 night before Ada Box, and all through the land, all the makers were waiting, soldering irons in hand. With learn guides on standby and pink in her hair, they knew that dear Ada Claus soon would be there. With a good multimeter, some solder and flux, noses pressed against windows for UPS trucks. With quick wit and know-how, and boards made of bread, the makers await with projects in their head. The poem is too long to do the whole thing, but we can't wait to see what the Ada Box brings. With good business practices and all of her smarts, Lady Ada helps us turn electrons to art. So do your thing, and always ask questions. If the component is backwards, you'll sure learn a lesson. But errors can teach, and you have the power. Oh Ada Box, Ada Box, please arrive any hour. Sayonara for now, but do hold on tight. Happy Ada Box to all, and to all a good night. Strap yourself in. We're launching in T minus 10 seconds. Destination? A new Class M planet called Ada Box 19. M here stands for microcontroller, because this Ada Box is the first one to feature the newest technology from the Raspberry Pi sector. Say hello to the RP2040. It's a speedy little microcontroller with lots of GPIO pins, and 64 times more RAM than the Apollo guidance computer. Get ready to upgrade your desk's mission control station with a circuit python powered macro pad. Complete with 12 buttons, OLED display, speaker, and rotary encoder. Customize it for your spacecraft to help guide you through the great reaches of the unknown. Or just have it type out your favorite emojis. On this interstellar journey, you won't be traveling alone. Our long-term Ada Box partner, Digikey, is the co-pilot and booster rocket. Just like a friendly astromechadroid, they're always there to help us keep the ship running tip top with plenty of repair parts and tools. Celebrate their contribution to Ada Box with a custom etched keycap that can be used on your macro pad or on any mechanical keyboard. Ada Box 19. Macro pad. Welcome to the Ada Box 19 unboxing. Thank you so much for joining us on our mission to planet keycap in the diode matrix galaxy. If you're a subscriber, you probably have your box by now and can join in on the unboxing. If you're not a subscriber, be sure to subscribe to Ada Box 20 coming this fall. I believe we've escaped Earth's atmosphere, so let's enjoy the view from outer space as we become accustomed to our new zero gravity environment. And special thanks to Digikey for making this Ada Box possible. Now let's get our Ada Box and have a look inside. Oh, what the heck? Let's just open the box. Sliding open. The Ada Box 19, the first thing we see is the lovely insert sheet with our gang of intrepid Ada Fruit explorers checking out space. They're off on one of their typical space adventures. And on the other side, we list the box contents as well as links to learn guide tutorials and a coupon code that you can use on a future store purchase. Now, diving in all sorts of good goodies. Let's have a little bit of a closer look. Here's what we have in the Ada Box mission control capsule. First of all, the Ada Fruit macro pad. This is a three by four customizable keypad, which is programmable in Circuit Python. It's starring the Raspberry Pi RP2040, which is a powerful chip that can act as both a USB, HID and MIDI device. To plug into it, we have Kale box red switches. These are perhaps the most common switches in the galaxy with a smooth linear feel. Of course, you can replace them with any MX compatible switches you have on hand, thanks to the hot swap sockets. We've also got translucent DSA profile keycaps. These will snap right on top of your MX compatible key switches, and you'll be able to see the neopixels glowing right on up through the keys. Now, we also have the macro pad top and bottom plates. These are custom PCBs that will keep your macro pad stable while looking awesome, thanks to this gorgeous silk screen. Also included, we have a purple USB-C cable, an encoder knob, M3 screws, and little rubber bumper feet. That's not all, however. We've also got this custom Digi-key shine-through etched keycap. If you have an illuminated keyboard, you'll be able to see the color glow right through the top. You can also use it right on your macro pad. And finally, we have this Circuit Python space explorer sticker. It's so shiny and spacey. Slap this on the side of your rocket and let all of your intergalactic traveler friends know that you represent. May not survive re-entry into Earth atmosphere. Now, before we go any further, what even is a macro pad, you may ask? Is it something you can dance with? Yes. Is it something you can juggle? Probably not. Is it something you should caress? Possibly. Is it like a keyboard? Yes. Yes, it is like a keyboard. In fact, it's a USB keyboard which you can program to do what you want. But what you want could be anything. It can lay down a bunch of keystrokes for you as a macro pad, usually does. It can do keyboard shortcuts. It can do music by sending MIDI notes. It can do game pad. It can do joystick locations for such a device, especially one that lets you really customize the look and feel of it with different keycaps, different key switches. And this one has a little display on it so you can read out information or give yourself a hint as to what things mean. It's also got neopixels shining up through the bottom, which means colorful RGB LEDs that can again indicate things blink when you need to pay attention to something. And there's this rotary encoder that's already soldered on there which acts as a button when you click it and acts as an endless knob when you turn it. So what are the possibilities with the macro pad? They're infinite. 