 Welcome to the show. It is time for John Park's workshop in the Ask an Engineer time slot. Thank you everyone for stopping by. First of all, happy holidays to everyone who celebrated holidays over this holiday season. A lot of us have been taking time off. I was off for Christmas for a little bit. I'm popping in to do this show. I'll take a couple more days off and then I'll be back next week with some of the shows that you know and love in their normal time slots. That's right. So I'm going to be doing my Tuesday product pick of the week show next Tuesday. As usual, I didn't do it this past week. And then I'm going to be doing my workshop show on Thursday. And that is because Lady Aida and Bill are going to be back on Wednesday for show and tell and Ask an Engineer. That's what we think is going to happen. Of course, things can change. So be prepared in case we shift things around. But the plan right now is to have PT and Lamor back next Wednesday for show and tell and Ask an Engineer. And then I'll be doing my show this show on Thursday. So look forward to that. Everyone's looking forward to that. And looking forward to a new year. Of course, looking forward to 2023. It's exciting to jump in to the new year. And I hope that it's a good one for all of us. We kind of need it, right? Be really nice. Thank you for people stopping in on the chat. You wonder what is he looking at over there? Here's our chat over on Discord. And I've also got an eyeball over on our YouTube chat. So hello for people who stopped by Adam Alexander and Devin's Workshop and George Graves over in our YouTube. And then you can see who's here in our Discord chat. And if you want to join that chat, if you're wondering where is all the chatting going on, if you're somewhere like Twitch or Facebook or somewhere where we're not actively monitoring the chat, then you want to head over to our Discord server. And that's at adafru.it-slash-discord. Look for the live broadcast chat channel. And that's where you see this conversation going on. So thanks, everyone. Thanks for stopping by in there. Yeah, and if you got any thoughts, questions and things, please ask over in the Discord. I'll try to keep an eye on that during the show. And let's see. The next thing I want to do is mention the store, right? Adafruit has this store. It's how we make money. It's how we pay for all these people and things. And it's how we get stuff out to you, ship cool stuff out to you, but it's how we pay for designing that stuff and supporting it and writing learn guides and libraries and things. Lots of code, all the examples that we do. That takes a lot of people, a lot of great people. And if you want to head over to the store, you can find great stuff. I'm going to show you a new, new, new product video later featuring Lady Aida and her singing. So that's going to be fun. And if you want to get some nice, sweet 10% discount when you do head over there to the store, well, I've got good news for you because I have a coupon code that you can use. If you head on over to Adafruit and you put some stuff in your cart, it needs to be stuff. It can't be conceptual things like software or gift certificates or subscriptions. But if you buy some stuff and you want to get 10% off, then all you need is this coupon code, Jazz Hands. If you type that in or if you have your computer set up with optical recognition software that recognizes this motion and types in Jazz Hands with a hyphen for you in all lowercase, well, then that's awesome. That was really good thinking on your part. And that's going to get you 10% off, but most of us will probably just type that in. Jazz Hands, Jazz, Dash, Hands. Why? I don't know. It's just what I felt like when I thought what should today's coupon code be? Jazz Hands. So type that in and that's going to get you 10% off in our store. What's that store look like? You may ask, well, let me pop over there for a real quick second. I'm going to hit my product link there. Here's the store. Let me hit products. Let me hit, oh, there's the new products. In fact, how do I get back to the regular shop? There we go. There's the store and that has links in there, of course, for the new products, but also some featured stuff and some banners on there. You can also go through the Learn Guide and look for guides that you like and find some stuff, throw it out in the cart. And not only can you use that coupon code Jazz Hands to get your 10% off, but also we have some bonuses at various shipping levels. If you head over to ittifruit.com slash free, I'll do that right now. You'll see that you can get a free nude, one of our LED flexible noodles at the $99 tier. If you go to $149, you get a free KB2040 in there and the nude, the stack. If you spend $200 or more, UPS shipping, ground shipping is free. And if you go to the $299 or more, you're going to get a Circuit Playground Bluefruit. You're going to get the free ground shipping with UPS. You're going to get the KB2040 keyboard and you're going to get the nude. So that's going to do you well if you're looking to get a bunch of stuff. And then you can also stack on top of that, your 10% off discount by using the coupon code, coupon code being Jazz Hands. So head on over to the store, get some cool stuff. And I'll show you some of the new products later or actually Lady Aida will in their new new new video. So you can see what new stuff is out or you can head there right now if you want. But if you want to play along in real time, then hang on because I'll be playing that video for you in a little bit. Hello, lovely A72 over in the YouTube chat. Thanks for stopping by and saying hi. Also thanks, DJ Devon3 seems to have found a rather appropriate Jazz Hands gift. Let me hover over that. Oh gosh, here we go. Jazz Hands, fantastic. Oh nice, some nice found a cool. That's kind of a