 It's me, John Park, and it's time for John Park's workshop, also known as Ask a Jep Year. And I'm also laughing because over in our Discord, if you didn't know, that's where the chat, but mostly the weirdness is going on. That happened. Why is that happening? Todd, Todd Botte, put that up there. Cute hat. I like that. Let's see. What else is happening? I've got a fresh cup of coffee, and they're ready for the show. I switched over to tea for this portion of the day, a delicious English breakfast tea. Last night, I was going to grab some tea, and I was like, what do we have that's not caffeinated? And the one I picked up said it had three times the normal caffeine of tea. So I didn't go with that one. Yeah, so if you're wondering where the chat is, this is a good place to look for it right here. It is the Discord, and you can get there by going to Adafru.it slash Discord. And then once you're there, that's our server. You can find the live broadcast chat channel, and that's where people are hanging out. We've also got a group of people over in our YouTube chat, so thank you for stopping by everyone. I see, oh, no, I'm Pedro and George Grazer over there. Hello. Ishae, Christopher Netherton, Carlos Artega, hello from Bogota, welcome. Thanks for joining us here this evening. Also a Evil Dave of Canada, I don't want to miss you there. And then, as you can see here, our Discord chat, we've got, it's Pop and Hayoshi, 2-2-3-1, Puppy, Osterly, of course, Todd Bot with the funny graphics, Mark Gambler is there. Who else is hanging out? Hey, Zamsbury, Zamsbury, nice to see you. Some nice, of course, Todd Bot. So let's see, we've got a bunch of stuff happening today. What's happening? First of all, if you are normally arriving right here and now for Ask an Engineer, that is not happening right now. PT and Lady Aida are off doing kids stuff, and so I'm moving my show to this slot for a little while. I don't know exactly how long normally this show happens on Thursdays, but I am adding some of our Ask an Engineer-ish features to this, and I can adapt as we go for the stuff that's popular and the stuff people want to see. I don't have all the official things down. I will say we get free stuff for you in the store if you order a certain amount, and I don't know what those thresholds are because I don't have it in front of me. I think we have a page about this, but I couldn't find it earlier. You'll load some stuff into your car. It'll usually tell you, hey, if you add another 25 bucks, you'll reach this threshold and you get a free cutie pie or whatever. So we have some cool free stuff available in the store. I also have a coupon code for you. So this is last day of November, November 30th. Pretty sure that's the last day of this month, but I don't say no to November. I say yes. Why so negative? I say yes, Vember, that's the coupon code today. Yes, Vember, that'll get you 10% off in the store. That coupon code is good right now through to, I think, midnight tonight, East Coast time, even though I'm here on the West Coast, it works that way. You can't get software gift certificates or subscriptions with that code, but anything else, any real physical stuff that you want to order, type that in on the way out and you'll get 10% off with, yes, Vember. Let's see. Over in the chat, someone, DJ Devon 3 said I think it's $100, $200 and $300 are the cutoff points for the different tiers of free goodies that you can get in the store. So go check that out. I'm going to try to artfully drip this tea bag into another mug. So that's coupon code. Yes, Vember. In the store. Other things, other goings on. Show and tell. We had a little show and tell before this show. Couple of two, three cool things that we're showing on here. One, our own Jeff Epler, aka Jeppler, showed the little 5x5 Neopixel, tiny QT Pi BFF. It plugs into the back or the front of a QT Pi and it gives you a little board with a little matrix of RGB LEDs, little Neopixels. Jeppler created a game that you can play on there, a game of 2048, which is running on the Neopixel grid, incredibly tiny. Liz also, using this grid, created our, I should say our own BlitzCityDIY Liz, created a scrolling temperature readout, including icons, tiny 5x5 icons. That's the art right there, making things legible in that tiny, tiny, tiny size. So thank you, Liz Clark. Thank you, Jeppler. Also, Micah came on and showed the current prototype of the e-fidget, which is a haptic motor-based circular PCB that will feel like a fidget toy by simulating or tricking your brain into think something is spinning once that is up and running. Right now, there are some issues with the MOSFETs, so Micah will be doing an iteration of those and hopefully bring that on back as you get new versions in. So thank you, yeah. And if you want to show stuff and tell, come on any Wednesday at 7.30 Eastern time. And you can just jump into our Discord to find the link, there's a little link that will take you into our show and tell, and then you can show your stuff. So we have a jobs board right here. That is at jobs.atafruit.com and you can go and check that out if you are looking for work. Here you can see some people who have posted their resumes and info. You don't need to pay anything, all you need is a login. All you need is an email login with Atafruit. These are vetted and we have no fees, no spam, we'll never send you, we're not doing anything nefarious at all whatsoever, we promise. That's just what someone who's doing nefarious things would say, isn't it? But I promise we're not. Maybe we are. I don't think we are. But here you can see we've got a new position or rather a new resume posted just today from someone in Mysore, India and it is an engineering, hardware design engineer. If you're looking to hire someone, go check out these resumes. You can also check them out by keywords and locations if you're searching for someone. And of course we also have the other side of the jobs board which is postings for people who are looking to hire someone. So you can go and check out both sides of the jobs board right there. Excuse me. Let's see. Next up. Hey, did you know I have a show on yesterday, Tuesdays. Tuesdays is my JP's product pick of the week show on it. I pick something new or something from our archive, show you how it works, get everyone pumped about it and then slash the price in half. So not always half, but usually. This week it was this ENS-160 mox metal oxide gas sensor and during the show I like to show you the product, show you how it works, maybe a little demo, a little code. And then I like to make a little one minute recap that I can show you right now. Take it away, me. Look at this little beauty. This is my product pick of the week this week. It is the ENS-160 mox gas sensor with STEMAQT. It's plugged in with a STEMAQT cable over I squared C to a QT pie