 and welcome to the show we're here once again it's time for that thing right there it says it it's JP's product pick of the week that's me JP here we are in my workshop here I've got all of my previous product picks of the week I think we're at number 53 this week can you believe it and I'm excited to get down to it so first thing I want to do is send you over here if you head on over to that URL that appears on screen it's gonna take you to this product page it's gonna give you a 50% discount all you have to do is point something at this QR code a camera of some kind or head to this URL it's product 1958 and head on over there you're gonna get the 50% off discount unbelievable during the live stream only so during this broadcast about the next 25 minutes or so put it in your cart and and check out you can order a maximum of 10 of them so we've gone in a backwards order so now let's track back even further to when Lady Ada first announced this product and then we'll dig into a bit of a demo so take it away Lady Ada radio silabs 4713 FM transmitter chip it's a teeny little chip that can do a lot it's an FM transmitter and it can also do RDS which is the radio radio data service that runs over FM there's FM stereo it's actually a really nice FM stereo job and I'll have a demo for it shortly and it just takes audio in and using iSquad C you can catch on micro controller we have Arduino code you can port it to another micro controller and then you send it commands to tell it what FM station you want to transmit on you tell it the kilohertz like or megahertz and then you can also use RDS which is the the way that sometimes if you're in a car like it'll say like the station name and the song was playing so it allows you to send that data so I don't have a pocket radio that has RDS it's rare for pocket radius to have it but we have on the tutorial I show how to use a SDR radio to get that data so you can transmit any data you want over FM and have it show up so over here I have an mp3 shield and it's connected to the FM radio and have a little antenna here and I'm just playing audio through it and last day check this was working so hopefully it's still working I don't see why it wouldn't be there's kind of a iSquad C and so yet just playing audio off of the micro SD card and the audio is coming out of the mp3 shield and into here and this is gonna go over there okay and over here I have a FM radio and let me see if I can get this to work so it's tuned into 101.5 which is the radio station that this is transmitting on but it is transmitting audio and it's playing that Ada bought theme so yeah you can use you know any FM receiver to receive audio and it sends it in stereo so that's like lovely so you're gonna tune into it is that what you're doing I did now I'm turning it off because it was it's loud disruptive but yeah you can you just tune in over FM and it even says like you have full bars signal and you have stereo as well okay I can turn it back up again okay all right that's that's the that's my demo it works over FM so actually that's how we do the testing we actually have this radio and you listen in oh really while it plays audio through it so you can make sure that this is actually a fun tester because you you you put it down on the tester and then you listen for like audio music coming through on the on the pocket radio okay all right and with that make your own pirate radio station yeah well I like that idea I want to make my own private pocket FM pirate radio station you know what I'm gonna do I'm gonna head over to my mystery cabinet of super drawers and get one hang tight for one second I said super drawers I'm back hey and here it is this is my product pick of the week it is the FM radio breakout this is a really cool little gizmo I'd never used it before I wish I had a long time ago when I was doing more escape room stuff because it's perfect for that in fact I'll show you a little demo geared towards that but this is I believe it's a psy labs or silicon labs chip and if you head on over to the product page let's jump right over there first of all if I refresh this we should see that price drop so it's half off right now you can get a maximum of 10 of these in case you got big plans perhaps you're doing something with a Halloween haunt it would be pretty cool to have people tune into a particular station or stations and this can do that the broadcast range is about 30 feet if you head to the product page you can take a look at some of the details on it and then click on the link to head over to the main guide and the main guide will give you a little info on the pinout and how to how to use the thing how to wire it up and use it and we've got some example codes for using an arduino using it in arduino code or using it in circuit python essentially it operates over i squared c so your library and code on your microcontroller are going to tell the broadcast chip on here things like power and frequency that's broadcasting at and allows you to then even change those things while you're broadcasting but then the actual audio source is going to be plugged right into this little stereo jack you got right here little 3.5 millimeter stereo jack and then that audio will get broadcast over FM which is