Jazz Handsy, I like that. All right, what else have we got? What's happening here? What's new? Show and tell, we love to have you come on and talk about stuff, show us the things you're working on, show us your projects. We had a show and tell, tonight it was hosted by Liz, thank you Liz so much for hosting the show. And the tell, and who do we have on? Kevin from Digi-Key came on to show a personal project he's been working on, which is a bunch of, I'm talking like 600 neopixels to light up his bar area at home, a little home project. And he showed off using WLED to program them wirelessly. So I think he had a Feather ESP32, one of the wireless feathers, I'm not sure which one. But he mentioned Feathers, he probably got a Feather ESP32 S2, I guess, and is able to code it entirely from the web using WLED. Very cool, I know that there's a guide on learn using WLED that Aaron put up, Firepixie. So go check that out if you wanna learn more. But it was really cool, he had under bar lighting, he had a wall area where some glasses are and some reactive effects based on a microphone as well. So really cool and a really interesting way to code up your LED projects right from your phone and you can pick animations right from some presets as well as get deeper into the coding of that if you want to. So really cool looking, lighting there in Kevin's bar area. So thanks for showing that off, it was really neat. Very inspiring, I definitely wanna check out WLED. Noa came on to show his 3D printed owl, he has a new design for a really beautiful, stylized owl sculpture that has a rotating head and a little switch at the bottom for rotating it and he was able to do some really cool puppeteering based on suggestion from Liz, but it's a print in place, I believe, multiple parts that go together, lock with a little twist at the bottom and then when it's put together you get to puppeteer it. Really gorgeous design. And I believe he said he'd be showing, I can't remember if he said if he's shared the files for that yet or if he will, I'm guessing he will if he hasn't already. Next up was Jeff, Jeff came on with this incredibly cool and weird keyboard that I suggested he get and do something with a few months back. I found a, it was the Atari X EGS system which was a game system. It was also an Atari X E home computer. This is new info to me that Phil B shared that there were these two similar systems, one was a home computer, one was a game system, but it had a keyboard on it, sort of a rubber dome keyboard, nothing too inspiring as far as the switches go, but it had this big weird off centered help button and we wanted to see if he could get the keyboard working and add that help button to it and of course it's Jephler, he did. He's got it working as a USB keyboard and he can press that big help button to act as a macro button, so very cool update on that. Paul Cutler just shared an update over on the Discord, thanks Paul, he said the owl files are available on printable, so if you want you can probably check over on our Discord and you will find links to those. Speaking of Paul, Paul came on and showed a practical project that he's been working on which is using a Feather ESP32, I can't remember which one, I'm gonna guess S2 again because he said he was coding it over Adafruit IO but it could be any of a number of different Feather ESPs. And what's the project? Well he's got hard water where he lives in Minnesota somewhere, so he has a whole home water softener, I'm guessing it's a big tank somewhere in the basement or outside, which requires you to fill it with a bunch of salt for the softening process to work and as the salt gets used, the level lowers and then he forgets he needs to change it and then eventually remembers, well no more because he's built this project that uses the Feather and a time of flight distance sensor so it's gonna be able to tell him how far down that salt level's getting so it'll give him some real time feedback and be able to hook that up with Adafruit IO to get some warnings or visualize it on a dashboard. So really cool project that Paul is working on there and I'm guessing that's using Circuit Python, I didn't say but that's gonna be my guess. And then lastly, Jeff came back on, Jeffler came on to show off a 1979 computer newsletter called TPAL, I think it was. I had a bunch of basic programming examples and it was a little sort of zine style printed newsletter that he thinks his friend picked up at a computer store, probably not even something that came in the mail, just something he went and got at the computer store so it was kind of nice to see a little historical bit there and that was our show and tell. So thanks everyone for stopping by and we're looking forward to seeing all of your shows and tells in the new year. So come on by next Wednesday for the first one of 2023 and let's see what else we got going on here. I did not do a product pick of the week this week because of time off for the holidays but I'll be back next week with one of those so stop by on Tuesday at one o'clock Pacific, four o'clock Eastern and I'll show off a new product pick and give you a big discount on it. Let's see, next up, hey, how about, let's do a Circuit Python parsec when you get set up for that. Yes, Circuit Python. Okay, hold on one second here, let me get that code in front of me. I remember what we're talking about here. All right, for the Circuit Python parsec today, I want to show you how you can use a Super Nintendo controller as a input in Circuit Python. Now this uses the keypad library and the keypad library can deal with shift registers as well as matrices and other input methods. These Super Nintendo controllers and clones like the one that we sell in the store use a shift register. So I'm using the shift register side of the keypad code and I have it set up