 Welcome to the show. It's me, John Park, and you are just in time. Actually, I'm a little late, sorry. Everything crashed, right? As I was getting ready to go live. But here we are now. Thank you. Thanks for coming. This is JP's product pick of the week. It happens at this time every Tuesday. And one of the things I like to mention about this show is that it is our live stream that takes place inside of the product page. So if you want, head on over to this URL right here. You can go to that QR code. You can type in that URL, 4161, that's the product ID. And if you head there, you're going to get a 50% off deal on today's product pick of the week. I'm going to refresh my browser right here before your very eyes and you'll see, hey look, half off. So head there, product 4161. And I'm going to proceed to do the show from inside the product page. You can see it elsewhere as well, of course. And I want to thank everyone for stopping by over in the chat. Hello, people in the YouTube chat. Hello, Saltima. Hello, everyone over in the Discord chat. See Grover. Oh, there's Ken Santima there. Yenny Skoo. Seven. Gary Z. Skrrrrrr. I like your name, Skrrrr. That's cool name. All right. I know I've already gone backwards and told you what the product is without really telling you what the product is. So just in keeping with that weird theme, let's have Lady Aida tell us all about it. Lady Aida, what is going on here? So we've got the VCNL 4040, which is a really nice proximity and lock sensor. We've been doing Stemma for quite a bit. In fact, we've had Stemma connectors on our boards for a while. I actually want to show some old boards from like 2017 to see what I originally came up with, which was, you know, use this JST connector and had alligator clips. And actually we even made a board with this dial because I thought actually we would be doing more wearables and alligator clip stuff. It turned out not really. It was more useful to have a small connector. So after seeing Spark Fund has been making quick stuff for a couple of years, I was like, that's a really good idea. So when we were doing this next batch of I-Squirt C devices, we added these connectors, the JST SH4 pin connectors, which are quick compatible. And they're actually also Stemma compatible. They're actually compatible with the larger cables, the same pin order. You just need the larger to smaller cable adapter, which we'll have in the store shortly. But what's nice about this is that it's chainable. And with I-Squirt C, as long as cables aren't too long, you can chain, you know, a couple of them together. And I have level shifting on the ones that need three-volt. So you can use these with a five-volt device or three-volt device, whatever you like. And here's an example of, for example, the BCNL. Oh, it's kind of cool. You can see the infrared pulsing out here. And then this is an OLED version of our .91 inch display. You can see it's a prototype because it says name. But then as I cover it, you know, I've got a little example sketch here that just prints out the proximity and light. It makes like demos and plug and play really easy. All right, yeah. So that's the product. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to go and grab mine from the mystery cabinet. And then we'll talk about it in a little more depth. And I have a kind of fun demo I want to show you. So let me go grab my own. Stand by. All right, yeah. So this is our product pick of the week. It's my product pick of the week, in fact. My product pick of the week today this week is, are you ready for it? It's the VCNL4040. It's a proximity and luxe sensor in STEMIQT format. And I've got a couple of different ways I'm going to demo it for you here. And I also wanted to show you the product page for it. So there's a little better look at it right there over my shoulder. And you can see it's a breakout board with the pair of STEMIQT connectors on it. So you can go over I squared C to any of your single board computers or to your microcontrollers. And we can chain together multiple of these. This has the little package right in the middle, the VCNL4040 sensor. And it's a sensor package that has both the emitter as well as the receiver for proximity and for visible light, for luxe. And what I'd like to do, let's head back over to this product page for a moment. And you can see here, first of all, like I mentioned, if you go to the product page, which is PID 4161, that is going to give you a 50% off. So you can get this for $2.98, which is quite a bargain. And if we scroll down in here, we'll see, hey, look, there's our video. It's playing right there. That's this video. So if you want, you can watch it from inside of the product page. This is a proximity sensor from Vishay. And if we scroll down to the bottom of the product page, we can get to the technical details and the learn guide. So if we head over to the learn guide, that will show you everything you need to know about the sensor. It talks about the distances that it can measure, 0 to 200 millimeters. And that's going to play into how I'm going to use it in a demo today. You might have seen a teaser of that online. But this is great for really, really near stuff and fine detail checking distances that are really close. If we take a look, you'll see in the guide, it talks about the pinout, as well as using this in Arduino, or Python and CircuitPython. I've coded this one today in CircuitPython. And then if you head to the downloads page, you can get straight to that data sheet. And let me see. I always like to