right there. I have a little readout here showing air quality index, organic compounds, and then the CO2 level which is parts per million. I'm just going to breathe on it from pretty nearby. You'll see that level start jumping up there. My CO2 levels jumped up to what, a thousand or so. I'm going to stink it up with this paint marker. So you can use this for, watch these values here, I'm just setting this paint marker. The volatile compounds was jumping up in the five thousands there when this first landed. It is the ENS-160 mox gas sensor. Whoops, we're back. Hi. It wasn't sniffing that marker. Don't do that. It's bad for your brain. All right. Let's see what else is going on. Hey, how about, I'll mix it up a little. I'll tell you this right now, I'm going to take questions. So I will warn you now, I sometimes check the discord during the show as well, but if you want to ask me any questions, go ahead and shoot, especially towards the end of the show. I'll take questions at the end. So just type in your questions over in the chat there and just tailor your questions for your host here. I'm not Lamor, so I can't answer in-depth electrical engineering questions, but you know, other stuff, I don't know, retro gaming stuff, computer graphics, synthesizers, those are good questions, microcontroller things. This is not actually Ask an Engineer. This is Ask a JP. But yeah, I'll take questions later on. Let me do some other little sort of announce many types of things. Remember this thing, the Adabox, we haven't seen one in a while. We will be getting back on the Adabox train later this, actually next year, I should say, so 2022, no Adaboxes, but we're coming back in 2023. If you're wondering about them, you can head over to, let me throw this page up here, you can head over to adafruit.com slash Adabox, might also have Adabox.com. I can't remember. But go and check that out, because from here you can sign up to get notified when the boxes are going to be available. And you can also subscribe to the box or give it as a gift for a future edition. I think right now we have a limit of 5,000 somewhere in that range, 4,000, 5,000. I think we may be full for the next one, but sometimes people drop off of that list. So if you're interested, click here to get notified and get into the system for the return of Adabox in 2023. And I will also mention that we have CircuitPython, which is code plus community. And to celebrate that, we have our CircuitPython or Python on microcontrollers newsletter. New issue comes out every week. And you can get this in your email, it doesn't cost anything again, we promise not to spam. You just go to adafruitdaily.com and you can get that in your mailbox. You can also go right here, went to adafruitdaily.com and there's a link pretty much right at the top to see the latest issue of the Python on microcontrollers newsletter. Some news here, we have 10,024 newsletter subscribers. So you're in good company and I love this graphic that Bruce did for our 10,000 thanks for 10,000 subscribers, a little over 10,000 subscribers. Other things that stood out from here, there's an article on real-time operating systems. I saw the Raspberry Pi Pico now has manufacturing happening in Kenya. I don't know, where is the other one? Is the other one in England? Do I have, I don't have a Pico right here. I'm guessing the other ones are made in England, but I'm actually not sure. That's my guess. There are links to Python on hardware content on Mastodon, getting more interested in Mastodon as a social network type of place. Links here to Tim's deep dive as well as my Circuit Python parsec from last week and a link to the Circuit Python show with Paul Cutler. Some project of the week and some other cool projects like this Pico Dev M3 rotary encoder knob PCB that's running MicroPython I believe and C++. Also I saw there was a nice little connection machine, you can see here with all these tiny little graphics, kind of miniature version of connection machine here. And also this one's cool actually and this one's related to something I'll be doing more of tonight. Our good friend Todd Kurt had his PicoStep RP2040 sequencer featured in MagPy Magazine. Not only the magazine made of pixels, but the one made of ink and paper. So the physical edition, if you get that, you can go check out MagPy Magazine and there's an article in there about Todd's very cool PicoStep sequencer. I have one right over there and I'll be talking about that in a little bit. Let's see, whales, okay. Paul Cutler said whales may be where the other manufacturing is for Pico. Thanks Paul. You can see there's a lot of other projects in here that you can go and check out. It's a great place to keep up on the latest news if you don't want to spend too much of your own time digging around all of the deep recesses of the internet. We have people doing that for us. Thanks so much Ann and team. We also accept submissions. This is, I believe, kind of remember how the submissions work on this. Let's see. I'm scrolling. I'm scrolling. I might mention, do we have a thing on here? Team, oh, we have updates from the team. Circuit Python team members, upcoming events, latest releases, and contribute. There it is, right down at the bottom. You can check out the full archives with the link there as well as submit a poll request on the GitHub. We actually use GitHub to create the newsletter. I think this one's done in a markup language and you can go and submit items in there as well or post any questions in the forums or Discord. That is the Python on microcontrollers newsletter. All right. Let's see. Next up, let's do a Circuit Python parsec. So long as I can find the right screen. There it is. By the way, oh, just blanked out, let's see if it stays on there. You may notice I switched up my text editor, my coding editor here because something went haywire with Adam, which is the one I use. It can't talk to its package server to install packages. Something went corrupt with my little terminal program at the bottom and so I switched over to sublime text today. I used to use this a long time ago, so we'll see. It looks nice and it does have a working little terminal down at the bottom there that I'm happy about seeing you again. So for the Circuit Python parsec today, I wanted to show you Blink Without Delay. You may be familiar with Blink Without Delay as one of the seminal Arduino sketches that shows you how to do things without blocking, how to count time and do things on a time interval without blocking the rest of your code. And a way that you can do this inside of Circuit Python is by setting a state of a certain time using time monotonic, which is a clock that's always running, and then comparing the current time monotonic to the last time monotonic. So let me show you the actual demo here. What you can see is I have LEDs