so that it just reads each of the different keys on the keypads when I press them, the D-pad here, the select and start button and even the shoulder buttons. And depending on which one I press, I get a different display here of NeoPixels. So the way this works is pretty straightforward. I've set up NeoPixel. Also I've imported the library for keypad, that's the main thing here. I've got a little list of names here. I've set up the keypad object right here. So this is a shift register. It's name is Shift K. And it is keypad.shiftregisterkeys. Then we set up the pins for the clock, the latch, a value to latch, data pin, the key count, how many are on here, and the value when pressed is set to false. So that tells us which direction this is gonna go when we press something. Then in the main loop of the code, all I do is say the event is shiftk.eventsget. So it checks for any events that are happening on the device there. If something gets pressed, then I'm running this little pixel code here and printing things out. And when something is pressed, it returns the key number, event.keynumber. And that's what I can pass to my little function that I have here for defining pixel patterns. And so it's really straightforward, very easy to use. You could use this to turn these into USB key presses or for pure microcontroller type of projects here without a computer at all. And so that is how you can use a Shift Register Super Nintendo controller as input in Circuit Python. And that is your Circuit Python Parsec. Beep boop, beep boop, beep boop. That's Circuit Python. All right, yeah, I was hoping to maybe do some other things on here, like maybe a little Mario animation. I didn't have time this year, but I might come back to this even just for fun for my own personal project because it is a tricky thing to deal with these types of controllers if you've ever taken one apart and thought, hey, maybe I can just read these as inputs. They're not separate individual digital input pin type of output pin types of things per press. It's actually using this little Shift Register. So Dan, Halbert, thank you so much for including that in the Keypad Library. Makes it very easy to deal with these types of controllers. And just a little bit on how this is set up. If you look here, I've got a Feather RP2040 and I'm using one of the Terminal Block Feather Wings here and I've got my controller here. I've actually taken off the connector, the SNES style connector. And you can see here there are five pins that are actually used in that. And I have them wired up, as I showed before, to the clock latch data and the power and ground pins which are then connected to my Feather there. So a pretty easy way to connect up one of these controllers. There's a closeup of that there. So controller is this black cable and it actually has five conductors coming off of it that are plugged in there. And then these other ones here are my running to my NeoPixels there. Boop, boop, boop, boop. Could play a really limited version of Tetris on this maybe. All right, so let's see. Let's see if anyone's got any questions over in the chat. Otherwise, we'll move on with questions, none existing it. Doot, doot, doot. All right, so let's jump forward to talking about our circuit Python is code plus community. And to me, that means the Python on microcontrollers newsletter. So here is, if you head to AdafruitDaily.com, you can subscribe to our Python on microcontrollers newsletter and get all the latest info, all the latest news each week. It's delivered for free into your mailbox, very low effort, you can cancel at any time. We promise not to spam you. All you need to do is head to AdafruitDaily.com, put in your email address and sign up. And the newsletter is also accessible just as a webpage here at AdafruitDaily.com. You can click on a link that gives you the latest of the Python on microcontrollers newsletter. And I want to talk about a few of the items that caught my eye this week. One is the circuit Python 8.0.0 beta six has been released and some of the interesting things that come with this release are mentioned in here including some switches over to the .toml, settings.toml file from the .env. So you can check that and head out to the blog or the github from these links to find out more. Another interesting one, this is actually sort of the road to this being in Python. TinyUSB has added BitBang USB host support for RP2040 and while this is running just in Arduino right now the hope is that this will find its way onto Python soon and this will include hopefully right now I think there's serial and mass storage host capabilities but hopefully this will also move into some of the other things like USB HID, MIDI and other things like that. So that's just a glimpse on the timeline to adding some of this USB host support to RP2040 which is really cool. There aren't too many microcontrollers out there that allow you to do both a USB side and a USB host side, client and host side. TNC 3.6 and TNC 4.0 are the only two that I've done it with before and those are really hard to find now so I'd love to have something else that you could plug in a MIDI keyboard or a mouse or whatever you want and still be able to output on the other side, so it could be really cool. There's also a link here to head to the Adafruit blog to check out a post from Scott on the upcoming 2023 plans for Circuit Python and we'll be doing more posts about that, about our plans and looking for people's, both annual wrap up and for people's predictions and hopes for the coming year. There was also a story in here about Raspberry Pi foundations saying there probably won't be a Raspberry Pi 5 coming in 2023. They're gonna be doing some catch up on manufacturing and getting some devices out there of existing Pi boards before they move into the Pi 5 so you can click