 Hey, hello everyone and welcome to Show and Tell. It's me, John Park. I am guest hosting tonight. Phil and Lamore had some stuff to take care of and wanted to let you know there will not be Ask an Engineer tonight. They'll be back next week so be sure to tune in then. You get the night off. You can go play some video games and eat snacks tonight. I think they will be doing some pre-records of some segments. So watch through the week for some little videos to show up here and there on our social media. But we have some of our Eight of Free Team members here to show off some projects they're working on and things they're up to. Also if you are a member of the community and you would like to hop in and show something that you're working on, please do please stop by. What you can do is head over to our blog. You'll see a blog post there that will give you information about how to join in or head on over to our Discord server which is at ateafrew.it slash discord and you can jump into the live broadcast chat channel where there is a link right for this. Question we got from the chat actually Jeremy Figgins asked does this mean no coupon code tonight? That is correct. No coupon code tonight. You can tune in tomorrow during my workshop show. There will be a coupon then but none tonight. So let's go ahead and get started. We have Scott joining us here. Hey Scott. Hello. Hey John thanks for hosting. Sure thanks. And have a meet. Yes what are you up to? What's going on? I'm working on moving CircuitPython to Espresso's IDF 5 as we were talking before the show. This is the SDK C-layer that they provide to make the code the same across all their chips and we built CircuitPython on top of that. So IDF 5 is a big change that they've done on top of that and 5.1 which will be next also supports some new chips which is exciting and also one of the reasons that we have motivation to move is because we get the latest chip support as well. So I've just been testing it out. So here I have an S2 running my build and you can see there's my Wi-Fi access points. And unfortunately the HTTPS call fails. The one that's HTTPS works but the other one's not working unfortunately so I'm trying to figure out why that is. I think it's a memory related thing so I'll have to take a look at that. That's kind of where we're at. It's compiling. I've got a building for all the boards but I'm trying to figure out like to get it to work and then I have one other quick screen I wanted to share just for folks that do ESP work. So a lot of what I've been doing is diffing the comparison to what I've been doing previously and I just wanted to highlight for those folks who actually do ESP boards I'm adding these PS RAM size mode and frequency things to make it really clear what your board setup is and I was telling you earlier you can also see that I'm changing the mode and the frequency from the existing version so the deleted red version is deleted and these new lines are newer. As I'm testing I'm also speeding up with flash and the RAM accesses that's great. We'll hopefully make a circuit by thumb run faster. That's a nice bump. Yeah it should be a nice bump. It's like optimization I've done with like IMX and RP2040 but I haven't actually always done the optimization work on the ESP so I'm excited to do that and hopefully get some speed ups. Oh that's great. Yeah I was telling you I've been working with the little ESP 32S3 QT Pi for some projects and loving it. The thing is just so beefy. Yes for sure. I mean circuit Python development on it is I feel like it's noticeably faster from hit save to it's just up and running your code which is really nice when you're iterating. Yeah totally. Thank you for the hard work you're putting in. We all appreciate it. No problem. Thank you to Eddie for paying me to do it. Great. Thanks Scott. We'll see you soon. Take care. Thanks John. The intense behind the scenes work that goes on. That's good stuff. All right next up we've got Liz. Hey Liz how's it going? Hello speaking of the ESP 32S3 I've been working on a matrix portal project with the S3 and so up to the side here I've got four led panels and they're 32 by 64 so it makes a display that's 128 by 64 and then I'm using the S3 to get data from the ESPN APIs and I'm tracking data for NFL football MLB baseball, MLS soccer, NHL hockey and NBA basketball and so what it does is you in the code define what teams you want to track and then it will pull down what team they're playing against when the game is when the game is active right now the only game that's active is Red Sox which should be coming up a bit it'll show the score and also like a little detail about the game if it's off season which hockey and basketball are right now we'll say ruins are just killing right now. So yeah I'm gonna start writing this up so folks can use it and it's using the JSON streams library which Scott worked on as well and what that means is like it's a huge JSON file if anyone's tried to look at the ESPN API and so this streams it so that's not storing the whole thing in memory which can sometimes cause your board to like crash so yes this is a nice way to to parse through all this data. Yeah oh this is excellent I I really look forward to this because I had actually done some work with code that Melissa had written to do on our one of the E Inc boards and the mag tag I think and there were some of the ESPN JSON files that worked but some like college football had such a massive schedule there were so many games in a given JSON file that it would eat the four boards so also this is E Inc