 line from New York. It's Asus Engineer. Hey everybody and welcome to Asus Engineer. It's me Lady Ada, the engineer as it says down there with me is Mr. Lady Ada. I got a jam packed shoe free night an hour plus of all the maker hacker engineering news plus a special feature Phil's rant. You'll have to just tune in. Really? No, it's not a rant. It's how we can all. No, it's good. It's like it's got feelings. It's how we can all do things better together. It's Phil's advice. Yeah, it's not rants. What do you want me to say? I just think how we could do things better together. I love them. So I don't. Yeah. The positive thing. Yeah. I mean, it just depends on how you look at it, I guess. Okay. I'm sorry. I didn't mean that. I shouldn't have said that. What I meant was his fashion. It's a little bit of a rant. The fashion review. Let's kick right into it. Why don't you tell us what's on tonight's show? All right. On tonight's show, we're going to talk about Chippin' Safe and Smart. We are still shipping all of your orders nearly instantly. Safely. Safely. Here's some pre-pandemic photos. Our team thanks you for keeping us in biz all this time over the last year and more. Please place your orders if you'd like to support Adafruit and all these folks manufacturing in New York City. Show and Tell. People around the world showing and sharing their projects lately. They'll be talking about who's on the show and tell, what they share. Time travel, look around, world makers, hackers, artists, engineers, current news and more. Help Wanda. We got some jobs from the Adafruit Jobs Board. We've got some circuit on Python news, Python on hardware news, MicroPython news, all the news that's Python-y, that's in our newsletter and more. Got some main New York City factory footage. We got some 3D printing videos from now on Patreon. We have everyone's favorite segment. Did you key an Adafruit present? I and MPI this week is worst electronic. New products. Top secret. We're going to answer your questions over on Discord all 28,000 plus of us adafruit.it. Discord please go there to post your questions towards the end of the chat. We'll try to get to all of them, but that's the best place to do that. All that and more on you guessed it. Ask an engineer. All right. That's us. Okay, so let's get right to content. Yeah, let me go over some stuff. I think there was a weird... Twitch stream? There was a weird thing where I stopped the show and tell, but maybe it didn't go. But if you're having any problems in the refresh, let them give them a chance to catch up. I think the show is running out. So before we start off, I'm going to do one of the unfortunate things that I have to do each show it seems. So this is some friends of mine. They're in a space in Brooklyn Center in Minneapolis. They're an advertising agency creative firm. I used to work with some of the people there. They're doing a relief drop-off at Brooklyn Center at Coven's Minneapolis. It's a 2429 Nicolette Avenue. It's relief for the folks in Brooklyn Center. And I know for folks who haven't maybe seen the news, Brooklyn Center is in Minnesota. Another person was killed by the police. And so right now, especially in the backdrop of what's going on with the officer that is accused of killing George Floyd, this is not good. We're all tired of it. Another person dead. So that community, they have needs. There's people that are protesting. There's people that are trying to help out the community. So this is where the relief drop-off is. I'm going to post some more resources on Adafruit as soon as I get a chance. I try to wait because we'd like to do more things than just a hashtag. We try to use our platform for good and for awareness and to get people to do things. So I'll post links. Some of these are direct for the family. This is for Dante Wright and other resources and more. So I have to do this every week but this is how it is and this is important to all of us. These are human rights that we're all fighting for. So on to show stuff. So we have a mass thing that we've been doing for the last 75-ish days, 85-ish days. So our 100 days of masking is almost over. We put a mask in every order. That's a dollar or more going to all of the United States. And it's worked out really well. Thank you, everyone. You've sent me nice emails. You've told our team and it's part of what we do for freebies. We're going to be ending this because it's going to be that 100 days soon. Yes. And it's also part of the other things we give away. That's right. What do we give away in each and every order? I'm glad you asked. We are still doing all sorts of freebies. We love to give away free hardware that we think is useful. $99 or more. You get a free perma-preto half-size breadboard. Great for making your projects more permanent and have nice soldered wires instead of a breadboard, which can be flaky after many years of use. One for nine or more. You get a free semi-QT board. We have a couple of different centers that unfortunately we can't get anymore because there's a part shortage. We still have about 10 to 15 different boards. You'll get a different one each order. If you make an account, we'll make sure you don't get the same one twice. Otherwise, you'll just get a totally random one. $199 or more. You get free UPS ground shipping in the continental U.S. And $299 or more. You get a circuit playground express or all-in-one dev board. That's great for use with Circuit Python, Arduino, Code.org, Site Discoveries, MakeCode, Rust, and more. It's a great, no-sorter way to learn programming. We give them away for free. Kids love them. Adults love them. Everyone loves them. Even cats. We're going to have a bunch of more freebies. The other thing is that I'm sure we're all going through in our lives in different ways. Everything's restarting. You'll hear about part shortages. You'll also hear about, okay, we're all, everybody's back. A lot of things are restarting. There's some projects and some efforts and some things that we really want it to do. And we have a whole new lineup of products. So we'll probably have a bunch of other freebies. We've tried to keep everything as easy to manage for our teams over the last year. And now we're all ready to go and even add more and do more. We just want to make sure we weren't adding any more burden to the already kind of complicated thing, which is operating during a pandemic. So stay tuned for that. There's a lot of cool stuff. In particular, I think we'll see Trinkies and more maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't want to. Yeah. I don't want to ruin it. Secret. Yeah. So keep ordering stuff. Trinkies. Show and tell. People around the world. Show and show other projects. Lady Aida. We had a bunch of folks on show and tell. Yeah, I'll go through them real fast. There was a lot, so I wanted to hit everybody, but JP's got a different fun house. He's adding a PIR sensor to make a motion-activated project. He'll show that on his live stream tomorrow. Jepler made a little whack-a-mole game with a neokey featherwing. Melissa made a home assistant interface using a fun house so she can control her lights and have her Alexa actually work with the home fun house and turn on the LEDs. Very impressive. She actually got a lot of integration doing. Non Pedro updated their 8x8 matrix to be a 32x32 matrix. They have a video that we're going to show to wet your appetite later this week. They're going to probably have the guide. It uses the RP2040 feather. It plugs right into the back. Scott has been doing a lot of continuous integration auto commenting work, so we have continuous integration that checks people's code to make sure it's linted. It compiles. It doesn't need any formatting, but that can be a little confusing for people, especially if it's their first time contributing to Circuit Python libraries. So we're going to use GitHub Actions to help people to tell them what they need to do and point them to the guides that we've written. Not rant related, but one of the things that I had in our talk last week, I think I did, is I screen-shotted someone. It was their first time that they ever put a pull request on GitHub and it was pulled into the Circuit Python branch and the entire repo. They were so happy. They're like, I've never done it before. I've done it. I think these type of tools even help people even more because what we see a lot is folks will try to do things, either in electronics or programming, and they get really discouraged. Not necessarily because it's a tool. Some of the people aren't so friendly, but if you can help with all these tools, everyone always says like, oh, everyone should learn computer science, but that's easy to say in practice. You have to celebrate the achievements like a pull request and make these computers help us. Not robot disciplinary. Sean, coming to us, writing some code and tutorials for Digi-Key has been playing with the Pico and got one Pico to debug another Pico via a VS code with step debugging, which is very impressive. It took a week, so he's going to write that up so other people can learn from what he's learned. I'm excited because I'm on Windows 2 and I grade development. He used to be only on Windows now and Windows actually the toughest. Robotics CoLab had a 12-week open source robot building project for a bunch of students. They built the robot. It can record and playback motion and it's got like sensors and like vision and it's a super cool looking robot. Robotics CoLab. I'm going to have a post about this. They just sent me some more info a second ago. Stuart made a UBC disinfection box with an oven as the body and it's got all sorts of safety interlocks and controls. I did a really great job. It has like voice commands and warnings. It has a passcode so you don't accidentally turn it on. A really great engineering product. I like how they took it a couple extra steps to make it a really safe project because UBC can really give you a sunburn. Michael is working on his satellite message center with the Rockblock modem and is getting further and further. I just come by and give this update on how well it's working. Psy got his Pico cellular board working and he made a Pico phone using Twilio and a Jokes API. You can call a phone number and it will tell you a joke or maybe it calls you and tells you a joke. I couldn't quite tell. Rick took an Arduino compatible feather 328p and added some sensors to it and made a one-use IoT project. It tells you whether the box that contains the