on that link to go to the Tom's Hardware. Article is also a interview here with Eben Upton that you can go and check out from the blog or over on YouTube. The story here about ESP32 Github updates are available over the air with MicroPython and MicroGit so this is something that would allow you to keep a ESP32 device in sync. Excuse me, I'm about to sneeze. Wow, that was a good one. Pardon me, that's right into the microphone too so I probably could have covered that. Sorry about that. Man, that was some sneeze. So this will allow you to keep your ESP32 devices in sync with a Github repository over the air which is pretty interesting. It allows you to clone an entire MicroPython repo onto a MicroPython microcontroller. Then there were some projects here that caught my eye. There was a really neat looking sort of telepresence remote articulated robot hand project here. This was programmed in MicroPython and uses some of the Adafruit Flex sensors. If you look at the GIF there, I don't know if that'll play probably, oops, now I've done it, let me go back. I don't want to go there. Probably is playing at it sort of a limited frame rate but you can see there there are three or four Flex sensors on a finger mounted controller and then there's a robotic hand in the background that's moving to keep pace with the flexing of the fingers which is pretty cool. And that's using ESP32 as the microcontroller on there. Some other items that I thought were cool. There was a 3D printed hot air balloon from Geekmom I think, right? Yeah, and this uses a little Neopixel ring, Geow ESP32 C3. It has a web workflow using the web IDE and it also has some really cool looking light pipes on there that illuminate. You can follow the link there to mast it on to find out more. And then there was also a little section in here on some new boards that are out that support circuit Python and you can scroll through all these cool projects here. Other Python projects, some new products that are circuit Python capable. Here's the link or the list and then a bunch of links to looks like about a dozen new boards that support circuit Python. So you can go check that out. And that is the Python on microcontrollers newsletter. So go check that out at AdafruitDaily.com. All right, let's see what else have we got going on here. Hey, everyone loves Adabox and we are so excited that despite having zero Adaboxes in 2022, we have plans for multiple Adaboxes coming in 2023. So head over to adabox.com or adafruit.com slash adabox. I think we have that first one. And go check out the links there. You can sign up if the list is full. You can get on the waiting list. We are looking forward to bringing some really cool content, cool Adaboxes, neat stuff, new products, fun unboxings and videos, projects for you to build with them. All of the usual Adabox shenanigans really excited to be able to jump back into those next year. So thank you so much for your patience on those and we really hope you are getting excited as we are about the return of Adaboxes in 2023. Yeah, thank you, George Graves posted over in our YouTube chat, there is at adabox.com. I'm glad I didn't just make that up. You can't just go making stuff up. So next up, new products. And we're very excited to have Lady Aida and fill back for a real genuine new products video. So please take it away, Lady Aida. It's new products. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's time for new products. That's Christmas Day Day Edition. I here at my desk with Lady Aida. I'll go through a couple of the new products that we've put in over the last week or two. So let's kick it off. First up, we've got an updated product. This is the IS-31FL 3731 PWM LED Matrix Driver. So this is our Charlie Plex Driver. It can drive nine by 16 LEDs because it Charlie Plexes them. We sell the grids as well, like LED grids with SMT LEDs. This is the driver board. Also handy if you're just driving like a gigantic LED matrix. This is a very inexpensive way to drive all those LEDs. We've updated it by adding STEM and QT connectors because it's all iSquared C controllable. So it's otherwise the same pinouts on the top and the left. We just had a little spot on the right, added those iSquared C ports, and we also updated the silkscreen. Next up. Next up, another updated product. This is the Chrono Dot from MaceTech. This is kind of famous. This is a really early product we used to sell. It's a product number 255, which is many, many, many years ago. And this used to come with a DS-3231, which due to the silicon shortage has been totally unavailable. And so you can see here in this image, it now comes with a Max 3128. Sorry, 31328. We actually covered a 31328, 31329 on iNPI a couple of months ago, if you remember. What's interesting about this chip is it's also an ultra precise RTC from Maxim. But what's extra interesting is it is pin, sorry, it's not pin compatible. It is far more compatible with the DS-3231 RTC library. And so if you were using the DS-3231 and you wanted to update to this new 31328, this board is pretty much dropping compatible. You can use your old existing code. I think it basically has the same precision. The one thing that didn't get added to the update chip, the 31328 is an eProm, which is why there's, if you see at the bottom there, there's a separate iSquared TE Prom chip. But it's on the same iSquared C bus. So it's like a nice little update and most important, it's available and you can actually buy it unlike DS-3231s, which are tough to get. All right, next up. Next up, we have two new products of the same family. The PCA 9546 is a four channel iSquared C expander. So this is really handy when you have, say, for, you know, say DS-3231s RTCs or humidity sensors or accelerometers or other devices on the iSquared C bus that use the same iSquared C address. And