 Hey, Erin, how's it going? Fantastic. Hey, internet. It's us. We're here to do a show and tell. It's not Phil and LaMoure. We tricked you. We're guest hosts this evening. How's things going over there, Erin? Things are going great. Lots of projects happening. Lots of excitement. It's springtime and summertime, and everything's going crazy. The weather is bonkers here in California. It's gray here, and then it's sunny, and then it's raining, and it's gray again. That's very strange. But what I wanted to talk about more than the weather was a project that you and Melissa worked on. So I'm going to bring Melissa on and love to hear about what you guys have been up to. So I'm going to start, because I've got the project right here with me. So Melissa and I have been working really hard on this, and we made a magical item, a magic book that tells endless stories. Let me just do a little demo here. So I'm going to click this button right here. Tell me a story about show and tell. Oh, you know what? I think it went real fast this time, so we might not have it working. I might give it one more try. I think I thought I heard some other audio. Yeah. So what this book is doing is it is listening to me talk. And then it goes to the internet, and it goes to chatGPT. And chatGPT takes the prompt that I spoke out loud, and it creates a story. That's wild. And it tells me a story of about 800 words long or whatever we decide. You can set different prompts and that kind of thing. And I built the whole thing into this really cool, old Leatherbound book that I found up in this crazy old abandoned paper mill up in the California. It was on a shelf of books that were all moldering and falling apart and being eaten by rats and rain. And so I rescued it and carved out the inside and put this beautiful project inside. A lot of artwork I designed on mid-journey AI, which seemed appropriate to me. And then Melissa did a whole lot of the code, and it looks like we've crashed here. Yeah, as I said, it looks like it crashed. So I'm gonna go ahead and turn it on and off and see if we can get it started. So Melissa, what is the foundation of it tech-wise? What are you running in there? It's running on Pygame. And basically what we've created is it's essentially an e-book reader because it goes and formats the text and draws it out all out into paragraphs and everything. And so it takes, it is a speech recognition to get the text and then it sends that over through whisper to actually recognize what you're saying, which is from OpenAI as well. And then it sends that, it adds that to a pre-made prompt that we came up with through trial and error and actually generates the story and then it'll go ahead and display it. And then I created some buttons to go and navigate through there. And Aaron did pretty much all the graphics through mid-charting, I believe. And... All right, now I was just listening while you were talking just then, Melissa. So I think, yeah, I actually started this up when we were kind of backstage before the show and JP was talking about an audio modulator or something. And I ended up with a story about that. I'm sorry, because I wanted to show you guys that. So we'll have to see what it comes up with here. I did decorate the cover pretty. I used an Oren from the Neverending Story, which I created and put one on the spine as well. Oh, pretty. This used to be a book of poetry by Sir Thomas Moore, that's him right there, from the 1800s. So it was really difficult to cut into this thing with a band saw and destroy it, but I think we probably improved it. Had to happen, yeah. It's taken a while there. Oh, here we are. It's actually, there it goes. The mischievous manor or mirror. A mischievous mirror, that's what it says. Once upon a time at a far off land, there was a kingdom ruled by a wise and just king named Arthur. He was beloved by his people and had a reputation for being fair and kind. So the story is generally, I don't know, about five minutes long. I can touch, we have a little touch screen here so I can page through the story and go back and forward to read earlier stories from the same session. There is a cool little magnetic clasp on here so that when I close the book, it goes to sleep. Oh, that's crazy. It's just really neat. I've got a charging port on the bottom and an on off switch on the side so that we can keep this thing running for a good long time. It is a really, really cool little device. Oh, that's gorgeous, really cool. And then, yeah, we have a guide out for, about out for, it's almost done here. I don't think it's been made live yet but do you wanna show them like the, how you exit? Yeah, so we built a little Easter egg in here. So if you do want to reboot or you wanna change the wifi or something like that, you can close the cover. If you close the cover three times within five seconds then it will actually exit the script and you can use your pie in other ways. So it's a really cool device. Another cool feature is that we have, Melissa's added a file called book prompt. So you can go in there and you can give it prerequisite prompts. It can always use your child's name as the star, for example. If you tell