really cool if you click on the download section of the guide on the last page you'll find the data sheet as well as a programming sheet from silicon labs and you can dive into some of the info there one important aspect is the frequency range that's supported which is 76 megahertz to 108 so megahertz I always get these wrong they're saying megahertz right there I think that's right so 76 to 108 so depending on where you are in the world you may have some portion of that on your FM dial and let's see what I want to do next actually is jump into my little down shooter here where you can see one that I've already got wired up so you can see here I just have a ground and power running from my microcontroller I'm using a feather nrf 52 no not at our 52 a feather RP 2040 the RP 2040 is powering it so I've got power ground and then I have a reset pin and the I squared C so serial clock and data and that's all we need in fact I think the reset pin might not always be strictly necessary but I used it so we have that in our example code and in our in our guide so what have I got going on here let me I'll pan out just a little bit here for a second I don't know if I'll refocus but you can see here I have a little gizmo that's a small Eurorack pod that's using a radio music from music thing modular which allows me to essentially play back wave files from an SD card but I can tune them in like radio stations to sort of further the metaphor and pick different tracks that I want to play or starting points on those tracks and I'm running it through a little effects processor and then I'm running it's output to my little FM breakout so now behind me here you can see I put up some some stuff to hide some of the distractions you can see I've got a little AM FM radio with its antenna my antenna coming off of the you can see it jiggling around they're coming off of the breakout is this little wire I'm just gonna hang that to get a nice signal and then I currently have this tuned into I think it's 103 roughly which is what I'm broadcasting at so what I'll do is let me turn up the volume on my radio you should hear that mixed in and let me know if the mix is bad I've got a mic on there so you can see if I've got or you can hear rather I've got a little sort of numbers station type of thing playing right now it's a real radio you can hear I got a nice clean signal on my FM coming off of the little breakout I'll go and change which file playing here so you can see I'm keeping the radio tuned where it was but now playing different audio you can tell that's a file that I'm playing and in fact what you'll be able to do with this is kind of anything you want to the audio so now I've got it you can hear this is sort of a clean signal coming through and I'm just gonna check on discord to hear that yes sounds good okay so what I'm gonna do is now process this through a little sort of delay box you can do some spooky stuff you can do some sort of escape room types of things in fact one thing I wanted to show here is let me let me tune this back in I'm gonna give a clean signal but I'm gonna tune it back into something that we can discern okay so now what I'm gonna do I mean turn that down for a second while I show you the code bring up circuit Python code that I have here and where do you go there you are so in the code I'll jump back in a second and take a look at this but I just want to show you this demo right now I have just a very simple thing set up which is it's gonna play for three second or six seconds rather on the initial frequency so 103 103.3 FM after six seconds it's actually going to change itself and I'm gonna tune it down to 90 90.3 so I'm gonna turn this up we're gonna play we should hear it play and then after about six seconds it's we're gonna get static or if there's some other radio station I'm picking up but this is more powerful than whatever I'm picking up locally so we'll hear it change then I'm gonna retune the dial down down to 90 and we'll hear our same audio get picked up this robot voice or computer voice so let me turn this up. Now I'm gonna resave. Start broadcasting. A couple seconds later it's gonna go out. And there it is again. So you can imagine that you could have this happen programmatically you could have it changing at random intervals you could use buttons just a simple button press to switch the frequency which is really cool for escape room types of things where you maybe want someone to solve a problem and then once they've solved it you can start broadcasting at a particular frequency and then maybe change that to a different one to give a different clue so a lot of really neat possibilities there as well as with about a 30 foot range you could set one of these up in your lawn or on your porch for a haunt and when people drive up to see your Halloween display or for trick-or-treating you could have a sign that tells them to tune into a particular station and get some sort of spooky music that you wanted to play or or other message creepy messages so that's just an idea of the kind of things you can do. If we look at the code here this is from our basic demo that we have I've cleaned it up just reduced some of the options in here for running it on different boards but this is essentially