blinking on my boards here. I have a feather with a Neopixel on it. I have a little rotary encoder, STEMA QT board with a Neopixel on it, and I also have the board D13 LED. They're all blinking every half second. What you notice is those will keep blinking, particularly easy to watch the little pin 13 LED up at the top of the board there. But as that's happening, I'm moving my dial here and changing the colors of the Neopixels. You'll notice that nothing is blocking. I can smoothly move between these colors, and it doesn't interrupt that blinking interval there. You can even press and release the button to get a different brightness effect. And the way this is working is you can see key thing. First of all, I've imported the time library. First of all, right before my code begins, I created a variable called last time and made it equal to time monotonic, which is the, hey, what time is it right now, microcontroller? Then in my code, this is the key right here. If time monotonic, which is the current time, minus the last time is greater than whatever interval I want to be blinking or doing my thing at, in this case a half a second is what I set it to, then we'll go ahead and run this code in here that does the little blinking stuff. I am also continuing throughout the code loop to check my position on the encoder and do the Neopixels stuff there for color. But this way, these things essentially run without getting in each other's way. And that is a way that you can do a blink without delay inside of CircuitPython. And that is your CircuitPython Parsec. Boop, boop, beep, beep, boop, boop, boop. All right, I appreciate this from the chat. It is Kayoshi who says, I was gone so long, you were actively using Sublime the last time I was around. Geez, I wonder, yeah, maybe that was a couple of years ago, more. I guess I could go scroll back through some videos and figure it out. Also some notes about time monotonic, BlitzCityDIYLiz as I use time monotonic and almost every project, super useful. And I'll bring the discord back up here so I can read it. In Todd Bot's Halloween Thanksgiving Christmas Lights, he's noticed a loss of precision in time monotonic for long running stuff. Need to switch it over to Supervisor.TixMS, oh that's interesting. So if you have something that's trying to run a long time, in this case over the course of weeks as Todd was saying, then you may lose some precision with the time monotonic. Alright, so let's see what else have we got going on here today. New product, just the one. Let me switch over to my browser here. And if I'm not mistaken, we had, if we click on View All New Products, one new product in the store this week. And that is this, the Adafruit Feather RP2040, which you may be asking yourself hey wait a second, that's not that new, right? And in fact you can see one clue here, the product ID is in the four thousands, and we're currently up in the higher five thousands. This is a board revision actually, and it's got some cool updates. So first of all, it is black again. I think we had been doing maybe pink or purple for the last, I think it was pink for the last rounds. This is back to black here. And you will see one obvious change to the board, which is the boot select button is now mounted with a little cool little side mount button. This means that you can click it even when you have a feather wing on top. So typically a feather wing will break out the reset button. So you'll see the reset button is still where it is, and it's top mounted. But when we get a feather wing on there, we usually still have a reset button. Pretty much all the feather wings will have a reset button. However, if you need to get into your boot loader, you usually have to press reset and boot select, or boot select and then reset, release. And that's hard to do once you have it with a feather wing on top. So this gives us this side access to the boot select button. Also, boot select has been moved to, I think it's GPIO 4 when your code is running, you'll be able to use it as a user button. So this is, I believe, after it has started once it's actually up and running. That is now switched over to be used on GPIO number four, which gives you a tactile button that you can use for free right there on the board. No need to add one, which is great. I love when boards have at least one little bit of user interface. A lot of these will use capacitive touch if you're desperate to have some user interface, but nice to have a physical button on there. So those are, we had, I think, just one batch of them made up. So we've got 61 of them in stock right now. So if you, like me, if you love that feather RP2040, it's a great board. It's got the USB-C on it, which I love. Of course, it has a lipo charging circuit built onto it. And it's got a ton of memory, eight megs of memory on there. It has the Stem-a-QT plug for I squared C stuff. So it really is the most modern up-to-date feather as far as those types of features. So I love it. It's $11.95, but if you're, like me, super excited that it's still November, then you can go get it for 10% off. So don't forget, take that coupon code with you to, there we go, to your cart and type that in. You're going to get 10% off on your order. Maybe throw in some feather RP2040s. And that is new, new, new, new, new, new product. All right, what's happening? What else is going on? Osterly says it's still March of 2021 for them. I can dig that. Okay, it's August 3rd, all right, yep. What else, what else is going on here? So I have a few different things I want to show you over on the bench. And some of them I'll come back and forth for. So let's head on over, yeah, let's head on over there. So first of all, I'll have a little bit of an update on some IR, infrared stuff. So last week I showed my little circuit playground blue fruit running the IR blaster. This is the Stemma, three pin Stemma, two millimeter JST type of three pin Stemma. And this has the pair of high power IR LEDs. And these work great for my TV be gone zapper. I'm running it now both from buttons as well as over the blue fruit app, which is really cool, means you can set it somewhere discreetly and use the app. But when I was cleaning up some infrared related stuff, I found this old thing, which when you look at it at first, you may think, hey, is that the TV be gone kit? And I think we still have those, right? Let me jump back into the TV be gone kit. So this kit here, which I believe was made in collaboration with Mitch Altman, has a similar to look to this one. But what this one is, is a jammer. So this was made by Alan Perrec, I believe. I hope you can get your name right, Alan. And I think this was maybe from 2010. This is going back a few years. This is really neat. What this does is it's sort of a counter measure both for a TV be gone and for any regular remote. So you can use it to stop near-duels from turning off all your TVs with their TV be gone, TVs be gone. You can also use it to as a prank to block any remote, even someone who's got the right remote for their device. So the way this works, I've got it turned on, hopefully the battery is still good. I put fresh battery in this morning. When this is running, you press this tactile switch on it. It then sends out a bunch of IR nonsense in four different common bands. Over both wide and narrow beam IR, there's four IR LEDs in there, at pretty high power. So I'll show you an example of this. Let me see. Maybe I'll switch over to this view right here. Sure. So you can see on my TV right here, I can go ahead and adjust my volume. You'll see my little volume indicator show up there. I'll let that on-screen display fade away for a second. It's the easiest way you can see this. Then I'll also turn it off. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to first set this here and click the button. Now I'm trying to adjust the volume and it can't get that message because there's so many nonsense bits being sent by the little IR jammer. After 30 seconds, oh, I could use the clock that's right there, couldn't I? 30 seconds is going to seem like a long, long time. I can also point this away. All right, so now I can use my volume button again because this IR is not enough to bounce off of over there. So to demonstrate it again, I'm going to try to turn off the TV. So I'm going to press a little button here. IR jammer is just sending out tons and tons of nonsense. I'm trying to turn off my TV with the power button. It is jammed. It will not work. Also, every time you press this button, it adds another 30 seconds of jamming, which is pretty cool. So I'll wait. I'll wait for that. I'm going to keep trying, keep trying. Eventually here, those 30 seconds are going to transpire. Yeah, now I can turn off my TV. So that's a really cool device. I don't think any of my cameras will display the purple lights of IR. I think they're all filtering that. So you can't see it doing much, but you can see the effect here is that I can turn on my TV now because I have the the jammer not facing it. But if I try to turn it off, it's just not going to work, which I think is really, really cool. That could be a fun project to do a remake of, which is one reason I bring it up. The jump back over to the page here. This original, you might be able to buy it on Alan's site, alan-parek, P-A-R-E-K-H dot com. And it's got a few different projects on there. There may still be the store available if you want to check those out. This was done with a PIC microcontroller. So you can read up on it. I think you can check out the code. I don't know if it's open source, but I believe you can maybe able to check out the code. Or no, you know, I think it just has a hex file for burning your own chip. So anyway, the concept of it, you can probably understand. And if you're sending bits rapidly in the frequency range of typical IR, you can probably confuse the heck out of an IR, which is really cool. So that was just a little gear report blast from the past type of thing. And it's also related to my little TV be gone there. And I am working on the guide for that. So look in the next few days for a new guide on the the blue fruit TV zapper that I've built. All right, let's see. What else have we got going on here? So let's talk about this step switch project. Oh, you know what? Actually, since I'm on gear report stuff and it's fun, I wanted to show you a cool album that I've been listening to and I particularly want to show it to you because this is let me see if I can pull this up on here. This is really cool. So the name Remute Generations. So this album, I just got this in the mail all the way from Germany, I believe. Remute is a musician who has been releasing albums on retro game console media. And this one is for the Dreamcast. So it's a Dreamcast disc that runs on not all. There are some Dreamcasts that can't play this kind of funky CD format. I forget what it's called. It's the later ones, but earlier ones can. And you know what? I'll switch back over to my main view here. And that'll work. And I just since I was doing I wanted this clock thing right here in the front. I'm going to pull that and just plug in my Dreamcast here. This is this disc right here came on a CD and particularly formatted in a way that allows things to run Dreamcast. It'll say not produced or licensed by Sega, even though the main logo there says it is. And so the cool thing about this is that it is a terrific sort of techno album that has 15 songs on it. Each song has a unique demo scene style graphic that was done by I'll have to check the name of the artist. But so it's got you can play this in a regular CD player. But if you go ahead and hit start here, controls on the Dreamcast remote for just going to the next or previous song. Has a little animation on the on the memory card there. And so I can switch songs. You'll see there's a completely different graphic per song, which is really cool. Something is going on with my. Dreamcast signal that's giving me this weird letter boxing weird positioning thing. I'm not sure what that is. That's probably my Dreamcast or some issue with my setup here. So anyway, super cool. And apparently, Remute also did a N64 cartridge based game and I think a GBA game with with albums on them on them. So pretty darn cool. Love weird stuff like that. So much effort. Yeah, it's called a mill CD. M-I-L mill CD format is the one that has both visuals and the CD music. And I think they can usually be played in regular CD player. But if you have an earlier Dreamcast, you can also play play the animation on there as well, which is super cool. So go check out Remute. Just because I thought it was cool. I'm not getting any kickbacks or anything, but check it out. All right, let's see. So, OK, next up, I want to talk about the step switch project. So this is this has been on my radar for a little while and I've done a little bit of work on it. So I mentioned earlier, let me switch over to my bench cam here. I mentioned earlier that we had Todd Botz Pico sequencer, the Pico step sequencer in MagPie magazine or the world got to experience that just came out. And just a refresher on this, it's this beautiful little MIDI controller. And that's why I have this second little synth here, this little nano box from 1010. It can send out USB MIDI so you could use it with free iPad software if you wanted to. Also, it sends out classic MIDI so you can plug it into your classic gear. So in this case, I am using sort of classic MIDI and if I hit the encoder there, that starts and stops. By the way, ignore your the flashing of the graphics. That's just refresh rate stuff with my camera. And so I can while it's playing, I can turn off notes and