it, every single story is about a little girl named, you know, Aaron, then every story will come out like that. And I've done some interesting stuff. It is really smart. The one of the most interesting ones is I got a story about the history of Bitcoin written in an Iambic pentameter. You know, you can do it in that. I mean, you can do it in the style of Neil Gaiman, you know, or Dr. Seuss. I was getting brand new stories coming out of this thing. It's really powerful. Like it's really surprisingly powerful and magical and just endless stories as many as I can possibly ever come up with. Really cool, really, really cool. Well, I'm looking forward to checking out the guide so I can at least try it on just a, you know, Raspberry Pi with minimal hardware and maybe not an 18th century book. But it's tempting to hold the full thing because that looks beautiful, really. It really is the never ending story. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thanks for coming on, Melissa. Aaron and I are going to go check out some other people's projects now. So let's see. Next up, whoops. Sorry, were you- Oh, I was saying thank you. Sorry to catch you off. Okay, thanks a lot. All right. Next on, let's bring on Jepler. Hello. I'm actually just snooping on that guide since I have behind the scenes access on Learn. I love that logo on the front, the fact that it's in the Python blue and yellow colors of the real Python logo. So I thought that was cool. Anyway, I have a board here with an RP2040 and if you want to bring it up, bring up my screen share, I'm going to plug it in. So a couple of weeks ago, I talked about how I got a real vintage CPM machine but maybe y'all don't want one of those because it weighs as much as a boat anchor and makes as much noise as a dishwasher. So the idea here is you can emulate CPM on an RP2040. This is using a project called Run CPM and that is originally by Makba, the board, and somebody by the name of Huido Leiballer has ported it to RP2040 and then I've made some adaptations so that it works just based on the internal flash storage of the Raspberry Pi Pico. I guess that's this little chip here rather than requiring an ST card. So you can emulate multiple drives and I need to get the quick window up here. So here, like are the standard CPM utilities but on the B drive, we have Zork. Ooh. And anyway, so it's like the original Zork that you would have run on a home computer in the 80s. That's great. And I actually don't know much about Zork but I have figured out how to get a jeweled egg. So I thought that was pretty cool. There's an Easter egg. I played a lot of Zork and I think this is in this one. Try just typing X, Y, Z, Z, Y. I'm not sure what that's supposed to do, but. No, there's some wizard that's involved with this and there are a few of these mysterious things that happen throughout that are creepy and I've never understood the meaning of those letters but they're good. I mean, there's a lot of lore to it, apparently. And I knew about it when I was a kid but I was not systematic enough to figure out how to be good at it. Also, it's actually really slow on the real hard work because every time you type a command, it'll like read the disk for five seconds and it's kind of like, this is really super snappy. That's great. Yeah, so the hope is next. Paint Your Dragon did all this stuff to support the video connector, both on this and on the Adafruit Feather that has the video out connector. And so I'd like to make this come out not onto the computer via a serial port, but to work on the, you know, just so you could hook it up to any monitor and then one more step towards having just a whole computer system that runs independently of a quote real computer. Right. So anyway, just having a lot of fun learning about CPM and. I've never touched CPM. You can't exit. Yeah, it's like before, it's like if they only had 20% of DOS, that's what CPM is anyway. It's the right 20%. And so with some of your plans for using the HDMI or the DVI output, you also have some plans for input. Yeah, so we talked about some possibilities for that. We might put a USB host feather next to it. So, and then somehow have the, have the two boards talk to each other or wire up a PS2 keyboard. We don't know yet. More interested in getting the display going because I think that's just a lot more exciting. I haven't done a project with the DVI out yet. So that should be fun. Really cool. We're looking forward to seeing that. I will drop a link to my version of this project. It's on GitHub just in case anybody's interested. This is what it can do so far. And I had a lot of fun today playing with it. Really impressive. Thanks so much, Jeff. All right, y'all have a good one. All right. Let's see, who is up next? How about Liz? Bring Liz on here. Hello. Hi. Hey, so I've started playing with Synth.io with this project here, which uses our new ANO rotary encoders that are StemRQT because Lady8 was like, why don't you make a synth with them? So I'm going to plug in the speaker. And can you hear that? Yes. Okay. So what it's doing right now is there's four synth voices and they're all playing random notes in a triad. So, and sometimes