 Here we are it's me JP. It's time for another JP's product pick of the week Thanks for standing by while I did battle with wirecast broadcast software. I love you wirecast, but you're killing me so Let's see. It's time to Take the lid off of this thing and dig into some fresh delicious new product pick of the week First thing I'll do is send you on over as I Peel open that hermetically sealed jar of good product pickness Send you over to this URL. This is five four six six is the product ID So head on down to a to fruit out a t slash Five four six six or you can type in the whole URL or head on over to this qr code if that's your Sort of thing sort of thing you like to do you can do that Excuse me, I'm gonna have some delicious iced tea clear my throat. Let's see So if you head on over there What you're gonna find is the product pick has this video live video streaming right from within it So you can watch from within there you will get 50% off this product pick this week, which is terrific terrific discount And you don't need a coupon code. So just throw them in your cart and go The discount is only good during this show during the time period that this show is on and we've set the Maximum this week at Four instead of ten so that more people have a chance to get them because I don't think we have a huge stock of them So you might want to get them early if you're thinking of getting them, but If you haven't gone to that page you're wondering. Well, what even is it? Let's have lady Aida take us Take us back just a few weeks and introduce this product pick take it away lady Aida Next up my goodness is this motorized pot I've always loved motorized pots. You see them on Fancy av equipment, you know, you can load a setting and all the potentials will slide into the location That you had pretty much pretty much the coolest thing and maybe the reason why many people go into music music production They're just like it's like if you have music if you're a music producer like should I go to the overhead now? Yeah, it's gonna get right because I really have to show off. So I have this I know it's excited Okay, it always has like a Different feeling to it Than other things that move it's like it's alive. It's definitely alive So this demo is I just got my feather and motor wing. So this is a five volt to ten volt motor you do need an H bridge to control it because going left and right basically is inverting the Polarity of the motor connect. So you need a full H bridge But we have many in the store When you can, you know, it can make it move to left and to the right and then when you don't have a voltage You can move it wherever you want and then you would read the potentiometer Signal off the bottom here and it would tell you where you are So so here's how it works like let's say you're like, oh, I want it to be in the middle Which this isn't going to do because I have this pre-programmed You would set it to the middle and then you tell your Microcontroller or micro computer. Hey read this resistance So it was the analog voltage and then it would if you want to recreate that it would move the Motor left or right until the reading matched up and it would stop and then it would release it so that you could of course tweak it After it's been set. So the motor and the potentiometer are separate. It's not smart It's not like you tell it There's no way to tell it like, oh if I give you half the voltage It'll go to the middle the the motor either is on or off Pulls it all the way to the left all the way to the right. That's all it knows The position control has to be done separately and then this is the slider note. It's metal. There is one pad Here, I don't know which one exactly but it's in the datasheet that's mechanically or electrically connected You can use as a capacitive touch detector. So you would know somebody's touching it so you can release the motor This has everything it does have everything so we'll probably use it on a project But I wanted to get some of these in stock so you could do some cool audio Projects with it. All right All right, indeed. Sorry my software is being a little slow to respond. So I got a Click and wait here to get make sure my audio is working. So let's take a look at this This is right here the little box it comes in and it's got a little protective foam there I'm gonna do some demos and things But first off, let me introduce it properly This is my product pick of the week this week. It is the motorized slide Potentiometer aka flying fader so You can see here. We've got this DC motor We've got a number of solder lugs to attach wiring to and I'll show you how that works in a moment But it's all essentially integrated in software. So in software, you can tell the pot what to do You can read over an analog read what this slide Potentiometer is doing measure its resistance as a voltage divider And we also have the touch capacitive touch sensing of when you're touching that lever or not so The a couple details about it the fader is a 100 millimeter fader It gives you 10k of resistance The DC motor is a six to ten volt motor It actually works pretty well under a five volt or so and I found that four double a batteries works really well If you have the type of motor driver that takes external power or if you want to wire that up yourself Works great under that that roughly six ish volts that you get from four double a batteries and There's a little timing belt style rubber belt that runs through through the pulleys It's a geared motor. We have a little belt that moves this back and forth And the way this works is that in software you can tell it to move until you reach a certain resistance level on The slide potential or so it's much like a servo motor in that sense. You can say hey go to position 240 and That's gonna through some math be known to be about up there Motor will go all the while reading the potentiometer and stop moving when it reaches that resistance