 Welcome to the show, it's me, JP, and it is time for another episode of JP's Product Pick of the Week. And here we all are. I want to thank you for stopping by. We have some people over in our chats. If you're wondering where the chat is, you might be in YouTube, you might be in Twitch, you might be watching this on Periscope or LinkedIn Learning or who knows where, YouTube, perhaps, but the one thing I know is that you can find people chatting about this show and I'm reading that very chat right over here in our Discord and you can get there by heading to adafru.it slash discord and then once you get there, look for the live broadcast chat channel. This one, that's where we're at right here. If you're tuning in late, I had my mic on while the show hadn't quite yet started yet and was clearing my throat, so excuse me for that. That's what the throat clearing attention getting is all about. So let's see, before I go any further, what I'd like to do is point you at this URL. That'll take you to today's product pick and you can watch this show right inside of the product page itself. That right there, that's the QR code, what does QR stand for? I don't even know. That's it, that's QR code that'll take you to that page. Head over there and you can watch the show inside the page and you can throw one or up to 10 of this week's product pick in your cart and we have it on a steep, steep discount today. It's not an expensive item anyway, but it's half off, 50% off, so that's not nothing. What I'll do next is have Lady Aida, I'll jump back just a little bit in time and have Lady Aida tell us all about this week's product pick. So please take it away, Lady Aida. Another BFF, this is the Neo-Q BFF. So if you want to make the smallest keyboard, it's just one button, but connect it to USB. This Neo-Q BFF is a little add-on for all of our QDPI boards that adds a single MX compatible switch socket with a reverse mount Neo-Pixel, this is what it looks like on the back and then that's what it looks like on the front. So you plug in a key switch, which it does not come with because we sell the individual keys, we have linear and clicky. You pick which one you want and then you plug it in and then you had a key cap, again you pick the key cap. Maybe I'll see if I can find the, you know, the demo here, I'll show it off. You plug it in and then you write the code to, you know, whatever you want to do when the key is pressed, you can have it, so the key switch or like a play pause. So this is just it plugged into little mini headers just to make it removable. You can plug any QDPI, this one I think is the RP2040, which is just our kind of go-to. You can solder it closer together, but it's not like if you want to have it socketed, this is kind of as small as it gets. And then you can plug this into USB-C. And then this is the key, so like I said, you can plug in any MX compatible key switch. In this case, I think it's a linear black and then you put in your favorite key cap and then there's an RGB Neopixel underneath and that will blow through as long, you know, if you have particularly a translucent key cap, like you can see on the animated GIF, you can see it blowing through, or you can just not use a Neopixel, or if you do have a Neopixel and it's not translucent, it'll just blow around the key. Yes, indeed there it is right there. Look at that gorgeous little board. That's my product pick of the week this week. It is the Neo-Key BFF, not Gnocchi beef as it turns out, that's what I thought, but nope, that's not it. It's the Neo-Key BFF. This is a little best friend forever add-on for a cutie pie. So take your cutie pie, take your BFF, marry them together and now you can add on this little add-on board, kind of like a mini shield. This one allows you to take a Cherry MX compatible mechanical key switch, typically found on a keyboard and you can plug that into, let me get that right, I want to bend the little leg on there, there we go, you plug that into the socketed receptacles for the two pins there and now you have a mechanical key switch, it can be the linear red like this, it can be a clicky white like this, we've got plenty in the store that you can choose from and different key caps and the way this works is, I'm going to show you it in action, I'm going to mess with some some blue tack first, there we go, clean up the little blue tack there, this thing's kind of light so it's not not going to stay put without some sort of mechanical fix in there or blue tack. So here you can see it in action and what this allows you to do is it has a NeoPixel, a reverse mount NeoPixel shining up through it, which you can see through different key caps so depending on the key cap type you pick, some of them are fully clear, some of them have little windows or you can even just see the sort of glow around there and you can program this to kind of do anything you want, now one thing it's really great for is these minimalist USB keypad or macro pad projects, so this is a single key, you could program this to do anything you want, in Circuit Python it's really easy to do USB HID things such as creating a mute button or a camera effect so in your broadcasting software if you need to always go to one particular screen, I've got mine set up here so if I press the button there it pops up a plate of gnocchi, now I've really got gnocchi on my mind, but you can see there it's also doing the little color shift when I press that, it's going from green to blue, you can use any color you like and what I'll do is actually show you how you can put these together, so this one right here you can see I've put it in a very minimalist configuration with header pins so it's just plugged right onto the bottom of, this is a QDPI M0 so it's got a flat bottom, there's nothing on there so you can get real real close with that and I'll go ahead and unplug this one and I'll show you one coming together here so this is our gnocchi BFF with some short header pins on it and then I have a QDPI here with some short header sockets, we just plug those together and that allows you to change your mind about which BFF you want to put on a particular QDPI and then you can see here I've got one of these Kale blue switches that's also a clicky switch and it by the way has a space here even if you have a fully opaque key switch there's usually a little space, a little rectangular slot there that an LED will shine up through so I've got one of our little custom keycaps here and then you can see these two pins and there's also three little mechanical pegs that fit into there for some stability these fit right into those little socketed keycaps you don't have to solder that key switch down it's not permanent you can choose a different keycap if you like and now if we plug this in this one I don't think I have doing anything other than some color cycling so that's not sending any any USB HID things but these are also great for MIDI projects they're great for IoT projects so I'll bring back this one right here and you can see I'll put that view in the corner instead so this one is actually sending a letter when I press it and a different letter when I release it's actually sending an 8 and a 9 using HID and that I have as camera codes for popping on different layers inside of the software here so if you take a look at how this is set up this is just a slight variation on the example code I'll show you in a second from the main guide bring up my coding window there and you can see actually down at the bottom there I don't I just have a little console that's not not doing anything in particular but it's a nice way to be able to test what your switch is doing without causing havoc so this application has focus right now so it