 Lady. What is this? Hi everybody. It's time for show and tell. It's me Lady Aida with me, Mr. Lady Aida We're here on show and tell here in stream yard. Yeah, we're doing some more broadcasting experimentation. So you see a new background Yeah, we're experimenting with optimizing our Broadcast capability so we can do more shows and also take care of a young leg all at the same time Okay. Well, I we've got still show and tell as usual come on by Get some folks from the inner fruit Community showing off projects that they're working on. Hey, it's a new year. Great times over. Yeah I got I'm gonna I'm starting versus happy new year starting off. Okay, so my project that I'm working on is Let me add this Well, let me first start off for the folks who didn't know Here is our lady Aida the different factory and there is a baby So of course the first thing that I needed to do was get a old-timey Goffy goffy Baby pram carriage pram. So the idea is so this this looks okay, but it needs some work so the idea is to not only make it look goffy and Adam's family Tim Burton II, but also add some cool electronics and stuff like that. It's also very big Like you could fit in it. It's huge. Yeah Yeah, it's it's a machine size bed. Yeah, it's it's old. It's it's not not quite a hundred old years old But it's not pretty close So the idea is I'll post some photos as I'm restoring this and doing some things And it's too big for our apartment Because we have a tiny apartment, but it can be a data for factory So it'll be a data for factory bringing you to the data for factory And then maybe we'll be able to go around New York with it and more but it's kind of cool. It's heavy It looks like a giant coffin on wheels That's what you can expect From me because that's that's how I roll. Oh literally, okay It's my project. All right, I'll come back with progress photos. Yes. Okay. So first up We're starting with Aaron. Hey, Aaron Hello, Aaron. Hello. I have been working with Nudes is like a little LED noodley thing. You just hook each end up to a coin cell battery and the thing lights up So I just published a tutorial on how to put these things in your costumes They're really cool for little standalone things. So I have like a just a mask here And all I did was solder it to a little 3d or rather to a three a coin cell battery holder Whoops, it's got a switch on it turn it on and I just lined the eyes and I've got a super cool Costume piece. It's really easy to do. Um, I did the same thing with this hat. This one actually this coin cell holder has a You can say it or not Also from the shop, it's got different modes. So we can make it blinky so really easy to use one of these things but then I wanted to Use a microcontroller because I like microcontrollers. So I made this zoot suit also and I'm gonna see if it can make a little darker And just kind of put some subtlety in here I put a couple of them behind the lapels and one inside the pocket square and I hooked this up to a cutie pie So I can actually control these with software now. I can make them blink I can make them come on in different Configurations or dim, you know, so there's a lot you can kind of do with it Which is it's pretty cool. Um, these are real comparable to el wire, but there's no big Inverter to deal with and they don't make noise and so they're they're pretty cool They're really easy to add to costumes. So I've been having fun playing with them I love the subtlety that you're just it's not it's not visible like el wire It's just kind of a backlight or a diffuse effect Yeah, um, it is it is easy to make them subtle. I think it also be real easy They're super flexible. So it'd be real easy to weave them in and around and make interesting shapes and that sort of thing Um, so I don't know what else could be done. There's all kinds of stuff That's like possibilities are limitless and I know a lot of cosplayers They'll do a character that has just like one bioluminescent power or something You know, I've seen people put like, you know, one stripe of LEDs up their arm or something like that And these would be just perfect for characters like that Yeah, you'll also don't have to figure out a way to make the el wire Not sound like it's screaming or get electrocuted by the el wire, which like I made I made fun el wire extensions And it was like super awesome until um, I you touched my neck. I was like, ow Yeah, you don't want to wear those on your face like This is much better and it glows for hours and hours and hours. So like it has I haven't you know I put this coin cell in I've been wearing this I wore it out several times if for photo shoots and stuff like that and it's still going real strong. So Yeah, it's a lot of fun. All right. So cool product much air. We'll be showing your video tonight. I'm asking engineer All right, Liz How are you doing? Good. How are you? Happy new year again for doing some of the shows while we were out and also um pre cog future thanks in advance for taking on a hosting uh Showing tell coming up soon too. Of course. Yeah, no problem. Super fun to do. Uh, so I've got um This is a personal project I've been working on kind of last month or two Which is a big uh, kind of interface for my modular synth And it's using a pico and circuit python to basically generate these melodies But as you can see it's getting a little out of hand. So I had some pcbs made so this is let me autofocus Or manually focus Uh, so this is a gate in pcb. So it's a gate in circuit that changes the five volt logic down to three Uh, and so I'll use a couple of these to be able to send a gate in signals to um the The project and then this is a breakout for the the DAC stem of board, uh, which has four outputs. Um, and Just kind of simple, but it'll alleviate some of this breakout. Uh, I'm this spread board stuff I made an kind of identical breakout for an ADC as well And one thing I want to point out is I use the penguin stuff that uh, phil b worked on And to do that I was able to bring in This kind of like old school looking fonts and I was also able to bring