 And welcome to the show, it's me, John Park, and it's time for John Park's workshop. Here we are in the workshop again. I forgot to turn on the AC earlier and cool the place down, so it's a little hot. But hopefully that'll calm itself down and we won't melt cameras and things today. I sure hope so. I wanna say hi to everyone over in the chat. We have some people over in our YouTube chat. Hey, Dave Odessa, nice to see you there. Come on by and also in our Discord chat, which is over at adafrew.it slash discord. You'll get an invite, you can instantly join. And then head on over to the live broadcast chat channel. That's it right there. Looks like we're doing well. Oh, someone has posted their drawer of ultimate power. That looks cool. The heck is this thing? Geez, little hexagonal drawers. That is really neat. And that contains a power boost 1000C. Hey, way to go, doctor, very cool. It's like 3D printed drawers. Sort of Pokemon vibe I'm getting there. So yeah, hey everyone over there in the chat. Thank you for hopping in and let's get to it. So what have we got? First of all, I just a quick mention about our jobs board. If you're looking for work, if you're looking to hire someone, you can do worse than to head on over to our jobs board, which is at jobs.adafruit.com. That's it right there. And if you scroll around in there, you'll see there's some positions. There's a new-ish posted one here, there's electrical engineers and technicians for power tools at DeWalt. I know Phil and Lamar mentioned that one last night on Ask an Engineer, but I didn't get a chance to check it out. Let's say it's in Towson, Maryland. It's full-time engineering position or positions. And they're looking for people who are into tinkering with software, hands-on, taking things apart, electronics or programming or hobby. Hey, that sounds like a lot of our viewers. So very cool. Go check that out. That's at jobs.adafruit.com. And that's just one of many positions. They're all vetted by the way, carefully vetted so you won't find any sketchy stuff up here on the jobs board, at least we endeavor to avoid that. So you can go with confidence. How about that? Let's see what else is happening here. You know, I've got a show that I do on Tuesdays and that is the product pick of the week show. Oh, look, there's a logo I brought in and it got real tiny. Let's make it big. Here we go. That's the show right there, JP's product pick of the week. I do that on Tuesdays and during that show I show you a new or a favorite or oldie but goodie product and we spend about 20 minutes going over it, doing some demos, taking a look at the software, how it works and there's always a big discount during the show. So if you are interested in the product during the live stream of the show, which is on four o'clock Eastern times on Tuesdays, this is usually a 50% discount. Not always, sometimes it varies but very often we have 50% off on a pretty hot item. This was it this week. It's this prop maker feather wing and I'll give you a little one minute recap. The prop maker feather wing. The prop maker is plugged into a feather M4 and then I've got a strip of Neopixels running right there. I'm just using this little speaker here which is nice and compact. I'm powering this by battery right now. I plugged in a switch. I actually used a little mechanical key switch and soldered to one of our little sockets there onto the sort of built in switch output. So when that gets grounded and now turn my laser pointer here on and off. The other thing I'm doing on here is I'm using the tap detection. So every time I tap it, I am playing a sound effect as well as switching my Neopixel colors to something random and you can see here it responds really quickly. That is the product pick of the week. It is the prop maker feather wing. Yeah, there we go. And by the way, there was a question during the, during the show. Oh my gosh, I'm already sweaty. Look at that. Actually, it might be water. I just took a shower right before the show and pretend it's water. There was a question during the show yesterday about using the feather RP2040 with the prop maker feather wing and I tested it and it totally works. Here is, where's the one I used? This right here, that very prop maker feather wing. I popped that onto a little doubler just cause I had the, or a tripler actually, just cause I had the pins on there and not the socket. So I put that on there, set the prop maker. I can do the demo. Why not? Should I? Sure. It's more fun if we do unexpected things, right? Let me grab this. Let's set this all up. How about? Unplug a thing. I'll break all of my upcoming demos just by doing this, but it's fun. So let me switch you to a camera here where you can see what's happening real quick. Hold on. Go up in the corner here. So this bundle of wires here, there's my neopixel strip and I have that little switch. Pluck this off of, but what I'm gonna do is, oh my, I froze YouTube. Oh no. Why is that? Hold on one second. Is it back? Let me see. They say excellent connection. I wonder, I'll hold on a second here. You let me know if it fixed itself. Oh yeah, YouTube is doing a little data right. Yeah, we'll see if that picks back up. Sorry about that. Weird. Yeah, it's gremlins. You know what? I even reduced the bit rate. So I thought we'd be good. It was good on Tuesday. I just suspect that my internet is having little ups and downs of how much bandwidth they're really letting through. I'm gonna blame them. So YouTube claims excellent connection, so I'm gonna pretend that that's working well enough. Let me know in the comments if it's not. So what I've got here is my Feather RP2040 