the speaker can get a little crackly. I'm going to unplug it actually. So, and what they're doing is they're playing with Euclidean rhythms. And Euclidean rhythms, it's this mathematical way of distributing beats evenly over, so for example, like if you had four beats over eight possible notes, distributing them so that they come up evenly. So in here, I can go to the Euclidean mode and I can change the number of beats or I can increase the number of possible iterations. And I've also got beat division going. ADSR will be coming and then BPM. And so then for the actual chords, I can go up in the circle of fifths because that's kind of a fun way to modulate. I thought that could be a neat way for people to have stuff that sounds good. So right now I just have four chords in there but there will eventually go all the way around. So kind of in the beginning stages and I need to figure out why the speaker keeps crackling. But this will be a learn guide probably in the next week or two. And it's all using Synthio. Yeah. It's a great looking synth. I think people are gonna freak out when they see that. Yeah. It's like the biggest weirdest click wheel iPad that never existed. Exactly, yeah. And this sheet is actually 3D printed just really thin and I was adjusting it so that it would fit on the bed of my Ender 3. Printed all diagonally. Yes, yeah. That's great. And the reason, one thing I wanted to quickly mention the reason why this one looks a little weird is because it's actually on the same I squared C address as the matrix. So I was concentrating on the I squared C addresses of the Alpha numeric but I didn't realize they were on the same. So right now this chip is actually getting the same command as the matrix. So I need to fix the. That's just built in glitch art you've got. Right, I was like it looks cool though for show and tell so I'll leave it. It totally does. We have numbers and letters. I really want to play with all the wheels. Yeah, good time. That's great. Well, we're looking forward to that. Looking forward to more demos and a guide. Thanks, Liz. Thank you. Have a good one. All right, next up we have Noah. Hey, what's up folks? Can you hear me okay? All right. Yeah, so I want to talk about last week's project. It's this 3D printed replica of the spaceship Earth from Disney World's Epcot. I kind of have my Epcot shirt as well. But I want to give a shout out to Erin because she introduced me to WLED which is a really cool piece of software that works with the ESP32 chip sets. So all the LED animations are running off of WLED. It's running off of a QT Pi Pico and the Neopixel BFF driver board because it has the five volt level shifter thing. But yeah, there's 156 new fixes that are hot glued to all of these little holes. So the dome is all 3D printed without any supports and it's two halves that are just attached together with these magnets. Yeah, it was really cool playing with WLED. It's super easy to install and there's like a butt ton of different animations that have their own individual sliders and things. Because it's on the ESP32, they have like a mobile UI. So it's running a web server so you can kind of make your own little dot local host name. So I have mine called EpcotBall.local and you can take all of those effects and create your own playlist. So I have my little night time show Epcot playlist. So there's so many effects. I haven't even played with all of them because there's just too many of them but I'm really liking the swirl ones and there's this one called like the 2D firework and I just love how you can like swirl around. Kind of, I didn't really do any like pixel mapping or anything like that. We were planning to do that but it just made a lot more sense just to use WLED. Yeah, it works out well. Yeah, and I just have the NeoPixels like going in a spiral and that seems to make pretty decent typology. So I didn't have to worry about mapping all the pixels. I was checking out this guide is excellent. And if people haven't, they should go check it out just to see what it looks like wired before you put it together because the wiring of some NeoPixels looks actually really cool. Yeah, it's these soft NeoPixel strands. So they have like these flexible enamel coated wires. So they're really flexible. I think they're about a millimeter to a part. So you have a lot of wiggle room to kind of mold them and shape them into whatever shape you want. But the spaceship Earth is a pretty cool structure. The original one is like a V8, I believe. This is a V4. That's like the amount of triangles basically that are across the geodesic sphere. And the pillars, it actually has these real pillars in the actual traction. And that like helped it be the support. So I didn't have to use support. So it's like the supports are the supports, if that makes sense. And then the last thing I had in here was just, I used one of the USB C breakout so that it routes the USB port. So I can have it here instead of having to like figure out how to mount the Qt Pi. Qt Pi doesn't have any mounting holes, but the USB C breakout does. So I just have two screws. Yeah, so it's just two screws and everything else like magnets. So it's just