is nice and all but this is so much more of like a scoreboard kind of look yeah I love I love your idea for this project it's really cool. Thank you and the one thing I was worried about was the logos because you know you have to have everything format into like bitmap and make sure okay so I I wrote up on the playground I can put it into the chat a Python script that because within the JSON there's also links to logos for all the teams that you can access. No kidding. So I run a Python script and folks will be able to run it on their own computer too which will grab all the logos put them into folders so then you can put them onto your circuit pie drive and they're already resized to 32 by 32 gamma everything like that. Wow that is excellent really cool really great work that looks fantastic. Thank you. I got help as far as which stats people would want to see from my brother-in-law is a huge sports fan and I promised him one of the mag tags which I never gave him because the thing was crashing for the sports he cared about so maybe I owe him one of these. Yeah definitely and being from outside Boston it's like impossible to not know about sports like it's against my will. Fantastic thanks Liz and you said that's a guide you're going to be working on soon so people yes should hopefully be out next week. Wow great really cool thanks so much. All right next up we got Pedro. We have multiple views what's happening. So I can come bearing gifts there is a coupon code still active I think. Check that out all right over in the chat. I use Tombstone which shows the project we're showing off and this is an update to last year's Tombstone with the matrix display so Lamar wanted to show off again the prop maker rp2040 and wanted to show that it can run the matrix display as well as all of the other prop stuff so we got servo raven crow guy here with the led eyes and then I forget the name of the time of flight sensor l35 lcd something help me out Liz she did the code for this excellent as always so when it detects distance coming up and there's a little wait time like 30 seconds it's not like constantly looping over when the kids come by and you know want to scare them so there is a speaker hidden right behind here but I disconnected it because it's so freaking loud but total crafty project here aside from the three printed bird which I guess you could just get like a styrofoam one as well so I just use the wire cutter and because these are so thick uh there's enough space um thickness to inset your matrix display as well as all the components so speaker fits in here and I'm just building like little um foam core little um holders to keep everything in place and then when the wire cutter I'm just building all these like uh recesses so all the wires and the LEDs can get pushed in same thing with like the sensor and then everything's just powered out the um one of the wall adapters for the matrix display so using the conduit for um all the wire like hiding everything and then even the servo horn for the uh raven it's just like more uh construction with the the crafting so foam core to build your horn and then just easily inserts into the uh head there called LEDs all mounted on there the same way same thing with the servo it's actually just the uh black foam core on there because I didn't want to go into fusion and like spend all this time um modeling all the components for that so like 10 minutes I was able to just cut everything out of foam core in up and rounding so um yeah super easy project uh nice little upgrade and then of course hindsight you know when you finish the project like oh we could have added this and that so some of the ideas like no way had was like oh the text should have changed when people kind close or like had like a candy dispenser to you know dispense that like for relays so it's like turns on the fog machine or like I don't know have like a whole little graveyard scene you know so definitely some of the things we're going to be thinking about for oh that's great yeah exactly yeah even like we were talking about earlier before the show like those translucent displays to like make that box go so it'd be so cool for next year so maybe next year yeah you're you're uh you're at least ready nice and early for this halloween with this uh project so oh yeah I mean when halloween rolls around we're gonna do the christmas stuff already so it ain't over yet and then and uh the learn guide is live for this or I guess that's posted up and oh you can use coupon code uh get some I think we're out of stock but sign up to get more prop makers I'll be back soon great and that's all right awesome stuff great project thanks for sharing that thank you all right all right uh let's see next up we've got joey hey joey nice to see you howdy good to see it too how's things things are good so um I wish I had more to show in my hand but I actually I can show some photos of what I just did over the weekend uh if I can share my screen sure uh share my whole screen okay so um can you all see my screen there it is yep so yeah so my buddy uh Zach has this I don't know conceptual art project sculpture park de facto sovereign nation in the desert called the Republic of Zachistan and um so we went out there this weekend um it's just kind of some photos of the uh flagpole of robot guardians uh and uh one of the monuments which we actually went there mostly to repair these monuments you can see some of the panels missing but one of the things I kind of wanted to do out there was uh build a weather station because you know uh because