 Welcome to the show. It's me, John Park, and it's time for another episode of JP's Product Pick of the Week. Welcome, and thank you so much for stopping by, and I will wish you a happy day after Independence Day for all of you who celebrate that. So let's see, what have we got happening here? Broadcasting? Hey, looks like we are. So tell me, was that broadcasting the whole time? I think it was. It's so strange. I have three monitors all black. Oh, I froze. Okay, yeah. Well, let me know if I'm back. That is so strange. I don't know what that is. And I recently restarted this machine and everything. So Kachank, biatograph of the Hagen says, looks like we're reconnecting. I'm back. Hey, thanks. All right. Thanks, DJ Devon3. Thanks, Rich. Hey, Tech of the World. Welcome. So, hey, let's do that first and say thanks for everyone in the chat for letting me know what's happening. This is our Discord chat, if you're wondering where most of the chat is happening. One is I'm keeping an eye over on the YouTube, but this is our Discord server, and that's at ateafru.it-slash-discord, and just go to the live broadcast chat channel. And there'll be people discussing whatever's happening in the current show. David SS says I'm back-ish. Uh-oh. What's the ish part? So let's move forward. We'll pretend that never happened. What I love you to do is head on over to this QR code or this URL right here if you want to see the product pick of the week moments before I reveal it and get a jump on a great discount. So we've got no discount code required. Just put it in your cart and buy it during the show, and you will get a 50% off discount on this week's product pick of the week, and I believe you've got a maximum of 10 that you can get. Uh, so that URL will take you there. I will now have Lady Aida go back in time briefly and tell us a little bit more about today's product pick. So take it away, Lady Aida. Lowy. This is super glowy. You use this just a minute ago to talk to the other Eleagies. You're like, hey, Eleagies, come here. Yeah, Eleagies, come here. This is a very, very small LED grid. It's a one inch square. It's exactly one inch by one inch. It's got these new Dot Star APA 102 2020s. This is a two-wire protocol, you know, individually addressable LEDs. You only need two wires. You can use it with any microcontroller because it's not timing specific like neopixels. This one has it like brightness five. They're incredibly bright. So watch out. Don't burn yourself. You can use our Dot Matrix code. You can have it scroll text. You can have it do this little plasma code that's always fun to do. It's compatible with any Dot Star code. Do you want to show it off at all? Yeah. Overhead. Okay. So, yeah, it's just got this grid so you can see how small it is. And then I just have a trinket on the back that does the driving. And then there's four mounting holes that you can actually snap the mounting holes off if you want. So you don't need to have them. But basically, my thing here was like, well, how small can I get an eight by eight grid? So one inch by one inch was pretty small. And what's nice is it's easily controllable with two wires. Just give it about five volts. And you're good to go. Very glowy. And yeah, this is not even that bright either. Yeah. That's nice. Let me go back to this video. I really like the video that we put together for this. Look at that. Yeah, that's the fast LED plasma demo. This is a fun demo. But you can have it in words or little icons. Chainable? Can you put them together? Yeah, you can chain them. You can make a wall. You can make a wall, but it would be very hot. Yeah. We're not into making walls here. We're into making bridges. Yes. LED light bridges. But I think this could be good for art projects or costumes or jewelry or something. I don't know. I just wanted to make the very, very small RGB LED grid. All right. That was my goal. And what a great goal it was indeed. So let me go ahead and grab my own and we'll take a look at this here in the down shooter. I've got my little mystery jewelry box here. And look at that. We've got our board and a little bit of an extra there. So let me hop to the front view camera only here for a moment. And I'll let you know that this is this week's product pick of the week. It is the Dotstar 8x8 64 pixel LED grid. Now this is a little different than a Neopixel. If you're not used to these Dotstar rather than running over a single data line, this actually runs over a clock and a data line, which means a couple of things. One they are a little bit more capable, a little bit you can run these a little faster, do some fancier things with them as far as refresh rates. And you can use them with boards such as a Raspberry Pi that don't do the timing so well, which is one of the issues with using Neopixels on some boards. So Dotstar is a similar but different type of board. And let's head down to this overhead view again for a second, this little down shooter here and take a look. So this is a little one inch by one inch square. It's got 64, it's 8x8 of the little Dotstar's on there and you can see there's these little mounting tabs, you can snap those off or you can use them with M2.5 screws to attach them to something. And if we flip that over there you'll see, so this is the little capacitor that comes with it in case you want to run a power capacitor here for smoother sailing, you can. And then across the top here you can see this is the, let me get a better view, there we go. So this is the clock in, data in, ground and 5 volts and then we can chain these so you have the bottom 5 volt ground and there's the data out and clock out so that can run to the next one. So you can make a bonkers little cube out of this or just run one by two or four by four of these, whatever you want to do, you can do that by chaining them together. Sometimes you'll need to add power steps along the way so that you don't try to run that power across the whole grid. And what I love to do is show you a little example of a project I put together which is this right here, it's very bright I know, I'm running this under some diffusion acrylic so it's going to look a little bit blobby. I'll turn my exposure down so you can see a little better there. So here I'm running some scrolling text across here, across here, not across here, as well as just some flashing colors. And what I'll do is I'll show you how that's set up. There's a lot of ways that you can code these. You can use in Arduino fast LED, in circuit python fancy LED, LED animation library, straight up matrix code and I'll show you how that works. Let me open up my code window, that'll work right there. And jumping to the code here, so main thing here, I'm importing dot star and