 Lady Aida, what is this? Hey everybody, and welcome to Show and Tell, which will hosts are here again. Me, Lady Aida, with me, Mr. Lady Aida. Sometimes we have other folks from the interview community come and help out hosting Show and Tell, but it's us, you're stuck with us. Okay, so we're gonna check in with some interviewers and other people in the community. Where are they hacking, 3D printing, coding, taking apart, putting back together, fixing, breaking. We're gonna find out for the next 20 minutes. We got a bunch of stuff going on tonight. A lot of cool people from the team. We're gonna show what they're up to this week. We're starting with Scott. Scott, what you got going on? Hello, as folks probably know, I've been working on the ESP IDF-5 update, which is like the underlying code that we get from Expressive to use their chips. And on my stream last Friday, I started the 5.1 update, which gives us support for a couple new chips from Expressive, which is pretty exciting. So I have here a C6, and what you can see in the screen share is that Web workflow is working on the ESP32 C6 DevKit M, which is one of these Expressive created dev kits, which is pretty cool. And I guess the main thing about the C6 is that it has Wi-Fi 6 support, which I think it's just changes to the protocol to handle congestion better, I believe. So I don't think it's like any new bands is still 2.4 gigahertz, but it should do a better job at navigating busy airwaves, I think is. And there's definitely only more Wi-Fi everywhere. Okay, this is cool. I'm calling for people watching who don't know. Scott and I were chatting about how we want to get back to Web workflow to keep hacking baby toys. But one of the things to do that was we wanted to get 5.0 or 5.1 IDF merged in, that we weren't working on something that was then gonna get blown away or had to be, we worked for 5.0 or 5.1. So we're gonna definitely all of our meat and vegetables, and then we're gonna have to start. Yeah, yeah. And I was just like actually trying to do the serial terminal demo, and it was like not working fully for me. Yeah, but you know what? I see more stuff coming out my terminal window than I can see here, so I gotta figure that out. I mean, it's there, it just needs a little bit of cleanup. But I think now we actually have a really good project that's gonna use it. We're gonna really hammer on Web workflow and get people trying it out. I mean, I like to release a product when I know it works, and I think it's gonna be a good experience to people. So we're gonna release that Toy Hacker board once we have Web workflow rocking out. Nice and solid. Yeah, yeah, and I'll have to squirrel it away again. Not destroy it. Thanks so much, Scott. Are you doing a deep dive this week? That's the plan, so we'll go over this, and hopefully the H2 is really close. It doesn't have Wi-Fi, but I wanted to add it anyway because people like to add boards to certify on, so thought I'd do that. So 2 p.m., Pacific, 5 p.m., Eastern, Scott, we'll do a deep dive and you can learn about the innards of all this and more. Totally, yeah. And the last thing to say about the C6 is it does have more RAM internally as well. Ooh, how much RAM does it have? It's like 512 instead of 384. 384, yeah, 384 is what the other was. Okay, that's great. That's more RAM. That's nice, that's nice. I mean, we love PS RAM, but it's not as fast as internal RAM, so. No, it is not. We always love more RAM. Yep. Thanks, Scott. All right, next. Jebler, what you doing? Good evening, I've got a new keyboard. I was reading the Adafruit blog the other day, as you do, and I learned that Unicomp has updated their Buckling Spring keyboards to use the Raspberry Pi Pico as a controller. So if you wanna bring out my screen, I'll show you a little quick learn Adafruit Playground guide that I wrote about putting CircuitPython on this keyboard. So I got this keyboard today, took it apart, put CircuitPython on and wrote up some code so I can use it like a keyboard, you know. Oh, that's nice. So yeah, what you have inside, this is not my photograph, this is from Admiral Sharks keyboards, which is who our blog was citing. So they've got the RP2040 microcontroller in there and then like these two different ribbon cables that come off and those go to this, it's a double layer sandwich of flexible CircuitBoard and then I guess, you know, the rows are on one of the connectors and the columns are on the other. Yeah. And it's a little bit wonky because the matrix is 16 by 16 elements. So to scan a column, you have to set the three address bits and then set which of the two like MUX chips is enabled and then you can read off the row of pins. So you can't do it with the keypad module or you can do it in pure Python. Okay. And anyway, so this is up, I'll drop the link on Discord, but it's like the most professional keyboard that you can get and put CircuitPython on in like the space of half an hour. It's natively supported. That's cool. It's fascinating, they actually like, when you said Pico, I kind of assumed that