dog food has been opened in the last seven hours. Why? Because that way you know if somebody spent the dog in the last seven hours. Or if you know the dog is lying. So you know if the dog is lying saying it hasn't been fed because he says there's four people in the household and again the dog is like I've never been fed my entire life. This will light LED to let you know. Yeah. If you're someone who looks around your house and says boy I wish I had a thing that does the thing. Check out the show and tell us because there's a lot of like single serving devices that like you also give another example. So he has two ducks in not quack quack ducks but ducks. There's two ducks in his AC system. Two of them go one place, one of them goes the other. Now you can control all three from different locations. That's a very specific thing and for that house that's the way it has to get done. And then for this dog feeder and we also had Collin did a cat one. Yeah. You just want to know if you fed them or not. And we're also working on something. You don't have to log it. You don't have to go to the internet. You just want to know when was the last time I fed them. We have one that will text us if there is water leaking and then other ones that we're working on. Folks like to know when I left the house today did I close a garage door. Yeah. So things like that like you can do it now and when you watch these shows you can hear how they're using Twilio and Zapier and if then this that and there's a lot of like even no code solutions to do that. All you need to do is maybe a little sort of Python. Okay. And that's all these Mark came by. It's been as one year show and tell anniversary made a show and tell Neo pixel feather wing and it looks great using the show and tell logo to celebrate one year of come by show and tell. Yeah. All right. Thanks everybody. Very soon we'll be resuming stickers but for now all participants on the show and tell get our thanks. It's part of our Adafruit live series of shows. If you're watching right now the second it's Wednesday 8 p.m. That's where you're watching show and tell is Wednesday 7 30 p.m. Eastern times and together those are our Wednesday shows on Sunday. We do the desk of Lady Ada and the desk of Lady Ada is one of my favorite shows that I do on Sunday. Probably one of yours lady and for desk and for desk of Lady Ada this week. I do. I do a speed up now. This is 30 seconds of all the things that this was a little bit long. So yeah we showed off the project bundler. We talked about how it does it with the Jason back end. So if you're interested in how it works in the in the back end we also showed up a bunch of trinkets. We showed off this canneau board and then the Jason output and I did a teardown and we showed off some graphics of trinkets and then I basically just did some trinky demos here as a rubber ducky project and also showed off the QT 2040 trinky and then I talked about in the great search of finding a little yeah so then we have the great search we do that with digikey and that's when Lady Ada uses her powers of engineering to find what you want and then this one was a neat one because there are these like standoffy things. These standoffs are incredibly hard to insert. It took me like a few minutes to insert them but they're they're standoffs that are nylon low-cost standoffs and they're not actually standoffs they're board supports which is like the most of what I taught and what you could learn from watching the great search is what they're really called. So I go through and I show how I find it and I look at the 3D model and then I look at other within the datasheet I get some ideas for other parts for this board support to separate but mechanically connect the boards without extra screws or hex nuts or whatever. Okay and that's our show that we do on Sunday so check it out you can watch the full thing that's our little speed up just to remind us because we go over a lot every Sunday night and lately we've been showing I'd say like four or five new hardware products so definitely a good Sunday night show thing if you're interested in electronics. Come by. All right so every Tuesday speaking of live shows we do a product pick with JP this is where we broadcast live from the product page and while the show is going on live you have a really big discount so here is this week's recap from JP and don't forget every Tuesday we do this if you want to save some bucks and also hang on JP. The product pick of the week is the AMG 8833 infrared thermal camera I have a pi portal and I'm running an Arduino sketch with the AMG 8833 plugged in over I squared C it is using its 8 by 8 infrared sensors to measure the temperature using infrared of objects in front of it and then this program is actually interpolating that to the 124 pixels so you can see we get a really cool sort of predator thermal vision look at the world you can see pretty clearly me waving my arms here as I get closer it'll detect the heat getting closer so there's my face you can see my forehead is the hot part at the top my mouth down below it's the AMG 8833 thermal camera but wait there's more on Thursday on JP show he has a couple cool things coming up I'm going to show what's coming up this week I'm one of the previews but last week I'd ask JP can you show this cool thing that we just launched it was beta on the learn system and I'm going to let him explain it but we've already updated it and updated the name I'm going to talk about that in a bit but if you've just wanted the easiest silly too easy you'll make it too easy easy we're lower than the standards everybody anybody could do electronic programming now what does that mean so um we're making it even easier to do projects and JP's gonna this is like the first hour we launched and we was like hey JP go check this out and showed off on your show do live demo all right you guys bundle fly you're downloading a project from the learn system and you just need to get the parts of the project you need so that's going to be the code that's going to be the libraries and that's going to be the assets we have this bundle fly project bundler that goes and collects all the libraries that you need to run a given piece of code and all of the assets gone are the days of separately copying things over now all we do is click on this project zip link if I look in the contents of this unzipped archive that's everything I need we'll pick everything here that I just unpacked from that project download I'll drag it to my circuit pie drive this will follow all of the dependencies of everything in the code dot pie file and every dependency the library itself might have oh there it goes and voila bundle fly so that is tomorrow JP will be showing another piece of this and then here's a preview of something you might see all right time travel we're gonna look around the world makers hackers artists engineers information and more so first up eight boxes full everybody who's gonna get an eight box probably gonna get a box we're shipping end of april may ish there are some parts delays but we're not worried about that we'll be worried about other stuff later but not these particular parts however here's what I suggest sign up because if you didn't get a chance to sign up folks move or their credit card didn't work or something and then we have briefly some spots that are open and you'll get the one that's coming up 17 now here's the bit of news if you are an international customer we are stopping pausing international after this eight a box there might be a few people that had a gift certificate one and like we'll continue and we'll fulfill all this but we'll let folks know exactly when this can happen reason is the entire world changed everything with shipping and shipping eight a box and taxes and that and yeah many things I had thought we were going to be an international federation of planets perhaps at some point but no we're all this independent kingdoms and everyone's on their own and it's kind of crummy so one of the things that changed is anytime you ship something to another country the cost for the end customer is going to be more than an eight a box at some point and a lot of times it looks like that's becoming true so nothing's changing for anybody at all whatsoever if you already subscribed you will get this yeah we're fine we're going to work with our resellers we're going to do everything but basically eight a box is going to be USA Canada and then when we do international we just have to figure out yet another way to do it so don't worry not going to go away forever but it will be going away soon in a variety ways everyone will get an email don't worry about it you'll know about it in advance and no one gets charged until we ship anyway so you don't have to worry about like but I paid for a year don't worry about it we don't ship until we charge okay next up here's what I wanted to talk about so a couple weeks ago probably like a couple months ago I had made an observation and I said fashion observation I said hey everybody there's a lot of young people in particular that'll post their Lego projects up and maybe they'll do electronics or maybe they're just doing Lego and some guy my dudes say well don't you know here's how you spell Lego the right way don't you know Lego is going to sue you because they sue everybody and there seems to be this unofficial deputy deputized Lego police and I think we don't need that and so I said hey instead of that maybe just say hey cool project hey nice use of these building block things but what when someone posts their project online and the only thing you have to say is you know Lego's trademark when did we become trademark lawyers don't do it if you're a trademark lawyer you don't do that and you don't talk like that you'd have to say there's not legal advice blah blah blah that's you don't see lawyers doing that so don't do it yeah they charge yeah so the next thing for free so the next one I mean respect trademarks yes but don't don't ruin a builder community by talking about how you're the unofficial enforcer of the Lego brand anyhow so the next one I talked about is there was a post on another website and I was brought to my attention I took a look at it and I said okay we'll talk about it someone said the maker movement and Arduino circuit python had lowered the standards so that means anyone can just learn electronics anyone can just do coding and they meant it as an insult and they also said you know people just