 And welcome to the show, it's me, John Park, and it's time for JP's product pick of the week. You have arrived just in time. Me too, we're all here now. And thanks everyone for stopping by, for jumping in over on the YouTube chat, as well as our Discord chat. It is great to see you. Now the first thing I'll say is, if you wanna go and check out this week's product pick, you can watch the live stream inside of this webpage right here, point your camera at that, or just type in this URL. This show appears inside of the product page, so you can keep watching right from in there. And you can get an enormous discount, 50% off on this week's product pick. I am assured that we have a whole lot of them in stock, I know we had some stock issues for a couple of the product picks recently, but this one I think we're in the clear, unless you people buy thousands of them, I think we're gonna be good. So, before I go any further, what I'm gonna do is have Lady Aida talk to us from the past, the not too distant past, about this week's product pick from her new, new, new segment. Take it away, Lady Aida. This is a mini Pi TFT. So this is a very adorable little screen. We got this screen in, we made a breakout, and then- Look at the quality of this. Do you have some Photoshopped? It is beautiful. It's for real. So I have the live version as well, but you can see there's two ways to use it. Either you can use it, it's tiny. You can either use it with Python directly, which does not require kernel drivers. This is what I'm doing here, and I'm just using Pillow, which is a library. That looks unreal. It does look unreal, but it's real. It can actually play little videos on it, but it's quite small. This is a 240 by 135, which is good enough to have good resolution, great color, of course it's full color display. In this case I'm not using all the colors, but you can still see its color compared to an OLED. There's two buttons on the side that you can use to change UI or do signaling, whatever, because it just turned out that I had to make it this wide to get all the pins, and then we had enough space exactly for two buttons. It works on any Raspberry Pi you like. You can either install the kernel module if you want, which it does update your kernel to the latest. That's the trade-off. Or you can, if you just need basic drawing on to it with Python, use the Pillow library, and that's definitely the easiest way, and it'll work on any single board computer that has SPI and Python support, so that's handy. And then a bonus on the bottom, it even has a little four-pin quick connector. Of course I didn't bring any quick sensors, but if you have a STEMI QT, your quick sensor, you can see there there's a spot to plug them in. So it's really easy if you want to connect a sensor or an output or LEDs or whatever, and you want to use that I-Squared-C port because you've kind of used up these pins. Maybe you don't want to use a stacking header. This makes it really easy to connect external I-Squared-C devices, which is quite popular with people, especially since we have Blinka and all of our libraries for Silicon-Python. Since it displays video, could you have the camera go to it? Yes, we did a demo where we have the Raspberry Pi camera and the machine learning output go to this little display. That's using that, I think that was with the kernel module, but you could use it, again, if you can get anything into Python, you can just play it on the screen. Yes, indeed, that is it. So let me jump to my down camera here and grab one for myself so we can do a little bit of a demo. There it is, done, done, done. It's a little music there, don't I? So let's talk about this. This is the product pick of the week. It is the MiniPi TFT. It is a SPI, SPI, bus-based display. It has a couple of buttons for GPIO and it's got that little STEMA QT connector on the bottom so you can plug in something like this GPS. Let's say you want to add GPS to a Pi project. It's just as simple as plugging into there and then using Blinka, the circuit Python for single board computers with it. Let's see, what are the stats on this? This is a 240 by 135 pixel display. You can also use it in different orientations. There's commands inside of the drivers to be able to do that. And what I thought I would do is a little bit of a demo here. Let's take a look. I've got a Raspberry Pi here. This one happens to be a Pi 3B version 1.2, so a couple year old one, but you can use this with pretty much any of the Raspberry Pis, including Pi zeros. What I'll do is you'll see this has header pins to plug into the first 12 pins. So we still have some available for connecting other GPIO to for your project depending on what you're doing. And I'll just power this up. I have a little bit of code running on here that I'll show you in a second that is gonna run on startup, if everything works, crossing fingers, it's gonna run on startup. And what it'll do is display some important information while the Pi is running. And it just refreshes every couple of seconds with things like the time, your SSID, your IP address of the device itself, the host name, and even my ping I've got here for the wide area network. So this is really cool because one of the things that I often run into with Raspberry Pis that I'm using is I have no idea what IP address they're on if I'm gonna SSH into them. I don't have them plugged into a monitor. And so I just wanna SSH onto them and do something with them. This, it's actually, I have a wacky network that is gonna cause it to kind of go in and out which is annoying. But this one is working, you can see here that address there 192.1681.30 is the address and there's the host name that'll allow me to log into this and I don't have to go and check on my router to see what devices are connected. I can just look right there and find out which is super convenient. This code is pretty straightforward. In fact, before I go there, let's take a look at the product page for that. This is it right here. If I refresh this, we should see a big 50% off right there, $7.48 right now, maximum of 10 that you can buy. And when you scroll down in here, you will get to, whoa, my browser's going wacky on me. You'll get to some links to projects as well as the main guides, this primary guide here. If we click over to that, I have that in another tab. There it is, mounted on a Pi Zero which is a really nice little fit. And this will take you through things like the pinouts for it as well as how to install it either in kernel mode which means you can use it as a prompt. You can plug a keyboard into there and use it like a tiny, tiny little mobile computer. Or you can do what I did in this case which is the Python setup. And I'm actually running a variation on the stats example here. So if you take a look at the stats example, that'll take you through pretty much what I'm running on here just with some different choices as far as what information I'm displaying. We also have a couple of cool projects in the learn system. There's a Pi hole which is a little ad blocker that you can add to your network and this will give you info on the screen there. As well as here's one that Melissa did and this is in kernel mode, I think. Oh no, it's actually, this one's not kernel mode. This is