28x64 monochrome OLED for a crisp heads-up display that can be used in Arduino or Circuit Python to display key maps, stats, computer performance, and so on. There's also the rotary encoder with push button soldered in for you. You can twist and turn it or push it to change volume or monitor brightness or scroll, whatever you like. A tiny speaker can give audio feedback or play some fun bleepy tunes. If you want to add more hardware, we've got this Stem-a-QT port on the side that lets you connect any iSquared-C add-on peripherals from the massive Stem-a-QT quick family of plug-in boards. Now you can also dress up your macro pad with Paint Your Dragons fabulous decorative silk screen enclosure and hardware kit. You get these two custom PCBs that are cut to act as a protective bottom plate and a mechanically stabilizing key switch plate on top. You can use these included M3 screws to connect those. We'll take a look in a little bit how to do that. And since this is a symmetric design, you can decide which side you want up or down. You can also attach rubber bump-on feet to protect the bottom from skidding. Let's dig into the stats just a little bit here. Macro Pad runs on the Raspberry Pi RP2040 chip with 8 megs of flash memory, a dual core Cortex M0 at 130 MHz with 264K of RAM. It runs circuit Python, Arduino, or MicroPython with ease, with lots of space for development code and files. The USB-C connector is for both power and data. And of course, this can act as a USB-HID device. Also, it can act as USB MIDI, UART, etc. The three by four mechanical key switch sockets accept any Cherry MX compatible switches, and they're individually tied to GPIO pins, not matrix wired. There's one NeoPixel RGB LED per switch on the north side of the switch, which can shine through. The rotary encoder has 20 detents per rotation with a push switch on a GPIO pin. The push switch on the rotary encoder is also used for entering bootloader mode. On power-up you simply hold it, then press and release the reset button, and then release the encoder switch. The 128x64 OLED is a monochrome display that is high-speed and tied to SPI for quick updates. The 8mm speaker slash buzzer has a Class D amplifier and an RC filter, so it can be used to make simple beeps and sound effects. And finally, there are four M3 compatible bosses that you can use for screwing on a backplate or attaching it to a 3D printed enclosure or other case. I think that you'll find that the assembly of the macro pad is actually pretty fun. First of all, we get to peel off the screen protector. Oh yeah. Then we're going to insert a couple of the key switches into the switch plate. So you'll note the orientation here. We have these two pins or legs oriented to match the socket, so down in the south position, and then we'll plug a couple of those into that switch plate, making sure they match orientation. Let me snap in nice and snug. And now what we'll do is very carefully align those little legs with the sockets on the macro pad. This is really important because they're so thin, they're easy to bend, so you want to just make sure to take it slowly and carefully so that you get nice alignment before you try to go and manhandle those into there. And now those are stable and we can start to insert the rest of the switches. Again, just going through carefully and making sure to check the legs orientation before placing those in there. Sometimes you may find that one of those legs is bent just a little bit before you even try inserting it, so just push that down into place a little bit and that should work just fine. I've also found that you can, if you have any question of did a pin actually make it in or not, if you flip it over and look at the little kale sockets here, you'll see the little tip of the pin shows up. If any of those are missing one, then you've got a bent leg. You want to pull it out and fix that and try again. There we have it. All of the key switches are in place. Now what we can do is go ahead and add the back plate and here you've got a decision to make. Which way are you going to go with the beautiful Vera Rubin satellite and golden record image side or the macro pad control module interface side. I think I'm going to go with the control module visible on the back. It's not a permanent choice. You can always switch that later. Oh, one important thing before we do that, check and see the four little captain covers that you may find on the little threaded bosses here. You can just peel those off a fingernail or if you're having trouble, you can go in with a little pick screwdriver or other tool. Okay, now we can go ahead and place that on and screw those in place with the provided M3 screws. Now while you've got this flipped over, you might as well add the little rubber bump on feet which give you some skid protection on the desk. All that high performance macro padding you're planning to do. No more skidding. Okay, what we can do next is put this little D-shaft compatible encoder knob with soft touch right onto the encoder shaft and just press down. That's about as far as that's going to go. Yeah, just like that. I almost forgot, when we get ready to put on our keycaps, you'll want to grab 11 of the clear DSAs and perhaps that one Digi-key cap can go right there. So these DSA ones, there's no proper orientation for them so you can place them any way you like on there and just press them on. And now your macro pad is assembled and ready to get plugged in and start programming. If you want to plug it in, we have this USB-C to USB-A purple