want to put leds on their bikes and they don't learn anything like that yes some people just want to put leds on their bikes and that is a lot of fun I do and some people are engineers and they go to space and they also put leds on our bikes on weekends or when they go to buddy man and then some people they aren't into electronics coding yet they just want to put led on their bikes and they want to put their own images on it this is how you get them into it that's fun so let's all avoid that thing now this isn't a native for community it's not a native for it's like but I think if we're all aware of these things we can help you know rehabilitate folks because if it's only crummy comments it's only things that are going to discourage people you know the word gatekeeping comes in so here's today's every single time we show someone how to solder or another company shows how to someone the solder or someone shows how to do something that's a very important skill that some of these gatekeeper guys will say like you gotta gotta cut your feet don't solder don't just plug in everything the problem is this hey everybody it's solder not solder america stop this now honestly there's not a w in anywhere in there aluminum too get that right as well and i know they're joking but they're not this is every i delete so many comments like this now when we say solder because that's it's okay you know we're saying it doesn't matter and so my request is um i'm also going to really get essay about how stupid pronunciation spelling is in english i'm decor that this is how it is i use lowercase in my emails because it doesn't matter if it's a professional document that i'm putting up online um except when i started hackaday it was a lowercase um but you did that with css but i did that because i wanted all the comments to be lowercase because it like lowers the volume a little bit it's okay it's okay it's like sheets for your eyes next to if you could just look at everything in like if you could turn down things i think we would so um so let's not do this and and let's let's if you're if you're gonna type something say hey this is really great that you're showing people how to solder don't and this is such a it comes up every so we have like we have thousands of videos and anytime there's anytime someone says solder someone decides stop everything i've got to let you know can we talk about how the word kernel isn't spelled anyway the way it's pronounced like the military term kernel like it does not look anything like the word kernel i'm not even like nobody goes to the military do you know why they have guns they have a gun and they'll be like say kernel again so that's right so so this is the thing i don't think we should talk about else if we're gonna if we're gonna take the l now i'll say this if if this was in in person and someone kept doing this hey i'm i'm soldering and someone kept coming up to me and saying you're saying it wrong i i would right good point but it's on the internet maybe that's why i feel like i would say i'm going to burn them i wouldn't do it but i would say it you know it takes a soldering it takes a person with a soldering iron to stop a person so anyways that's my request let's all when we see this to be like hey let's at least mention something about the good not just like pronunciation stuff okay cool all right more time travel tune in next week for another passionate rant for our show it's a passionate opinion brought to you by Phil Psyche yeah so any who not a rat happy birthday polo happy birthday polo in the chat we were just talking about spark fun i want to talk about polo because it's their 20th anniversary and birthday and polo go check out their website there's a sale going on right now they got great robots yeah and you can see their first product motors and you can see a whole series of products and yawn who's the co-founder or founder or co-founder i think you know i get lonely too i talked to other people who run companies because i'm like what can we do to make this electronic world better and i think when we all talk to each other especially companies that are like we don't consider each other competition maybe at one point we did but not anymore and we're always looking out for each other when we can and i remember when uh covid started and um i was emailing with the co-founder i'm like here's what we're doing here's what here's the stuff like and we and i i feel like when we do electronic design and you come up with things there's like a skateboard or culture to it which is like hey check out my trick check out my trick but there's also like how do we support each other running companies because it is one of the toughest loneliest intense things you just eat glass every day and ask for more um that you can do so happy birthday polo congratulations most companies don't make it 20 years you did all right next up we have a whole slew of videos collin's lab notes is a little video series that we do every single day yeah so it's a minute each it's on all social media platforms i'm gonna play each one back and back to see on the other side i've never owned a reflow skillet so i figured i should start small say hello to mhp 30 aka mini hot plate 30 it's intended for use in desoldering and rework tasks but i'm guessing it'll work just fine for soldering a small board i'll be using low-temperature solder paste which is also eutectic so the tiny solder beads in the paste will go from a solid state to a liquid state all at once for example this test board i ran earlier i didn't even speed this up so i'll only have to cook my led for a little while and did it work yep thanks mini hot plate for those who prefer feedback from their key switch the question is tactile or clicky tactile switches provide a satisfying bump before switch actuation this bump can be subtle or more pronounced it's determined by the size and shape of an actual physical bump on the switch stem tactile switches are a balanced option good for long typing sessions and they're relatively quiet in comparison to as the name implies clicky switches provide audible in addition to tactile feedback the sound is created by a mechanism inside the switch usually consisting of a metal leaf spring sliding collar or in this case a spring bar which creates a rapid drop-off and resistance and audible click after a certain travel distance an rgb led isn't exactly a single light emitting diode it's more like three rolled into one or maybe it's a three-headed diode you can see the three semiconductor light sources inside using one of these with a microcontroller requires three current limiting resistors plus three free pins capable of pulse with modulation of course this is the old-fashioned way of doing things digitally controlled leds make rgb lighting much easier each one of these has a built-in driver chip that listens for color data on its serial port and when that properly formatted message arrives this little neopixel kicks into gear and handles all the pwm and color control on its own and continues to do so until it's told otherwise thanks little buddy while soldering you should make a point of periodically cleaning your iron's tip with either a wet or brass sponge but which one a wet sponge is cheap and simple you clean the tip by dragging it through one of the slots in the sponge you will need to rewet the sponge at the start of each work session so you might want to keep some water handy a sponge won't scratch your iron but the water in the sponge will cool it down rapidly and this repeated thermal stress over time will shorten the life of the tip by the way don't try swapping in a kitchen sponge they can't handle the same amount of heat the brass sponge costs a little bit more but lasts much longer it is more abrasive but that actually helps it clean more thoroughly and you don't have to water it which is nice whatever cleaning method you choose to use you can help preserve your tip by coating it with a bit of solder before powering down just fyi okay more head all week from colin uh next up we have a new jobs posted on the jobs or jobs dot eat it for dot com post your skills or if you're a company post a job or if you're looking for volunteers this is the microsoft flangebees teal's program they are looking for a teal's volunteer you can read all about it it is a person who's looking for a computer science and creative problem solving passion as it impacted your life in a positive way help all students gain access to these critical skills and become a teal's volunteer uh teal stands for technology education and literacy program in schools and more details jobs dot eat a fruit dot com and uh post up your uh if you have volunteer things that you want to do it's okay as well lady and i look at each one of these and we approve them so you don't have to worry about spams and scam and none of your information is shared so that is why it's super good next up python on hardware we got a bunch going on okay let's zip let's see there's so much going on right yeah we gotta zip through it i don't want to just pick one thing i do i'm just gonna i'm just gonna hit a couple things real quick okay um we already talked about the um learning system uh project bundle so this is uh a little bit of a breakdown of what it is and some screenshots i'm going to work on the catney haxter featured the flowers this is uh winter balloon uh synth and it's powered by circuit python check out that cool interview uh recap of scott's deep dive and then news around the web um lots of pico projects yeah like a python circuit python but definitely a lot of pico projects people are building stuff yeah top button the chat is doing a really neat thing with uh all these encoders and midi stuff so check that out i was looking at that right before our show started um you just posted up some cool stuff in github um here's a raspberry pi pico video conference controller running you guessed it circuit python so um if you look about what's happening you'll see a lot of people are taking stuff they already did in circuit python and then seeing if it works on the rp2040 then there was people who were like i want to do a project but the the code isn't available yet for rp2040 unless i use circuit python because there's a ton of libraries code support projects so we're seeing like right now it's our number one uh download yeah um and i'll talk about that in a second um but it is right now the most downloads that we're getting for installing circuit python was on