you know it's a it's a de facto republic in the desert it deserves to have it's like weather data known so I kind of wanted to build this weather station so what do we need we have like wind we have wind direction speed rainfall and then sensor package in here it's a solar panel to keep it uh alive and so yeah I designed this board it's a kind of clones y'all feather wing quadrupler uh and has some boards of my own design including the lcd feather wing which y'all actually sell yeah I love that one yeah and um this satellite modem and so yeah let me show you some sensor package uh this is the uh well first of all I wanted to interface the sensors over a more weatherproof wire in the stomach qt so I have this stomach qt to rj11 jack which means I use that ice bird c active terminator to kind of keep the ice bird c lines nice and nice and sharp yeah um our ltr390 uv sensor pms3 something or other uh air quality and a bme280 for temperature humidity going out this cable gland this enclosure is actually a I think annoying headboard project of the weather station y'all did um see here it is in the enclosure which I got from y'all and um yeah this is a first time I've kind of designed a board for an enclosure so that's kind of cool uh gets this like kind of clear pet g hat to keep it all in place and yeah here's me soldering in the desert first thing in the morning adding a temperature sensor for the battery which is important for in your like outdoor projects but yeah this is like uh this is what it looks like when it's finally put together and uh I really like designing like again these are all like kind of boards I've put together for the from on the feather form factor but I now can kind of mix and match like oh I need solar power but I also need a low power display and a rain gauge so now I can like plop those three boards in there and I can kind of design a gadget around like yeah there's like this feather kind of form factor and I have more and more things I can just kind of plug in you know yeah there's a modularity as well as the the custom side to it which is really helpful yeah um so yeah this is the first satellite data that came down I was able to get it on a buddy's phone just took a photo of the screen and uh yeah me installing the weather station first visitor it got to see it's a god spider but yeah so this is the zakistan uh weather station and you can actually see live satellite weather data oh great that's fantastic I was about to ask where is it broadcast oh it's yeah we get the data down via swarm this uh a little low power low cost iot satellite network and post it up to the website so yeah that is the uh that's my weekend project we're going up to zakistan and uh what an upgrade for zakistan right uh I hope they have a wikipedia page and they do and they'll be on there or I'm gonna go edit it that's really cool joey thanks for sharing that for sure yep good to see you thanks for having me good thing take care all right uh that's really fun uh by the way if you're still watching joey in the chat mark gambler has a question what size battery did you use for that so I don't know if you're over on the discord uh or if I can bring you back on here let's see let me bring you back on if you're yeah yeah yeah um I'm using the 6600 milliampere hour battery that y'all sell so it's like three cells yeah I'm joined together I'm actually realizing I'm using y'alls the colossal panel that y'alls have the solar and uh yeah I probably don't need that much battery because it's topping off every day on the you know the sunlight that it gets but I didn't know it's cloudy you're ready for uh yeah yeah for a few days of clouds ready for for the solar eclipse or the the dust storms yes great thanks joey sure thing uh all right very cool project and now I want to go to zakistan uh let's see next up we've got dj debon three hello hello can you hear me I can hear you very well what's up okay uh well I had nine matrix panels running off of the matrix portal s3 they were working great as you can see something went wrong everything is uh like uh jumbled up now because I tried adding 12 okay so I tried adding the one at the top and then that just kind of like messed everything up it does not like tile four tile three you can deal with tile four just jumbled everything up uh so I did that like five seconds before coming on kind of thing uh so yeah live demo didn't work uh I'll get it worked out for next week so those are rows of three those are rows of three correct yeah okay and they are big by 32 is that right uh the total is 192 by 128 now okay yeah that's a lot of pixels yeah yeah I don't know if you can where's the camera matrix portal s3 this is the only thing that's sending data through this entire panel and that's going from a usb cable up to idc up to the top row and then all of the sensor data is off of this bme 688 itc sensor and it's got like you know weather data and stuff in there not quite displaying correctly uh but no that was the brakes uh one question is what's the uh what are you using to power that because that's got to be drawing quite a bit of current oh yeah uh I am using two five volt 18 amp mean well psus okay and they're they have these really neat socket switches yeah with uh on off and you just plug in a pc power cord and then the other side of the pc kind of I can't like pick this whole thing up and show you it's all buried back there um but the pc power cord then goes splits off into three and then goes to a live neutral hot on the power supply and then all of the power cables get routed up into