about fits like a 200 by 200 millimeter printer. So most printers are probably that size these days. And it's like 24 hours, just having to print. So it's a pretty big print. But I posted the CAD files on printables and somebody has already posted that they made it. They're just waiting on the electronics. So shut up. Oh, that's great. That's exciting. Yeah, so hopefully more people may get and check out the Qt Pis and the WLED I'm going to be using that for like, all of my all of my new pixel projects got to be WLED now because it's just such a, just as cool. I feel like I'm gonna decode it again now that I know what to do. Goodbye code. One tip that I've been playing with WLED for a really long time. It's really cool to set a very dim background color on some of these animations and then run the animations over the top of that. So maybe play with that. Yeah, it does a good job of blending them too. Like you can tell it how long you want the blend to be the transition. Really cool stuff. Awesome. Yeah, let me check out the guide. So folks can see the whole guide and how to set up WLED. It's kind of easy. So yeah, perfect. Cool. Awesome. All right, thanks, Noah. All right, great job. Beautiful Epcot ball. All right, let's see next up where we've got Scott coming on. Hello. How's it going? Good, how you doing? I wanted to do one quick update on, sorry, switch, turn that off for a second. I showed this last week and it's still not quite long enough. This is my weather display that I've got sitting here and I wanted to show that I added sunrise, sunset times along with high and low temperatures and the high and low temperatures shift during like when they actually occur along the timeline and then the days for the new week or for the rest of the week are correct now, too. Yeah. But the thing that I really should show is my USB cables are just not quite long enough. This is the prototype bus pirate that Amore put together. It's running RB2040 and she says the hardware is pretty much done so we've got to get the software going. So I've been playing with that and now show my screen. The thing that I've been working on and you can see here is now that I have the actual hardware it enables you to turn like the power supply off and on. So now that you can see that the two top LEDs there are lit as well. That's the five volt and the three volt LEDs to tell you it's on. And then if I hit W and then I turn them off there's also a mode LED which I can't type with while holding up. I'm just working on the spy mode here. So I'll just use all the defaults and now I'm in spy mode and now there's a separate red LED there to say like you're in a mode that could be driving the pins. Otherwise when you're in the like default state which you can do by default and it'll be off and that means that the pins aren't doing anything right now. And your power is the power you're turning on an office to supply to the IDC connector which is where you're probing something. Yep, yeah. So my plan tomorrow is to like hook up a flash chip and be able to like poke the data on the flash chip itself all from the bus pirate and it's like transaction thing. I can't make up. It has this weird like Oh, there's like some characters you can do to like read things and stuff. I just crashed it so it's not working. Cool. You can type that sort of thing to like read 10 bytes, for example, over spy. It's snazzy. Well, you've got your task ahead of you here. Yep, there's my error that stopped it from working. So I'll go fix that. Very cool. Thanks for bringing that on, Scott. Thanks, John. We'll see you later. Okay, let's see. We've got about eight minutes. So if everyone can do about a couple of minutes on their projects, we'll start with Sir Prince a lot. Kevin here. Hey, Kevin. Hello, hello. So I made this sign for my little girl and I use the NRF 52 board and then I programmed it and it can go through different formations. And the really nice thing I did with it, I mainly use it as a nightlight for her. Alexa, turn off Kara. So I have a, in that closet, I have a smart switch and then that's connected to a PSU for five volts. And then I ran it through my attic up and down through the wall and it goes right into that. That was the first thing I noticed that I was so impressed with is that you actually integrated the wiring into your wall, which looks great. I had to get a little bore scope just so I could, because I didn't want a big hole in my wall. So I had to find the wire that I ran through the attic and pull it back. Great job. Yup. That is definitely the trickiest bit about LED wall art. Oh yeah. That was fantastic. I bet she loves it. Yeah, she's about a month old, so. Oh, she probably loves it anyway like this. Well, congratulations. The night light aspect is super, super clutch. And so I turned on Kara. It gives me some flak every now and then, but I just pushed the manual switch in there, but yep, that's mine. Beautiful. Great job. Love it. Thanks so much for bringing that on. Yep. All right. Next up we got Delchie. Hello. Hi. Hi there. So I have an update on my project from last week and it's an amazing, amazing update. This is a craft access terminal. Some