 Adafruit join me every week, this is my NASA brother Pedro. Good morning everybody, I'm Pedro. I was creative tech here at Adafruit and every week we're here to share 3D printed projects featuring electronics from Adafruit. That's right. This is where we combine 3D printing and deal with electronics to make inspirational projects. Hello everybody, hanging out in the Discord chat room. I'm going to give a shout out to everybody in just a few moments. We'll do housekeeping and then we'll jump right into all the fun demos. The fun, glowy projects this week. So yeah, if you want to join us live during the show, we have lots of gifts and memes and fun stuff going on in the Discord chat room that you can get there by hitting up the URL discord.gg slash Adafruit. Yeah? Yeah. And then we're in the live broadcast chat room, live-broadcast-chat room. Pedro, welcome everybody in the chat room to the show. Pedro, please. Good morning, good evening, good afternoon, good night to everybody hanging out all over the world. Give a shout out to everybody hanging out in all of the chat rooms. We got Dean, we got Rolls, we got Unhurt Grace, we got Paul Hunter, we got Jim Henderson, Rahzan, Deweyster, Yanni, good morning to everybody hanging out all over. Shout out to Yanni posting up all the neon signs. Really good ideas. We have lots of neon signs this week. So yeah, we're going to do the housekeeping and then we'll jump into our lightning bolts. So let's run through this stuff, shall we? First up, we're going to head up Adafruit.com slash free and see all the different free bees that are going on while supplies last, where we're still living through the chip shortage of 20 and 22 and we're going to have these free bees until we can't. So these are great, so check these out. So the first tier is for orders of $99 or more, you will receive a perma-proto half size breadboard paisa bay and for orders that are 149 or more, you'll get the half size perma-proto PCB plus and Adafruit Stem Acutee Breakout. If you have an account with Adafruit, make sure you don't get the same one twice. And then the third tier, for $200 or more, you'll get the Stem Acutee Breakout, the half size perma-proto and free ground shipping from UPS for continental U.S. only. So check this out, Adafruit.com slash free. These get automatically added to your cart as you add things to your cart. So you don't have to do any special coupons. Yeah, you can get all of the free bees. So yeah, limited time only, yes, in a very small text. So check this out while the supplies are lasting. Okay, let's head over to the jobs board and find out some jobs that are wanted this week. I'm seeing some new positions. It contracts a gig for the Burlington, New York, no, Burlington, North Carolina area. There is some Circuit Python RP2040 positions, particularly. It's in the job title. So check that out if you are in the market for a new gig, it could be a side gig here. But that's the latest that I'm seeing here in this month of May. So check those out at jobs.adafruit.com. It's free to do so. You can post up your resume or post up a job offer. Sweet, sweet. And that's the jobs. We want to promote the newsletter that happens once a week by hitting up adafruit.com slash newsletter. You can subscribe to get notified when all the new stuff gets added to the adafruit shop on the weekly. I just want to give another shout out to Ann Barela and the rest of the Circuit Python team for doing up the Python on microcontrollers newsletter. Shout out to all 9,000 subscribers who are subscribed to it. Very cool place to get all the latest stories and happenings in the world of Python on microcontrollers. Cool. Shout out to Paul Cutler for doing up the Circuit Python show podcast this week. We have a little bit of break. But next week, special guest Liz Clark is on, I believe, but definitely check out Melissa's episode. It was really nice to tune in and hear her story. So shout out Paul Cutler and subscribe to that podcast on all the fine podcast services. All right, are we ready to jump in? I think so. Let's go ahead and jump into this week's project. This week we have very awesome neon lightning bolts. This is cool. So I've been wanting to make a sign using these neon style neopixel strips. And we actually kind of already have. So we'll take a look at the previous stuff. But for this project, the goal was to make a simple sign with some constraints in mind. So the idea was to let's make a sign, three printed, and it takes up the whole length of the neopixel strip. These neopixel strips come in one meter. So that's a full meter and they have 96 neopixels, you get plenty of neopixels to play with a little bit under 100 and you have this really nice silicone diffusion. And what you can do is you can cut this up and you can splice it to make all sorts of intricate shapes. But the constraint and the goal