so you're limited. You can only use one per bus, but you want to say control four of them. This is pretty common. People have like, you know, motor driver maybe or they want multiple accelerometers or multiple gyros or multiple humidity or pressure sensors because they wanna measure pressure in different locations. So this chip will take one iSquared C port in and allow you to select four different outputs by writing the address to the, you know, the port number you want to route your signal to, I think onto address 70. And the chip itself also has three address pins. You can change that if you're like trying to address, you know, chips that use address 70, of course you can change it to be, you know, 71 to 77. And that way you can address multiple chips on the same port. We carry the TCA 9548, which is the eight channel version of this chip, but maybe you don't need as big a version. You know, you don't need as many ports. You'll need eight, you'll need four. Go for it. We also have this chip in a STEM IQT format. So solder free if you have our STEM IQT or quick boards, plug and play. And again, it gives you a four channel iSquared C multiplexing. This board also in addition to multiplexing has a three volt level shifter because, you know, maybe you have an Arduino Uno on one side that's five volt logic and power and you want to address iSquared C devices that use three volt logic and power. So it'll allow you, if you go to the back, the one with the quarter, that image, if you see on the back, the V out jumper by default, it uses the same voltage as the input to the V plus. But if you'd like, you can cut and adjust that trace to use three volts. And so it'll do a lot of three volt logic level shift down. Again, this is the four channel version of the eight channel iSquared C multiplexer we put in a while ago. So choose which one, either the breadboard version or the STEM IQT version as you need. Choose wisely. Choose wisely. Okay, I think so. Next up, more STEM IQT accessories. This one is going to be very handy for people who want to connect to five volt power, five volt logic iSquared C devices on the most common three volt power and logic microcontrollers and microcomputers that are available now. So if you have, you know, old style Arduino Uno and you want to connect to, you know, for example, the Sen55 or there's some, you know, maybe GPO expanders or RTCs or other sensors that use five volt power, five volt logic, you're good to go. But nowadays a lot of people are using RP2040 PICOs or ESP32s or Raspberry Pi computers or even, you know, NRF52 or other modern Arduino compatible or microcontroller boards. They have three volt power, three volt logic. And it's not, it's pretty common to see down shifters, but up shifters are a little more rare. So this is an up shifter. You give it three to five volt power and logic in and there's a switch cap charge pump converter that'll give you 100 milliamp continuous or 250 milliamp peak. It's the AP3602A, which we have a data sheet attached. And it'll boost up that power from three to five volts and it'll shift up the I-squared C logic from three to five volts as well. So again, handy, there's a couple of sensors and devices we've seen where, you know, they want five volts because there's a motor in the sensor or there's, you know, it's an old style chip and so it uses five volts and not three volt logic and you want to connect to that with your modern three volt microcontroller. There's also, if you go to the quarter shot, on the back, you'll see there's a V-I-squared C jumper. If you want to have power be five volt, but the logic level be three volt, you can cut and set that jumper to use the logic that keep the I-squared C at the same logic level. Don't shift that up. We've seen that a couple of devices as well where again the power is five volts, but the logic level is three. So you can use this board either way. It's also breadboard compatible. If you're not using STEMAQT at all, just, you know, solder in the header and use it on your favorite breadboard. All right. And the stars show tonight besides you lady, our team, our customers, our community, everybody who's been helping us out, especially why we took a little bit of time off to bring Kitto into the world is Scorpio. Kitto is a Scorpio. So this is, I wanted to make this, get this board out before the end of the year. Didn't quite get it out for Scorpio season, but that's okay. It was pretty close. And I wanted to get this out for the end of the year. So this, the RP2040 Scorpio board is finally out and available. It's going to be in the shop this week. So this is an RP2040 and this board is feather shaped. It has all the feather pins that you know and love. But on the end there, there's another two by eight header. One row is ground, the other is eight contiguous pins connected to the PIO state machine inside and they're contiguous. And so they're really good for driving lots of Neopixels. Especially since the RP2040 has 264K of RAM. So there's a ton of RAM. It's got the PIO state machine which is excellent for driving Neopixels. It's a dual core. So of course you can have all your, in addition to having all your Neopixels DMA, you could have two cores if you want to do extra computation on one core and then blit in the other one and maybe get wifi data or something and use that to calculate or adjust what the graphics should be shown on your Neopixels are. But the RP2040 makes for a perfect Neopixel driver. And so this board is basically designed specifically for you want a feather, you want an RP2040, you want to drive a ton of Neopixels and we've got Arduino and circuit Python code that does that again, all with DMA. So you don't have to sit there and like toggle each pin and hold your processor hostage. The RPIO peripheral goes off and does it and you can check