 Hello and welcome to the show. It's me, JP. It's time for JP's product pick of the week. And here we are, nearly on time. Someone made the comment. YouTube Pixel made the comment. I thought trains showed up on time. In some countries, yes. Sorry for the delay. I have no excuse, except it's slightly rainy out and that just freaks me out in Southern California. So here we are. We have got an exciting product pick this week, one that I really love. And we have plenty in stock and we have a humongous discount for you today. So the first thing I'll say is, if you're new to the show, you might not know that we broadcast this show from inside the product page. And you can get there with that QR code or this URL right here. Head to that product page. You'll find out what the product pick is. You will see a 50% off, half off. I'm going to double check that myself. Let's see. Sure enough, half off today. Maximum of 10 per customer. If you have big plans, you want to get a bunch of these and get up to 10, no resellers, just normal customers. Not to call resellers abnormal, but you know what I mean. So head on over there and you will find out what the product pick is. You can throw them in your cart. You don't need a coupon code or anything like that. All you got to do is chuck them in your cart, hit buy and go, do that before the end of the show. The price will go back to normal at the end of the show. So this is only during this time. We don't take rain checks, no back orders, nothing like that just in real time right now. So let's see. I also want to say hi to people over in our chat. Thank you for showing up over in our Discord chat. If you're wondering where that is, head to adafrew.it slash discord and you will get an instant invite. You can head to our live broadcast chat channel inside of our server and that's where people are hanging out. We've also got the chat happening over on YouTube. Pixel says it's sunny and beautiful here next door in Phoenix, Arizona. Good for you. We've been getting lots and lots of rain. Our yard is so green. That's unexpected and weird for LA. So let's see. Before I go any further, what I want to do is have Lady Aida introduce us to this product pick. So please take it away, Lady Aida. To the Grand Central Inform, maybe we'll go to the overhead because this is a pretty epic board here. So yeah, so it's the largest Circuit Python compatible board we've got. It's also one of the largest Arduino compatible board we've made. It features the SAMD51. It's a 120 megahertz processor, Cortex-M4. It's got like DSP instructions and random number generators and a cache. It's a really wonderful chip. It's got one megabyte of flash, 256K of RAM. So it's just can do anything really. Stuff any data you want in RAM and you can process it quite fast. The SAMD21 didn't make it chip with this many pins. We couldn't make a mega-shaped one. Only the SAMD51 finally came out with 128 pin chip, which we needed. We needed that many pins to have all the pins do something. So we've got 70 GPIO total. We've got 16 analog inputs, two analog outputs, tons of timers, PWMs. I think it's got eight circums, you can have eight I squared C, I SPI and UR connections. You put eight megabytes of SPI flash on there, which you can use an Arduino or in Circuit Python to hold your code. There's a debugging port right here if you want to connect your J-Link or that Mel Iced. MicroUSB for data upload and debugging. You've got your standard five to 12 volt DC jack and we added an on-off switch so you can easily turn on or off. We had a little bit of space so we thought we'd add a SD card. A lot of people use these large boards for driving CNC devices or 3D printers and so having an SD card slot could be really handy for storing files on it. Built-in NeoPixel for status, LEDs as usual, power supply as usual and just like a ton of pins. It's a three-volt logic board so it's not gonna be a perfect drop in replacement for a Mega but given that the Dewey didn't really quite launch very well and it had a bunch of problems. I never got I squared C working very well in the Dewey. We think that this is kind of the next step up from a Mega so if you liked a Mega but you're like, well, I want more and I want it faster because the Mega was only running at 60 megahertz so this is running at 120 and it's got caching and it's just super, super fast and that's not even including all the extra Cortex M4 speedups that it's got, it's just blazing fast and you get now all the pins to use with it. So we've got Circuit Python and Arduino support for this. Even though it seems like a really big deal it's just a really big Metro M4 and we've had that out for at least six months. So we're kind of excited to see what people do with it. It's got this beautiful silk screen on the back. This is the ceiling of Grand Central Station. So if you go to New York and you go through Grand Central if you look at the top of the roof of Grand Central you'll see this graphic which Philby has adapted for the Grand Central silk screen. Got that train theme but it's just grand and it's central. So toot toot, check it out. Sudden music, hey, yes, toot toot indeed that made me laugh and then I got, I lost my cool. So here it is, check this out. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. That right there is the product pick of the week this week. It is the Grand Central Metro M4 at SAMD51 Express. So this is in that really nice, huge, bigger than a Uno, bigger than the sort of normal Metro. Here's a M0 Metro Express. This is the Grand Central, it's ginormous. It is the size of a Mega if you're familiar with the Arduino Megas. Like Lady Aida said, it has that Grand Central Station ceiling art on the back there, the theme there, the train theme there is unmistakable. This is the closest to a train theme shirt I had sort of that hickory stripe. But I wanna talk to you about this board a little bit. So let me go to this overhead view here. So what to say about it? So it's the at SAMD51, so that's the Cortex-M4 chip. Fantastic for running circuit Python as well as Arduino. This is running at 120 megahertz, it's fast. It has floating point math support for DSP instructions. It has a mega flash 256K of RAM, eight megs of Q-spies. So you can store files on there. You've also got an SD card there, a little micro SD card reader so you can read files as large of a file system as you can get to work on there. It has a 32 bit 3.3 volt logic and power. There are 62 GPIO pins broken out here, I believe. I think there are maybe 70 total, some of those go to some of the LEDs and things on the board there, but I think you can get it 62 pins, which is just an enormous amount of GPIO without having to go to expanders and use I2C and things like that. If you are building a project that has lots and lots of IO and needs a lot of speed and you wanna use circuit Python or Arduino, this is a really great board. It's kind of a go-to board. It's a great board to use just when you're prototyping things. You won't run out of IO on it very soon. You can just plug stuff right into the headers. This one comes with the header pins or the header sockets soldered right onto it. The, what else was I gonna say? The number of analog pins on it is one of the huge draws for me. It has 16 easily available analog pins. I think there are a few others scattered around that you can bring it up to about 20 without having to bodge wires into other things, but 16 right off the bat that are just labeled A0, the A15 inside of circuit Python, really easy to get to, which is a great number, of course, for music-based projects. Sequencer synthesizers, a lot of things tend to have 8 and 16 knobs that you wanna use or faders. So I'll show you an example project using 16 knobs on one of these, all analog reads. This also has the A0 and A1 real analog outputs. So if you need to do real stereo audio output, you can do it on this board using to the dual DAC that it has on there. There are eight hardware circum ports. So you can stack those up as eight UARTs, eight separate I squared C lines, eight separate SPI buses. There are 22 outputs that have PWM on it. There is stereo I2S output if you wanna go to a little breakout board for that. And it even has the 12-bit parallel capture port for doing video and pictures if you use a compatible camera board. And let's see, I'll show you, here's a couple of example projects I wanna show you, but actually, before I do that, let me head to the site here. Here is that image out of there. Here is the main page. So this is product 4064 and it is half price right now. So $19.98 we'll get you this amazing board, just a beast of a board. The data sheet for the chip is available here. So if you wanna go and check out, this is the, let's see which exact one it is. I think it says, let me go back a page. It's the SMD51P20A is the exact one. So you can check out the data sheet here to find out all of the details. Data sheet is available in the learn guide. So if you head to learn, I'll switch over to that page real quick. If you head to learn, here's the learn guide for introducing the Adafruit Grande, Grand Central, not Grande, Grand Central M4 Express. You will see probably the biggest pinout sheet we have just because of all these pins broken out. By the way, if you hadn't noticed the tail of the board here, these are double rows of separate pins. So those are not two ports per pin. That's actually separate pins there. You get a bunch of digital outputs. Those are digital 22 through 53, I think. So you get a whole bunch of input right there at the end. If you head to that learn guide, you'll see we've got setup instructions for updating the UF2 bootloader. You can set it up with circuit Python. You can set it up with Arduino as well. And we have a lot of guides. I think these will show up down at the bottom here. If you scroll on down, there are, let's see is this showing though, this is showing feature products. If we go back up to learn here and just use grand central. Adafruit Grande Chai Mocha Latte Centrale. Yeah, I made a thing called the Arduino Grande at one point and I confused those words in my head when I try to say grand central, I go for Grande. So pardon me, that's what's going on there. So here you can see there are a number of guides that are in the learn system using your grand central, including some camera ones from Phil. Here's a MIDI guitar. There's one of the robotic xylophone projects. So you can see a lot of these thing they have in common is they need a lot of IO. And this, especially with analog IO, this is a great way to do it. Also, this one, I'm gonna show you a variation on this one here, this grand central USB MIDI controller in circuit Python. This is a project I built a few years ago. So learn guide on it. And what I'll do is I'm gonna show you a new use I came up with for this