people refer to it as a dog boat or a bone. Back in the good old days of POTS telephone systems, linemen would carry these and they would hook up into the phone and install a phone inside your house. This one was unique because it had a 300-bot motor in it and you could actually contact the switch and provision from the pole without having to go through waiting and all that. Unfortunately, now they're pretty much useless. So I was looking at it and I was looking at my pie portal and I noticed something. The display screen is the exact same size as the pie portal. So what I did was I got my tinkering tools and my talkering tools and I wrote a bunch of code and I ended up using the original touch pad that came with it. And I now have a working tone generator sort of kind of set made from a no longer useful piece of equipment. Great job. That's cool. The original, I don't know if you can hear it. It's actually sending out the tones. It's using a GPIO extender board so that I can use all the pins. And it's telling me which pin it pressed and what DTMF tones it's making. And there's a touch screen button there that will, once I get the code working, do funny tricks like the 2600 hertz and the blue box and so on and so on. It's not battery powered yet because my battery's haven't arrived. But it was a lot of code writing in Circuit Python and a lot of help from the community folks. But great job on that. Really nicely done. That is wild. I hope to have that clip to my side when I go to death about this here. Ah, good. Good. That'll impress people. Really nice work. Thanks, Delchy. Cheers. Looks great. That's cool. I love it. All right. Old stuff into old stuff. Oh, that's great. It's great. Cool. I'll show this on my show tomorrow but when I added some LEDs to this toy, just the fact that they made this red translucent plastic, there's so much of it that it just diffuses things so well better than kind of anything I would just hack together using manufactured stuff. There's a lot of advantages. All right. So last up I'll bring on DJ Devon 3. Hello. My first thought Delchy was don't share that to JP. He's gonna want to turn it into a synthesizer. I just have some nudes. It's not much of a demo here but what I thought was pretty was the nudes in the mason jar. And so what's better than nudes in a mason jar? Nudes in a bottle. That's pretty much all I got. Oh, that's why. Brain. This is running from a coin cell, three volt coin cell. And I did a battery life test. This has been running for over 40 hours. Oh, that's great. So just from a three volt battery, which would, I wanted to do a realistic real world test. So I did that as well as these are light. These are running from six volts. So this is two, three volt coin cells inside of here that are running all of that in there. So those are all in series. Those are all two in series and they're all chained together. And shrink wrapped, kind of like dreads. So you can do a whole bunch this way but they do run out of power much faster that way. Versus this way, three volts, 48 hours pretty much. Yeah, that's really good. So that's all I got was just a real world test because that question comes up so often. So I wanted to put that one to rest and just have some video evidence. Look, they actually run that long. Yeah. This is really relevant in Aaron's world with the types of gigs and stuff. I've done some amazing necklaces and I've made just LED necklaces with the Neopixels inside before and a little life of batteries. And these are just, they're blowing them out of the water. I can wear this all week. I can wear it all night. It's never gonna work out. They're really cool. And these have an on off switch so you can flip that on off. And since it lasts for like 24 to 48 hours, if you only, I don't know, go to a party or something, you're only gonna get Halloween. Well, you only need that to work for like two to three hours on Halloween. Shut it off. You can literally reuse that for like five Halloweens in a row. They last a much longer time. And I have some charts. They're boring charts, but they're charts. So this is basically the power profile. And that is a brand new nude versus one that's been running for 35 plus hours. So the milliamps just drop off. The current consumption drops off, but it doesn't like hard cut off at 2.0 at two volts. So it runs out just like a glow stick. That's how, yeah. It's basically an electronic glow stick. Cool. A skinny flexible electronic glow stick. Yep, great for necklaces and things like that. I had a thought of, well, what if you chain 30 of them together? And I was like, you're gonna get up to 100 volts. Like you can't really do that. So you will hit exactly. You will hit some kind of limit at some point. But maybe. All right. Okay, well, JP, that's your territory. I will set my house on fire trying to do that. You go for it. Don't do it. Thanks, DJ Devon 3. Yep, have a great night. All right, well, we are all done. We gotta hand this off to Phil Lamore for Ask an Engineer. Aaron, thanks for co-hosting. Thanks everyone for bringing on your super cool projects. It's great to see all that good stuff. And we will sign off. Bye-bye. Thanks so much.