in emojis as a separate That was something I was going to do when you do it and that's awesome It's cool because there's so much art available and that was so hard to do Yeah, so um, and I I really like how the font came out Guy like that retro font and then so basically like I did one Font um for the vector and then I just put these on a different Font type and I was able to run the script that way and it brought it in I love that emojis that came out I mean, it was one of the things I wanted to do because I wanted to like again and can do a board that had Something that was emoji and I just like like I never got to it So I'm just like that you because I didn't know that it would work or not. I was assuming it would but you know Yeah, everyone's pcb art looks better now when you use these tools like the fonts look better Super sharp. There's so much free artwork. That's fantastic because everyone wanted to have like Unified ui's and here's like what music looks like and all the you know Phone art that people have posted Yeah, there's and stuff like that so like that looks That is a beautiful pcb and it probably didn't take too long. You didn't have to redesign all the artwork Exactly. Yeah, it was super simple and philby's guy is great. Um for using penguin. I was able to do it with I'm on windows. So I use the Linux subsystem to to run it on Ubuntu and it worked great and so Got these pcb's that will clean up the spaghetti and Yeah, go from there All these tools kind of work like microsoft embrace linux in a while ago and like you can actually do all this stuff It doesn't matter what operating system Yeah, all kind of we can get it to all the work now. It's not just like well Not for me. So, okay. All right. Well, thanks so much. Those All right emojis jepler is going to show you something really awesome jeff got the jeff of the day award I differed by the way Oh jeff you're muted. You're muted We're gonna take away the awesomeness is is is is seeping through regardless. Oh, I thought I even checked that So here's the end result which is circuit python is displaying to my standard hdmi monitor Uh, but the how we get there is a little bit weird right now. And so if you go back to the overhead, I can Talk about that for a second So this pico here is running circuit python with display io and It's just connected with five wires. By the way all the time now I am making these uh little headers to plug in the wires in the order. I need that's That's the greatest thing. So going with with the so-called four wire, uh display protocol over to here And this is a very cool board from pi moroni called the pico dv and it's got a dvi connector and some crazy smart guy person figured out How to create a valid? I think it's technically an hdmi signal from an overclocked raspberry pi pico So I added to that the smarts to understand circuit pythons display io spi thing So circuit python Sends display commands to this guy and then this guy is controlling the monitor So anything you do with circuit python for display io you can put this with it and Uh show it on a monitor So we're kind of in the process of polishing this up and phil b is going to Turn it from something that runs to something that we can like actually Let people compile or maybe have a uf2 artifact that they can download And I don't know. This is really cool. What did I miss talking about? Now um This is kind of the dream. I think last week when we were on Ask an engineer. I was talking about my like circuit python 2023 like being able to Start with really basic programming and then work your way up to building like a full computer um This is just like yet another piece of of things like being able to display things Is next mode works and you know anything anything works now. Do you want to uh, hold that up again? Yeah, let's do the ripple and yeah like you if you you can type and it will it's a computer It's a computer, but it's on a dvi screen and it it's instant 640 by 480 And you guys do the pixel doubling to to make it right? So the the internally it's using a resolution. Uh, this is 400 by 240 Which is then scaled up to the standard resolution of 800 by 480 at 60 hertz Yeah, I think that's about how much ram we have I think that was like that's about how much ram we have You have to buffer the whole thing at two bytes per pixel. That's correct Yeah, they have other demos that that go up to higher resolutions But then they'll go down to like eight colors or two colors like black and white mode That's cool. Okay. This library is really neat. Uh, you should check it out if you're at all interested in this and the pico Do you need board just worked really smooth? Well, can you do with black and white mode? What's the biggest resolution with that? Um I will drop info about that in the discord chat and just because I don't want to get it wrong I've been trying to oh, yeah That would be cool. But it's only monochrome. Yeah, well Look at look at our we can we can do those cool atkinson dithered images right there. Oh, yeah, you can do the max stuff Yeah, I have I have It's like 768 by 412. It was a it was a weird one. It was a little different ocean whatever Yeah, so In theory, you could do this with the camera In theory, you could do this with the camera. Oh, you can take the camera wait, but you don't need the pio for the camera I'll get back to you on that. Okay. Go figure that out this way. That's gonna be It should I think it should work. I think it should work. I'm curious. All right. Thank you Okay, someone should find out jebler Uh, so you give the jeff or the week award next week as well. Yeah. All right, uh, sweet and all right on that topic feel B a What original mac resolution was 512 by 384. Thank you the numbers are just etched. Yeah They're they're currently burnt in Yeah, uh, hey, I have also been messing around with the the pico dv uh pico dv board From i'm aroni and that library pico dvi Um, like jeff says just amazing bit of code that somebody Came up with for that The gotcha with it is that you have to use the pico sdk to use