 This month on Maker Update, a beacon for lost keys, a peek inside Adabox 15, spooky pianos, gaming with Neopixels, more pins per pin, and a keyboard that can only type one thing. Hello and welcome back to the Adafruit edition of Maker Update for August 2020. I hope you've had a great July and the fireworks are starting to die down wherever you are. I love a good fireworks celebration, but after several weeks or even months of it, it was just getting to be a bit much. Anyhow, we've got an awesome show for you, full of great projects, so let's get right into it with the project of the month. Do you ever have that problem of tools wandering off, maybe in a shared workspace? The author of August's project, Rdagger68, works in an office that has guests on the regular, but the restrooms are shared with other offices in the building, so you need a key to access them. As a result, the keys are often checked out, but rarely returned, so they developed a system built around these oversized key fobs that sound an alarm when they're taken out of range, like if you tried to take them into the elevator. The key fobs themselves are a pretty thorough lesson in compact design. Each one houses an NRF 52840 Express, a 3W audio amplifier breakout, a waterproof speaker, a 500mAh battery, and an inductive charging coil. The key fob itself is a 3D printed case indicating which restroom the key unlocks, and the Neopixel in the microcontroller shines through the case to indicate battery status as well as proximity to the beacons. This project comes with a thorough write up and a 20 minute build video explaining their design process. They also include this design for a 3D printed cradle to recharge the fobs wirelessly. Each one contains a wiring harness that allows the cradles to be ganged together if you need to charge a bunch of these. Okay, so maybe this won't help you find your misplaced tape measure, but it will at least give you a heads up if it's taken out of range. You can find everything you need to build your own down in the description. Now for the news, Adafruit has just released Adabox 15. Included in the kit is an Adafruit Clue plus a Bonsai Buckaroo. The Bonsai Buckaroo is a breakout for the Clue and Microbit that lets you monitor soil moisture and drive a water pump, perfect for robotic gardening projects. There's also a 3V water pump, a AA battery power pack, some alligator clip connectors, a KN95 face mask, and a fingerless glove, which will come in handy for making gesture based projects with Clue. You can subscribe to Adabox by following the link in the description. It's still a little ways off, but mark your calendars for Circuit Python Day coming up on September 9th. Sponsored by Adafruit Circuit Python Day is a global virtual event with live streams, tutorials, hackathons, and plenty more. Ann Barela created this guide to building a PyPortal countdown clock, so you won't miss out. Look forward to more updates about Circuit Python Day coming soon. And don't forget that the Adafruit store is open and taking all orders, so if there's anything you need for a project you're working on, they're ready to get those precious parts into your hands. All of their shipping and handling is performed under COVID-19 best practices, so you can order with the confidence that they're keeping your safety in mind. Let's get back to more projects. I know it's only August and October still seems a ways off, but this glowing Neopixel bottle piano from Air and St. Blaine looks like the perfect jumping off point for making your own spooky touch reactive props. Check out how she's transformed these basic household bottles with iridescent cellophane, glass beads, and more. To create the interactive touch pad, she's mixing graphite with air dry modeling clay, and then inserting a wire into each pad before it dries. She then painted an additional layer of graphite and water over the exterior of the clay after it dries. Each pad is wired to a 12 key capacitive touch breakout before being connected to a Circuit Playground Bluefruit. The Circuit Playground is also responsible for the note playback and the Neopixel light show corresponding to each bottle you touch. There's a lot of creativity in this project, and you can make some really fun interactions when your decorations and props are touch reactive. When you think of video games, you don't normally think of an RGB LED strip as an ideal display, but this pixel chase game from the Ruiz Brothers is just that. There's a Neopixel strip inside the ring of this design, and a single pixel lights up and races around the ring. The goal is to press the arcade button just as it's in the same position as the second stationary pixel. If you win, the pixel speeds up, and you keep trying again and again until you can't keep up. The circuit is pretty simple with an M4 express board, a button, and the Neopixel strip, plus there's a battery for gaming on the go. There's a few other interesting game projects out there, using RGB LED strips as displays, like Line Wobbler by Robin Baumgarten or its open-source cousin, Twang. Both games are one-dimensional procedural dungeon crawlers. Back in 2016, John Park created a replica prop for Lucio's Sonic Amplifier from the game Overwatch. It was a really complex build involving an Adafruit metro board, a music maker shield, an amplifier, and a power boost for charging. Four years later, the game is still as popular as ever, and he's made a second attempt at this build, simplifying the circuit with modern hardware. All that's needed for this version is a Feather M4 express running Circuit Python, while a prop maker feather wing handles the heavy lifting for the audio effects and Neopixel animations. The entire project is now documented in a single place if you want to build one for yourself. If you've ever had the remote for your Roku give up and die on you, you know how much of a pain it is to replace it. Okay, that's probably still easier than building your own, but that didn't stop Dylan Harada from doing just that. He's using the Pi Portal for its Wi-Fi capabilities and its touchscreen. I know there's some phone apps out there you can use to control your Roku, but for something like this, having a piece of dedicated hardware is great, and it's nice to have all the necessary software interactions documented like if you wanted to take a crack at building your own. Now for some tips and tools, Colin Cunningham built this tiny custom vote keyboard to help remind folks of the power they have in democratic societies. Politics are getting increasingly worrying here in the United States, and it's critical that everyone makes their voice heard. We've seen a lot of projects that mimic USB keyboards through the use of HID libraries. As a project, this is one of those. But what really caught my eye about this project is the use of these PCB mountable mechanical key switches. Whether you're looking to build your own custom mechanical keyboard or you just want to build a control surface full of clicky keys, these are great to know about. To help you in your project prototyping efforts, the Ruiz brothers have created this 3D printed case to house a perma protoboard and a feather microcontroller. There's two design versions for half and full size perma protobords. You'll need to mount your feather on female headers for the USB socket to line up with the case properly, but there's some additional holes in the design for easy mounting of a DC power jack and a toggle switch for power. Go check this one out if it'll help you with an upcoming project. One of the most vexing things about designing with microcontrollers is running out of GPIO pins, and one of the earliest workarounds to this project is using a shift register. The idea is this, you wire them up to your board using a few GPIO pins, similar to a serial SPI protocol. With just one shift register you get eight additional GPIO pins, but they're chainable, so with three you can drive up to 24 pins. While the tool is old, Catnip rembore has a brand new guide up on how to use them. Go check it out. For this month's Adafruit feature product, we're spotlighting this fingerprint sensor that you can add to your next project. Similar to fingerprint readers found on safes, this unit features a rugged metal housing and a lighted ring around the sensor, capable of displaying red, blue, or purple. The onboard memory can store up to 200 fingerprints, and while the Molex connector might prove fussy, you can just cut the whole thing off and solder up your own headers. There's a library for Arduino and circuit python, so making use of this should be a snap. Alright, and that's going to do it for this month's show. Thank you so much for watching. Be sure to subscribe, give us a thumbs up, or leave us a comment if you enjoyed it, or even if you didn't. As always, huge thanks to everyone at Adafruit for giving this show a home and all the other great work that they do. Take care, and we'll see you in September.