actually using pill or pillow, the graphics library in Python to do an animated GIF player which is a lot of fun, tiny little GIF player. If you take a look at my code here, what I've got going on is, find that window. Very familiar if you used to circuit Python but this is running on the Raspberry Pi itself. This is Blinka or sort of variant on circuit Python for single board computers. And you can see there I'm importing some libraries including the pill, PIL, this is the image library and the display driver for this RGB display. It's the ST7789. Then I'm setting up some of the pins for things like backlight for these buttons here for the SPI for the display. And then what I'm running on there, you can see is I've got an image that's gonna support having a background. You could do BMP images if you wanted to on here. I'm just, or shapes, I'm just using text in this case but I am bringing in a font. You can see here I've got this true type font using deja vu song, TTF. And then for the main routine of the program, what I do is I set some choices for the color of each of these lines of text, a little bit of string formatting and a command. So you can see the first one there is hostname-i which gives me the IP address. And then I'm using this little cut. This is an old school Unix command that our good friend Todd bought was filling me in on which is a way to kind of grab either tab delimited or other delimited information from, if you try just running hostname in a Linux prompt you'll see you get a lot of information and this cut command is able to go and grab a particular chunk, in this case delimited with a space and then it's grabbing kind of the first chunk that we get, I think. And then I'm asking for the hostname itself which is why it says Raspberry Pi, I haven't renamed this one. I didn't even change the password. Then I'm grabbing my SSID using a similar sort of command here, the IW-config-wlan-zero so the wireless LAN SSID shows up and then again using grep and the cut to grab just the name there so this where it says IaldsNet. And then I was changing this around a bit. Okay, I had LAN ping on here. I decided that wasn't so important. I do have the WAN, the wide area network ping so it tells me what my connection is looking like which is pretty good right now. And then I'm also displaying the time. So the bottom one here, you can see it only updates. I mean internally it's getting the correct time but my display is only updating every couple of seconds because I'm doing a few pings to check the wide area network ping and then I have a little bit of a delay at the bottom. To actually draw to the display we've just got a couple of things going on. One, I draw a rectangle which just blanks the screen. It just, I'm using black in this case so it just covers over the last time that we drew to it and then I am drawing each of these lines from this command section, getting a string for the data, formatting it and then displaying it with this draw text command at a particular X, Y position. X is always constant, Y just adds for each line so that they don't overlap. And then we display the image with whatever rotation that we have in there and then I do a little bit of a sleep there. So you can see if you're used to doing display types of things in Python or in circuit Python it's very straightforward to use this cute little adorable little screen and I think it's perfect for things like a little informational display. I probably wouldn't want to use it as my main monitor. That could be a little tricky but it's really nice for adding just a little bit of information and like I said, since we can use that STEM at QT port that information could be in this case a GPS tracker some sensor for CO2 for example anything you wanna grab a nice little I squared C device plug that in there and then add that Blink library it's gonna be really straightforward to add that to your project. And so let's see any thoughts or questions in the chat let me know. Rich Sad says they enjoy the ST7789 TFTs they have. Yeah, I think we've got these on a feather and maybe another breakout. It's a really gorgeous display. That's, you know, you saw PT and Lamar talking about this. My focus isn't great there but you can see it's really nice and clear. Even look at that. It's an IPS display. So you get real great readability from angles side angles up and down. It's really nice and legible. Has a little backlight in there and it's very easy to see. So let's see. Oh yeah, if you check out the Discord chat there's a nice picture of one that Todd has on a little pi zero and a cute little case there like that right angle USB. That's nice too. Over in YouTube land Sam Whitty says, okay, time to buy. Hey, great. Yeah, we do have lots and lots of these available. So knock wood, we won't run out. I think that that's unlikely to happen. What else? Yeah, inside of pi zero case would be lovely. And you can also, you know, Dremel out a little section on other types of cases if you want to cover it or 3D print something that's designed to fit this. I've used these types of displays before on Raspberry Pi's for MIDI projects. There's a fairly typical thing to do to bridge together MIDI devices using a Raspberry Pi and it's great to be able to see info show up on there. What else? Cyberdeck ones with this mini TFT could be cool. Yeah, for sure. If you're plugging into the Raspberry Pi 400, we have that little add on that gives you a 45 degree angle sort of bus board to plug into. All right, great. Okay, well thanks everyone for stopping by in the chat. Don't forget to head on over to, oh gosh, I've lost Chrome. Where'd you go, Chrome? There you are. Head on over there, yeah, right there. To this page, it's product 4393 and that is available just during the show. You don't need a coupon code or anything, but if you go and put in your cart and check out during the show, you'll get the 50% off. I think we still have them in stock. And so I'm gonna very ill-advisably not shut this down and just unceremoniously unplug it. Don't do that to your Raspberry Pi, that's a bad idea. But I forgot to bring an extra one in here so I need to pull that off of the Pi there. And let's improvise a way to hang that because I forgot to make a little clip for it. The nice thing, and this does have one mounting hole that'll fit the mounting on the Raspberry Pi, but the nice thing is that I can always get out of jail free with one of our Stem-a-QT cables. So that is it, that is the product pick of the week. It is the mini Raspberry Pi TFT. And that's gonna do it for another JP's product pick of the week. Thank you everyone for stopping by. And we've got a whole bunch of other shows coming up tomorrow including 3D Hangouts, Ask an Engineer, Show and Tell, which I believe is being hosted by Noah and Pedro this week. We should have, let's see, I've got my workshop show on Thursday. It's gonna be a deep dive. I'm not sure if it's Friday with FOMI Guy. I think Scott is out officially now for pre-Paternity leave. And let's see. Grover says, be sure to run the exit bump music for a while. They give us time to close the shopping carts. How about a 15 minute mini concert? All right, I like that idea. I think that'll do it. Thank you everyone for stopping by. See you next time.