it which is a you know command line stuff And you know if if you program for a bit that's that's no big thing, but it's not super beginner friendly It's not like arduino friendly. So i've been working on adapting that to work in the arduino ide Just as a library you can include and then you have access to the the gfx library Uh, you know all the stuff we do with drawing shapes and yeah It's funny. It's like you shrink down to the size of one of our tfts Yeah Yeah, so this is just a portal. These are neat these portable. Yeah Yeah, but uh being able to use uh the gfx library And then program it in arduino should I think make the whole idea of a lot more beginner friendly And you'll be able to you know Do microcontroller stuff to your television if you want to Yeah, it'll be really fun. I think we're rotated right now. There we go You know one of the other things is everyone has these giant flat screen tv's in their homes And they're just off a lot of the times or if they're on they're just like You know Selling your information or streaming or just doing something awful. Um, you could turn into a piece of art. That's not net connected You could have it with something you create Yeah, there's you know a picture frame and stuff There's lots of diy things you can do but it always involves, you know, like start with a raspberry pi You know, it's like cool. You can make this little little microcontroller, you know You can just Code on something and you're done it shows it was your beat right? The frame rate you get because you have that the version of the xyz it's incredibly fast because you're not bleeding the data over spi It's in going directly into frame buffer memory and then another core is pushing into hdmi at 60 hertz Yeah, so the frame rate is just even faster than the you know, the parallel displays we have because it's just You're just writing straight to the frame buffer. You know, yeah super buttery buttery buttery we like that phrase. All right, nice work. And also, um, it's cool to see your handy work on liz's PCBs that you send off that was neat. Isn't it cool? Super sharp All right. Okay. Well, thanks so much. All right, great. All right Live from the space coast and how are you? Hi everybody, um Yes, uh, fortunately I get to watch lots of rocket launches. It's way cool but, um, lately I got some pop-ups from ebay that said that a number of people were selling IBM pc at Class computers. I've got on the shelf just out of range. I've got a pc and two x teas um That I was showing a while back So I was eager to get my hands on an at which has a 286 processor and Came obviously after the x t um And these were crazy expensive, you know, like $6,000 machines back in the 80s and Not something everybody could afford, but um on ebay. They're going for about 300 dollars But you don't know what you're getting so I get the machine and The hard disk is not working There's You know, you There's cards and stuff hardware in the machine and you don't really know what's what until you actually open it up So, um, this machine actually had one neat card. This is a, um, token ring Uh adapter. I don't need the type of network adapter has all kinds of crazy uh neat electronics on it But it's not really useful anymore if No one's really going to use token ring or networking um, I actually bought a An ethernet card to see if I can kind of get that working, but that's going to be tough. Um, And I bought an ega card That's kind of standard for what I do. I don't go like purist, you know, 1986 or whatever because um It's kind of like, you know old cars, you know, you can put big engines in them and and do all kinds of fancy things So I like to rev things up. Um, so it has a bga card Um running at eight megahertz 286. I got some extra memory So it has some standard pc memory They call conventional memory and some extra memory that 286 could use called extended memory So it's got 1.4 meg in it which for a machine at the time is quite a lot. You can go up to several meg, I think But again, DOS will only use like 640. Um, unless you do some special tricks. Well, um One thing you can do on this machine is Run microsoft windows actually, but you can't run a really good version that might do something windows 3.1 was a decent version, but To me You really didn't get going until windows for work groups, which is windows 3.11 which only runs on 386 machines So this is kind of the last version of windows That would actually run on these lower machines And I was very upset at microsoft for You know starting to exclude the older machines because I had an older machine and I was trying to squeak every last Bit out of it. So anyways, um, that's the fun. I've been having. I've got a model m clicky keyboard here. So uh, that's kind of fun Souped it up with a three and a half inch floppy drive so Like lady eight of us doing a while back. I can play with all the floppies. Yeah And uh, it's it's a lot of fun It's neat to be able to go back and make uh machines come alive and do fun things with Yeah, these machines won't hurt your feelings What I like is that you you have like that the nasa meatball logo and you're actually living in the nasa meatball logo timeline Uh, where we never moved To the worm logo or whatever Was a lot of work. That's true. I think I have a little worm logo sticker somewhere over here and um, no, yeah, um Living living your best life in the 80s well, I am My last year college I did work for a jet propulsion laboratory like a student internship I I could have stayed but um, I don't think the southern california lifestyle was really what I was Looking for time travel now and just have all the things that you want from that sign period and all the things you don't want you can Leave behind. Okay. All right. This time period is great. And I'm loving it. Yay Well, thanks so much, Ann. All right and living her best life and best ibnpc life as well All right, we're gonna go to jp and then sith so jp take it away Hey Hello jb. Hey, sorry my camera Speaking of the southern california lifestyle uh Here we are and This