proto board. So we do have a proto board that works with the grand central. Get my camera set up here for you. Just gonna put a smaller me in the corner there. Let me just fix this, hold on one second. Should do it. So what you can see here I have is just an external monitor that's actually running a VGA signal from an old laptop. And on that laptop I'm running Lumen, which is a video synthesizer software that mimics a hardware video synth actually. And I wanted, as you can see, there's a lot of knobs on here. In fact, there's these 16 knobs across the front of it at the top that are really useful when you're tweaking parameters. So what I've done is I've taken, here's my grand central and I have a proto board on top of it to which I've soldered 16 little potentiometers and wired those up to the 16 analog inputs on the grand central. And now you'll see if you look at this top, these top two rows of eight knobs as I turn the potentiometers in my grand central I'm changing the position of those knobs in the software and thereby I'm adjusting parameters on this video synth so we can change the horizontal and vertical sync and frequency and shape and different color things and effects so you can see it's really nice way to get a whole bunch of knobs or faders or other analog inputs into a project all thanks to the grand central having those 16 inputs. I'll go ahead and unplug this, move this over to the side and I'll show you, it takes a little careful wiggling especially because this double row at the end here you don't wanna bend those pins but there you can see grand central plus a proto board which means you have a whole bunch of proto area there that's how I set this one up to wire up a bunch of stuff, bunch of sensors, input these could also be input connectors interfacing to other ribbon cables and things like that off to your project so that's a nice use I think for the grand central is to just get a whole bunch of analog input that's real fast, really easy to work with. Another example actually I'll show you plugging directly in, put that back together there into, let's see, do I have enough? I do, yeah, I have a bunch of cable here so I have a flight stick, joy stick, an old fashioned parallel port or DB15 port one off to the side, I'll show you in a second but here you can see this is a connector with a bunch of cabling coming out of it and I went through a breadboard just to pick up some resistors along the way but with these kind of little jumper cables you can plug into, and I'm only scratching the surface here right, so this is, let me see if I can unsuction this thing, it's got suction cup feet, so this is an old fashioned joy stick, it's actually a radio shack flight stick, I got it at a thrift store recently and as I, let me switch over to this view of the world here, you can see here as I move the joy stick in a couple directions press the fire buttons, move the throttle, I get these values sent from my grand central over to the serial port there, I'm not actually doing anything interesting with them right now, but this has four analog lines on it so you could potentially get four of these joy sticks plugged into this with no problem and then take care of some buttons as well, you can see here I've just started to barely scratch the surface of digital button input, you can get tons and tons of buttons, these usually have four buttons and four analog lines based on the DB15 joy sticks there, so let's see, Pixel says you could have 62 Hello World Blink sketches running at once, that would be fantastic and what else is there to share, so let me, before I forget, I will post, that's the URL again, so if you wanna go throw some in your cart at the half price, normally these are 40-ish dollars, now they're 20, just during the show, no coupon code, just throw those in your cart, up to 10 of them and you can build nearly any project your heart desires, love the M4, we of course all experienced the part shortage for a while there, well we have gotten these at SAMD 51s back in stock, we're able to make boards that use the M4 so we've got a whole bunch of these, I don't think we're gonna sell out of these today, would be great if we did, go buy loads and loads of these and build some cool projects, we'd love to see what you build with them, this one also has a lot of the conveniences of, where did I just lost one, I put it over here, this one actually has a lot of the conveniences that I appreciate from pretty much the original Arduino Due and Mega and Uno designs the barrel connector for power, so you can give that a DC power anywhere, up to I think 12 volts to power that, we have on-off switch here, I think that's an addition that Lamar put that you wouldn't see on some of the Arduino ones, we've got the reset button there, this has the typical four LEDs for power as well, as indicator for things like boot loading and TX and RX transmission, but it also has a NeoPixel on there so you can do some interesting status things with that on top of your usual LED tricks, so I don't know what else to say about it, it's a great board, let me know if you have any questions or thoughts in the chat, otherwise we will wrap things up, go back to this page here, good, no questions, yeah so many pins, all right, let's do it then, let's wrap this up, thanks everyone for stopping by today, that's my product pick of the week this week, it is the Grand Central Metro M4 Express, bye bye.