's not cool enough, they've also posted a collection of wonderful gifts of their manufacturing process. Check them out if you haven't seen them yet. Which is not to say they've abandoned their community. Since we've all been sheltering at home, they've expanded the weekly Adafruit show and tell to one hour every week. It's one more way they're helping makers to stay connected, even while maker spaces and meetups just aren't possible under the current health regulations. Now for more projects. You're likely overwhelmed with designs for face shields, masks, and other PPE you could be making for your family or for your local first responders. But if you don't know where to start, Erin St. Blaine created this fantastic tutorial for making a cloth mask out of materials you likely have around your house. Her patterns can be printed on standard letter paper and it's all hand stitched. Even if you've never sewn a stitch in your life, this is the perfect place to begin. And this time when certain foods can be a little hard to find at your local grocer, it's tough to rationalize sacrificing them for engineering challenges like the egg drop challenge. You know, the one where you need to build a device to protect an egg being dropped from a specific height? Anyway, John Park used the sensors and the display on board the Adafruit Clue as a digital stand-in for a reusable and less messy Crash Test dummy. Perfect for prototyping designs before its final egg test. Whether you're sheltering with family and your board game collection is getting more regular use, or you just have a regular game night and want to add a little bit more structure to it, this Neopixel Game Timer by Erin St. Blaine is a wonderful addition. Thanks to the Circuit Playground Express and Make Code, you can set it up in minutes. You could be done with just the board, but it'll look so much better if you extend it with a Neopixel strip, or find a bigger button to mash when it's time to take your turn. Carter Nelson from the Adafruit community built this Adafruit Morse Code Chat Client. And if you've been looking for a good way to learn Morse code, this is the perfect rainy day project. You'll need at least two Clue boards, and they connect to each other over Bluetooth Low Energy. One button is for dots, and the other for dashes, and if you press both together, it will send your message. Incoming messages are just displayed in alphabet letters, so this will only help you with your expressive skills, not your receptive. Still, this looks super fun. Dana Wall created this guide for outlining some of the design considerations for face shields. It covers a few different strategies for cutting out the PET sheets to form the protective barrier, and a video guide for setting up parametric designs in Fusion 360. The designs for protective face shields are changing fast, but it's a great guide for anyone who wants to get involved. Last month, our featured product was the Adafruit Feather NRF 52840 Sense. Now, Catney Rembore has a full guide up for this powerhouse development board. There's a complete rundown on the board pinouts, including the iSquad C addresses for all the onboard sensors, a setup guide for the Arduino IDE, a few basic BLE tutorials, and more. She also outlines the Adafruit BLE NRF 52 API and walks you through Circuit Python on the Feather Sense. Speaking of Circuit Python, there's now a Spanish translation of the Circuit Python starter guide, courtesy of Alvaro Figueroa Cabezas. The code examples and the messages from the REPL are still in English, so you'll need to be a little language flexible, but this should help to extend Circuit Python to more people. If you've managed to get your hands on any recent Bluetooth low-energy boards like CLU or the Feather NRF 52840 Sense, there's now a desktop dashboard that runs near Chrome browser. Once you connect to your hardware, it will spawn a number of panels depending on what sensors it has on board. There are panels for accelerometer, temperature, barometric pressure, button indicators, a light sensor, an RGB color picker, and more. This should come in really handy for debugging your next project. For this month's Adafruit product spotlight, you may have noticed there's quite a few boards lately that come equipped with a combination proximity, RGB, light, and gesture sensor. If you've wanted to include this sensor in your projects but on a breakout board, you're now in luck. There's an on-board voltage regulator allowing you to accept 3.3 or 5 volts, pins for I2C, 3V out, and a pair of Stem Equic connectors. It's on the standard 0.7 by 1 inch PCB, and there's four mounting holes. Best part? It's only $7.50. And that is going to do it for this month's show. I'm hoping that the next time you see me here, this whole COVID-19 business will have settled down a little bit. As always, huge thanks to everyone at Adafruit for letting us do this show for you. Stay safe, look after your family, take care of your community, wash your hands, and keep on making. Thanks so much for watching. We'll see you soon.