I'm importing frame buff. And frame buff is what allows me to use this sort of like it's a little screen. So that's how I'm writing text to this screen here with some pretty simple code. And you can see I'm also using the LED animation library. I'm using that just to blink through those colors at the beginning there. But you can do things like color gradients and rainbows and such forth. Then I'm setting this up, since it's frame buff I can tell it it's not just a single strip, but it's sort of a logical strip of 8 by 8 or a grid of 8 by 8 rather. I'm setting up on the SPI, that's how I'm controlling this over SPI. The zero clock and the mosey, the number of pixels is 64. I'm setting it to a really low brightness, as you can see here. And then I'm setting auto right to false. Then I set up pixel frame buff and I tell it that we are using this object. This could be a neopixel object, in this case it's a dot star object. And then I tell it my width and height of pixels. The reverse of X means that our first pixel starts on kind of the wrong side to do left, right. And alternating says does this sort of zigzag or does it all move in one direction? So you can find a version of this that'll allow your logical setup to work with your physical setup. And then I've got a bunch of colors defined here. I'm filling this with black and hitting display. Then I've written a little function here called word scroll. And this is using a built in function for text in frame buff that does individual letters. And I've just created a version of this that lets me set some things like the speed and parse a whole word. So you can see here my default is dot star matrix with a space at the end. So that's what that text is that you'll see running across there. If you don't give it any arguments, the arguments I am giving it down in my main loop are the word dot in one color set. The word star in a different color set. And finally the word matrix in a very appropriate black and green. And then we're running a color cycle animate at the beginning of that. So we do color cycle animate for 3.6 seconds, which is what I timed to be a nice amount of time there. And then we run through our little scrolling animation there. If we take a look back at the web page here, let me move this off to the side a little bit and I'll put on that on top for a cute little glow there. There we go. So on the main page here you can see we've got the half price right now, some info about the different pixels. So this is using the APA 102 2020 pixels as the dot stars or LEDs. And if you click on the second link here, you'll see we've got a really great guide. And I think I saw earlier, Charlie, I'm sorry, I can't remember how to pronounce your name. Charlie G wrote this guide and is over in our YouTube chat. This is a really nice guide on using this exact little dot star grid board to make some beautiful jewelry. So this packages up the grid in a little pendant. And then there's a secondary box that contains a microcontroller and battery as well as a little switch. And you can send it different animations, different text. It's really gorgeous. So take a look at that. That'll give you some good ideas on how to use it for other types of projects as well, but a really beautiful one. And there's build instructions here for doing both a 3D printed or a laser cut variation on it. So a couple different ways that you can build the pendant as well as the controller board box. And this one also uses a touch control to change the different animations that you display, really beautiful work. So thank you for sharing that project with us. Let's see, let me jump into any questions that we have over in the chat. So let's bring up the discord here. Let's see, Rich got some of these, yay. Todd heard there would be LEDs being lit somewhere. By the way, they mentioned in passing, little more mentioned that these can get pretty hot. This one's not too bad. I'm running like you saw, not at a very high brightness. And it doesn't need to be. You can see here it's almost too bright for the camera at 0.05. And I've got a piece of acrylic across the top there diffusing it. Let me show the bottom side of this since I didn't before. You can see how I'm running this. I have the mounting holes I've left on. And I've made a little border here so I can screw in some M2.5 screws. If we flip this over, make this even brighter for a moment. You can see I have a KB2040 under here. And I've just sort of clamped it with some of my nylon hardware. So it's non-conductive to the back side of a piece of paper to separate it from the board there just to prevent any shorts. And then I've got the four wires for power, ground, data, and clock. The power I'm using this one, one of the cool things about the KB2040 is that you can use the 5 volts off of USB. So that'll generally allow you to pull up two amps of 5 volts if your hub or port will allow it. And there's a couple jumpers on the backside of the KB2040 that let you pull that 5 volts. So that's perfect. I believe these will run under 3 volts, but 5 is the ideal for the dot stars there. So that's the little board I put together. They're not quite as elegant as the pendant that we saw earlier. Let's see. Any questions in here? DJ Devin asked if the ears can be snapped off. You can see there, little ears can be snapped off. How many can be chained? Is there a set maximum? I think it's only going to be a power issue. I believe you can run more than these data-wise than you can in neopixels. I don't think these use memory the same way neopixels do. But if anyone has experience with chaining huge numbers of dot stars together, please let us know in the chat. Let's see. Oh yeah, a little gaming would be great on this. Looks like a little pac-man grid. All right. I think that's going to do it for questions. Thanks, everyone. So that's also going to do it, I think, for the product. There's a nice little picture I wanted to show of it there. And don't forget, head on over to this URL if you want to pick one up for a half price during the show right now. And this offer is only good during the show. So go get some and check out before we finish up. You might get a couple minutes leeway, but this will work just during the show. No coupon code needed. All right, so let's wrap it up. That is my product pick of the week. It is the 64 LED dot star grid, 8 by 8. And I'm going to take this one and its little capacitor that I didn't end up using and make a improvised hang tag. These are my favorite hang tags when I don't have another one. Put that on my little product wall there. OK, thanks, everyone, for stopping by. This has been another episode of JP's product pick of the week. And I will see you next time. Bye-bye.