I can switch sequences entirely and change the notes of particular steps. All right, and so one thing that I immediately thought when Todd built that and when we got these step switches in to the store was that I would love to pay homage to the Roland 808 drum machine or rhythm composer as Roland calls it. And so here is a modern miniature recreation that Roland did of the drum machine. I'll plug this in just for a second. This isn't really about the music demos of things here today, but let me just give you a little bit of drum sounds here if we're talking about drum machines. And you can see here as this is playing, we've got four beats with four subdivisions per beat for one measure here. And as each step is played, we get a little light showing us where we are in the step sequence. And then if you're editing this, you can go in and turn on and off notes using those steps. So this is sort of the granddaddy of all the step sequencers. And while this thing is great, I wanted to look into making my own 16 step sequencer based on some of Todd's designs and using our beautiful step switches. And so this is what I've got going. So if you remember, we have, and I don't have them, any spares here, I can pull one of these off. We have the step switches and we also have these little breakout PCBs. Zoom way in there, there we go. So we've got these little breakout PCBs that give us the common or ground, a normally open switch, normally closed switch, and then the anode and cathode of the LED. And it gives us that broken out on both sides, which just helps with choosing where to mount it. If you're going across a divide somewhere, you can use them, use those pins wherever you want. So what I did was a few weeks back, I started soldering these on and now I've got a nice set of 16 of these going. And I was thinking about doing this on Permaproto boards, but it actually works pretty nicely on one of these big three row breadboards. Maybe it's not the permanent solution, but it's a really nice way to get going with it. And I've got a KB2040. So this is the keyboard KB2040 microcontroller. Right now I'm just running the LEDs. I don't have the switches hooked up yet, but I've got the LEDs going to ground and then their positive leg, each one is going to a pin on my KB2040. This was my idea. There's a flaw in this idea, but this was my idea is I wanted to do PWM because we want to be able to run those light levels so that we can show both a step that's lit up as well as the position of the current beat in the playback. So if I can find a convenience source of USB-C power for this, here's one, oh, I could have stolen it from the little nano box there. You'll see I've just got this much of the demo going, which is I've got some pretty bright LEDs. And then you'll notice the brightest light is that position in the sequence as we go along. It may or may not be keeping up with my video frame rate, so sorry about that, but you're not mistaken in seeing it jump across two of these. And this is because I was not paying enough attention and I think I can only PWM 14, not 16 LEDs from the KB2040. And this may be, I think there are only, I think there are only seven pairs of PWM channels. I could be totally wrong on this, but as I was setting this up, it was saying, hey, you can't use that channel, it's already in use, one, yeah. So I'll look at the pinout with you in a second to see, but it's okay, I can switch over to using I squared C based PWM driver or possibly different microcontroller, but I'm gonna have to have 16 GPIO pins for switches or a multiplexer of some kind and 16 PWM outputs for the LEDs. So again, if I can't do that raw on the board, then I may just use a little outboard multiplexer for PWM, PWM driver. So like I said, switches aren't doing anything right now because those are not hooked up to anything at all, but I'm happy to just see this happening. So it's at least the earliest proof of concept of what that's gonna do. I'll show you, we can talk through this and maybe someone in the chat has some insights about the back here to learn. I'll just do keyboard. All right, I'll do KB2040 pinouts. All right, let's get up close and personal with this. So here's what matters. We've got on this nice pretty pins here, we have the PWM zero A and B. PWM one A and B, two, three, four, five is split across the bottom of the board. So it jumps right over here to pin D10, that's PWM five. Mosey, Miso and clock, you can't use those if you're already using PWM channels one and two, which I didn't pay attention when I was looking at it. I was like, oh, it's got like 18 PWM pins. You can't use those while you, a channel can only be used in one location. So then we get up to five A and B, which zero and one have, but that was already what I was trying to use here with, oh sorry, yeah, that was this D10 here. So that D10 five A is not usable. Then six is available. So I think the solution, and Liz just mentioned it in the chat, is the AW9523, that may be how I'll do PWM. I think that one, is that the one that's out of stock that did 18 or rather did 16? Because we also have one that I think I can chain that does eight. Let's see, this is the GPIO expander LED driver. Whoa, hey, sometimes that happens with learn, just click it again. Oh, what's going on? Bah, hey now, let's go to the shop and then see if I can get there by a back door. This is the AW, it's got 16 IO, okay. Yeah, so I think this one can do it. And we do have it in stock. Okay, maybe we was just out of stock for a little bit. Great, in which case I can probably, I can probably use the GPIO built in for the actual switches. If not, we have a variety of different multiplexers for switches that I can use to. Oh, hey, Jepler mentioned I can use a PIO. One of the PIOs can be used to drive PWM-like signals. Yeah, ooh neat, that could be fun. So Jepler's got a guide. Let me bring up the Discord. I like thinking out loud about these projects because there's so much good advice available in the chat. So yeah, Jepler said there's a way to use one of the four, I think it's four PIO processes on the RP2040 to do a PWM-like thing, very cool. All right, so those are some of the things I'll be tackling. I'll probably have a few of those things sorted out next week. I'll take a look at that as well as some of the functionality of sending out MIDI notes. I should be able to cross fingers, piggyback on much of or most of Todd's code for the PicoStep sequencer and just kind of expand it out to be the 16 pins that I wanna use. Let's see, other thoughts on that? Let me know in the chat, I'll check that out later. So, questions, right? Oh, learn guides, hey, don't forget. Let me jump back over to learn here for a second. New guides. So, we have, didn't I say that this was available down to the very bottom of the page here? We have, I swear I saw this last week, what's our total number? I think you have to go to a guide first. All right, I've lost it. I might just need to go to the main learn page, that's probably it. We have, yeah, it's gonna be here. I have a good feeling. 