fabric cable and you'll see that that just plugs right in like so. And now you are ready to plug this into your computer and get started coding. I'm going to go ahead and plug this in just so we can get a little bit of a demo of how things look. I've just plugged that into power. It's not on a computer but you can see we get these beautiful rainbow colors and the little demo program here tells us the encoder position when the encoder is pressed and we get a little light show there and each key that's pressed changes its color as well as reporting its status on the screen. There's no problem with ghosting and pressing all the keys at once. It's time for a parts wrap up. Inside this Adabox we have of course the Adafruit macro pad, kale box switches, translucent dsa keycaps, the macro pad top plate and bottom plate, a d-shaft soft touch skirted rubber knob for the encoder, for M3 screws, for rubber bump-ons, the pink and purple woven USB-C cable, custom etched digikey keycap, thank you digikey, and our circuit python space explorers sticker. I'm John Park and this has been the Adabox 19 unboxing. Thank you for joining us and next we'll go live to explore some projects that you can build with your macro pad. That should be working a little bit better. Tell me if you hear the audio nice and clear now. It's all static, no audio. Hopefully that'll work better now. We had a crash during our transmission that caused some unusual settings to get set. Better now but low. Ah okay well that is a good sign. Let's turn up this here and this here and now we should be a little bit better. Okay sorry about that and also I apologize because we had technical difficulties that messed around with our transmission but now here we are back in front of you. So what I wanted to do is get back on track and say first of all thank you so much for coming, thank you so much for participating, and for those of you who ordered your Adabox, thank you so much for your patience if those have not come in yet. We know that we're working hard to get those onto trucks and out to people and some people have started to get their shipping notices, some people have not yet, some people have received them, so we run the gamut but hopefully all will be taken care of soon enough and then you'll get to play around with your macro pad which is very exciting because it's an incredibly fun thing to find in your Adabox, at least I think so. And in fact one thing I wanted to do right away is thank DigiKey for helping us in getting this Adabox out and as you noticed we have the very cool DigiKey silkscreen on the back as well as the DigiKey key cap that you can place on top of one of your keys and one thing I wanted to do is ask our good friend Mr. Carl Sagan to tell us a little bit about the macro pad, Mr. Sagan. If you wish to make an Adafruit macro pad from scratch you must first invent the universe, copper, silicon, carbon, elements forged in the hearts of distant exploding suns. It is made of star stuff. Very interesting and thank you for sharing those facts with us. Who knew? Now when you get an Adabox one of the first things that people like to do is head on over to check out the learn guide. It looks like our learn guide is not showing up, let's see where it went off to. This is part of the things that we lost in the, yeah sure enough there's a weird missing screen capture so you get to see behind the scenes a little bit how a star man puts together a show here and I add a screen capture and we're going to go ahead and configure that get ready for it hopefully it'll work hey it's appeared oh I see what's going on all right that's a little better see if I can move that off to the side there we go would you believe this is the 19th one of these we've done incredible okay so when you get your Adabox you may want to go ahead and check out the learn guide and that's just been published and we just put out a blog post letting you know the learn guide for the Adabox will let you know everything from the contents of it if you head to this unboxing Adabox page you can scroll through there pardon me one second I'm going to turn that AC back on because I think the sound didn't care about it and my cameras are going to overheat there you go so that'll take you through the contents of the Adabox there with a little bit more detail and then we have a page on assembling your macro pad that goes through those steps that I showed as well as if you're interested in 3d printing a case for it the Ruiz brothers have posted that a nice little adjustable case we also have a main guide on the macro pad itself from catney and this will take you through again the assembly steps in a little further detail pulled from the Ruiz brothers video there you can see that's the pre-production version of the back plate we have some early ones that went out without some of the silkscreen and etchings but the boxes have them oh wow my AC just stopped that's bad hold on let's get that all right if you've been wondering what life is like on mars it's a lot like this okay so you'll also find the main guide has instructions on using the macro pad inside of circuit python how to load it up how to load circuit python on there and use the libraries and then in the essentials section we have a dedicated library for macro pad library called ater fruit underscore macro pad that helps you use the macro pad with some convenient commands so you don't have to set up the key key matrix reading or the screen a lot of those things happen under the hood with this library using the rotary encoder using the beeper they all happen in sort of nice convenient ways