 it's me, John Park. It's time for JPE's product pick of the week. And sorry, I noticed my mic is a little hot. I've got a new setup, somewhat. Let me try to, whoo, rain that in a little bit. There we go. Sorry about that. So first of all, hello and thank you for stopping by. I see we've got some people over in our various chats, and those being the YouTube chat. Hello, John Oh, Jeff Hunt, Chad Lawson, OG, Thinkster, Wet Willy, Dave Odessa. Hello and welcome. Thanks for joining us. If you are somewhere else where you don't see an active chat going on, you may want to check over on our Discord because that is where we've got these fine folks right here. Hello, Liz. Hey, Paul. Super Daddy, Jim Hendrickson, C Grover. Welcome. Thanks for joining us. So head on over there. You can go to Adafru.it slash Discord, jump into the live broadcast chat channel and partake in the fun. So let's see. What have we got here today? We've got a cool product pick, one that's been out for a while, but we've never had the big, big JPE's product pick discount on it. It's going to be a 50% off sort of deal. In fact, you want to see me, let me do this live right here. Let's see how this goes. So here's the site and I'm going to refresh the site. Whoa, look at that half price. Okay, but I'm getting ahead of myself. You can head on over there if you want. Go to that URL right there or to that QR code and you can watch this show from inside of the page there. You can also throw that item or up to 10 of them in your cart, no resellers, but if you want them for yourself and you want them at a deep, deep discount, throw them in your cart. There's no coupon code necessary. All you have to do is check out before or just a little bit after the end of the show because then the price goes back up to normal. We stashed a few. I know we were selling through on these. We stashed a few, I think about 100 of them before the show. So we should have plenty to go around unless the first 10 people just buy 10, in which case, whoa, what are you doing with all these? So before I talk any more about what the product pick is, however, I'm going to jump back just a little bit in time and have Lady Aida introduce it. So please take it away, Lady Aida. Next up, Matrix Portal. We've been doing a lot of Matrix projects and I wanted to make it easier to build some of these internet connected projects. Historically, we've used a Metro M4 Airlift and an RGB Matrix shield. So this breakout plugs into the back of a Matrix and does it all. So let me grab one and I'll show it off. Overhead. Okay, so what we've got here is a SAMD 51 Cortex M4. So it can run up to 200 megahertz. Type C. Everyone's like, when are you going to do USB type C? Okay, now. Now everything is with USB type C. Okay, leave me alone. ESP32 is a Wi-Fi co-processor. So that lets the SAMD 51 do all the LED Matrix driving and a circuit Python or Arduino code and all the Wi-Fi SSL stuff is handled by this chip. Level shifting, onboard SPI flash, breakouts for analog pins, UART, SPI, all the good stuff. Stem EQT connector to use any of our 50 plus boards on it. Two user buttons, side buttons and then one reset button that's kind of recessed. JST port and then these two little SMD hex nuts. Basically, they're soldered onto the PCB, allow for power. So the power comes in from the USB-C or you can, you know, apply power here if you want or through the connector. And it's like no soldering required. You basically, this comes already attached, this header. This header plugs into any hub 75 RGB matrix, which is kind of like every RGB matrix. Everyone that we sell is hub 75. You can use it with 16 by 32 up to 64 by 64. So it's got the extra address e-pin. So if you want to use it with 64 by 64 matrices, it'll work. And here's the demo. It's just going online and getting the price of Bitcoin. Congratulations. It's about $11,000. This is a running circuit Python. It's very easy to make RGB matrix projects. You can chain the matrix. In this case, there's only one right now attached, but you can make a long string of RGB matrices as long as you don't run out of memory. And the SAMD 51 has 192K. So you're good for quite a bit. And we have a really great new library, the Proto Matter Library, which runs on the SAMD 51 and is optimized for driving these displays to get like this beautiful, colorful displays. Almost no work required. And now you don't even have to solder. Don't worry about the wiring, because the wiring is the hardest part of using these LED matrices. People always it's hard to mirror it and you get it wrong and it has to be a certain pin and the clock has to be on the same port. So don't think care of just plug and play to make internet connected LED devices. Yes, indeed. That's what you can do. You can get these to make internet connected LED devices and look, that's it right there. In fact, it's sitting on top of a little LED matrix. That beautiful board right there, plug and play ready to go, ready to make all of your dreams come true even when it's upside down. Hey, there we go. So this right here, that's my product pick of the week this week. It is the Matrix Portal. It is, as Lady Ada said, a SAMD 51 Cortex M4 chip on there. Also has the coprocessor, which is the ESP32, which gets us our Wi-Fi connectivity. We have the Matrix Portal library for Circuit Python and similar functionality in Arduino that makes it really easy to do online things to find statuses and display them. But I'll tell you, one of the things that people are really wild about is it's got an accelerometer on board. So we can do things like the little sand falling sand demo here. Oh, there we go. It's all falling. That is a 64 by 32 panel that I have right there. And the thing is we have a whole bunch of different kinds of panels that you can plug this into. And as you can see here, if I go ahead and unplug power from it, it's at USB-C, I am sending power from the board to the matrix there, and data goes over this little IDC connector there. So this is a standard on these Hub 75 style panels. And