is my project that I just finished up and wrote the guide on and it is in contrast to liz's project I stuck with the breadboard. I at one point was thinking about putting this on perma proto But I decided to rebuild it again on breadboard, but just do a much neater wiring job. So I I've just crowded it as neat as I could Without it taking forever, but but eyeballing it I got my lengths pretty good for the wire so that I could keep it all on breadboard What this does is uh, maybe gonna crash my computer like it did earlier today, but maybe not Or my call earlier. Uh, so I've got a copy of garage band running which is free on a mac and there's some similar DAW type synthesizer software you can get on other os's That can play back a general midi drum kit So midi usually when you send different note messages You'll be sending different pitches expecting a piano like thing to happen But in general general midi if you send things over channel 10 Then it says okay Note like 32 is the kick drum and 33 is a snare and 34 is a hi-hat So it was this really weirdly specific thing in midi It's how like your sound blaster sound card worked and a lot of other things work They just said okay if it's coming on channel 10 then don't treat it like pitches treat it like different samples So get played or different things get played. Uh, so this will just this is just a um Default patch that I created for this that's gonna play drums and it's gonna play over I've got 11 different drum voices or tracks on it. So as I change Patterns here you'll see the the kick pattern is this. This is the snare pattern This is my low tom medium tom high tom. So you can go through and pick what you're gonna play I'll play it now. You should be able to hear it Lots of cowbell So if I want lots and lots of cowbell Now I can hit this if I want to Speed it up. I'll just hold the button down for a second. It switches the use of this menu between picking tracks and picking the tempo So you can go through and Choose what you're gonna play in your Different drum patterns I set it up kind of the simple way which is we just have one pattern I'm not storing different patches or different patterns in there You could do that and in the guide that I wrote I I showed a little thing that when I hit stop just now It actually prints to your serial the current pattern in the same format that I use in the code So you could come up with a different pattern hit stop and then copy paste that as sort of a Interim method But if you wanted to extend the code to to do something like a double click on here Gives you a pattern select or ways to save in your code I leave that as an exercise to the to the viewer, but I did about this. It's it's working pretty well and uh, it's all One of our big old breadboards. That's some nice wiring too. I will I appreciate the fine wiring quality. Thank you. Thank you I've almost crowded all these under the sort of staples for ground and power. No, it's a mistake Pop out It looks great though. Thank you We'll be playing your music video as part of the intro of ask an engineer And some of your other videos from your shows during the week and thank you in advance jp for taking over next week's Show and tell you'll be the host and then we're going to figure out what we're doing We have um some raspberry pi visitors. Um, if we could do a live show with them We will if not, we'll do a pre-record and we shall work things up. But thank you jp for My pleasure, which we're checking to Okay, thanks guys Seth play us out. How you doing? Hey, Seth. Hi. All right. So I have been working diligently over like the last year or so On and off trying to make my own watch Um, I had shown off the bcb before but I finally got it into a little case, right? Oh, that's nice And so I I didn't want to reinvent watch bands. So, um, I figured out a way to make the channels that fit The watch project where we're like, we're not going to reinvent watching closures and bands Yeah, so I just uh, I made a little enclosure for it and right now it's just running an rp2040 and uh I run a little tft display. So it I think it gets like 11 or 12 hours of battery life if you just Intermittently check the time But I've I've had a lot of ideas and for how to make it better and uh, Hopefully I'm going to get a a nice guide put together for it because I know the the learn guide has where we can do user Learn guides now. So Hopefully I can get something Good together and and maybe get a few of the pcb's made with the the newer version or even maybe even the rp2040 version to You know help everybody else Enjoy It's just subtle things like just simple timekeeping is uh, how do you get a watch that just tells time? yeah, and uh The next version i'm hoping to do some some bluetooth because the the nrf chips are are back in stock everywhere and And went not and uh, yeah, and now I also have this other little thing here So a while back when the rp2040 first came out. I made a little e-ing display for it, but um Obviously have some bugs to work out on there But I I swapped the pins on it, but uh, I was able to run the little test the size test on it and uh Thankfully you guys had all the driver library necessary to make this work And I didn't have to go to go hunting Sweet all right good stuff. Um, keep us posted on the watch project We'll put up on the blog when you're ready to share the files or like whatever You know if you if you put some stuff up there, maybe some folks leave and write some apps for you for your Right. Yeah, definitely. I love that. All right. Thanks so much. Thanks. Perfect timing All right, that was our show until thank you so much everybody. This is our favorite half an hour of the week Every single week is gonna be back. Um, jpl be in the doing the show next week and list And then we're doing our rotation with some data for team members and more we have some surprises We have lots of videos. We got a lot of stuff going on. Thank you so much yet Thank you so much everyone for joining us being part of this adventure ask an engineer start some two minutes