they were like, oh, we redid the board to have RP2040, but they like. Yeah, no, it's literally we glued the module on or soldered it on, I should say. It could have been just like easier for, you know, it could have been like, well, we don't have space constraints and for manufacturing, if you're paying for, if the manufacturing is expensive, having it ready to go board might be cheaper again. Maybe it's just speed, you just wanted to get to it. I don't know. I mean, obviously you're picking and placing one item instead of all those items. Maybe there's a savings there. You were saved from having to do the design. I don't know what their trade-offs were. It would be really fun to hear from them about why did you do it that way? I think we've all made decisions recently involving parts and chips and getting things out that probably needs some explanation. It's like however, whatever, whatever. Yeah, they were using, I don't remember which manufacturer, but it's like a chip became unobtainable and they weren't able to chip any product for a while. So this let them ship product again, but it's also a really cool product for customization. Just the first round to get it to market and then they're gonna update later. Like, I don't know. Yeah, right now all of the ones that they're shipping are reportedly with the RP2040 Pico in it and the one that I got was. I'm really thrilled, because I love Buckling Spring, I hope it's enough. It's my favorite. All right, thanks so much, huh? All right, see you around. More keeps. All right. Next up will be paint your drawing. What you got going on? Oh, that's me, gosh. I got a Nudes thing. Nudes the Flexi. Yeah, whoo! This is a family show. Hey! Yeah. So I mentioned a thing in the Nudes Uber guide and it's the idea that you can actually control these off a microcontroller pin or some of the LED drivers. I forget the one in the shot, there's like a 16 channel or you can use WS2811 drivers, which is the same thing that's inside NeoPixels. So you have like NeoPixel Nudes. So I mentioned this a long time ago, but I haven't seen a lot of uptake on the idea. So I put a demo piece together using a whole crap ton of Nudes. I just stuck it in a hat arbitrary, because I was at the Halloween store looking for things to decorate. That's a neat aesthetic. It's almost like a Gatsby punk. It sort of looks different in person, but it does look like the great Gatsby like, but with like electronic steam punky stuff. Yeah. So I put 36 Nudes in the hat and they're all PWM dimmable using the 2811 driver. So it shows up like NeoPixels. Yeah. And it's not very creative. I mean, it's kind of the unflavored gelatin of ideas. All one color is green. But it's also, look, vanilla is, you know, people say vanilla, but I actually really like vanilla ice cream. Yeah. Well, it at least showed me the idea, like it holds together and you know, it took a lot of grappling on those LEDs to get them all in there. And I thought I was going to break them. I know every single one got through just fine. Works great. So maybe I'll do something a little more colorful or interesting shapes or something. Yeah. I didn't know. But at least there's the idea. Yeah. Yeah, there. Yeah, it's like, you know, sometimes you don't want like a full rainbow, like LED pattern or something like this. This is like a professional one. You can go to a wedding with this one. You can go to... It really reminds me of, you know, when you go to like a movie theater and they have the marquee and they use like kind of these warm white lights. It sort of has that feel to it. Yeah. Though I think using multicolor, you know, it could do some very cool neon. Yeah. And the old animated neon signs could be replicated. Yeah. Okay. All right, very cool. All right, dang it. Thank you. Thank you, old sport. That's a great cast of the line. Okay. Bye-bye. Let's go to JP. JP, what you got going on? Hey, what I got going on is a revision to my Synth.io fundamentals platform. So I just have finished writing up the Synth.io fundamentals guide and I had been doing examples on what I thought was kind of the minimal viable synthesizer we could put together from the shop, which was a QT pie with a audio BFF for the I2S amplifier. And then Lamar said, hey, wait a second. Since you started that, we actually put out the new prop maker feather board. So this is RP2040 and it's the prop maker. So it's got an I2S amp built on and it's got the screw terminals here to screw your speaker in. So there's literally zero soldering necessary to get your own customizable circuit Python synthesizer up and running. So I just added that to the guide and made all the examples work on this. And I just wanted to show a quick demo. The sound won't probably be too loud because I don't have a mic on this right now. But you should be able to hear it. So here I've got it working as a polyphonic synthesizer plugged into an iPhone, which is sending MIDI messages to tell what notes to play. And I'm using an app here called fugemachine which allows you to set a few notes and then