when it's done and then you can compute the next frame of data. So it's got USB-C, it's got battery. And the important part is on the right-hand side of the board, let's go on the one. Yeah, on the right-hand side of the board. So on the left-hand side you get the business end, USB-C, battery, the reset button, regulator, battery charging, middle is the RP2040 chip. There's a small Neopixel on D4 if you want to have onboard notification to tell you what the status is. There's eight megabytes of flashed memory so you can use that for your program storage or of course both in Arduino and circuit Python you can put a file system on it if you want to have images, you know, configuration data, what have you stored on that flash memory, there's tons of flash memory. There's a boot pin, a boot button for entering into boot mode that's also available as a user button. I think it's on GPIO 7. So you can, once the RP2040 is booted, that button becomes a user input button. There's a vertical STEMI QT pin and then below that you see a chip and some resistor packs. That is the logic level shifter. So even though a lot of modern Neopixel strips are happy with three-volt logic, not all of them are, especially if you're giving them 5.5 volts of power. And so there's an onboard logic level shifter that'll take those eight signal pins and shift them up. I think it's pins 16 to 23. So those GPIOs get shifted up from three volts to five volts, whatever is on the USB port. And then there's 100 ohm resistors just to kind of reduce any ringing effect, especially with long wires going into your Neopixels. And then on the back, if you look at a quarter shot, there is, if you happen to want to configure it, on the back you can change the VLogic, the logic level output from five volts to three volts. Say you don't want to drive a five volt signal into something you're driving non-Neopixels or something that requires a lower level voltage. And also you can change the direction of that shifter. It's nominally only output, but if you want to turn this into say a logic analyzer, you can change the direction to be inputs and it's five volts safe because it's using a five volt safe level shifter. And then that signal could come in and you could turn this into say like an eight channel logic analyzer and use some open source software to do so. But we really think this would be great for people making LED art because we've seen a lot of art projects in New York and online where people have massive displays of Neopixels. Oftentimes using unfortunately chips and microcontrollers are no longer available or they're very hard to get right now, but the RP2040 is really easy to get. So we think using the Neopixelate library that we've got or you can even, because this chip has enough RAM and it's pretty fast, you can use the Neopixelate HDR library. And that adds dithering, some pixel subsampling which basically means that not only do you get that eight bits per color, 24 bits per pixel color, but you also get another two by doing some temporal dithering. Very good for when you're doing gamma correction or you have low brightness LEDs. A lot of people notice that because the LED brightness is linearly PWM'd but our eyes kind of are logarithmic. LEDs that are at the lower brightness level, the brightness shifts change more dramatically than at the higher level. With dithering, you get an extra couple of bits. It smooths that out and makes it a little bit more of an elegant distribution at the lower brightness levels. All right, and that's Scorpion. That's new products. It's a very happy Scorpion. All right, we'll see everybody throughout the week. We have a lot of new videos and more planned. We have multiple setups as we do tons of videos, not only for the last week of the year, but as 2023 approaches. So buckle up. There's gonna be a lot of hardware, everybody. That's right. Thanks for coming by the new, new, new. New, new, new. Here at my desk. Awesome. Great to have Lady Hita back with all the new stuff and some really cool stuff. I'm looking forward to that Scorpio too. I saw a lot of people in the chat are excited about that and I'm with you on that. Giant, huge strips of lots of LEDs. Looks a lot of fun. Also, questions in the chat. There was a question and I'm not sure. I might need a clarification. Kayoshi asked, is this ruined? And I'm not sure. Perhaps you're referring to the battery. If you have torn a wire off of one of those batteries, it can be pretty dicey to solder to it. It's a little dangerous, so I'm not gonna recommend people try to fix that cell. You might just wanna get a new cell. And I'm not sure what's going on with the spool there. Said that you've lost the spool end. It must be somewhere, right? It's not infinite, is it? Probably not. All right, let's see. Then, I think that covers all of those things. So I wanted to mention again, since Lady Aida was talking about all those cool new products that you can get 10% off in the stores. If you wanna load up your cart full of lots of that cool new stuff, then add some jazz hands at the end and you'll get 10% off. Jazz dash hands is your coupon code today for no particular reason other than I felt like it. And make sure that you throw stuff in your cart, not software gift certificates or subscriptions, but actual stuff, and then jazz dash hands will get you the 10% off on your way out. Oh, I see, Kayoshi said they pulled out, it's magnet wire, it's supposed to have a nice, tight spool. Yeah, you could probably spool that back on there. I don't see why not. It's pretty easy to spool that kind of wire. The worst thing to try to spool is three-printer filament. If you've ever had that go bad on your cart, or had that go bad on you, boy, that's a process of trying to fix a bad spool of kinked-up printer filament. All right, let's see. And so I wanted