this just plugs right into it to deliver the data. And then the power goes over these lines here. These are, if you're wondering, what's the deal with these panels? These are what billboards are made out of. This is what Times Square is entirely made out of. It's just lots of these. So they're made pretty small so that if a couple pixels fail, you pull that section and drop in the next ones. These are meant to plug into a standard set of connectors. But you don't probably have the room for a whole billboard. So we allow you to do one, I think up to four, depending on the number of pixels of the displays can be connected using a ribbon cable for data. And then of course, you got to pass power around. And there are some jumpers to set on the board to do that 64 by 64 height. And then you can go wider with that. So we have some libraries that show you how to do that. I wanted to show you a demo I just made. And I am excited about this because we've now got GIF support. So this is the first time I've used in preparing for the show today, I've used GIF IO on the matrix portal with the matrix display. The nice thing is this display just basically shows up in display IO. You can use it just like pretty much any display you would in display IO. One second while I adjust the camera here to show you the little demo here of a GIF. Here we go. So look at that right there. There is one of our panels with the matrix portal right there. I've got it dark at the moment so you can see the colors a little better. Running a little animated GIF. This is a, I don't know, I think something like a maybe 40 something frame GIF. So it's not tiny, but it plays back great. It plays back really nice and fast. Look at those great colors. And if I adjust my exposure to make it a little brighter, it's going to wash that out. But you can see here, I built the little Lego frame for it. And around the back, you can see there is my matrix portal plugged in. It protrudes off the side and depends on the size of the matrix that you're using how far that is. But that gives you access to these buttons right here. And I don't have them set up to do anything on this demo, but you can use two buttons for user things. And then this top button here is a reset. You can also use, because these have a pretty standard IDC connector ribbon connector, you could make a little ribbon cable situation to move the matrix portal anywhere you want. It doesn't actually have to be rigidly bound to it. It's this kind of little IDC ribbon cable here that'll that'll plug in. And those are keyed for polarity. But yeah, you can see we've got bunches of different kinds of from from little we little 32 by 32 ones. This is 32 by 64, all the way up to if you saw the project I did recently using the Star Trek L cars display that was a pair of 64 by 64s that were joined up for power and data that allowed me to have 128 by 64 pixels. So really nice and big. The learn or yeah, let me go let me go to the product page and then to the learn guide to show you some of the many, many things you can do with it. So first of all, yeah, here's the page. This is that product ID 4745. So you can always get there with a to fruit dot it slash product number in this case 4745. You can get these for the $12 and 48 cents. Just chuck them in your cart. No coupon code needed. If you scroll down in here, you'll get some of the key features. So like I said, at samd 51 Cortex m4 ESP 32 Wi Fi co processor usb type C. We have an I square C stem of Qt connector. So you can add on peripherals to this. Let's say you want to add a little encoder or something to control it. You can. We also have a JST three pin out that can be used for audio playback audio IO or other GPIO uses has that built in list 3d h accelerometer. There are some GPIO pins broken out that you can connect up. The address E line jumper is what we soldered to be able to use 64 by 64 matrices. And then we just declare it in code. And then the buttons indicator neopixel on board power indicator and then the two by 10 socket for hub 75. The pin out you can see here if you go to learn guide that will tell you even more details about what these GPIO pins are that are broken out if you want to use those. And if you click on the learn guide section and just search for matrix portal, you'll see tons and tons of different projects we have here. Here's some nice sprite sheet animation type of stuff from Jepler with this this RGB LED matrices. Learn guide. There's proto matter, which is going to let you use Arduino and some really fast screen refreshes or protest sign on air sign. These like the clock and the weather display. These are pulling data off of different online sources. So we have ways to parse JSON documents and then put that information up on the screen. Here's Liz's great IoT Twitter listener party parent. I believe that one was watching a Twitter account for for a mention and then it would animate the dancing parrot head. So lots of great guides there that you can dive into, especially the ones with connectivity. Here's the scoreboard one uses the phone uses your web page to be able to update. So let's see, what else do I have to show you? Let's let's take a look at this code. So for this project here. For this gift animation, by the way, one of the things you'll notice is I'm using a diffusion LED plastic. This is an this is an acrylic with a diffuse surface on one side that really helps to sort of blend the pixels together a little better. So you don't see the individual very piercing bright points of light, you don't have to use those. But we do sell that plastic in the store too. So you can look for that LED diffusion acrylic. So here's the code for what I'm doing here, you can see it's pretty straightforward. I am importing the matrix portal as matrix that's going to let me use the display really easily. And I'm importing the GIF IO. And then I create my matrix object here and I'm telling it the width and height 64 by 64 in the case of this one right here. We are then using pretty standard