inside of the macro pad library so definitely check that out first here's a little example here of some code for doing a beep doing digital input doing keypad and then okay so those are actually those are vanilla versions sorry there's the macro pad library version so if we click into here now you'll see we have demos on the basics of just reading switches displaying text to the screen we all have sample code here to do things like this read the rotary encoder read the rotary encoder clicks playing little tones and I'm going to show you some demos of these things in a moment and as well as using the macro pad as keyboard and mouse using the macro pad as a midi trigger that was a piece of code that I was able to help cat me with and I have a little demo to show you there as well as the docs on the library and using it inside of Arduino so thanks to the Earl Phil Howard core you can use Arduino on the rp2040 chip that's the basis of this board which is pretty cool uh clicking along we now get into the projects so this is the project you're going to want to check out first this is the macro pad hotkeys product project from phil b and this one has already started to get new templates made by people who want to control different things on the computer using the macro pad so phil provides some shortcuts for using things like photoshop and a web browser like safari illustrator and there are versions of these for windows as well as mac i found some of the windows ones tend to work on linux as well on a raspberry pi uh so this is the the basic uh project you want to put on and then you just mess around with a little config file to change the color the text and the function of each of those buttons so this is a really great guide to get started with if you've just opened up your macro pad you'll see that the uh demo program on there is just a pretty light show but if you want to get this thing working as an hid macro pad this is the project to check out uh the macro pad summer olympics hotkeys is actually one of these variant projects that isaac wellish created using phil's core uh program and then adding a config that gives you a few different pages when you turn the knob of the um different stats on the sports that you can watch at the olympics as well as some shortcuts for launching different browser pages to watch the olympics online through nbc and uh through your local cable provider or however you connect to watch on a browser so that's really cool and i have a demo of that going on as well uh there's a ableton live macro pad launcher that i created this uses midi to launch clips in a DAW a digital audio workstation and it reads back midi coming from the DAW in order to keep lights and text in sync which is uh like a miniature version of an ableton push there's a uh macro pad 2fa authentication friend that was created by carter nelson and this one is as you can you can see it's using some custom key keycaps on there a little clear ones that you can print out your own labels and that uh keeps a uh a functional 2fa to function authentication uh password going with a uh service online the reese brothers put out the macro pad pad braille keycaps project so you can check this out if you want to three print your own braille keycaps so that you can use them to feel your way around this keyboard and then launch whatever you want to launch on a computer uh here is the three printed stand from the reese brothers there's a whole project on that uh and then this is a side uh sort of a deeper look project from dan halber who created the underlying keypad library that we used to scan either the gpio pins directly or through a diode matrix or with a shift register so this will work on a whole slew of different types of keyboards column row ones which i'll be doing in an upcoming project uh the snes game pad which is a shift register and then our macro pad which is directly tied buttons to gpio uh and one last thing we often get this question and catney took care of this i think just today which is where do i get the original firmware the firmware that came in my demo in the adabox i've put something else on there and i want to go back in time to to that happy time when i had that original demo here it is so you can just follow to the last page of the guide for adox 19 and you'll get the the firmware there uh okay well i think it's a good time to uh check out the uh i'm going to check out the chat first of all make sure no one's telling me that we've lost audio or anything scary like that uh looks like no red alerts shoo uh so what i want to do is actually show you some demos so let me head over to the workbench over here and i'm going to give you a little overhead view as well and let me head over there to show you some demos okay so uh first of all one thing i want to mention is this is sort of keyboard mania here so the macro pad it is part of our part of Adafruit's getting really interested in mechanical keyboards some people like Colin Cunningham have been into them forever other people have more recently gotten excited about them but we think that the macro pad is a really nice distillation of this mechanical keyboard madness hobby uh it runs everything from uh 10 keyless which is my main keyboard uh using uh some clicky blue switches and some custom uh or group buy 808 keycaps to a big old battle tank of a ATXT keyboard here this is uh using blue alps switches is a real old beast that i'm still trying to get working to our own little custom uh raspberry pi pico based macro pad type of keyboards there's a couple here i've used mostly for midi projects and uh then we like i