plugged in. I'll go ahead and I guess I gotta flip that around like that and plug. Actually, you know what? I like this, so it's easier to get to the USB. And you can plug into either one of these. Oh, I had it right. Like that. And basically the same code worked on it. Let me grab a USB-C cable. These are said and done. Where'd you go? There it is. And that's not the right kind. Here it is, USB-C. And there we go. We've got, oh, something's loose. There we go. So I can turn on my laser dot there. The only issue I've found is there is a little bit of noise when between sounds, it's just got some static going on and know that they're, actually, let me take back one thing. This is using PWM-IO rather than audio-IO PWM-audio-IO, and that's been changing in Circuit Python 7. I know there's been fixes and things going on, so that'll probably continue to improve. But yes, on the basic level, this will work. You could also add code that goes to the low power mode on the amplifier that'll turn it off or just turn off the amplifier and code when you're not making sounds. You can turn the audio off, so there you go. So to whoever asked that question of someone on YouTube, I know they said, ah, heck with it, I'm gonna order it anyway before we know for sure. Shoot, because yes, the RP2040 Feather works just fine with the prop maker. So that's your follow-up to that question. Let's go ahead and set that right over here on the pile of very recent projects. You don't wanna see the mess that's there. Yeah, ironically, today I'll be talking about shop organization, and you can tell, I work in a somewhat object-rich environment. It's not exactly a sterile everything in its place kind of workshop, but I will talk a little bit about some organization stuff anyway. So let's see, looks like we continue to have a good connection. I'm glad for that, and thanks for letting me know. Let's see, what else? Any questions? No, we're doing well, okay. Then what I'd love to do is set something back up and then jump into our regularly scheduled circuit Python Parsec. Just do some camera stuff and make some adjustments. That'll do it, that'll work. All right, very nearly ready to go. Let's do it, here it comes. Okay, I'm gonna tip the camera so we don't see my sweaty shirt. I'm gonna sit a little low, there we go. For the circuit Python Parsec today, I want to talk about returning multiple values from a function. So what you can see here in my code is that I am importing from the random library, rand int, that gives me random integers, time so I can do a little sleep, ate a fruit macropad, which takes care of a whole bunch of stuff with the display, and then I'm creating the macropad object. Now I've created this little function that's called get random xy. This function right here, you feed it a minimum and a maximum for x positions and a minimum and maximum for y positions. It returns the x and y location using a random inside of those constraints. That fact that it can return both of those values is the cool part here because I can use just one function and a lot of different parts of my code can keep calling back to it to grab these two xy random values. Then inside of the main loop of the program, you can see I'm casting a variable called x and a variable called y to the return that we get from that function. So get random xy and then I'm saying I want to go a minimum of 16, which is a little offset from the left and a maximum of 112, a little offset from the right and same for the y axis, 16 and 48. Then I'm printing that to my little serial display. Go ahead and see that happening right there. So those values x and y are what get returned from my function and then I'm just using this macro pad.display image, a little BMP file and then its position is that random x and that random y position inside of some constraints that my function returned and then we do a little sleep and the result is you can see I've got this little blip, this little sort of space invaders alien jumping around the screen there inside of my constraints and so that is how you can return a couple of values from a function inside of CircuitPython and that is your CircuitPython Parsec. All right, now I'm gonna go check the chat because it looks like YouTube is claiming that there was no data. Did we survive that segment? You tell me. Oh, now it says excellent connection. Yeah, okay, I'm gonna wait a second because I wanna know, you know what, I'm recording that so if there was a problem I won't repeat it now, I can just publish that recap two minute version later. So, Parsec was good, okay. Yeah, I think just as I came out of it the YouTube dashboard popped up a little no data so it's toying with me, how fun. Thank you Steve Robillard over in YouTube land. He said it looks good, so excellent. What else is going on? Dave Johnston says when they retire from Intel they might apply to the position that we had for, who was it? Not DeWalt, was it? Now I'm already forgetting. Hi Randall Bone, gotta go back and check. It was DeWalt, yeah, DeWalt. I get confused with the tool companies because I think a lot of them own each other, right? There's like Porter, Cable, DeWalt, Milwaukee, Makita is like one company or something. I'm not very loyal to them. I use some DeWalt's for my drivers and drills. I use Milwaukee for a bunch of other stuff. Good, all right, so let's see what else have we got going on here. Good morning from Australia Blue. Welcome, it's afternoon here. Okay, you know what I wanted to jump into? So I mentioned shop organization. Let's get away from, oh and by the way I wanted to thank Todd Bot, our good friend for this tool tip. He's the