display IO hierarchy of groups. And then we're using this from GIF IO the on disk GIF map odg is an on disk GIF. And I have a GIF I put on there called cyber dot GIF. And then we have some timing things, the GIF object is being added to the display display o tile grid, using a particular pixel shader for the color conversions. And then in the main loop, we're simply moving a frame updating moving a frame updating, moving a frame updating. So really straightforward, we could just throw different gifts on this. We'll probably put up this example code somewhere if you want to grab it as a easy way to just get started throwing gifts on, you can then of course do things like have it play a loop of multiple gifts or update only when you press a button. So you can you can get a lot of mileage out of that with your matrix portal and a nice little display. Let's see what else anything I'm forgetting. Let me know in the chat if you have any questions. Yeah, 2231 puppy said how long will the discount be around after the stream? Not long at all. We the discount is just for the during the show. So give or take sometimes 10 minutes to an hour of someone being able to have the the chance to go and adjust that. So it's it's not a sure thing. What size panel is that? So if your question is about the one that I have on screen here set CET asked, this one is a two millimeter pitch. So that's how close together the pixels are. This is a two millimeter pitch. I believe this one's a two and a half millimeter pitch here. And we have all the way up to six millimeter pitch so you can get pretty big ones. The sometimes here. Here's a nice. Here's a nice example. Here's a 32 by 32 pixel in six millimeter pitch. This is great for doing pixel art stuff. A lot of sprites and icons are 32 by 32. So that's a nice one or 24 by 24. That's a nice one for those. But you can see that the distance between those is rather large. That's the six millimeter. This one I think is a 2.5 millimeter. So big, big difference there between those two. And I believe this is a 64 by 64. So all of those you can drive with the matrix portal. Let's see other questions. Yeah, what Willie question was this is Adafruit circuit Python gift support it is not expressive pixels, but that's another option. There's a learn guide on that. I haven't looked at that. But yeah, we have a couple of different ways to do those as well as just sprite sheet animation. So a sprite sheet that has one long or wide image, and then the code can just like on a on a video game sprite sheet page through those quickly. Jeff Hunt asked, do you did you say they can daisy chain? They sure can. If you look at I'm going to bring up the learn guide again. If you look at the L cars, little cars, Star Trek panel. You'll see on the back. Well, there you go. So there's two of them. And these are two and a half millimeter pitch 64 by 64. So I put those together. And then I gave them both power, as well as shared data. So you can see there that's what that looks like with two of them chained together. You can't see the power hook up there. Let me see. I've got a better image of that. No, I closed it up before I showed you that surely I have a there we go. Here's a nicer full view of it. So you can see that's two panels together and they have the standoffs for power that come off of the matrix portal can deliver about three amps. I think if you have a nice USB C power brick plugged into it, I needed more than that for this. I was going full bright white and 128 by 64 pixels. So I used an external power supply that's a four amp I might even up that to a 10 amp. And then that power can go directly to the panels and then I just tie ground into the matrix portal. So that's a way that you can do that. So yeah, Connor McCarter asked what she uses a power supply main learn guide will we'll talk about all those options for this size and type of panel you can use something like the Raspberry Pi USB C power brick it's like $8 we have it in the store can supply up to three amps at five volts. And that's good for for running the power directly off of the matrix portal when you get bigger displays brighter displays more displays chained together. You can use an external power supply for just the panels like I did there. So check that guide out. That's a that'll show you how. Let's see other questions. Oh yeah, David G says you can go four up of the 64 by 64s. So you can do 128 by 128 pixels. Think that's the max that we can drive but I could be wrong on that I believe actually there's a learn guide that Melissa did where she was driving even more than that I think it was 64 high or 32 high but super wide like four panels wide. Yeah, and David G says if you want to use multiple panels try to simultaneous simultaneously try to order them all at once so that you're more likely to have the same color temperature on them and that's somewhat tweakable especially if you're not doing white. But it's a good point don't wait a year to buy a panel that could could end up being slightly different color shifts to it. Alright, I think is that going to do it? I think that does it. So let's let's finish this up. So that find a convenient way to hold this. It's it's overblown it's sort of blown out there but you get the idea that right there is my product pick of the week this week it is the matrix portal. It's the matrix portal. Thanks everyone for stopping by for JP's product pick of the week. Remember you can head on over to that site right there while the show is on pretty soon after we go off the air that discount will go away but right now it is half off. So pick yourself up a lovely matrix portal and a display and maybe a power supply and take a look at some of those guides don't forget some of that LED plastic to you can score it with a knife and snap it if you're careful if you don't have a laser cutter or a band saw or another way to cut that table saw works pretty well. Alright, thanks everyone for Adafruit Industries. I'm John Park. This has been JP's product pick of the week. Bye bye.