2,776 tutorials in the learn system. And we have a few new ones this week. So, I'm gonna jump over to new guides here. We've got, first of all, an updated guide. So, Adafruit Graphics, GFX Graphics Library. Phil Burgess went and added a page on minimizing redraw flicker. So, some people had questions about minimizing the flicker when you're redrawing, and Phil wrote a whole page on some techniques, depending on what you're trying to do, on how to minimize flicker, which was great. Thank you so much, Phil, for doing that, for updating that guide. So, you will see that time to time, by the way, if you head over to the new guides page, and you see something that looks familiar, it's probably gotten an update. And I'm here to tell you about it. Next up, we have the 5x5 NeoPixel Grid BFF, guide from Liz Clark. You saw, if you watch show and tell today, some cool projects that both Jepler and Liz have been creating using the little BFF. There's some scrolling text stuff, which is kind of amazing, you can see it running on there. And that's probably more legible in real life, or with an LED acrylic diffuser over the top of it. But you can send tiny little messages on this, and much, much more. So, check this out. The guide gives you pinout information, how it gets powered up, info on running it in circuit Python, Python on a computer, using Blinka, as well as in Arduino. And then next up, we got this gorgeous. Look at these colors. Come on. Ruiz Brothers, knocking it out of the park with these Micro-Lipo V2 cases. So the Micro-Lipo is a tiny little almost thumb drive-like lipo charger that you can just shank into any unsuspecting USB port and steal some power from it. And it's just a little PCB. This is a beautiful little case the Ruiz Brothers made. You can print it out in different colors. And it gives you access to the current switch. There's a little switch on there for flipping between two current levels for your battery charging needs, depending on the size of the battery, as well as a little dust cover for the JST plug for the battery. And it also gives you just something nice and convenient to grab onto. And it is a snap fit. It has a great little snap fit action. So go and check out that guide, and three, print yourself some. Lastly, we have the ScoutMakes FM radio board guide. And this shows you how to use. This is a board that we sell in the store. And this allows you to use Circuit Python to tune in radio. I haven't gotten one of these or used it. And so I could be totally wrong here, but I believe it's just FM based on the example code I looked at. It looked like it was running through FM frequencies. But someone tell me if I'm wrong about this. In fact, one of the things you can do when you get to a guide is usually, I'm going to expand this a bit to get it to show the sidebar. Oh, there's no feature products. OK, we'll add those in. Feature products should be in there. It shows you the product you're using. I'll click on that link in a second, but this gives you the pinout as well as the Circuit Python code example on how to use it. And so what I'll do is just head back over to the shop and type in scout make FM radio kit. OK, it's out of stock right now, unfortunately. This is a full blown kit. OK, so I'm not sure actually. This would be a good one to ask them. Or maybe we're going to carry just that little board there. Because I think this kit has more. And we already had a guide on that one. So this must be something new, right? Maybe that's why there's no link to it. What's going on here? It's mysterious, very mysterious. Oh, yeah, and this is over STEM at QT. All right, I clearly know nothing about this board. But good thing we have a guide for it. I've got to go get one and play around with it. So those are your new guides. And click back on here. You can see the main page. Just click on View All under New Guides. And that will show you. I believe we also have one other updated guide that is in moderation. So that should be out any day now. If you check back, I'll leave that as a teaser. But Ann mentioned to me that there was one updated guide coming that is in moderation right now. So let's wrap it up with some questions. I said that I would take some questions. I'll jump over to the Discord here and scroll through here and see what I can find. Let's see if I don't make the display angry. All right, oh, I've made the display angry. It does not like me moving that window off of another monitor. Oh, yeah. Oh, I've totally angered it. Sorry, computer. All right, let me get a swig of tea here and scroll up. If you have a question that I don't seem to notice, you can type it in again now. And I'll catch it down there. And I hope my Discord doesn't keep auto-scrolling like it seems to be doing. Oh, no, it just jumped way far. One question I saw was, why Rhino 3D? I have shown some of my workflows before using Rhino 3D. I don't have it set up to share. It takes a bit of doing to bring up those screens. So I'm going to try to get back to where I saw that question. And then I will answer it and try to keep my place there. So close, so close. I'm sure there's a feature in Discord that lets me jump to mentions. Feel like we're very, very close. Getting closer, I'm really no good at multitasking. So otherwise, I'd be answering your question while I scrolled and looked for your question. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Oh, yeah, there it is. OK, some nice asks, why Rhino for 3D? So this is an interesting question. And I've got to ask this question about Maya as well, which I use for 3D, particularly when it's animation, character stuff, rendering, visualizations, things where what it looks like really, really, really matters, less important is trying to manufacture a thing or print a thing. And largely, that's because I spent 20 years using Maya in 3D animation world. And despite having learned and used a lot of different 3D applications over my career, there does come a point where you're working and you don't actually have time to spend looking over at Blender or other things. If I were starting today, I would totally learn Blender. I've watched its development over the years, and it is fantastic the things it can do. The interface used to be wildly different than most other standard things, so I was not interested in slowing down how I worked. Now it seems like it's much more conventional. I think you might have options to use it in other modes. But with Rhino, I don't know of an equivalent that's a open source or free or alternate to it. And Rhino is a weird one. The reason Rhino existed in the first place was that there