the tens or thousands or maybe even hundreds of thousands of picos so if you have a pico and you want to do something but there's not software yet or you're just looking for some start uh help um circuit python's the way to go we have things for the funhouse board um the pico phone that was just on our um show and tell show and tell um so a phone made with a lot of key micropads lots of keyboards um this is a cool uh cat zoom demo with a neotrinky um a uh citron maker pi pico and it works at circuit python that's over tom's hardware has been covering a lot of what's been happening in the world of rp2040 and more including their like it's like the it's like gossip it's like look there's chips on the way to arduino and it's like ooh and they have a a shot of that um so this week the the big story i wanted to talk about which at least the big story i think and i'm just going to go over to the video in a second is um these circuit python powered wings so this was a feather project that has these flappy wings and it uses circuit python and they were you know fairy wing like and um trust me when i say the world of of cosplaying and fairy wings it's not all happy rainbows um and so we wanted to make sure that we got like the best guide that could be used for anything we spent a lot of time on it and check this out we did not expect these cool like she's got wings and a tail wings and a tail and this is like kind of one of the best examples i've seen of animatronics and it just happens to be circuit python and this is someone who does cosplaying um i think for living um tons of amazing costumes uh that drivable um car from wreck it ralph it was just like there's it was unending as soon as i saw this i'm like this is the best thing ever so this is all made with circuit python and if you needed to make adjustments to your code at an event or something it shows up as a usb drive you can change the speed you can change um how much it pauses um you might want to do something like oh i'm doing a photo shoot right now it'd be great to have the wings do this so anyways this is like i think like culminates so many things together 3d printing or learn guides and all this and uh projects like this will even be easier and we'll talk about that in a bit with our new bundler and then the other big news um that just happened right before the show is we're up to 200 boards yay 200 so like i was saying before the number one download right now out of all 200 boards and what are 200 boards a bunch of them aren't even from ater fruit we made circuit python so it could go anywhere run anything other people can use it and so now we have 200 boards and if you look one two three just in the top eight three the boards are sorry four half 50 aren't from ater fruit and the reason i'm mentioning stuff like this is because you know you have people that are nice about things are like well why isn't our why isn't it all arduino's why isn't it all something something why isn't all this and what we want to do is you could take a board and you can run make code on it or you can run arduino one or you can run circuit python on it and the developers who make boards they want to have something that's updated all the time maybe they don't want to write an entire like almost os at this point yeah so anytime you update circuit python you get all the new features in the latest so how nice is that so this this came along because we thought this was a good idea we have circuit python dot org's on on ater fruit and the top boards are from ater fruit and so it's all open source and we have all these contributors so we think that if you're it's like one of those things like be so good they can't ignore you like i understand like people dig in they're like i should always be cc and c++ forever but give it a try because it's a huge ecosystem it's fun it's fun and we're up to 200 boards you can choose any any weird board imagine it we probably have it you like you got it you got one bluetooth got it like stm got it and we'll have a lot more so congratulations on the team everybody out there everybody community member there's 200 we're gonna have 200 more and check out circuit python dot org slash downloads and you'll be able to see all the boards scroll through them fast and just use the filters like wi-fi you can see all the wi-fi boards and with that is that that's this week's python hardware all right talk about with the uh a couple good comments here uh circuit python devs it's so fast to do a huge class of projects now yeah that's it it's true and then bill uh hey bill um is in there and says the at community looks blue because they made the freedom wing wheelchair interface possible they're three volts 12 volt up converter is amazing for 350 yeah see this can be 350 all right so we have one video i'm gonna show before we do the guides the video is from phil b and this was uh one of the silk screen videos he did yes it's silk screen time again i'm working on the itsy bitsy rp 2040 uh small board with a powerful chip designing small boards like this i i try to avoid this phenomenon i call the blowgun effect and this is um like going back to the 1980s if you read like mechanics illustrated there was always this ad in the back two inches square the tomorrow blowgun and even as a young teen with no real graphic design education i could still sense some kind of aesthetic crime was being committed here i do my best to avoid it but sometimes these small boards there's just there's only so much you can do and sometimes you just have to embrace the blowgun ad you just have to be the blowgun ad so there's the finish board yeah it's a pretty busy itsy bitsy's okay we have 2455 guides lady in it what's on the big board this week okay we've got a couple guides a lot contributor guides this week from uh jan we've got uh more dc motor performance hacking so changing the frequency in the way you drag your dc motors to get the most torque whenever you need it we got the new guide for the eight of new trinky from catney so you got arduino and circuit python code to get your little trinky board up and running touch in and glow in and we've got two guides from lali we're going to be carrying the scout makes kits and so they put the guides for their two kits up on learn so when those are in the store you'll be able to quickly get to the learn guide and vice versa okay so i wanted to talk about our big feature um jp had a little bit of video about it i also want to talk about it so we don't have a logo yet we're getting we're getting close but uh let's first go over to the learn system ready yeah okay so this is a guide that is the code the sailor moon locket and uh before you know you could go to github and you could you know look at the code you can cut and paste it you could try to figure out which libraries you could read them you can like look at the specific things you could use uh circuit circuit but now you just click download project bundle and when you download project bundle it downloads a zip and uh you know i'm using my desktop here it's like you want to allow downloads all this blah blah blah um and then you would download it yeah and that has code up high it has all the libraries has all the dependencies has everything in the way all the graphics yeah all the music anything you need and you literally just drag it over yeah to your drive very easy so the big the big pillars of like making electronics too easy yes one is do you have a site that's easy to use yes do you have a uh store experience that's helpful and open for everyone yes yes do you have all the files posted on github for open source use yes is there code under a license that's that's permissive so you can use it okay do you have something like circuit python where when you plug in this microcontroller it shows up as usb drive yes you do do you have like an entire support team and community that helps people out with code yes do you have projects that people want to do like cosplaying or like satellites that go to space you have all these things so what's the next thing there's so much stuff that you can do just like computers with package managers and more and python known to be batteries included we wanted to make something we're calling it the you know project bundles yeah you bundle it it's bundlers um and uh now you just click one thing and your drive shows up and you just drag all this files over and the project just works that's right so now you don't have to even worry about it being too easy getting the code now now it's too easy getting all the files yeah so this is yeah and it's really neat elegant how you can stretch your soldering yeah lemur yeah lemur uh showed uh how this all works with this requirements feature and then dependencies and then the jace file scott's gonna talk about it probably on friday but the thing that we're still working on is uh we wanted to have like a little friendly like thing so we're calling it bundle fly because you bundle these up and then it flies over to you so we're inspired by um there's a really neat part of the fly with just goblum and uh it'll be a lot cuter than this but it's going to be called it was called bundle fly we're calling ours bundle fly yes so this is just to give people an idea what's gonna happen if you saw the disc of lady aida um you were terrified by this and if you have it now you are okay next up yeah you're gonna like reach into your body and it's gonna like your guts are gonna come out that's right cool um you know or alternative you know you know the little thing that like shows the files flying yeah place to place that's your intestines no try to stick on the crew and work thing bundle fly throws up on all your files liquefies them into a compact thing brings them over to you and and puts them on to your drive yes bundle fly bundle fly yeah all right so anyways main york city factory footage we have some videos and some speed up some more and i'm just gonna play emcee on the other side in york city factory footage unless you saw some cranes outside of our window this is the disney building that they're building across the street what's a big crane this is where all your disney plus dollars go and the gigantic bit yes it's converted to disney bucks crane time um and then uh here is uh not a sunset because it was raining the sun yeah sun rain all right 3d print Pedro we're gonna show two videos we have the square pixel project matrix and then we have a speedup so we're gonna play this back to back and we will see you