look, as you know, applications. What other things? This is for handheld devices, notebooks, tablets, PCs, consumer devices, industrial application. So not a lot of, you can use your imagination. What do you want to use it for? I do think we've had some similar sensors before on the show. I do think sometimes these are used for things like proximity of head to tell if a smartphone is up against your face because you're talking on it, so that it can dim the screen and save you some battery life. But what I want to do is actually jump into the demo inside of CircuitPython. So I'm going to jump over to my down shooter here. And you can see this is, in fact, you'll see there's a little bit of a purple glow there. That's the infrared emitter. And right now it is sensing my proximity. What I'll do is I'll show you inside of Moo here. Let me switch some cameras around. So inside of Moo, it is checking proximity, I think every 10th of a second or something like that. And as I place this stick, paintbrush handle, in front of the sensor, you can see the proximity value's changing. If I hold this really steady, I'm going to hold it with two hands. You can see it's giving us. I don't think these are in any particular units here because the number is going up, not down. This isn't millimeters or anything like that. But as that sensor value goes up and gets closer, you'll see there's a moment there where I have a threshold and it prints out the word blink. So you can see it there in the serial output. And then it's also just fun to watch the changes over in our serial or rather in our plotter. And the reason that I've got this with a threshold is that for a demo, Lady Aida said, hey, what about mounting this sensor inside of a pair of glasses and see if it can detect your blink? So you can wink and have that do something. So what I've got set up, I'm going to show you the full setup here. I've got my sensor. It happens to look upside down the way I have it oriented. I have it on the arm of these glasses, some of my reading glasses. And then I have a Feather RP2040 set up here. I'll give you full screen in fact of that now. And I've got on the other side of that Feather RP2040, a lovely little matrix LED display, it's a little feather wing. And I'm using that feather wing to kind of clamp the glasses to hold this in place. I've also got some capped on tape there to prevent any sweat or anything like that, any skin from bridging a contact. And then I just have the sensor board there attached with some wire. You can see it there. So that's just plugged in over STEM-AQT to this RP2040. So this Feather RP2040 has the STEM-AQT connector built right onto it, so it makes it very easy. As Lady Aida was saying, for wearable stuff, the alligator clips idea, that's pretty bulky. So this is really nice and small. And this powers the board and gets data and clock. And so what I'll do is, if you look here, let me go to a full screen. If you look here at the display, when I get my finger a little closer, I've got my little smiley face winking there. That's just my way of telling that it's been triggered. And you can see, if I put these on and I'll show my plotter there again, this is actually a little close to where I have it plugged in. So let's grab that Moo plotter. So you show me. OK, so you can see right now I have it spaced so that it's just on the edge. So we'll go that a little. So now when I blink, we get a wink, blink, off, on, off. Something else you'll notice in there is that I'm printing out the statement note on, note off. And the reason for this is I'm actually going to plug this into a synthesizer and use it as a USB MIDI controller to play a note on this synthesizer, actually trigger an arpeggio that's randomized. So it sounds kind of interesting. So let me, I don't actually have a down shooter of that. So I'll just go to full screen here and bear with me because we might have to play around with the sound levels. The sound you were just hearing, that awful sound, that's actually the wind blowing a little vent hood on the top of my shop. So all right, so I've got that plugged in and I'm going to mix in that sound. You tell me, I'm going to check the chat. Tell me, can you hear that? Because sometimes I've got this mixed directly into the mixing board. It might be blowing my voice out of the water. I'm not sure how loud that is. And I just have a little monitor in the back for me to hear it. So I'll keep an eye on the chat. You let me, I know that sometimes a little bit of a delay. Let me know if you can hear that well and you can still hear me. And so what I'm going to do is I've got, I can probably show you this little synth later, but what I'll do is I'm going to just use my blink control and you can see my little guy there. I'm going to use that to trigger the synth. Music is low. Okay, let's see how much I can crank that. How about now? We can hear it. Okay, it's very low, but you can hear it. I just cranked it up as much as that is going to come on that mixer. I don't have a volume control on this little hardware synth. So hope you can hear that. And then I'm just going to adjust one of the other settings by hand. So how's that for a weird performance? So thank you for putting up with that. Let me move a little bit of the synth gear here just so you can see for the curious what I'm triggering to readjust some camera and focus here. There we go. And let me give you the down shooter. A little me there. So what I've got is this is a, this is the RK006 from RetroKits. And this is converting my USB MIDI