one who gave me this idea for the Circuit Python Parsec about returning a couple of values from a function which apparently is not possible in Arduino or is a pain in the neck in Arduino so he was excited to see that inside of Circuit Python it was actually straightforward. I don't recall that being the case. Someone tell me, I trust Todd but what was the deal with that? It's very, very useful. See Grover says they forget the tool brand names just to remember the colors, that's right. I need the yellow batteries now. So, oh by the way, one other thing. The, let me jump back to this down shooter. These are some of the new key caps that we're carrying. I had to get a couple sets of those. They come in packs of five I think it is and they are this MA profile which is really nice square to sort of rounded oval almost square to circle kind of shape. A bit taller than the little DS ones but neat profile kind of matte finish, nice colors. All right, so next up I had an idea. In fact, before I walk over there you used like I have you could maybe inexpensive one. Okay, give it a second for everything to catch up and then you give me the sign when we're good. Huge apologies for this. I will I think be making some calls to various cable companies and fiber and things like that to see what can be done. And we're good now, all right, cool. So let's get a thumbs up, Twitch is back, yay. Let me know over on YouTube. Yeah, thanks for your patience with this. Okay, YouTube thumbs up. So I was talking about toolboxes, machinist chess, chess withdrawers in them and using them for organization. And I've got some of these chess with tools just sort of laid in them somewhat gently. I don't have them overcrowded too much but I wanted to do a little bit better both sort of organization and protection in particular for some of my measurement tools like my good calipers. So let me jump over there and I'll show you what I'm talking about here. And I will try to keep an eye on the stream. I'm seeing worrisome signs from YouTube at the moment. But if you take a look over here these are some of the typical drawers that we have in these. Let me see if I can boost the... That's really dark, hold on. I'm gonna jump up there and mess with that camera. That's a little better. All right, let's see how the stream's doing now too. I'm gonna open up Discord on my phone here so that I can see what you're talking about to see how that stream is doing. Doot, doot, and doot. Okay, you guys saw me going up and vanishing into the ceiling so that's good. All right, so these are some of the typical drawers that you'll get in these types of cabinets usually two rows or two columns of narrow and a few of these wider ones. So what I was thinking is a couple I wanna do. One, I actually have some spares of these that I got from I was doing some refinishing, refurbishing of these and I have a few spares and I actually just like to use them as like a little tray to set stuff in. So what I was thinking was for this I want to lay out some of these little, this little screwdriver that I like to use and this little high torque one. Lay these in here along with their bits and this one can use sockets as well. So I've got like eight, nine, 10 and 11 millimeter sockets that you can snap onto the end there. So I was thinking something like that would be kind of a neat little thing to organize in a tray using foam. And then here's some of my measurement stuff that I wanted to protect, particularly these digital calipers. I don't wanna bang it around in there. So I wanna create essentially a form using some foam that's cut to fit that will allow my tools to be protected, organized, have a home, have a space to put them in. And there's a few ways that you can do this. So I happen to have gotten some five millimeter thick EVA foam for a project I was working on. So I have some spare of this, it came in a roll and for some of these shallow trays, so this was the roll that I got for $11 or something like that. So for some of these shallower trays and these shallower tools, I don't need a big, thick thing. I just need sort of a thin, either this five millimeter or use contact cement and double it up and make a 10 millimeter deep section that I can then set the tools down into. So that's my idea and you can very simply and straightforward trace these and cut them out, which is, let's do that for just a little demo with this drawer here. And then what I think I'm gonna do for this one is actually laser cut it. So EVA foam is safe inside of a laser cutter, which is great because there's a lot of things that aren't and you have to be really careful with them, but EVA is foam that use all over the place in crafts. I have a lot of this nice thin stuff that I've used in crafts before. You could even do layers of things like color code stuff in your drawers with them, if you like. But this slightly thicker stuff, you can go much thicker so you could get something that's really just the right thickness for your drawer if you're putting bigger things in there. And so for this one that I think I'm gonna do is actually draft those shapes and laser cut them so that it's just perfect, gorgeous little clean lines. For just a demo here, what I'll do, I'll just make a little piece here and cut that by hand. And we can see what that'll look like. So let me grab a cutting mat here. I'll flip that over so you can see some contrast on that a little better. And let's grab a straight edge and some exactoes, who's sharp? That one looks new. Let's test that theory, actually. Pretty clean, yeah. So for this one what I'll do is I'm just gonna cut this to size. And I had actually