 Welcome to the show, it's me, John Park, and it's time for John Park's favorite things of today, also called JP's product pick of the week. I'm a little rattled because my computer just exploded into a huge fireball. Oh no, it just went dark. It kind of sorta shut off, sorta didn't shut off. It does this funny thing that it loves to do to me. But I think we're back. Yay, thanks everyone in the Discord, by the way, for letting me know the status. Seems like we're running on both YouTube and Twitch for sure. So thank you, and I mentioned our Discord, so hey, let me bring that up right there. If you're wondering where the chat is, if you're around Twitch or somewhere like that, we have the chat up on YouTube, and we've got this one right here. This is our Discord channel, Discord server actually. So head to ateafrew.it slash discord, and then look for the live broadcast chat channel. That's where all these good people are. Hello Dexter, Evil Dave of Canada, BlitzCity, Tyath, SeaGrover, ScottyBeamiup. Welcome, thanks for joining, and over on YouTube, Hello Tackle the World. You heard the music, yay. Yeah, the music was playing along fine, and then went, pew, gone. So I'm very happy it's back. Let's see, so next thing I wanna do is say, hey, head on over here. If you wanna check out this week's product pick, and you wanna get a great discount on it, I believe it's 50% off, we'll be taking a close look at it today, but if you want this product, throw it in your cart, and check out before the end of the show, or right around the end of the show, you will not need a coupon code or anything like that. Just head to this URL right here, or head on over to that QR code, and it's got a half off price reflected in the price. So thank you to our products team and Jelly for taking care of that each week. I stashed a bunch of these, I believe, and put them right into the store, right at the beginning of the show. Now this is kind of funny. Typically, at this point, I say, hey, I'll have Lady Aida tell us all about the new product pick, and then I'd go back in time a little bit, like a week before or so, and play the product video, except this is the first one I'm doing on my show here that came out while Lamor was on leave, so we don't have a Lady Aida new, new, new video on this one. I believe I announced it during my live stream on Wednesdays, but I'm not gonna play that. Instead, I'm just gonna talk to you about it live right here, so let me, first of all, show you what I'm talking about. Look at that gorgeous little guy right there. This, right here, is my product pick of the week this week. It is the 5x5 NeoPixel BFF Best Friend Forever for Cutie Pies and Jow Boards. Let's jump down into this down shooter, and I'll tell you what this thing is. I'm gonna put that right there. Let me set one setting. Do-do-do-do, here we go. I'm gonna bring up a camera over here. I'm gonna grab something to point with. So, first of all, you will notice that this is the same size as one of our Cutie Pie Boards or the Seed Jow Board. It has the same set of pins, and it hooks right onto the back of it. So, you can think of this sort of like a shield if you're familiar with that terminology from Arduino or a feather wing from the Feathers, except it goes on the backside of it, kind of like a little hugging backpack. That's what it is. It's belly-to-belly, I don't know. But I'll show you how that goes together in a second. What this one is, we have a few of these BFFs. What this one is, is a set of 25 little teeny-tiny Neopixels, RGB LEDs that are individually addressable. When you connect this to the Cutie Pie, what you're doing is you're connecting up power ground and a data line, which is on pin A3 by default. You can send it commands using the Neopixel Library inside of Arduino or in circuit Python, and light up these LEDs. I'll show you some demos of that in a second. You can also change that pin. You'll notice right here we have, by default, this jumper here is connected. So that's pin A3, it's telling you, which is one of the pins over here, actually. So pin A3 is the default. You can sever that with a little edge of a hobby knife and then solder a blob across either A2 or A1 if you want to change that default line. Or you can use this big, huge in pad right here. You can also use the plus and the minus for ground and voltage there. So you can drive this a bunch of different ways, but by default, it just hooks right onto the back of your Cutie Pie. And I've got one, let me see, let me grab one of these just for demo, mechanical demo purposes. This one has no pins on it, but this comes with a set of these little header pins. So you can use socket pins on one side. You can solder them directly to each other. You've got a bunch of options. I'll show you a couple of ways I've done that. So there's a typical Cutie Pie right there. These go with USB up on this side and you can see the NeoPixel BFF there says USB up. So these go just like that. And the reasoning behind that is that such a small board, we want you to still be able to access the reset. And sometimes you've got a boot and a reset button. See the status NeoPixel on this side. So we don't want to cover all that up. So rather than a shield that goes on top, it's this little belly to belly best friend forever hugging because they love each other. So let's take a look before I go into a demo over at our main page for this. And I'll cover a couple little interesting facts about this. Let me bring up my notes here. What do I want to tell you? First of all, I'm going to refresh this page. Let's see what happens when I refresh that page. We should get them hopefully in stock. We have 51 of them in stock and they are $4.48 right now. So that's half price, a maximum of 10 per customer. And like I said, you don't need a coupon code. So just put a bunch of these in your cart, maybe get some QT Pies. This will run with any of the QT Pies we have and show boards. So for QT Pies, what do we have? A M0, M0 Hackspress, if you add some memory to it. We have the RP2040s. We have a couple of different ESP32. We have the Pico. We have the ESP32 S2, ESP32 S3. I might even be missing some others. So any of those QT Pies, you