coming out of the feather into standard MIDI. There's other ways you can do it, this was a quick easy way and there's kind of nothing this little box can't handle. And then I have that running into this cute little corg wavetable synthesizer, the DTS-1, which has this little strip on here. That's how you can trigger it if you don't want to use MIDI, but I'd rather trigger it with winking. And then this has a bunch of things like changing effects and filters, the type of arpeggio or no arpeggio and so on. So that's what I was adjusting was just a couple of these knobs. Oh, that wasn't the filter, let me give the filter. Much more fun. So anyway, oh, now I'm triggering it by accident as I talk. So I've got that dialed in fairly closely. You can see that it's a, it takes a little bit of calibration to get that set the way you want it to. But once you have that set, this little sensor does a pretty great job of tracking whether you've kind of added that little fleshy mass of, I think that's what it's measuring is actually the sort of little bit of a bulge of my eyelid coming down. And Eric B. Wertz in the chat says, do you have something in your eye or are you just happy to see me? I really just winking at the audience today. You know how that goes. Of course, you can imagine there are some really interesting uses for this type of sensing in things like assistive technology for alternatives to mouse clicks and things like that. We have a good community of assistive technology people who are using Adafruit products to build things. I'd be curious if people like Bill Binko have any experience with using this type of a sensor. I know I've seen some people do like eyelash sensors before where there's some contacts being made with like conductive thread or something like that. But I feel like this is a little bit easier to set up. You can just kind of take it off and put it on because you're not applying anything to your lashes or your skin. So let's see. I think that covers what I wanted to cover. I'll show you the code real quick for that, which is right here. Is that, did I show you Adam? Which one is that? That is Adam. Sorry, I'm losing my window. There it is, hey window. So a lot of this is the USB set up, but then I've got an import of the VCNL 4040 library that's created on the I squared C bus. We instantiate it. It's just being called sensor here on I squared C. There's where I set my little threshold for blink. This is my little matrix display that I was showing these little animations on. And then really all of this is about the display and MIDI until we get to the main loop of the program. And in here we're doing a, this is what I'm printing. So this is what we were seeing in the plotter, just had a couple of parentheses in there. So that would show up in the plotter. The sensor dot proximity, that's all you have to do is ask for sensor dot proximity and the VCNL 4040 returns that value. And then I calibrated that so that when we blink, if that sensor proximity is greater than the threshold that I created, which is that 34 happened to be where it went conclusively to, hey, I'm winking now. I wish I'd called it wink everywhere. I was calling it blink before, and now I switch to wink as wink is more fun. When that gets exceeded, when that value gets exceeded, then I was printing out for my own sanity, hey, yeah, blink happened, and then changing the matrix to turn that eyeball off and on in the LED in the matrix display. And then so I wouldn't get double hits without turning them off. You always kind of need to turn off a MIDI note after you've turned it on or it'll just play forever. I have a little state that I flipped called as note played. If it is, then if it was not yet played, then we play it. So note on at a note, MIDI note value 40, and at a velocity of 120. And then actually to turn it off, it's when that note value gets below the 34, I am sending the same note value at a velocity of zero, and that's effectively note off. So I think that's it. So I'm curious if anyone has any questions or thoughts or suggestions on how to use this incredibly cool sensor. I'll bring this page back up again so you can see. There it is. The VCNL 4040 is only $2.98 right now, normally $5.95, maximum of 10 per customer right now during the show. So this discount only applies right now during the show if you're thinking of placing an order. Chuck one or two of these in your cart and maybe some stem of cables. And I think we have the RP2040, this super cool featherboard that I'm using here. I believe that's in stock. And just like all things based on RP2040, the price is super low. So this is one of the cheapest, if not the cheapest feathers that we make. And yet it's one of the most capable. And I also like that it's got USB-C on it and it has the Stem of QT connector built right on. So it's very easy to plug and play with this board. All right, well, I will, just for the fun of it, put this guy back on. We'll see if it's, all right, let me turn that down as I finish up the show here. And let me get some cameras out of my way. I'll unplug some things there. Oh no, now I'm never gonna send it a note off. There we go, I fixed that. All right, so that is my product pick of the week this week. It is the VCNL4040. It is a proximity and light sensor, Luxe sensor, on Stem of QT format. And I'm gonna go ahead and place that on my Stem of QT board of awesomeness. The name changes every time. Thanks so much for stopping by. That's been another JP's product pick of the week and I'll see you next week. Bye bye.