run play heads forward and reverse at different speeds to build these sort of organic compositions. So I'll start this here. Is it really called fugemachine? Fugue, like a fugue, like a Bach fugue. I thought it was like, like getting in a fight. Like that's a good name for the next social network, fugemachine. We have like MIDI fighters. And I'll hold this up to the mic up here for a second so people can hear that. Yeah, it sounds good. Yeah, fine. And this one does a whole lot more that I'm not doing right here because we can also bring in CC commands to change the waveforms that we're using as a wavetable synthesizer here. But I'm really excited about this because this lets people get up and running with this to build their own synth super easy zero soldering involved. And it's a great board. It's a board that can be battery powered. And if you do want to solder some headers on here, you could put this on a doubler or quadrupler and then start adding things like MIDI feather wings and OLEDs and maybe some knobs and build out a pretty cool little proto synthesizer using synth IO. So that is what I want to show off. Thanks so much, JP. And folks, can tune into your show tomorrow. Come on by. We're making stuff. And we're gonna play a clip. We were off last week, but we'll play the latest product pick of the week from this week on Ask an Engineer. Folks wanna check that out. Tremendous. Thank you. All right, thanks, JP. Thanks, JP. All right, Erin. What you got going on this week? So this week I just launched a new tutorial using these little NFC tags. These things are cool. They're super cheap, like two bucks to get one of these from the Adafruit shop. And what they do is they can pull up a link on your phone. Let's see. So if I just tap, I think this one's programmed. If I just tap it on there, whoops. It's really gonna get my link tree or my Venmo link or whatever it is. So this is just incredibly useful. I go to a lot of festivals and I'm out putting up art and stuff like that. And a lot of people wanna see, they see like my big art installations or my costumes or whatever it is and they wanna be able to follow me on Instagram, for example. But Adafruit was carrying my phone. So what I did was I made a jenglish tentacle. And I put one of these little NFC tags inside here. So now I can just tap it to their phone and then it'll pull up my link tree and they can follow my Instagram or my TikTok or look at my tutorials on Adafruit or whatever it is. I can also, I made one of these that pulls up my Venmo. It's way better than a QR code. So much better. It's easier, because it'll just work with any, anything you wanna put it in. You can put it in, I put in a little sign that says tap to paste that they can just tap like you do at the grocery store which is really cool. If you have a little craft booth or something like that it makes it really easy for people to give you money which is always helpful. It's a good idea with the tap to pay, to tap to pay or tap to donate because it's like, you wanna get a whole like payment processor. You're just like, hey, just send to Venmo or to PayPal. Yeah. And then they can- With QR codes, they have like a printed out QR code but you have to go and scan it and then there's always like a reflection and you can't get it, you have to click on it. Yeah. With this you just hold your phone up and it just tap and you're there. Hey, good guy. Yeah, we'll show that off in the show. And these things come out in shape. So there's buttons and cards and stickers and key chains and stuff. So like it's just the coolest idea. Well, you can decorate it. QR codes just remind me of menus during the last few years at restaurants because there's no more paper menus. It's like the QR codes aren't, it's not fun. It's not like, yay, QR code. I'm going to have fun or it's like, is this gonna like open up a malicious link or something like this? So this is kind of nice. It's almost magical. It is quite magical. All right, thanks, Aaron. Thanks, Aaron. All right, speaking of magical, Anzo, he's coming up with something fun. Ann, what you got going on this week? Well, I got a new revision of my circuit board, Elkar's touch pad. So each of these is a capacitive touch pad and for each button, if you push it, it lights up. Now I'm pushing 10 and the two is lighting up because I still have a bug in it. So I went back to the boards and made a new schematic and double checked all the data and the sheets and everything. So now I've got the schematic right that will translate into the key CAD board layout. Hopefully by this weekend or so, I can get another revision sent out, hopefully the last revision. But these second revision boards are kind of neat. They're half as thick as the first one and they still have the nice capacitive touch working and I think the light transmissiveness is a little better. So it's coming along and hopefully soon I'll be back with the final ones. I'll write up a guide on the Adafruit Learning System and you can make your own or mix it up and make different types of