to say, where are Matt with some projects? Showed you the 16-step drum sequencer and I'm working on a guide for that right now. I'm also midway through building the updated L-Cars display, so I'll be finishing that up in the new year and get a guide out for that. And then there was a, I just wanted to show you, the only thing I had to show you tonight over on the workbench is something I introduced, oh no, gotta kick this camera, it's gone funny. I introduced this a little while ago and it was a kid, I hadn't built it yet, but I've got it built now and I wanted to show you, let me update one of my camera monitors here real quick so I can see that. And I'll head over to the workbench, let's see, where is that view that'll do it. So this is an LED lamp board built to look like, oh no, this camera is having problems, isn't it? Okay, I wonder why it's gone a little flaky. Stay away, camera. This is a kid, I got off Tindy, it's called the Enigma lamp board, you can find it, just search Tindy, from Hack Modular. And this is meant to look like the, it's designed very similar to the lamp board of an Enigma machine, the top part that shows you what your letters are being deciphered as as you enter them in. This one, however, takes voltage, control voltage, to light up the letters, so it's meant to use for things like EuroRack, but I wanted to show you, I've got it working just with a circuit playground express here that I have sending out over the DAC, which is the digital analog converter pin, pin A0 here. Let me turn this on, oh it's on. I have it just sending out voltages which are one volt for 12 letters. So over a two volt and a little bit range you can light up letters. So unlike something like a NeoPixel, this is kind of a fun old fashioned throwback way of doing this, the circuit chips on here translate voltage into addressing different LEDs on here. And you can see my calibration is a little bit off, so you'll see sometimes it doesn't light the letter it should and it lights multiple letters at once. So I've got a little bit of tuning to do on here as well as what voltages I'm sending, and I had a different reference voltage for the circuit playground express. So it's not quite perfect right now. But a cool kit, I'd shown it before, so I won't go into huge detail, but I just wanted to show you, it was something I finished up, it was something I built for fun for myself over the break. Sometimes it's a lot of fun to build a project that I'm not documenting and throwing a learn guide together for, so this was just selfish fun to build that. But I decided not just to control the lighting as a VU meter style thing for my Eurorack synthesizers, but instead to send it some specific voltages from the circuit playground express. Now, part of the idea is there is it could be a fun way to do something like a puzzle, a riddle of some kind, a escape room or mystery box kind of thing. And I'll show you in a little bit more of the Eurorack fashion, but actually also using circuit Python. Right here, I have one of Todd Kurtz, little modules that he built, and you can find it on his GitHub, you can build one of these yourself. He gave me this PCB it built up. He calls this a trinket trigger and this uses a trinket microcontroller and it has some capacitive touch pads built into the faceplate here. So if I hover over and get closer and closer to the A pad here, you can see I'm sending voltages which aren't super locked in, right? It's kind of varying the voltages around, but that means I can get these fun effects of lighting up a whole bunch of letters at once as it sweeps through voltages and the other pad is used for sending out little sort of gate triggers, but this one is a continuously variable and hard to control because it's just my meat human meat finger capacitance here that's changing that and it's a pretty tight range there. So it's hard to dial something specific in, but that's one way to use this is just as a sort of neat VU meter and it has modes both for teletype and alphabet encoding. But yeah, going back to the Circuit Playground Express here you can see all I'm doing is sending sort of a table I created of the 16 bit analog out values or DAC values for this analog out on pin A0 and then it just works its way through those and loops them around. So this one's actually pretty, it's looking pretty good except for just a couple of the Q and the P have some tight tolerances on them. I think I have to still tune the trimmer pot a bit to calibrate that better, but kind of fun, kind of neat. You could use this sort of thing in any project you want. You could also use this as an inspiration for building a NeoPixel based project. So that's of course much easier to address because we can do it digitally and you can address multiples at once here if we wanted to light up let's say a word we would have to send those very specific voltages really quickly I think in order to light up a word like you're seeing happen there. So I'm not, I don't have a lot of experience doing that. I just got to put together this morning and wrote a little bit of code to test that out but that is super cool hack modular enigma board enigma lamp board there. You can see these, this pair of ICs here you can build it with them here for alpha, oops. I've just killed my camera again, what's going on camera? There we go. These ICs if they're in these positions it's alphabetical encoding and here it's the teletype ITA2 encoding rather. So neat project and a lot of fun to build for me. So this is a nice technique I've seen on a lot of circuit boards where just simply having no solder mask gives you this sort of glow through using the fiberglass material. So it's always gonna have a little bit of yellow, yellowish greenish tint to it but in this case it looks really nice. This is a little bit bright in camera