on the other side in this project we're making a square pixel display with an rgb matrix in black led acrylic this is a 32 by 32 rgb matrix running circuit python in the matrix portal library the electronics are mounted to a 3d printed frame on the back of the display it's powered by the rp 2040 feather in the rgb matrix feather wing paired with the feather wing doubler it's easy to swap out the feathers for future projects the rgb matrix feather wing is set up so it plugs directly into the feather wing doubler the frame and grid diffuser are 3d printed and snap fit together a sheet of black led acrylic fits over the display and it diffuses the leds the 3d printed grid fits over the pcb with each led enclosed in a square this separates each led and blocks the light from leaking into each square the grid is what gives the display that iconic square pixel aesthetic this acrylic is designed to diffuse leds and makes the colors really pop the effect gets softer as it gets further away from the light source the acrylic looks solid when the lights are off making this kind of magical this project uses the matrix portal library written by melissa lablon williams the code uses the library to create a slideshow player of animated sprite sheets the images are stored on the drive and the code looks for any bitmaps in this folder you'll want to check and update the width of your display with either a 32 or 64 the sprite sheets are a series of images that emerge together in a single bitmap each section in the image is a single frame of the animation that gets played from top to bottom it's really easy to play new animations by just tossing new bitmaps onto the drive the code automatically cycles through all the images stored in the bitmaps folder the stock grid and frame will be removed from the display using a screwdriver these screws secure the display's pcb to the stock grid and frame the two are replaced by the 3d printed counterparts so they can be set aside this was a non-destructive tear down it was fairly easy to take apart rest assured you could put this back together if you ever need to to cut the acrylic i made a template and printed it on a sheet of paper using a hobby knife i cut the square with a ruler so the cuts are nice and straight i then proceeded to stick the paper template over the acrylic lining it up with the bottom corner i used the scoring tool in a ruler to carefully score the acrylic i made several passes to get at least halfway through the sheet you want to be really careful not to apply too much pressure once ready i placed the sheet over the edge of the table and firmly snapped off the excess the feather wing doubler is secured to the 3d printed frame using standoffs and screws the frame is then fitted over the pcb with the grid diffuser on top the black led acrylic is fitted over the cover with the mat side facing out the frame pcb and grid can then be pressed into the cover additional feet on the bottom allowed to stand upright so it's less likely to tip over the idc cable connects the display to the rgb matrix feather wing along with the power cable to keep the display up and running you'll want to use a 5 volt power supply this 10 amp 5 volt power supply is great when you want to light up all 1024 leds so if you have one of these rgb matrices i hope this inspires you to check out circuit python and if you're really into square pixel displays check out some of our other builds now to make all this and more on 3d hangouts every single wednesday when i'm paid room did you key and a different present i'm mpi is worth electronic we need a this week what do they do what do they make all right this week we're covering an npi from worth electronic we've covered their stuff before this is their second time around i always love that and we get to cover different products from electronic companies um so this week we're going to cover this is kind of new i didn't even know that worth made uh opto electronics this is a vixel what's a vixel it sounds like pixel but it's not this is a vertical cavity surface laser that's right it's a laser laser you can have a laser on your circuit board quite easily you don't have to do with tubes or high voltage transformers or any of that nonsense so uh what's a vixel um so you know like i really call it a vixel that's apparently how it's pronounced it's a vertical cavity surface laser vertical that's because um it emits the laser out vertically through the top of the device cavity cavity it's not like a two thing it's actually like how it generates the coherent light surface you know it's on the surface of comes off the surface of the device and it's a laser this is a 3.5 millimeter by 3.5 millimeter vixel and you can see here it's kind of taking a product out this from a presentation there's a ceramic substrate on top of it is the um the contacts the a vixel element uh it's bonded onto the ceramic surface there's a housing element and then there's like a diffuse silica glass on top and um this has a two watt 940 nanometer um emission laser output except it's like you know normally you don't think of lasers as made out of solid um solid state but yeah i mean if you look at time of flight sensors and stuff they're using uh vixels as well um so this is like i got this from wikipedia this is kind of cool they show like how it's actually built um and they have like little thin layers of that in the substrate and that's what they use to um you know basically create the the cavity that emits the coherent light out of the top of the vixel um what do i mean by coherent light what i mean is the light that comes out of it is really 940 nanometers and you can see this is the distribution of light um that comes out by intensity and you can see it's very very sharp and pointed um it's really 940 and it's like not on the dot right it isn't like plus or minus 10 plus or minus 20 it doesn't have like a bell curve look to it it's a very fine point um and not only that but all the wavelengths that come out are coming out at the same phase as well so compare that with your favorite infrared emitter before this vixel which was you know the infrared led uh these come in surface mount through hall you know large scale you can get two watt higher emitters um but if you compare the output you see like the wavelength this is a particularly low cost IR emitter we use this for like a tv gone projects but you see on the left the wavelength um it's 940 right that's the middle but it's like it kind of smears out to like 900 up to you know almost a thousand nanometers so it's it's a very wide band comparatively to um the vixel and on the right you can see the ambient temperature also affects the wavelength so it's it's like it's good enough for an IR remote and these things are a couple pennies a piece but if you need coherent light you need light that is you the exact wavelength in the exact phase all at the same time and IR ledges is not going to cut it sort of these used for um they're often used for time of flight or or basically light our devices um so if you have an apple phone the face id system uses a vixel to light up your face and then you know i you read the patent but it like looks at the the response and it makes a map of your face if you looked at the xbox connect it also used a vixel technology to now in this chart of these the standard things distance speed of light time divided by two these are these what these stand for yeah because it's actually measuring how long it takes for light to bounce off of the point and so we have time of flight sensors that we've covered before um this is how light our works it literally bounces light and it has to be coherent because it actually measures the fate you know you can't have a jumble of light it has to be coherent so when it comes back you can measure how long it took and the phase difference of that light um and then you can do the map we're talking about like picoseconds here so you have to have a very good driver and that's one of the things that you light moves fast light moves as fast as light so you do need to have a driver like you can't just like turn this on and like boom you've got data coming out of it you need to have that precise timing circuitry and there's other companies that sell um the vixel drivers you do google for vixel driver and you can check it out there there's various companies that sell them that will drive the vixel that you've got here and then measure the light back but there are going to be other use cases for this is just the raw emitter there could be all sorts of uses for it it is infrared so of course it's not invisible to you know human eye so um you know one of you know in their presentation they're like look you know yes a lidar and time of flight biometric and 3d recognition um robotics home automation stuff i mean like basically these things used to be crazy expensive and now they're like 10 bucks um and you can just pick and place them on so this is like pretty sweet if you have a use case where you need infrared light and you could greatly benefit by having it be coherent um and by having it be very uh precise wavelength a vix will do the job much much much better than an ire led don't fight with an ire led it's not worth the time this does the job much better um so there's two versions of this there's the a and b uh just to be aware both of them have the basically the same specs but one has a viewing axis of 60 by 45 and the other is 110 by 85 so it's a wider or narrower band range um it's pretty neat it's like cool that you can just buy a laser semiconductor you do have to heat sink it i soldered up one to some wires and and you know you can you can see the light come out of it i'll say that ironically it was i thought you know usually you can put an ire led um under a camera and it'll show up but because this is so narrow band it actually doesn't leak into the visible range enough so it's like i could i could show it off but it's yeah it doesn't actually look as i thought like i'll be like a really bright point of light but actually you don't really see it because it's doing a very good job of not you know that makes sense bleeding into into you don't want to waste all those photons right because usually because you saw this usually there's a wider spread um so that's said uh check it out this is the b1 again there's also the the a version of uh the same uh sensor um and you can just it the both part names are like really long so just search for worth vcsl and you'll you'll find