can hook this to. And grab my notes here. It is 25 of these little one and a half millimeter NeoPixels in the five by five grid. These are actually SK6805 is the type of exact part type of NeoPixel this is. Like I said, it's default is A3. So in your code, you'll tell it that your data inline for the NeoPixels is on A3. You can solder up wires to change. If you have a different pin you need to use other than the ones that are on the jumper, then you can run a little tiny wire up to this in port up on the top there. Just cut the existing trace on A3. This uses by default configuration, it's gonna use the five volt off of your USB-C power but it's fine to run it on three volts. It's also fine, you don't need to level shift it with these particular types of NeoPixels. They're happy to run on five volt power with three volt logic. You can get away with pretty much any combination of three and five volts that you want. So let's see. Next thing I'll do is let me go ahead and give you some demos of this. Jump over to this nice little view here. And I'm just gonna zoom out just a little bit and I'll need to refocus. So what I did was I've, I'll take this apart once I demo it running but I've added a little bit of LED diffusion plastic on the top of it just to make it record nicer on camera. Sometimes frame rates are a little funny on camera and so you're not gonna see this running as smooth as it does in real life but it's running beautifully smooth, buttery smooth. And I'll show you some code examples. So here, over my code view, you can see I've got, this is a variation on some Todd bot Comet code and one of the things about it is lying to it about the number of LEDs you have so that it makes full Comet trails before it loops back around to the other side. So you'll see I'm lying there when I say 40 LEDs. It's actually 25 but that's part of the way this one works. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna grab some different code. Here is some code from Jepler and this is available in the learn guide. So I'm just gonna paste that in there and hit save. So here is some nice little marquee text code. Let me try this without actually without the diffuser on that one. Is that clearer? It's a little clearer maybe. It's quite bright but here you can see there's an example here of using Adafruit display text. So this uses the bitmap font, display IO, rainbow IO and allows you to type little messages that can scroll across the screen or individual letters. One of the things you'll notice about this is it's really nice for wearable stuff because it's so small if you put a little acrylic and you don't need a laser cutter for this. I know we often laser cut these things. I cut this piece on the band saw. So you can cut it with a hand saw. You can probably score it and snap it if you need and we sell some of this. This is this LED diffusion acrylic which is smooth on one side and has a little bit of a texture on the top and is translucent. It's really nice for diffusing neopixels. So you can make jewelry with that if you want to. Here's a fancy text code that Jepler wrote and this allows you to do some emojis. So you can see a little heart there at the beginning and you can see in my code there this is heart bitmap which tells you if the pixel is lit or not in a little heart pattern. I think it's sideways. I think this is turned sideways. This is why it doesn't look like a heart the way I'm looking at it right now. And another one we have is this. Actually let me grab this one. This is really cool. So Liz is working on a little weather project that I believe uses an ESP32, S2 or S3 version of the cutie pie. You can see I commented out a bunch of code because I just wanted to use this little test section that Liz included which allows it to run through its little icons, this little weather icon. So she painstakingly created these really cute little icons. I'm gonna drop my exposure real quick on this so you can see it a little better. These look so cute. So these are different weather icons for sunny, rainy, stormy, stormy with lightning, cloudy. There's a little rain with a little purple cloud there. Super cute. In her real version, she's using an ESP32 with Wi-Fi connectivity so it can go off to the weather websites and grab your real info and display the proper icons there and the actual info. Let's see, can you see them like that? Yeah, it's a little blurry. And then the last one I wanted to show, we'll see if this one works for visuals and sound. This was a really cool program that Todd Bot wrote. I saw he had, he had it on running on a different board that was, you can see there it says it was on an eight by eight matrix. I just modified it to run on this little five by five matrix. And what this one gives us is little bouncing balls and you can probably hear these are triggering MIDI software that I have running on the computer and it's just telling it these four notes and when to hit them. So it gives it a little bit of chance as far as the types of note clusters that you get and the order of the notes that you get. And I can turn, let me turn that down real quick. Where did you go? There you are. In fact, I will just close that there. So I thought that was really a neat use for this. You can see here this has a provision for changing the number of balls that you have bouncing around in there. So here's just a little, a little five by five, it's kind of steppy. And I turned down, there were longer comment trails on these, I turned them down. But you can get quite a few on here and they still perform really nicely. It makes just a cute display too. You don't have to do the MIDI triggering. It's also just a really beautiful display that you can see there. So yeah, Liz said it reminds me of one of those engines on the OP1. There's a, yeah, there's a Fates and Norns, the MonoNorns, a bunch of programs that do ball bounce based note playing, which is a lot of fun, this reminds me of that. So let's see, let me throw the rain code back on here again. And you can see just in your normal, normal use, other than me lying to it and saying it, I have 40 LEDs, I'm gonna tell it the truth here. Okay, I actually have 25. And you can see I