level So that's the basic operation of it And then you can also use the the capacitive touch to tell when you're touching it and disengage the motor or Keep it disengaged until you let go and then it can move back so let's First of all, let's take a look at the product page and the learn guide for one of the Motor drivers, which is going to be kind of essential in using this. So first of all, here's the product page We have about looks like 50 55 of them in stock right now. So we've sold through quite a few already so if you're thinking of getting them put in your cart and and maybe go but what you want to pick up is some kind of a H bridge motor driver such as this one right here the L9 one one zero It's a dollar fifty for this little eight pin dip I see and that will allow you to PWM two different Pins and that'll set the motor forward or backwards And you have a range of speeds that you can move in or another really nice one is the motor feather wing So I'll show you that in the demo that I'm using here today And in fact if you head on over to the product page for that or rather learn guide for that Motor feather wing, you'll see the kind of setup. I'm doing there Switch over to that page Look similar to this so you could drive up to four of these faders the motors on the four of these faders with This particular motor driver And you can see we've got external power coming in on the side there. So let me rearrange my Camera here so that I can show you the setup. I'm using we'll do a little exploration of the setup and then see an action so I'm gonna Pull that camera out a bit So you can see here how I'm using it. I've got a feather I'm using a tripler. Oh, you can't see that at all I didn't show you my down down camera about that I Think someone was was gonna help me on discord to catch that. Thank you Pop my discord open so I can see there so the Focus here So you focus down at the table level there. You see I've got a feather I'm using an m4 but this works really well with an RP2040 as well and most any feather really Got my feather on a tripler I've got the motor feather wing here and you can see I have two Wires that are running from one of its motors as four motor outs I have one of them that I'm using to drive the DC motor on the fader and you can see I've got these two Mini grabbers here connected to it. So those are ground and power or really Positive and negative voltage which can switch places. Thanks to the H bridge I've got a little battery pack here a little 4 AA battery pack giving power Feather is powered over USB I'm also sending MIDI over USB back to my computer, which I'll demonstrate in a second and then at the bottom here I've built a little circuit on my Open sort of proto area of the feather wing to read and a Rotary encoder as well as the push button of the encoder and you can see I'm also using some extra space there to run a 1 mega ohm resistor from an analog pin in this case I think it's analog pig pin 3 to ground and that's so that I can use the capacitive touch Sensing on here one other difference. You'll notice is that I have a chrome Fader cap on here so you can use these as is just a little more stylish and a little more comfortable to have a fader cap on But it needs to be conductive it needs to be a metallic conductive or chrome plated Fader cap in order to still read the capacitive touch. That's something I'll look out for So you can see here a couple of the features of it one. I can just move it like a fader And if I turn on some sound Second I'll turn up a software synth You'll hear what the fader is doing so I'm just adjusting some filter resonance and filter cutoff of a sound But you can see the cool thing is we can play around and then let go and get back to our Preset position there. Thanks to the the motorized fader. You can also go to other presets. So if I click my encoder I can go to a Different preset that now becomes the sort of standard place that it returns to hit another one And these are just four positions that I've pre-programmed and one that's real low there Now another feature that I added just because it's kind of fun a little bit silly But you might use this as a linear encoder and I turn off the sound here I think you could use this as sort of a linear actuator rather It doesn't have a ton of power So you're not going to fling a robot across the room with it But depending on your needs you can just control that position and use that rather than as a Potentiometer essentially like a linear servo and I've set up my rotary encoder as a direct control there. So you can see as I turn The rotary encoder. I'm changing the position of The fader. I'm also using that as a stored position. So now if I hit this four times It'll come back to this position. I have four saves. So one two three four back to that new position So if I change this That fourth position will now be way up at the top. So one two three and Four staying up there. So let's take a look for a moment at what that code looks like And let me take that View off of there So the code that I'm using here, it's a few things. So we have set up for analog i o so that we can read the slide potentiometer That's this import analog i o whoops My windows all over the place touch i o. That's what i'm using to tell this capacitive touch thing. So it lets go with the motor and the Motor kit is what i'm using in this case and it's a sort of convenience library that makes it easy to talk to this Feather with the four h bridge motors on it I've got some midi setup going in here. I'm reading that rotary encoder Button so that I can press the button. Let me bring up a Bring up one more view here about This one moment My software is fighting me There we go. So now you should be able to see the Slide pot as i'm using it. So Button pin 12 there that's what this rotary encoder is connected to so when I press that it's just going between one of those four preset positions Also setting up the