were no good NURBS modeling programs running on Windows. And the library that was the underpinnings of the NURBS modeling workflows on alias and SGI machines was licensed. Same one that was used in alias Wavefront and Power Animator and then later Maya got licensed by McNeil. And they built this whole program around it. And now Rhino runs on Mac and Windows. It's a great modeler. It's way beyond just a NURBS modeler now, which is kind of old fashioned way of building organic surfaces. But what happened for me with Rhino is that they added Grasshopper. Grasshopper is a parametric workflow that harnesses everything Rhino can do and gives you a node connection based workflow, which means you're not just building something straight ahead and hoping you have a few undos or saving copies of things on layers, but allows you to parametrically create things. So you can create a curve and then have nodes that import that curve, extrude it, cut a piece of it out, fill it the edges, and on and on, which makes it similar in a lot of ways to something like Fusion 360, Inventor, SolidWorks. These are programs that often have a workflow that is very adaptable and parametric for going in and changing things. So that means that when I build stuff for fabrication, I'm using Rhino and Grasshopper. If I have to change something inside, you know all the screws in this thing, I want to use M3 instead of M4, and I need a different size hole over the place. That's the kind of thing if you've worked with those sorts of things in mind, you can make a very quick change and just update all your models. So that's why Rhino, it's not, at the end of the day, there are programs like Fusion 360 that are more commonly used, more sensible, way cheaper. I don't know what it costs for the subscriptions now for Fusion 360. So in the long run, Rhino, which is kind of a one-time purchase, the updates pretty much seem to be free for life. I don't know when the last time I had to rebuy it was. They're not on a subscription model, which is interesting and very nice. Okay, next question. Kiyoshi says, what's your favorite input device? Okay, so I probably don't have just one answer, but an answer is, I'll show you this thing right here. I switch over to a down shooter. It's a vertical mouse. This one is so old, you can see all that weird rubber coating stuff is worn off everywhere. Oh my God, there's disgusting scunge, finger scunge over there that I'm super embarrassed by, I never see. Vertical mouse, this one's optical, has just a few buttons. It's totally out of focus. Oh, that's the exposure. Hold on. So I love this kind of mouse. I've been using this type of mouse probably for 18 years or something like that, maybe more. It puts your wrist in a natural pronation rather than putting strain by unnaturally twisting your radius all night there. This is kind of a handshake position which is really comfortable. These take maybe a couple weeks to get used to or less if you haven't used them before and then I've never gone back. These are great. So I love this type of mouse. This is from a company called Evoluent, right? Evoluent, vertical mouse three. Anchor makes a pretty nice one. Actually, I have one of theirs and it's way, way cheaper. And there are probably other makers of those, but that's my favorite pointer input type of device there. I love weird input devices. I love playing around with them, but at the end of the day, I come back to that right there. I've never been one for space mice. There used to be these sculpting interfaces that was a pen on a gimbal thing and I've mostly liked a mouse. Let's see, other questions. Did you make Lars or buy him and mod him? I've never heard the lore of how Lars came to be. Lars is just back here chilling with a Dreamcast and he is a commercially available stuffed animal that I added a bunch of electronics to. So I opened him up, I can turn him on. It's got an on-off switch there. I can tap him. But maybe he was on all this time and his battery's dead. I may have forgotten to turn him off last time. Yep, all right, we can plug him in. He's got a USB port there that I put at the bottom. I'll need a cable I don't have right here. Let's see, let's try this one. And he is a character, was something that a soft serve ice cream place here in Los Angeles came up with. So I think I have a learn guide on building this Lars with voice chip inside. And that tells the lore and shows some of the Instagram videos. Okay, so he's super creepy. This actor named Matt Bedell did the voice for those. And he's fantastic. Long chainy sort of thing. That's Lars, yeah, he's called a ugly doll, no. He's some other box over here somewhere. He's called a fuggler. Look him up, you can sometimes still find them. Well, let's see, other questions. Mark Gambler said, some stories are best left untold. And then Lars kind of took on a bit of a life of his own when he moved into my workshop here. Took over control of my mind with his parasites. Let me bring up my discord here. There we go. Oh gosh. Is that really stable diffusion? What? Sinister plush sloth. Image generated by sailor. Japler, did you do this? Oh my God, that's funny. All right, let's see, any other questions? I'm gonna get to the bottom of this here in a second. Sorry, I'm looking off to the side. I have this on another monitor where the text is bigger than my one right there. Oh, someone mentioned async.io. Mark Gambler said async.io all the way with sleep for delays, but I still have uses for time monotonic. Japler says Adafritics is slightly more subtle to use but avoids the problem Todd bought mentions of the time intervals slowly creeping. Yeah, I'll do some more, I'll do some more circuit python parsecs on some of these other time methods which helps me learn them, so that's great. All right, I'm gonna scrub through here. Sorry, I know when PT and Lamor do Eskin engineer, they got faster question and answer because they got two sets of eyeballs. There's a link to the TVV gone kit. To help with OLED videography, maybe add a neutral density filter to the camera or lengthen the shutter speed for each frame. That's a great idea, I like that. Thank you, Osterling. I will try neutral density filter, let's see what that does. All right, favorite Euro rack module says BlitzCity DIY. Ooh, that's a really quick answer to that is Pam's new workout, Pamela's new workout by ALM Busy Circuits is the only module in my main rack that isn't made by mutable instruments. I have a full mutable instruments rack and the only non-mutable instruments branded thing in there is Pamela's new workout, which is one of the best digital computer-y types of modules. It has eight outputs, it has a rotary encoder and a screen that lets you say what each of the outputs is doing for clock-type stuff. It can do way more, but if you need to have different clock divisions