the key thing is importing this library the Adafruit SI 4713 library then we're setting the frequency we're telling this to start up I squared C bus we are then instantiating the the object here SI 4713 gets created on the I squared C line then we tell it what frequency we're gonna be broadcasting on as well as the power and that's almost all all that it takes is now configuration that happens if you want to do the RDS and that's kind of the other piece of this the RDS is the radio data service I think it stands for but it is how you end up with some info on your usually car stereo display that tells you the artist and song now I can't do that in here because it's like lady I don't have a sort of pocket radio or portable radio that has that but what I did is I went into my Jeep earlier and recorded something and I want to I want to actually do this this is a first let's see if this actually works I prepared a Instagram post earlier and I've just posted it right now and it looks like it's posted what I'm gonna do is head on over to my browser and check out the Adafruit Instagram we'll see that demo play we might not be able to hear it sometimes that'll cause echoes and issues but let's see Instagram and let me go to the Adafruit one not mine and bring that up okay so here you can see this is the post I just put up there and I'm logged in let's see do I have a better way to do so well one thing is you can see it right there right let me let me zoom way in you can see on that one image whoops I'll show you it on my phone how about let me let me go to the down shooter that I do I didn't want to give it away earlier so let's move our demo and that'll work like that okay let's pop back to the down camera you can see here it's just gonna it's gonna loop okay so we start out I'm on FM 103.1 I think I'm you'll you'll hear this if you go to the Adafruit Instagram I'm playing some little synthesizer music over it and now when I press my info button on my radio it says Adafruit goth radio and that's again that's the the demo code has that there but you can change what your I believe station name and whatever the secondary piece of info you want is called song name or something like that so that's you can go check that out in in stereo over on on Instagram if you check that out but let's see is there any questions let's see radio data system as Devo Dessa says that's what that is hi Dave hi Johnny Bergdahl nice to see you and yes Altima mentions neighbors are shaking the radio is not understanding what's going on right you got to be careful with this stuff so you don't get the FCC knocking on your door but this this power level you don't need a license to do this so you can set up a very small pirate radio station which is pretty cool let me see what's happening over on our discord doctor says if you have multiple set up together you could have it jump between radios in a haunted house each module talks to one radio could have blank audio sent to the ones you want to be quiet oh yeah really neat I mean just consider the possibilities you've got a microcontroller telling this what broadcast frequencies to send on if you pair this with something like the music maker featherwing you could also be playing the audio right on the same device you you know what I have here is sort of external you could have a tape recorder a CD or something like that or your phones headphone out if you have such a thing but if you use something like SD card based wave files or mp3's running on circuit python and you have that audio out going to the audio in through a 3.5 millimeter stereo you can control everything right on one device which is super super cool let's see air wand says I think the demos are selling me on this hey good that's that is my express goal here is to get people to think these are cool if they think they're cool I want to stay on his arm but I think it's pretty cool and maybe go pick one up for a nice discount today all right let's see rich sad happy birthday by the way rich rich sad says when they were teenager I built linear amp from a library book visit by the black fans oh that was probably a little too powerful huh all right well I think that's going to do it yes so let's let me let me just remind you if you want to go check this out head on over to this website right here it's adafruit.com slash product slash 1958 you can pick up the FM transmitter with rds rbds for $9.98 half price just during this show so that'll go away right after the show so if you want to get some go and get them now and I think that's gonna do it right so let me go ahead and prep this to put it on the wall that one here by the way this comes with some header pins you can solder in to put on a breadboard or onto a little proto area if you have say a feather that has a little proto area or onto a perma proto and then you've also got this nice long piece of wire to use as your antenna I've got this one all stranded out here hung so that's the product pick of the week it is the FM transmitter breakout where does it go what's the next peg I think it's that one right there there we go all right thanks everyone for stopping by for adafruit industries I'm John Park this has been JP's product pick of the week and I will see you next time bye bye