them um on digikey.com and you can purchase them and and they're just it's just a diode you saw it on you power it uh with a constant current uh power source um because it is you know 1.5 volts or 2 volts and it can draw up to an amp or more so you definitely need like a good power supply and a good heat sink uh but like this is a super cheap off-the-shelf way to get you know lidar quality sensors into your design could be cool that's this week's iron mpi okay we're gonna hit all the questions at the end but i did want to bring in one since related to this um the diagram uh it shows that it's now a power output of two watts is it uh powerful enough to burn through stuff or is the wavelength too low um usually infrared isn't used i think it's a uv that are used to um as a laser um that said it's definitely too wide it's too broad like you'd need you'd need to focus it could you use this for a tvb going with like 100 meter range yeah you could i was thinking about that but you'd also again you'd want to focus it because it's quite wide but yeah it might work as a tvb gone but like you need you need to really believe me i turned this on and it's like the wire started smoking it's it's it's drawing a lot of power it gets quite hot what's the on-off for these can you scrub them oh like instantaneous like you know within one wavelength they're designed to be driven by picosecond level drivers yeah or nanosecond to picosecond uh range drivers that's how they do the time of flight all right okay so let's uh now jump to new products yep all right first up okay first up we've got the uh game do we know dazzler um and this is pretty nifty so this is a two-parter basically on the right is a feather wing breakout and on the middle is this gd3x dazzler which has a i don't get this part number correct this is a spartan six xc six slx nine xylings fpga and it's also got the um this ftdi uh you know hdmi driver chip it's got a bunch of ram and hdmi output basically uh it says a scripting system that lets lets you very quickly make stuff that connects to hdmi and you can play videos and animations um and it's like pretty nifty if you want to have hdmi coming out of your feather m4 this is designed specifically for the feather m4 um it's kind of an all-in-one like video system so i haven't hooked up here check this out this is hooked up to an hdmi monitor and this is like the first demo you run so it's got you you can load in this bitmap and then you tell it you want it to rotate it so this isn't a gif this is a composite image where it's like it tells it to draw the background and then it tells it to draw um all these blinkers and have them animate so it's like you can do quite advanced motion graphics and animations even though the feather m4 can't do it you you have basically this graphics co-processor it's quite powerful there's also um an arduino shield version and i think there's a pico version of course you can wire it up to a pico you just have to do wiring and stuff um but i just thought this was so cool there's like video game demos and like animation demos and like i think you can play mp4s or movies this is a glimpse of where we're going with like circuit python like there'll be hdmi out for yeah and what i thought was needed is what's you know the the the person who james bowman who who did this and wrote the code he realized if you have a co-processor that's doing all the hard stuff right all the graphic stuff it doesn't matter if the programming language that you're programming the co-processor with is slow because all the high-speed stuff is handled on the fpg anyways like you don't need to control an fpga with c control the fpga with circuit python it's easier and faster you've got a file system to look you know this is this bitmap is it on the file system of the circuit python device that parts really easy and then you off let all the graphic stuff to uh the co-processor they're very cool um so you want to do games you want to do hdmi output game doing a dazzler next up uh from m5 stack uh this was kind of neat somebody requested we got this and you know we'll always carry stuff on request we think it's cool this is an m5 timer camera it's an esp32 with eight megabytes of ps ram a camera module um and it's a nice little clip and what's neat about it is an ultra low power rtc with a timer so it's really designed to do like ultra low power go to sleep and then wake up take a photo and then send it over wi-fi so if you want to make like an outdoor you know or powered you know low power wi-fi wake up take a photo send it project this is kind of all in one it even has a mounting bracket it's kind of handy next up next up uh neopixels our favorite neopixels either 3.5 millimeter or 3.5 millimeter we love these we use them on all sorts of our products such as the neotrinky you see four of them here and you see them on many feathers and you're probably like man i wish i had a hundred of them and i wish i had a hundred of them on like a piece of cut tape well we gotcha um this is uh we've stocked these in packs of 10 but if case you ever want to like use these in a small pick in place um it's less expensive we'll just send you a real of uh 100 um leds uh you can use them uh you can kind of hand solder them if you're careful you can use them in reflow uh just be careful about moisture they're very moisture sensitive okay next up next up we've got usb c we've been carrying a bunch of connectors these are very low-cost usb c connectors why are they so low-cost as you look on the bottom you can see they are have fewer pins than normal they only have six pins why because they're power only these do not have data lines we repeat that again they do not have the data lines we have all over the product page a million places these are specifically for power only projects where you want to power something over usb c and again only over usb c um i think five bolts put a five kiloohm resistor from cc one that's one of the pins to ground another 5k from the other cc two pin to ground and then there's two bus pins two ground pins you got five bolts out no data lines but they're really cheap and they're pretty easy to solder because the pads are really big uh so there are projects that i think could use this um other than that they're great connectors just uh you know i don't know if i mentioned it already but um no data lines just power all right next up next up this is a cool long piezo sensor um this is kind of interesting so usually piezo sensors come in a square or round you know vibration sensor shape this is uh these are originally designed to be sleep sensors like they go in a pillow or underneath the mattress and when people move it can detect it so piezo sensors when they're moved they see this this fine hand model um as this fine model uh you know gently tweaks or pushes or twists the piezo it generates a very small current between the two um metal pins you put a one mega ohm resistor between the pins tie one to ground tie the other to an analog input you can read the analog input and detect touches twists etc and then you can act on it you know in this case it was designed for a sleep sensor data logger that said it's so unusual to find a piezo that comes in this shape it's a very long thin flexible shape this can be used for all sorts of uh sensor applications like wearables i thought or like sports or um you know at any time you have a touch sensor it has to go around something or through a thin slot it's just a very unusual shape it makes them a little bit more expensive but you know i've never seen anything like before so i think these are quite cool uh you can cut it down of course but once you've cut it you cannot reattach it because the film is is you can't start it in the film so you've got like the one end and then it kind of goes on for you know 600 millimeters cut it just be aware once you cut it you can't uncut it all right next up all right next up we've got uh the neopixel with um this is a one meter long 60 led neopixel strip and it's got this very beautiful diffused silicone covering which will also show on the overhead in a moment as soon as i get my my demo going um so these are basically like your everyday normal uh neopixels uh power them with five volts give them data on um you know one of the pins using any neopixel library but what's cool about them is um they've got this very durable and weatherproof uh soft silicone covering so let me turn it off so i can show you so it looks you can barely see the led strip through it i mean it's almost more visible on the camera and uh on the back it's got a nice it's it's a firm stiff like you can't really bend it this way but it you know it does bend back and forth this way and um what's nice about it is uh as i mentioned it's it's it's a very nice diffuse effect more so than it's not as much as our neon which is um you know really a thick plastic and very hard to bend and it's definitely not as clear as a um the uh clear translucent normal neopixel it's it's diffused and it makes it like kind of pastelly um it kind of has a beautiful look so we have really good photos check out the animations because they're they're shot quite nicely but i think if you want something that's durable and weatherproof and and has a little bit of diffusion um but still is flexible um this is a nice intermediary between the totally clear and um of course this um the the totally uh diffused neon neopixels so we can hold it up yeah i wanted to show it on the other camera chance yeah it's it's hard to explain but it's like i like the look of it yeah it's really nice it's a very elegant look um yeah i i mean i i've known and seen projects that like this is this is the main thing they just wanted to be diffused but they're using yeah it just has a nice clean look to it so i think uh you know for wearable projects or architectural projects where you you want it to be thinner than the neon but um it's cool not as not as harsh as the clear neopixels so i like it all right next up the star of the show tonight besides elated our team our community all the customers the folks in cat is it's it's a rp 2040 um that's right we're gonna put some into the shop a little bit later night after the show uh because we ran out but i stashed them so we'll put some more in this is the rp 2040 based itzy bitzy so people like the itzy bitzy inspired um by teensy boards but i wanted to have them with different chips um so it's kind of the same sort of size it's i think 0.7 inch by 1.2 inches