running to make rhythmic things happen as well as it can produce like LFOs and sample and hold things, super versatile and I don't really like modules that are deep menu dive-y, digitally kinds of things as far as I know, like I've never used ornament and crime, but I worry that it's different things depending on which program you put on it in a way that might be frustrating for me, but Pamela's new workout, absolutely love it. Pro version just came out just barely changed it, looks like neat changes, but that means the market is currently flooded with reasonably priced used Pamela's new workouts. So go check that out, great question Liz, thank you. Let's see, I think I saw a question on here about how many CRTs should you have in your workshop? I've been going nuts about CRTs lately and I'll tease one that I hopefully can do something interesting with. This is a PVM, I think this is a PVM, yep. PVM 96 from Sony, nine inch professional video monitors what PVM meant, so basically Sony had consumer grade TVs or Trinitron, normal Trinitron, they have professional video monitors, PVMs, which are used often by videographers and people on locations as confidence monitors for their camera setups, and then there's BVMs, broadcast video monitors are the highest end, most precise ones used in studios to ensure that you've got top quality before you broadcast or master something. This one is black and white, so it's at eight inch black and white, or is it nine, it might be nine inch black and white with I think this may do S video quality because it's got a video in and a sync, so it should be able to do S video type quality, but I could be wrong, if not it's basically composite with BNC, has two inputs on it. So that's a CRT that I'll show you, try to do some neat stuff with, but I've put out there into the universe that I'm collecting CRTs, and so they're starting to find me, which is good. And there were just one of those things that you shouldn't fall in love with because they're all just gonna die in time. Let's see, Kiyoshi asked what stepping is for a synth, and the idea there is that if you want to have musical notes, let's say drum beats, if you wanna have drum beats happening in a pattern, let's say it's just a kick drum and a snare drum, you can press one of these little step switches and say on the first beat of the first measure, boom, get a kick, and then maybe on the second beat of the third measure you have a snare, boom, or a hi-hat or whatever. So as you go in and click on the little step switches, you're lighting up and saying, okay, this drum is happening on these intervals, it's essentially a digital physical interface for doing something like sheet music and saying where different drum hits happen. And Todd's version there also has pitch information so you can have it send repeating looping melodies, basically. Let's see, other questions. You didn't know that Lars had a foot port? Yeah, that's the key thing. Look at Lars there with this, just getting charged up. Turn that back on. Charging Lars up. I love Lars, he's lovable. Blushing plush radish. Jephler, I think I adore your use of stable diffusion. This stuff's great. All right, let me know. Any other questions? I think we will wrap it up. Oh yeah, Todd, one thing about this monitor, it's so square, it's almost a cube. And I don't know why, but I think the throw of a black and white tube can be much shorter than the RGB ones, because an equivalent PVM that's color from Sony is gonna go out to here. So for some reason, this black and white one is almost a perfect little cube, which I love. Cubes are lovable. Mooman says, that's for the separate luminance and chroma. Yeah, what would the sink be? I don't know what the sink would be for this, if it's black and white. We'll find out. B-Boxing is all you need. All right. Okay, last one here, favorite wire cutters. I just brought them inside. I still really love my Italian auto wire strippers. Second favorite of these, actually, these are the ones we have, these little ones in native French. These are really good when you have thin wires and you're trying to very carefully pluck them. This is, what brand are these? CHP, is that right? CMP, CMP. Those are good. Yeah, someone found them. Oh, wait, those are the cutters. You asked about cutters, not strippers. Ah, I do like the ones you showed. I have some favorites that are, what's that Swiss brand with the spongy green handle? Let me find that. I wanna find that, those are the best. I got them at Fry's years and years ago. Let me pull them up. Swiss diagonal cutters. ERM, this is the brand, E-R-E-M. These might not be them exactly, but here I'll show you an eBay of some, someone wants to get $110 for E-Ikes. Mine were not $110. Whoops. These diagonal cutters are not exactly the ones I have, but that's the brand, E-R-E-M. They're super nice. They're still sharp after all these years. They cut really nicely. I don't cut mean things like header pins with them, though I use them just for wire. So that's my favorite cutters. You did mean strippers, wire strippers, yeah. Yeah, and you know what? The ones that we have in the Adafrit store are the same design as the ones that I have had forever and really like, let me go back here. These right here, I love these. I haven't used these, this exact one, but I think the ones I have are probably the same. Mine say made in Italy in them weirdly, but they look identical. Anyway, those are great for like doing a whole bunch. You can do multiples at once. You can fit like usually four wires side by side and at once and get precise stripping of the tips there. So I like those a lot. All right, that's gonna do it. We've gone maybe a little bit over here. I got overly excited and enthusiastic about stuff tonight, but I wanna thank you all so much for stopping by and I wanna remind you that one of the ways that we keep the lights on here is with our store. And if you want to go to our store and buy some cool stuff, maybe some diagonal cutters, maybe some wire strippers, and you want a discount, then don't forget to type in yesvenber here on the very last day of November, type in yesvenber in the little coupon code slot as you're checking out buy a bunch of cool Adafruit stuff and we would appreciate it greatly. Thank you so much to everyone in the community as well as in community support from Adafruit for hanging out and making things run smoothly tonight. And I will see you next week on Tuesday with a product pick of the week, Wednesday with a John Parks workshop slash engineer. We've got, if you look on our Discord, you can type in question mark show times and the bot will tell you when the other shows are happening. A bunch of great stuff coming up and happening again next week. So that is it for Adafruit Industries. I'm John Park and this has been John Parks Workshop. Bye bye.