mentioned we have some projects coming up that allow us to use uh this snap apart ortho linear setup and uh and you can hot swap different keys in there and one of the big deals about this hot swap thing is that there are a lot of keycaps in the world so uh you can see here i've got a little collection of some of the ones that we sell and some others that i have here's a silver cherry mx here is a very clicky clicky blue here's a jade also super super strong depressing clicky to silent ones to browns tactile much hated on but i love them uh and custom uh or specialized keycaps so we've got the we sell these little cute kitty keycaps here we have the little shine through keycaps that let you see your leds through just a little window uh we have some little smoke keycaps there and we got some nice jewel tone uh color keycaps there um so this is actually a little project i just put together some really simple code that just plays the tone playback so there is that little speaker so i just wanted to set up something sort of like the dual tone multifunction but i just had a single tone for simplicity of a telephone so and then here is that olympics project let's see actually ironically don't have my camera switcher i have a little keyboard camera switcher and i don't have it plugged in right now so if i can keep things from falling apart here it's okay you don't need to see it up too close but what you'll see is that i have the um this is the olympics uh project on here macro pet project if i hit let's say nbc it just fills in and uh launches the nbc website to watch some olympics on there i'm going to cover that so we don't get a copy strike uh close that real quick uh that'll do and this also if you turn the uh the little knob here i can zoom in at least that'll help let's go let's go way and like there we go uh you'll see as i turn this knob we get different pages of keyboard shortcuts so this has some different sports that you can click to go see their schedule and standings uh so if you want to know what's going on in climbing or sailing or karate you can go to this page three move on to page four and check out taekwondo uh triathlon and so on so that's a really cool project using phil b's uh keyboard shortcut main guide here was this little midi one uh that i had set up that that basic uh midi tester i'm running it through this little mini synthesizer here using midi and originally i set this up as usb midi but now i have it working over our little stem of qt cable there using uart so i've set that up just as essentially a transmit pin uh you can see i'm lighting this up as as i press things it's going to send midi if i restart my keyboard over here you should hear it play uh different notes and i'm sending cc messages which is what's giving me that changing um frequency of the cutoff of a filter there so that's another fun project and uh then here's here's the uh the main one right here the one that ships with it which is our beautiful light show and i'm going to just plug that into a uh a power bank and uh speaking of power banks some of these projects previously uh wouldn't work if they weren't plugged into usb h id compatible computer of some kind if we were particularly if you were using the macro pad library well i talked to catney about that today and she's fixed it and is going to pr that pretty soon so you'll be able to do projects without any difficulty such as this one that don't need to be plugged into a computer but use the macro pad convenience library uh so let's see i think that covers all of the demos i wanted to show there are plenty more and we're excited also to see people in the community are starting to post their own projects there's a whack-a-mole game that came out sort of a timed uh light changing and button pressing game that's uh that's great for the macro pad and we're excited to see what else people do other games you've of course got we've got to see some mini pong show up on this little screen sometime a brick out please i'd love to see that uh so let me head back on over to the workstation here and uh i think that does that cover it let me look at what else did i want to mention i think that's all i wanted to mention we've been here a long time thank you for sticking around thanks for putting up with some of my uh technical difficulties that i had again questions about life on mars life on mars can be technically challenging it also gets pretty hot here or maybe that's just los angeles maybe it's both uh all right so i'm going to check out uh anyone with questions in the chat we'll hang around just for a couple more minutes also lady aida and uh mr lady aida are in the chat so if you have questions head on over to our discord it's a great place to see what's going on and talk with a lot of people about uh fun projects unboxings project help circuit python arduino raspberry pi all those good subjects are there uh and uh i think that's gonna do it all right well thank you everyone so much and uh before i go i know that we had some uh some questions for our good friend mr carl sagan again so uh first of all i wanted to ask you um what are our best tips for survival the more you look like a samurai the better your chances of survival interesting and uh i know there was something else someone had asked uh about um some space wisdom perhaps there is a big potato orbiting mars huh all right well i think that's gonna do it for us for today again thank you for aida fruit industries i'm john park thank you to digikey for helping us make this happen and thank you to you all for coming out and with that we sign off dinosaurs conclusion dinosaurs