just, I don't get as much separation between those comment trails. And I think I can change this to dim quickly, right? Oh, wrong way, let's do like a hundred. There you go. So now you can kind of see these 25 neopixels. So it's five sets of five that I have running down there. The way it works is the same as any neopixel thing. So I've got LEDs equals neopixel dot neopixel. I tell it what pin. So in this case, it's on board A3. Number of LEDs, brightness, which I've set pretty low here, 0.1, and then turn off auto write. I'm gonna bring back my original version of that there. Actually, you know what? Let me go back to the bouncing. That one was looking nice. Okay, so let me use this one. And I'm gonna show you a way to make this a sort of more like a wearable or a prop type of thing, which is you want to battery power it, right? So let me switch to a bigger camera view here. And I'll turn exposure back up. So you can see what I'm putting together. I'm gonna try to focus this a little better. Okay, so what I'm gonna do right now, you can see I have this just plugged in over USB-C. I'm using some headers here, header pins and sockets to plug it into my little QT pie. Unplug that. I'll take off that diffusion shield. So there you can see we've got little sockets I put on there, little pins I put on there. By the way, I had a problem with this board, so I actually just severed these two I squared C pins on it, I can't remember why, but ignore those, that's not normal. And this is set up for USB use. However, we do have another BFF and I found a kind of chunky but cute way to add the battery BFF and a battery. And I'm using these long stacking headers in a very particular configuration that allows me to fit one of these little batteries in. I think this is a 400 milliamp hour or a 420, 400 milliamp hour battery into there. The battery BFF has a little on-off switch. I'm gonna flip that to on just cause I can't really reach that very easily once I put this together. You kind of could poke it with a stick, but I'll just turn that on. And then if I can remember the arrangement I want for this, I can plug, let's do it like this. I can plug in my Neopixel BFF there and then I'll plug in my cutie pie right there. So you can see that just powered up. And now we have a cute little chunky blob of jewelry or cosplay prop that you could fit into a pretty small area, right? You can, let me switch over to this view here. So you can imagine if you have a little prop of some kind or costume piece that you wanna include this in. You can spread things out if you need to do jewelry where you hide the battery and keep things flatter, but for a case where something could be chunky, like a little readout on something or if you wanna make a small fake television set for your Legos or something like that, hide it behind the wall like that. This gives you a pretty nice little battery setup and this is a charger here, that battery BFF, so you can plug in USB-C and charge that battery. So there it is in action. Let's take a look over at the Learn Guide now. So here is the Learn Guide for the 5x5 Neopixel Grid BFF. You can see here, I like this actually, I think maybe Liz did this photo using some colored headers. And if you match up the socket and pin sides of these, you can be a little more assured that you plug things in, right, because these are symmetrical, so you can plug them in backwards, you don't wanna do that. I believe we have diode protection on this, so you shouldn't hurt anything, but I wouldn't risk it. So the guide will tell you all of the interesting facts about it. It will give you the pinout, so you know how to connect things both in the sort of most simple way, as well as if you wanna start changing jumpers or soldering to your little inputs there. And then there are examples in CircuitPython and Arduino for using Neopixel Library with this. And then if you head over to the Downloads section, you can get the datasheet on these Neopixels, the SK-6805s, as well as some of the CAD drawings through your models and fritzing for this, and here's the little schematic and fab prints. So let me see, I'll check out our chats and see if we have any questions over in there. Yeah, Todd says, I do that all the time. I blow out pins on them and say, I'm just gonna sharpie that they're bad. Yeah, you can see there, I've got the little red pins there for what I did or I don't remember anymore. Let's see. The AZA asks a question, Neaport, and let me bring up my Discord actually so you can read along. Neaport, how much air gap to leave between the ESP32S2 or the Pico and the BFF? Yeah, I think, I actually can't remember, I don't think I have one of the ESP1s. So those have the processor on the backside. Since these are bottom to bottom in a lot of cases, you don't have the hottest stuff touching because it's not going on to the top. And I think the ESP32 is on the top, yeah. So you should be fine. You might put a little piece of Cap-Ton tape there if you wanna really set them together and just use header pins with no plastic in the middle. You can really get it super, super streamlined down. Liz admits that it was a fun side effect, but not intentional. Yeah, I almost went with those to color code it, which would be kinda cool, but I wanted to use the low profile ones, which then I didn't need to in the end because I put this in the middle of it. All right, well, I think that's gonna do it. Don't forget, head on over to that URL right there. That'll take you to that page where your big, big discount is awaiting you. Hopefully we still have some in stock. Let's see, let me refresh this here. 29 in stock, yeah. So you can grab a few more before the show is over and you'll get your discount. And I think that is gonna do it. So let me grab one and put it into, I kept the bag, which makes maybe that, maybe a little easier for me to grab that off the rack later. That's my product to pick up the week this week. It is the five by five Neopixel BFF for Cutie Pie and Jow Boards. And that's gonna do it for today. So thanks everyone for stopping by for Adafruit Industries. I'm John Park and this has been JPE's product pick of the week. Week, week, week, week, week, week.