it actually is a little darker in the real world not sure if I can adjust that down a little bit. There we go. Look out there. And then this just has the input of the voltage coming in and then I think there's a buffered output so it should be an exact copy of that voltage coming out of here so that it's not sagging which is bad for music stuff cause it means things start to go flatter or sound weird. So this is meant to be able to just pass through a voltage on its way over to something that's actually making some sound using a volt per octave control on an oscillator for example. So that's the enigma lamp board. And that's my last little fun project for me to build for myself of the year. Yeah, as Liz says it would be fun to build patches to spell things out which would be really cool. Let's see, other questions. Oh, Kayoshi asked what was the board I had the SNES controller plugged into? So this one right here is the proto screw shield feather wing or terminal block feather wing? I think we call it that. I'll show you right here. Let me bring up the store. This is screw terminal feather wing. No, oops, I didn't spell feather right. Why do I not know this thing's name? Proto, no, screw. Oh terminal, I think it's terminal block feather wing. Terminal block, assembled terminal block break out feather wing for all feathers. It's ID 2926 and it comes with screw terminals that break out every single pin on your feather as well as some extras. So you get multiple ground pins on there. Let me show this nice close up in fact. So you can, as you see here there are some that are standard so those are on the silkscreen. Some can vary based on which feather it is so those don't have a number but you can see you get two, three volts on one side and another three volt on the other. You get two grounds on one side and another ground or even two on the other I think. Yeah, so this is just a, in fact, I'll let me show you the down shooter here again. I'll turn this off. So one of the things this has is a closer to it here in refocus and I'll brighten it up since I'm not pointing it at neopixels. Oh, that's not brighter. There we go. There we go. So I'm gonna turn it off. It has an enable switch right there. So that will, no matter how you're powering your feather here over USB or via battery that enable switch is a way of essentially powering it down just by grounding the enable pin that's on the board. So that's a nice feature of it. I can pull this feather out. I've got it mounted using some headers. You can also mount to it directly. You get some little bonus proto area here like any of our terminal doublers or our feather doublers and triplers and quadruplers. And then you can see here actually if you look at the reflection on the copper traces under the silkscreen, you can see all those feather pins are just sort of fanned out to those terminals. And this will tell you again for some common ones like RXTX, the SPI breakouts, the I squared C breakouts. Those are standard on all the feathers. So those have a silkscreen on here. So these are great. And that's a nice way to do something like this wiring for the SNES controller. Also someone asked about the SNES controller. I'll jump back here for a second. And what do we call it? Gamepad, USB gamepad with accelerometer. That's not it. That's a totally different thing. We probably call it, do we call it SNES? Yeah, we call it SNES controller. So this one's just $4.95. We have 30 of them in stock right now. And it's a decent clone one. It's not gonna be as nice and tight to play on as a first party Nintendo branded one, but you probably don't wanna take a Nintendo branded one and dig it open to do a weird project with. So this is a nice way to have a, excuse me, a low cost SNES controller on hand. It's also got no branding on it there. So if you wanna add your own logo to it, a sticker, do a custom paint job or whatever, these are kind of fun to work with. I don't think, yeah, we don't have a socket to plug that into. It'd be cool if we had a little socket, but I just pop the end off and you're left with the five pins that actually, I think have little crimp headers on them because those, when they plug into an SNES, there are pins inside of the little barrels. And so you can use those. Let's see, other questions. Someone asked about giant seven segment displays. Yeah, I do have a project. DJ Devon said that I did a seven segment clock. It was the Ninja timer for American Ninja Warrior using Neopixel strips and laser cut acrylics. So you can look for that if that, VJ Pussycat, if that helps with what you're looking for. And Todd, I'm not gonna stick the patch cable on my tongue to see if I can spell things, although that would be maybe something to practice. I don't wanna just try it for the first time in front of everybody, you know. So yeah, that was the question about those. All right, I think that does it. So I'll remind you again, you can go and get 10% off in the store. If you wanna pick up that SNES controller, then it'll cost approximately 49 or 50 cents less. Is that right? Is my math right? I don't know if my math's right, I think so. Jazz hands, jazz dash hands, that'll get you 10% off in the store on your way out. And I will thank everyone so much for coming by and for participating in the community and being here all year. It's been quite a year and we're really looking forward to 2023. As I said, I'll be doing my product pick show on next Tuesday. Phil and Lamor will be back on Wednesday to do show and tell and ask an engineer, woohoo. And I'll be back on my normal Thursday time to do the John Park's Workshop show. So I will see you next week in 2023 for that. And I believe that is gonna do it. So thanks everyone for your different industries. I am John Park. This has been John Park's Workshop and now for your moment of Lars.