rotary encoder to read a couple pins And that's what allows me to change where that preset position is Kind of a luxury there and then we have the fader Which i'm reading on analog zero and then i'm setting this to be essentially an eight bit value it reads at 16 bits internally in circuit pipeline. That's what the math is done at regardless of the DAC But then i'm taking that value and making it eight bits or the 255 And then I have a little state variable that I can use to tell what the last position was So we know when we're changing that fader And then there's reading of the touch i o actually it's on pin a2 And then I also have the one mega ohm resistor going to ground for that And you can customize your touch threshold depending on the fader cap you have on there Here i'm just taking the raw value and adding 30 to it. So I have a really light threshold But that means I can I can move that just touching this this chromed plastic pot works great We do not by the way, we don't sell these. I'd love to see if we can source them We don't sell these they're a little bit hard to find but you'll find yamaha replacement touch fader caps on ebay A lot of them are in germany for whatever reason But you will find some here in in the us ebay as well Uh, then I've got a function that I've created which is allowing me to go to a particular position And this is essentially the servo motor part of it. So I can say hey, let's go to you know 120 Or let's go down to let's say 60 and so Going to 60 is this go to position with the argument of 60 and then it moves the motor checks the Potentiometer value moves the motor checks the potentiometer out. It's all happening incredibly quickly So it looks like a fluid smooth motion But it stops when it gets to within within a certain range. It's also feathering that Speed a little bit so it doesn't overshoot Here you can see these are my my opening moves here. So if I reset the board You'll see it's going to go through a little warm up sequence and go to go to a few positions there Uh, and then the main Function the main loop of the program here. I'm checking for button updates and if I do I If I do sense that that's being clicked I go to one of the four positions if the encoder changes then we're Changing the value of the current item in the list of current saved positions And then we're checking for touch if touch value So just has it has it been touched beyond its threshold then I make sure that the motor is set throttle none And then when I release that whenever i'm not touching it it tries to go to the stored position And that's what makes it shoot back there Uh, there's a little bit filtering going on here to get nice clean analog reads And then I also have my little midi output if you look here at um The Let's let's try our friend disco tool and see what's connected. Okay, so if we if we do disco tool Uh name is feather This is going to open up a serial connection with to and you can see here. I have this kind of nice analog print of my Oh, you know if I make this wider it'll It'll stay on one line, which is nice There we go. Uh, so this is kind of a snazzy little graphical interface of the of the fader position here that i'm using just with a With a nido print statement, uh, but yeah, you can see even when it springs around back Uh lands pretty consistently at at within a within a few Numbers of this 180 position 178 178 180 so it's it's pretty accurate Within a within an acceptable band given given how this uh this sort of Loop of um feedback works So, let me see. I haven't checked in on discord. Let's see if they've got any questions there um Let's see. Yes, it is just like magic. These are so cool and uh Yeah, uh, I'm hesitant to check and see how many we have left in stock here uh, let me Let me jump back to the item Let's see if we have any We have 34 in stock. Okay. Yes. So if you wanted to get four of them We put a max a max limit of four on these if you want to get four of them and Use one feather motor shield you could have a little mini flying fader box, which is pretty cool And the Little or you could use the little uh h bridge chips as well depends on how you want to set this up But you know given one feather or other microcontroller that's able to read the analog read the touch and send out pwm to a motor driver of some kind Uh, you can get a lot of bang for your buck and and build yourself a little flying fader Set up which is really really cool So let's see. I think that's going to cover it. Uh Let me know if you have any other questions in the chat Otherwise i'm going to pack this one uh prep this one actually for Hanging on my wall there Get some of those windows out of the way Uh, oh and I want to see did I miss anything else? Uh There's some other stats and details on the product page one thing is I think it has maybe a half a watt current draw at max um And that's probably if it's if it's at top speed and you stall it Is my guess so it doesn't doesn't take a ton Uh of current to drive the thing but I have found that the AA batteries or an external power source Give it a lot of umph if you run off of the usb pin on your five volt usb Uh on your microcontroller. It's probably not quite as capable So you'll you'll end up moving it at slower speeds or use a little bit of a reduced Uh curve for your deceleration and acceleration So I'm going to be writing a guide on setting it up to use Similarly to how you saw here or how I set it up another uh another time using that that l 9 1 1 0 Driver so we'll have some instructions up there But right now you can kind of cobble it together just using uh motor driving code some uh analog read code and some touch sensor code So I'm going to put a little hanger on there And that is my product pick of the week this week. It is the motorized slide potentiometer That's going to do it for this week's product pick of the week for Adafruit Industries. I'm John Park and I will see you next time Bye. Bye