uh bite size but has a lots of gpio pins um the gpio pins go all the way around i want to show and compare so this is the m0 yeah right in there okay so you got the m0 express the m4 the blue fruit and now uh new friend is made rp 2040 so the itzy bitzy it's for well that's actually two more the 32 u4 ones which i didn't even bring down uh because these are nice and popular but what i tried to do is i try to make them sort of similar i try to have like the neopixels over here and um you know these have the buttons on the end this of course has the antenna here so the buttons have to to move up um to the itzy bitzy if you want to have a lipo battery have a lipo backpack that you can use with it um there's a single sided board it has an 8 megabyte q-spy flash it has the reset button it has the boot button um i did the cute primary hack where the boot button is also a user button after booting so when you're running code you can use this as a single button input uh it's got a neopixel here i wonder if i still have the neopixel rowing program yeah i do it's got uh one red led for blinking it's got the crystal power supply lots of little capacitors i had to use a 402 components to make everything fit but it did all fit in the end um and then on the bottom we have the gpio pinout so this is if you're using with pico sdk or with you know micro python or something where you need to do the raw pin numbers these are labeled on the bottom and then um there's one pin d5 that's special purpose and that pin is level shifted up to about five volts so if you want to drive neopixels if you want to five-fold out but there's something there's just some times where people are like i need to to to control something that's a five volt input it really wants five volts particularly neopixels that pin is level shifted out to zero to five volts so you've got one pen over here it's five it's got the exclamation point to remind you that it's the output pin but otherwise it's what it's nice about the rp2040 is you know it's it's the dual core cortex m0 it's running at 130 megahertz it's got circuit python and now arduino um support's coming out micro python support you can do pico sdk and you just got a lot of pins um and i made sure that you know you've got not only a lot of pins but you got all the analog pins um there are eight pins in a row if you want to do like camera projects where you use the pio to to drive eight gpio at once um they're not all in a row because i wanted to match like the sda and spi pin and ur and analog pins match the other itzy bitsies um but they are available you can get to all those pins if you want they're just if you look on the bottom i think it's uh 26 27 28 29 and then 24 25 18 19 20 you know whatever basically you got lots of pins that are in a row so if you want to use pios to to drive many pins in parallel you got it and you know it's nice is that you can swap the between the two you got a project with an m0 and m4 you want bluetooth swap between it you want rp 2040 swap between that as well so um you know it's one of the original rp 2040 boards that we said we would design and so we've we've fulfilled it we got the cutie pie itsy bitsy and the feather so this is a great tiny board with lots of gpio pins and if you want you can add a lipo charger onto it by soldering on one of our lipo backpacks and those new products all right so we're going to do some top secret and uh i'm going to go to the discord and do some questions so let's first uh whether loading up over there and i scroll back a little bit here's i'm going to play three videos uh they're very fast so i'm going to play them one after the other these are stuff that we're working on and more maybe it's a tester on how we're doing things and then i'm going to show some images of some things that are coming up all right lady what is this hey it's a stem of sunday and today and we're vibing a really old project this is a rotary encoder to iSquad C converter using seesaw it's a little uh 50 cent chip that does the rotary encoder measurements and then sends the data over iSquad C i've got my j-link here because it's going to be fun to debug this um i've got my metro wired up to this rotary encoder and you see here i can turn this and when i turn this knob i have this arduino code that is measuring the rotary position and plotting it out for me so you can see it's working pretty well what's nice about this is rotary encoders are really annoying to write firmware for so having it all over iSquad C means you can connect multiple rotary encoders or you don't do a lot of timing nonsense so um just testing this out and it's also got a little button you can press so this will be in the store soon early data what is this hey i am working on more rotary encoders with uh the seesaw the sam d09 iSquad C to rotary encoder converter and um i already got the single iSquad C to rotary converter adapter working but now i'm like what if i want four rotary encoders we've got like one two three four and i have neopixels and the neopixels like change color based on uh you know how i'm rotating it so i can test all four encoders the cool thing is the code is actually extensible to like 16 encoders if it wanted to but i think four is a good number so over on my computer i've got uh this um example code that's plotting the rotary encoder reading so this is how i'm just sort of testing to make sure that i can like twist all of the encoders and the values are changing so looking good very twisty all right lady what is this well i'm building another qt pie rp20 40 tester this is the qt pie rp20 it is so cute it's so small it's got all these pins and on the back got that raspberry pie logo it's an rp20 40 with eight megabytes of flash uh it's got a stomach u t connector and two buttons and neopixel and we have to test each board make sure it works so we've got this tnt3.6 and it's using mass storage over usb to literally like load this as a little disk drive and then drag over the test uf2 so i plug this into usb c and then i've got this little cut out here which because there's no mounting holes so to line it up perfectly i press the button and this runs the test and then takes about two seconds and then we know it's working so if you want a qt pie sign up it's part number 4900 easy to remember we're going to be making more of these as you see it's fast so i'm going to test these and put them in stock today all right lady what's this it says a um long 75 millimeter long slide potentiometer that will connect over i squared c and has some neopixels on the bottom what's this this one is a uh four arcade button with four led um driver also over stem and qt what's this this is the qt 2040 trinket this is the idea of a plug-in board with an rp 2040 that you can then put a stem and qt board on top of and turn it into like a little like diy trinket someone called it linky trinket and we might have to use it i don't know linky yeah next one's mine so each trinket that we're releasing is going to have its own character this is the potentiometer trinket so i then know it's the rudder encoder sorry rudder encoder this is the proximity trinket this is a neopixel trinket and then we have a we started off with this is a keyboard trinket but then uh i was talking to bruce i'm like hey man like i might want to make it look more like keyboard so now this is like a cool backpack neoki trinket neoki neoki and um these will be the ones the force four that we're doing and then we'll have some um non-forever trinkets um we might like have to call them like nfts or something but uh just stay tuned for these these are all the characters that go with it and that is top secret for the week okay i'm gonna go to do questions don't forget we're on discorded for dot it slash discard okay i'm gonna speed around these we're gonna be around i won't show this okay now okay we got all of them okay ready to get the new products fast okay we did okay let me start getting through these uh there was a bunch that came up here um this is a video a picture one for you how come the board comes out of one side of the belt on our oven um is it just the order or is it just oh sometimes when we want to put boards through um and they sit flat on the it's more work because you have to put them on the on the mesh belt but they they come out flatter they don't they don't sink so for some boards it's better if you put them on the mesh belt you still use your hot air gun i do okay it's great for your work oh what solder or solder do you use um i i actually use lead free a lot but i still have uh someone at 60 40 that's the same one we sell in the shop to be honest i really like it uh when i'm i'm dealing with something that's better with low temp uh what do you think of converting an air fryer to reflow instead of a tester oven hot plate i have a cheap one just sitting here tough things think i'm the blower might help no idea i just look online see what people are doing my guess is not gonna work yeah i think you need a more stable like a hot air it's it circulates too much i think and also might blow the parts off i don't even know what air fryer is to be honest okay um next up first for the show the game do we know 3x dazzler i appreciate the heads up that you can't use a stacking header thoughts if you can get an airlift breakout to the pins near the header i wanted to connect it to adafruit io or should i wait for the adafruit dv ii i would actually ask the james bowman for support because the pins are fixed and i don't i think it conflicts with the airlift i don't i don't actually know it's a it's very magical um i would ask him to to try out to make sure that it is compatible with any other feather wings okay is it easy possible change to the picture on the matrix display over wi-fi from windows using an easy custom app like lab view code which uh if so which feather brain is the best for this type of dedicated 24 7 micro 2 by 2 array of addressable led apps esp 32 still or rp 2040 with wi-fi shield frames per minute um you you could uh i mean there's a lot at you're asking what's that real time microsoft one on windows yeah just use expressive pixels expressive pixels exactly what i you want i think yeah just use that okay okay too many question marks photons or waves both i know this is a thing okay you know i'd like to work on the standard model because i think there's some things we got some moans but um it really needs a mark yeah we were busy got to do like harness ours okay uh is there anything