means my broadcast software isn't going to pay attention to those key presses but otherwise this is straightforward HID keyboard stuff you can see I'm importing some libraries here including digital IO you could also use keypad if you want and I'm importing NeoPixel and then USB HID and the keyboard and key code commands then I'm setting up a pixel pin on A3 so this little board here it has a default of the NeoPixel on A3 and the key switch on A2 you can see here there are actually a couple little jumpers you can cut and it's explained in the guide you can cut some jumpers if you want to use different pins for your NeoPixel and for your switch if you have something else in mind for some of the other pins for example but these are the defaults so you can see here I'm setting up the pixel pin on A3 I set a single NeoPixel and then I've created a couple of variables for colors green and red and then I set up the NeoPixel object with just a single NeoPixel and I fill it to green then I'm creating a couple of events to store the key commands to send or the key codes to send so when I press key down we're sending an eight when I release we're sending a nine and then we have the keyboard object being set up keyboard is keyboard USB HID devices and then the switch is being set up here using just traditional digital IO along with a little state variable so that we know when to pay attention to it kind of like a debounce so then in the main loop of the code you can see here if the switch value is off that means the button is pressed it's pulled high and then we fill the LED with red and we send the key down so there's a difference between there's other commands where you can hold essentially USB key and then release it send just sends it right away so it's not going to pulse multiples of them if you have key repeat so this just sends it and releases it whoops and then I'm messing with the code here and then when I release it you can see it goes and fills back to green and sends that key up keyboard command so back in practice here you can see press it it sends the eight release it it sends the nine and those are just different key commands in my software that will show a layer and I happened to put a plate of delicious looking yokey on there because I'm very hungry so if you take a look at the learn guide here this is from Liz Clark this will take you through some of the different setups that you can do for wiring it up so you can connect them with regular headers short headers directly to each other you can even plug these into breadboards if you wanted to flip it around but it's really designed to go back to back with a QDPI these little BFFs you can see here there is a nice photo there a nice close-up of the board and here is the pin out and this will take you through if you wanted to use some jumper wire to bodge a different key onto there you could you could slice those defaults and set up a different pin just require a little thin piece of of bodge wire there and then you've got some sample code for circuit Python and use that right there that's the rainbow cycle function that I was showing and then you've also got an Arduino example here as well so let's see I think that covers it here's a nice actually close up of the front and back there so you can see and those are those little sockets on the little key switch holes there those are sort of spring-loaded so you can see here once you've lined them up you just push that in it stays it's not going anywhere now you could knock that off if you want it mentions this in the guide you could use a little bit of glue even a little hot glue on the bottom holding that one post is nice but you can also make a very small minimalist 3d printed case if you want or add this to an existing project or just use blue tack like I did and stick it on the end of your cable there that also gives you a nice little sort of like shutter control if you wanted to use that for a little photo booth type of project or something like that again these are great for mute switches those sorts of things and flying yucky plates what else I think that covers it let me know if there's any questions over in the chat this question over in the YouTube chat about a product looking for project help if you head over to the discord there's a help with projects and help with circuit python channel that you might want to check out there to razz pro over in our YouTube chat you can also check out the forums the eight of fruit forums at forum dot eight of fruit dot com and I will mention again head to this URL right here head on over with that link to this product page this project products five six nine five and that will allow you to buy this just during the show for this discount so don't do it later the discount will disappear but if you want to get these half off right now you can also add on some things like that blue mechanical key switch there if you want the clicky one or the black linear if you want one that's quieter as well as a whole bunch of different key cap choices as long as they say they're mx compatible cherry mx compatible they will work on this and let's see yeah you know what I just want to since I didn't I didn't make this really clear when I first intro this I'm gonna just jump back to the down shooter here pull those away and I'll show you this in action okay so let me get my camera to view all of those okay so the neokey bff is a little PCB it fits right on the backside or the underbelly of a cutie pie and it has a reverse mount neopixel you can see it there and glowing on this one and then it has the sockets for a mechanical key switch to plug in so you can see that one super bright there if I plug this one back in a little hard to do from this angle ah there you go you can see an action when I press it it is glowing red and it's also sending USB HID command to my broadcast software to bring on a delicious plate of gnocchi all right so let me know if you have any other questions in the chat yeah camera control DJ Devon said a super super helpful use case you could also do things like have it essentially rotating through presets so if you have two three things that you want to flip between even though it's sending us bh id you can do much more with that it's it's very very programmable so you can take a look at some of our macro pad projects for some ideas and then think about ones that would work well on a single single button like that you can also of course plug in stemma qt things to your cutie pie to extend this so if you had let's say a digital counter you could plug in a little matrix led display to this and have a number that's counting up as you press it there's a lot of possibilities for adding just one little sensor or other input using stemma qt plugged right into your cutie pie there over the stemma qt cable all right I think that's gonna do it let me know if anyone has any other questions yeah DJ Devon three said someone showed on show until using these for accessibility these are great for accessibility projects so that's a nice thanks for for that reminder there that's a another use for these and of course like I said MIDI projects if you wanted to just have a single button that does something like send mini panic if you need to have its turn off all notes if you get a hung note nice to have just a little single single key there for for special use kind of like a E stop all right so I think that is gonna do it for today that right there is well pull that out of the way there that right there is my product pick of the week this week it is the neokey BFF beep beep beep thanks everyone for stopping by for Adafruit Industries I'm John Park and this has been JP's product pick of the week I'll see you next time