previously cut this felt out a while ago to fit. I had just drafted that and cut it on the laser cutter so I can use that actually as just a template for where this cut is right here. And I can either just use that as a straight edge, that'll work or you can mark it and use a proper straight edge. This type of long reach pen or marker is a great asset for doing this so that you can draw around the edges of your tools. So in this case I'll straight edge. Okay, so this'll fit nicely into there. And by the way, I've never done this before so tell me if you have tips and tricks for this one thing that I looked briefly online, some people say it's not a bad idea to go a little long so that the foam kind of compresses a bit into the drawer and then it's not gonna go anywhere so I could have made that a little longer. And let's just do, how about this little guy here? Let's say we're gonna, and I like to leave a bit in there, one that's gonna be grabbed a lot so I'll leave that bit in there like that and then I'm just gonna mark around this. And you can of course do this for things other than tools, you could do this for a drawer full of raspberry pies that you don't want banging all around. You can do this for maybe robotics parts, servo motors, what have you, but tools makes particular sense because they're coming in and out all the time. I'll make that bit section a little large in case there's some other bit I wanna leave in there. And of course you can always go back and change stuff later. So, and now it's just a matter of cutting this out so I'm gonna, I'll just eyeball this one. I'm gonna start here or free-handed, I should say not eyeball it. Generally speaking, if you want to get good cuts with anything you're cutting like this in life, you wanna keep your cut direction consistent and move the, if it's possible, move the work around so that you're always cutting in a direction that works well for you. Go, let's see how we, so you can see this is a quick and dirty job. It'll serve the purpose, but you can also see why I wanna spend a little time drafting that in CAD and let the computer do the work for me telling my laser cutter what to do. And you could of course also use a 3D printer to make a form, make a stencil from that, use a cry cut machine and stack stuff up. I'm not sure what the thickest foam you can cut on a little Cricut, I guess they're called Cricut Machine is, but you could definitely stack up and use contact cement if you wanted to get clean cuts that way. And there we go, now we have a nice neat place for that. It's not gonna go rolling around all over the place. So I like that, I'm happy with that. Actually, I don't mind that thickness either. I don't think it needs to be taller than that for these, for at least this particular tool. I'll put the felt in there so it's not clanging around on the metal surface of that tray. So there you go, that's the start of that. And what I'll do actually, I should have been checking my Discord, let's make sure we didn't lose the signal again. No, it looks like we're good. All right, so let's, doctors says they recommend finger holes for grabbing stuff, that's a good idea. So let's jump back over here for a second and now I'll show you, we won't go through too much of this because it'll vary depending on the software you use but I'll show you at least the starting point that I'm gonna do for doing a CAD drawing to cut this stuff out. So let me jump over here and bring up my software. I'm using Rhino for this. You could do this in pretty much any piece of 2D or 3D CAD software that lets you draw dimensioned lines. So I just took the measurements of my drawer there and laid that into the software. I think it was 19 inches wide by seven inches high on the exterior and then it's 18 and three sixteenths inside and six and three sixteenths on the inside vertically. And then I also took the overhead photo just to kind of keep myself oriented when I laid out what I think I want things to look like. That's not gonna be perfect for dimensions because it's a photo, it's got some warping to it. I didn't try to perfectly straighten it but that's roughly where I was thinking of putting stuff. I think I actually changed that since I did that. So that one's no good anymore. I picked some different tools to put out there. Oh, Belu says they cut these from old mouse pads. That's a good idea. I would be careful if you're gonna laser cut them to know what they're made of but I think neoprene might not be a good thing to put in a laser cutter, not sure. Hi, Jenny Bergdahl. But you generally wanna avoid things that have PVC or any sort of chloride, polychloride vinyl I think because PVC, you wanna avoid the chloride. That's the really caustic stuff that'll kill you, wreck your laser cutter, et cetera. Take off your neighbors. So let me hide that. Duh, duh, duh. Hide that there. And so the process here will be just taking dimensions of things. Of course, ironically, I usually use my calipers for that. So to take dimensions of my calipers, what I'm gonna do is trace it and then just take those dimensions, go in there and start cutting them. Let's do it with something else though. And my positioning of this won't be perfect but let's how about grab this micrometer here. So I'm gonna take that and take some measurements for this. That's gonna be 109 millimeters this away. So what I'll do at first is just make a box that's, there we go, that's the size of what I'm building here. Just so I have these things oriented and that's gonna be 49 millimeters high. Charles Burnford says, should have ventilation system to filter out the gas in the cutting area. Yeah, that's