special i need to set up a board for a pick and place i have boards made for hand assembly and eagle but is pick and place much different as easy as to follow design rules and give them the gerber you need to talk to your board assembly house they will tell you exactly what they need and believe me they have a list of all the things that they don't want you to do so you should ask them because they will have that list and please follow the list and do you know how do you can have them look at your gurbers before you order them because it's very expensive to reorder gerber especially if it's more than two layer board can the piezo sensor be used as a buzzer like a button to use no it's a sensor input is the rp20 40 it's a bit c usb c or micro it's my code to stay the same as the rest okay uh how about a two millimeter pitch version for 20 percent smaller castolet only for thinner that's a different board okay uh question i've always wondered could you put an sd feather wing on an sd feather i wanted to make a a copper maybe a copy of sd card test file uh with the pins conflict any way to have the additional sd card use another pen it would not an sd a logger you could connect another sd feather however um i'm not sure that the sd fat or sd library and arduino support having more than two sd file systems so you're gonna be stuck there okay um 50 the $59 usb midi drums have eight encoders seven bits circuit python library for them yet i have no idea what that is you can connect eight encoders i think donbott can do eight encoders you're from boston um how do you print how do bostonians pronounce solder solder solder yeah so okay uh is the humidity sensitivity and components only for pick and place or hand solder too it's for hand solder but um it's because you're not putting it through an oven it may or may not affect it it's it's a complicated thing but um you already have so much more danger going on with hand soldering um that you you will you will bump into different problems than uh humidity um inside of say an led that's cracking it open would you uh uh make an itsy to feather no because we have a feather we should use a feather okay uh i'll answer this one what will it if it's cryptocurrency policy being with regard to recent environmental concerns well the only thing that we do right now is people um can use uh bitcoin on checkout it uses bitpay and that gets converted to us dollars to us at time of checkout yeah not really anybody uses it nobody uses it it's like four people because yeah and uh maybe we'll discontinue it at some point but the idea was when bitcoin came out and it was people were talking about it being used as currency not something you buy and hold on to forever and like watch it go up yeah most people are actually spending it so it has nothing to do with us so so right now our policy is um we accept it as a form of currency bitcoin through bitpay and we don't have any crypto products of our own so i'll give you an example we don't we don't have an aetherford coin we're not doing um aetherford nfts um but what what is going to change soon probably a lot of things because people are talking about the environmental impact i just saw um there are certain countries where the the amount of bitcoin mining is so high it's higher than all countries uh entire power usage so obviously there's a lot to work out um but right now um we really like to do electronics and focus on teaching and learning and helping people and so i think a cryptocurrency or something like that would be a distraction for us we're interested in what's going to happen we're interested in eco-friendly things so right now the only thing we do and it's been going on for i think maybe seven years we accept uh bitcoin via bitpay yeah um because if you think about it it would be nice for a currency to be used in this method because that could potentially save a lot of of it wouldn't be used as a yeah the value wouldn't be so extreme yeah because it'd actually be more tied to dollar yeah uh you want to what what's generally the the the worldwide part part storage being caused by it's not that boat that was stuck no uh basically long lead times uh some companies can book they pre-booked there's long lead time for components and people didn't do good forecasting this that's how it is okay i asked about the etsy the feather converter um next up uh why is everyone you're moving to midi hdmi feel so weak yeah you know smaller i like the bigger hdmi connection this one this thing has a big hdmi yeah i like that um but i i do i have three different hdmi connectors of the same camera type so you have to mini micro um what's the best option for feather that doesn't need bluetooth or wi-fi i like the feather m4 or the new rp20 40 okay we just got a grip on arduino platform io i see you're heavy towards circuit python we always continue to support arduino id and new products or i'll have to learn circuit python i would say look at the project you want to do and there if and see which is the easiest way to do it there's times where we will just have like arduino supports for something because it doesn't make sense to do in circuit python but for the most part like we should have you know everything has arduino support yeah we should have unless there's a very very good reason why it doesn't or we don't have the arduino core like there was an arduino core for p20 40 there is now esp32 s2 i feel like the circuit python experience is better than arduino experience but for the most part there's always arduino code and you can choose so every time every time arduino shared any type of stats about libraries and downloads adafruit was either number one or number one two and three or number one through ten for libraries like we're it's important to us we'd like to support it yeah but i'll say this if you have a chance try one project with arduino try it with circuit python it's the same project and just see because you who cares try with maycode you might like it on the same board you can try it yeah yeah um do we think we'll see intel or amd microcontrollers if so uh would you use them yeah sure they existed and they got discontinued yeah um let's see but i'll say this i really like that raspberry pi has managed to come in and help disrupt the microcontroller market because it was needed yeah and good luck trying to find some samd 21s right now but you can find some more p20 40s sure okay uh what library do you wish existed for circuit python that's a good question you can go to github.com so circuit python and click on the driver tag for issues and people have requested uh libraries check those out or write one of those because then you'll know somebody will appreciate it well we see uh home automation products with cameras yeah i'm sure you will we will make them and it'll be open source and you can figure out how it's all working out and that's not sending cameras elsewhere camera photos uh thank you for the session you guys well can you please share some insights to your journey so far oh you gotta wrap it up so watch the last 90 minutes we just talked about it um you know what i will give you just uh one sentence to to ponder over yeah publish something every day it's true that's the best advice because that covers probably a whole bunch of other things but no matter what you're doing in life whether it's like i want to exercise and lose weight put x on the calendar every day in a row that you do it and keep those going if you want to be a writer write something every day but make sure you publish it if you have ideas publish them somewhere trust me your ideas aren't so great that you should keep them in your head forever get them out there and also like you might end up meeting some people and and do them um so that's my that's your word of wisdom that's my that's my jewel of wisdom for today for your journey published every day um and then with that is all of our questions okay great oh one more sorry how do you balance what you want to do on a product versus what will make it reasonable to market check out make it a market we have a whole video series all about the process yeah i will add 10 videos all about i will add the following um i think back in the day people would say oh you know if something if electronics are made it overseas overseas is always going to be cheaper that's not always true in fact we're competitive with everyone for what we do because turns out if you focus and you do really good manufacturing in one spot your test and prep in one spot and you have really talented people you can bring that cost out so like a circuit playground express good luck trying to find something that does exactly the same thing with all its capabilities lower cost anywhere because ultimately design adds value you'd end up you'd end up we know what the bomb costs like it's it is a good value for what it is so i would say that that's one of the things to make something so good that it's worth it for folks whether it be a time investment hopefully hopefully it's easy but also if it even if it costs more make it so you know that it's so much more valuable like you can you know theoretically you can you can get by with just like a knife in your in your kitchen cabinet and you can use it for everything but you're eventually gonna like poke yourself you're gonna hurt yourself you should probably get a fork at some point because it's worth it okay like you're making things easier you're doing things for people so i feel that way with electronics like your time is valuable like you can get by with just having one utensil yeah but like your time is valuable so like if you want to do like led art and stuff like that like yeah you use the right tools you can cut your teeth on and make sure you learn the transistor and a capacitor and five years from now you'll blink or you can like use something that just gets you started easier because your time is valuable or stab yourself with a knife and your choice yeah some people like that okay so that was the that was the last thing all right we will see you tomorrow on some form online in some way jp shows tomorrow scott's deep dive is friday thank you so much everybody let me see who is in our behind the scenes a fruit chat tonight i'll thank them thank you to car thanks so much car we will see everybody next week thanks for ordering stuff please um keep us going is everybody thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you and we'll see everybody next week here is your mom's dinner bye