boards. But using PCBs makes it super easy to make these kinds of displays rather than using acrylic and covering it and then LEDs behind it. It gets complicated fast whereas some of the new manufacturers can print some really nice designs like this one. And we were off last week, but a happy Star Trek day. We're gonna play some of the videos that we were recording, we're doing video work for these tiny displays. So it'll be neat when folks will be able to put some of the videos that we showed like the Star Trek animated series on like a round display or a different display and then use something like that to skip chapters or a controller or whatever. You can kind of build your own little Star Trek device. I think we'll probably see a tricorder almost instantly once we get these display shipping and then folks can spin up their own boards to make the interface and all that. So it'll be kind of cool. I'm looking forward to it. I love the things that are going on and some of the new revisions of Circuit Python I think will help me finish making my little M4 computer from the original series displays right now. Okay, thanks so much, Ann. All right, thank you, Ann. All right, we're gonna go to Paul and then DJ Devon. Paul, what you got going on? I've got a new project. I like music projects. And let me see if I can, where do I change my camera in this thing? I have a Raspberry Pi that's just been sitting on my desk for years. I picked up an S3 matrix portal a couple of weeks ago too and I came across the Shazam IO Python library for CPython and thought to myself, well that's a new project right there. So I got one of the little $6 USB microphones that you sell in the shop and plugged it in the Raspberry Pi and it records a little sample, a 10 to 30 second sample every couple of minutes. You can see the speaker that it's next to that it can hear from. Sends it off to Shazam. And once it does that, it sends an MQTT message to Adafruit IO and the S3 matrix portal downloads the MQTT message and scrolls the artist in the song across the matrix portal. Ooh, that's an interesting idea. Yeah, ToddBot actually helped me with some async code. So it's running async IO with MQTT. I don't know if anyone's done that before. So that was pretty interesting and AnakData helped me with the scroll. So it takes the community sometimes to build a new project. It takes the village. That's a fun project. And then if folks want to try to make this on their own, where would they find some of these things? I've got a blog post up that I'll share and my GitHub link to the repo. Okay, right on. Yeah, drop it in Discord if you can. And then if your members send it to either myself or Ann and we'll get into newsletter. I think we usually have a Paul corner anyways but now you can get this in the newsletter either next week or the week after. Sounds good. Thanks for having me. All right, DJ Devon, what you got going on? Well, last week I came on with a 12 panel matrix display that was all jumbled up and I finally figured that out. So now it's all working correctly with the weather display that I usually have on a much smaller TFT display. So I ported that code over to this display and forget the scan lines. That's because of the camera shutter. It looks 10 times nicer in real life than what you're seeing in the video stream. Yeah, the fonts look great. They're actually yellow and they're showing up white. It's because it's all blurred out because of how bright they are. It's, I don't know what to call it. They are extremely bright. And then I have one second here. Another demo. And this one is just to say goodbye to Katnie. Thank you for all the code and community. I like that it's purple. That came up with, Todd came up with the fireworks and I just switched it out the little hearts at the end. Oh, that's so cute. Oh yes, a little heart. That's so cute. Yeah. So that's all I got for this week. I love it. All right, very cool. Thanks for showing us. I like the little glitchy things that come up too. That's kind of nice. Those are not on purpose. I know, they're not, but you know, they look great. I think it's just because it's so much more important. We've shown all the LEDs white. I spent a lot of time in video editors to get that effect, so I really like it. I know, yeah, the glitching is cool. It's running on two five volt 18 amp power supplies and C Grover in the meeting said, I'm running of juice through that it's almost like an arc welder. Yeah. I'm going to try to plan to add a couple more, see how many I can add without starting a fire. Well, it looks cool. I appreciate it. And thank you. And you have a lovely night and week. All right. Of course, thank you, DJ Devon. That's okay. That was a cool project. Yeah, thanks so much for coming by and thank you everyone for making this the best half an hour of the week. Every single week. And thanks to GP last week for hosting. We'll be back in next week. We'll see everyone in just a few minutes. Ask an engineer starts in five minutes or so. Bye-bye everybody. See you on the other side.