true, but I think PVC just doesn't get cleared fast enough from your average CO2 laser cutter and it can wreck the optics. So I think just, even if you think you've got great filtering and ventilation, I really recommend against trying to cut things that have PVC in them. Let's see, and that's 49, whoa, what did I type wrong there? Try that again, 109 by 49, there we go. So now I've got my handle there which is gonna be, we'll call it 17 millimeters. So I'll just go from here up 17 and over, oh, 49, call it 50. Sorry, it's trying to snap things to centers which I'm not intending to use. And so that'll cover the handle. We could get a little curvier with it and cute but that's the main part of the handle. And then the, for reference, that's what I'm creating right there. For this, I'm going to do a, I'll start with a 57, call it 58 millimeter. Oh, thank you, I've got grid snapping on. 58 millimeter circle here, diameter. And there, I can set that midpoint. Oops, I didn't mean to copy you. Let's see, that's pretty close. So I'll just make a kind of a boolean of all this and just keep the parts I want, which are this, this and this. Oh, I forgot to tell it to automatically delete all the excess, so we'll just delete all the excess ourselves. Anything left over? You, yes, oops, wrong one, that one. Okay, so that would work pretty well. So that I can set inside of my cabinet here, get a nice clean shape, not being super precise with some of the shapes that this will fit this object now I know. And then I could go in and sort of correct some of the exact shapes there if we want to get cute, like this could angle down in here where the barrel gets a little shorter and so on. We could also measure and place in a little cut out if you want the center of this to have a piece of foam that this slips over. You could place a piece there as well. So that's the idea. So I'll create, I'm gonna just draft up each of the shapes that's gonna go in there. Spent a little more time on them than I just did there. Maybe fill it some corners and things. And then I can lay those out in there. I can use the photograph at that point also to be a helpful guide for kind of where I wanted to put things. And then that's a really quick laser cutting job. This stuff cuts fast so you can move at a pretty low power and high speed. I think on mine I was doing maybe 20% power, 60% speed, or 70% speed and just cutting through through the foam. I kind of see, do I have any leftovers? Oh no, so yeah, the thing I was cutting actually, I'll show this another time, was a, you can see here if I switch views, hold on. I'll drop down to this camera. I was cutting out some Neotrelis grid holes in this foam based actually on our good friend, Steve Nureco, Denki Otto in our chat. He has a design for doing a grid controller using the Neotrelis boards and elastomer buttons. And it's sort of dense feet. All right, I think that's gonna do it. Yeah, I'm not gonna go and cut this now. David SS, do you have a CNC mill with a laser head? Oh, he's asking Blue that, okay. Yeah, the cutter I have, you can kinda, can you see it back there? I've had this one for, I don't know, 15 years now. It's an epilogue zing that is terrific, 40 watt. Or is it, I think it's 45 watt. It was an earlier unit. And love it to death if you have a maker space that you can use, you may have a laser cutter access there, or you can send designs off to a service provider online, such as Pinoco, and there are probably others. So this is kind of a fun way to do a really nice, fancy system for your organization, your drawers. What I recommend is once you've drafted things, go ahead and print it out at one to one scale. You might need a couple pieces of paper and some registration marks. Tape it together, set it in the drawer, layer things on there, make sure it's good, then you can go and start burning through the real material or sending your designs off to have them made. All right, well, somehow I think, even though YouTube's claiming that our data is low and degraded and awful, we are somehow still going, so hey, all right. Also, I wanna say thank you to, I think it was Belu who sent a tip from Australia. We appreciate that very much. I haven't seen money come through on the chat before yet. I didn't know you could do that. You can do that. Hey, cool. All right, well, thanks everyone for stopping by. That's gonna do it for today. Oh, one update actually, since I showed this as a work in progress on the show last week, I finished up making the aviator connector YC8 USB cable. So this is really nicely stable, solid, it works. This is a USB micro-B connector that I'm using here, but I can unplug that and plug in a USB-C on this end and leave the A there, which is kinda neat. And actually found that for some devices, I unplug circuit Python devices a lot when I'm working on a few different projects at once, and I realize this is kind of a nice way to save your USB connectors, because these things, they don't last forever, especially the little micro-B ones on your microcontroller, the strain isn't so great. So this is actually kind of a nice strain relief as wacky as this project is. Worked out well, and so I'm working on a guide for that. I took a bunch of photos of the gory details, turns out a couple of layers of the heat shrink, and then using two sets of wrenches to tighten up the thing, really cinches down the crimped connector inside of there. All right, well that's gonna do it. Thanks everyone for stopping by. I will see you next Tuesday for another JP's Prada Pick of the Week, and I will see you next Thursday for another John Park's workshop. Bye-bye everyone.