that but this is a neat way uh as a safety switch so I can turn on and off you know portions of the panels that way um and if I start smelling you know anything that's like burning because this does get pretty warm then uh you know I wanted to have a safety on off switch smart yeah well cool uh thanks for pushing the boundaries and trying to add even more right for this show I wanted to see how many maximum I could get from a matrix s3 uh from makes a portal s3 it does nine working on 12 that's really cool that is a huge display it's very impressive yes I'm gonna go up on a wall uh at some point yes that will go up on my wall um and maybe eventually run Liz's sports stuff along with the weather yeah yeah oh very cool you could probably even branch some of these to be multiple uh portals to do some data for for one lot of possibility I mean it's a huge display yeah yeah got room uh really cool thank you so much for sharing that looks thank you you have a great night thank you uh all right and uh last up we've got mark uh who was having camera problems but oh yeah we've uh we have a we have a picture in picture mark hi yeah I am back to having camera problems so I'm gonna have to do this old-fashioned way and just move my webcam over in a moment uh so speaking of weather projects I have sorry I'm gonna try not to make everyone dizzy for a moment uh finished up the enclosure for my lightning detector oh really nice yeah so it's still needs some tweaks um the I didn't account for the size of the battery in the bottom of it so the lightning bolt will hopefully be fully standing up but right now there's not room as the battery took the bottom of it and it is if I can cause it to light up uh does light up then when it detects uh lightning or your finger pressing on the antenna sometimes so yeah and I actually was able to test this out uh probably about a month ago when a storm came by and we actually had a lot of lightning I was surprised at how much you detect during a storm before that occasionally one in the distance that's the one maybe two every five ten minutes during the storm I was like oh there's like five in the last five minutes or ten and then a hundred and a hundred and fifty wow so what what is the uh what is it detecting how how are you sensing the light so it's powered by this I don't this is probably not going to focus it's a as 3995 lightning detector chip so the board I built uh now two months ago or so uh it detects at 500 kilohertz uh and that is important because apparently it used to be used for marine radio of some sort but that type of radio got decommissioned and that area spectrum was never reassigned so you don't get a lot of noise man made noise on that frequency so this specifically looks and looks for that and the chip itself looks for certain patterns so it can detect man made noise from a DC motor or your computer power supply versus actual lightning which has a slightly different distinct frequency I actually found a write-up um a write-up online that somebody did a lot of research on this chip that was very helpful in finding out how it works oh that's great so my if I'm understanding this right I'm guessing lightning throws a bunch of signal across a humongous wide range but you found this chip finds a sliver that's not going to be used by much else so that's a nice place to to focus your detection is that yeah exactly that if you're ever listening to the radio during a thunderstorm you'll hear the interference yeah um and if you've got a software defined radio or something you can see it which is where it first got my interest huh that's cool so yeah uh after redo the case once more to make everything fit then hopefully I can have it I wanted to make it portable my initial thought was then to bring it to sports games like my own sports games not professional ones and then it this all started when we were having an argument of whether the storm is too close ah okay and this chip will give you an estimate or if nothing else show you as the storm coming towards you away from you and then you can make your best judgment on that I love it I love the idea of you deciding to win this argument by developing a whole device yeah I didn't like the game getting cut short when the storm just blew past so yeah oh good for you that's fantastic yeah practical another thing to put in a weather station uh huh yeah uh I don't know how much lightning you get in uh zakistan joey but worth considering can talk to mark about that yeah no my weather station is currently on the ground broken from the wind so oh this will be in the next model okay so now I'm motivated good good yeah you've got an atom and a rebuild fantastic well thanks for sharing that mark appreciate it all right uh and that is going to do it for show and tell thank you everyone so much for coming by and sharing your stuff it's a real delight to see uh the the creative and excellent uh technical uh things you're building uh there is as I said not going to be an ask an engineer tonight they'll be back uh next wednesday so stop by for another show and tell as well as ask an engineer after that uh and uh that's going to do it i'll see you tomorrow if you want to stop on bio be doing john park's workshop at four o'clock eastern time one o'clock pacific and then we got plenty other shows so check the blog check our social media and also head on over to the discord server where we'll uh let you know when shows are coming up all right thanks everyone for a different industries i'm john park and this has been show and tell we'll see you next time bye