here was to, how can I make a sign with just the stock LED strip? No cutting and no splicing. How can I make a sign that will look cool and kind of have this neon look to it? So we came up with a couple of different signs. This is a lightning bolt with three sections and I really like this one because you can kind of see where the limitations present themselves, particularly in angles. So if you're making a sign with this neon style neopixel strip, you want to consider the angles. So here you can see in this lightning bolt you have these really sharp 90 degree angles and unfortunately you are limited to the thickness of the strip. So the strip is about four and a half millimeters thick or thin and with that if you're making something with sharp angles you kind of want to add some corner radiuses to your design. So here you can see I have a corner radius but it's not really conforming to it because it's just the nature of the thickness of it. You want to be very careful with buckling or rather just kinking this. You are able to damage it if you bend it too much. So if you just bend it in the right spot you can break the internal strip. So be very careful with that. And with that in mind you can create some really cool signs. Just consider the corner radius which is about 10 millimeters. We'll take a look at the CAD stuff in a few moments but I just wanted to highlight some of the things real quick about this pixel strip. One of the cool things about the strip is it comes with a pre-soldered wire connection on both ends. So what I was able to do was just cut off the connector end from the end of the strip and then wire that directly to our microcontroller of choice. This week it's the RP2040 QT Pi. So this is a small little cheap dev board that's really really powerful. It's running circuit python so you can have the LED animation library which is running here and just string together all sorts of fun animations. So this connector is great because it has this really nice latching bit and you can disconnect it easily by doing that. It's got a little tab that you just kind of press down and then you can connect it back like that. It's keyed so it only goes in one way so you're not going to do it wrong. So that's really nice. You don't have to kind of create your own wire deely. It's already kind of included here. And what's even cooler is our latest batch of strips come with labels on them. So here you can see it tells you what the red and the green and the black are, D, DIN, DIN that stands for data in. So this is the connector that is the first NeoPixel. It goes all the way across and then it comes down to the end of the NeoPixel. You can see here D, O, DO is really data out and this is the connector that you would chop off and wire this to your QDPI or other RP2040 board. This is obviously this is a Disney Mickey sign. It's just one of the things I was making. I didn't release this one for obvious reasons, don't want to get any copyright stuff. So that's just looking at the stock neon LED strips. So that's really cool that they come with these labels now. I didn't know that because the ones I had on hand didn't have that label. So in the guide we'll show you, you can tell which one just by looking at the connector. The one with the latchy bit is data in. Latchy bit, data in. So let's take a look at some other designs. I wanted to make a bit of a rainbow. And one of the things with rainbow, I just made it a continuous shape so it just kind of goes around it. So let's go ahead and plug this in. So with this connector, they're all the same connector so that means you can easily swap these out by just disconnecting it. I really like that feature. So here you can see the rainbow has a nice radius here so we don't have any problems buckling or kinking here. And this takes up just about the full length, the full meter long length of it. You'll notice here I actually trimmed away with some scissors and a hobby knife. I've trimmed away the kind of end cap bit here. You can see there's a lot of silicone there so you can use a hobby knife carefully to kind of remove that if you want to use the whole, the whole, you know, strip length. But there you can start to see where the, where the, you know, where the actual flexible PCB is. But yeah, it fits in there nicely. And another thing to note, you'll notice that there is some extra geometry here at the bottom and this just creates a compound shape so that these pieces aren't flopping all over the place. So with a lightning bolt, I kind of was able to merge these two ends at the bottom there. But if they weren't merged, you would have some, you know, floppiness to it. So there's another design consideration. If you have a piece that's kind of out there, you kind of want to add some, some material to the design so that it makes it more sturdy so that it's not going to just fall apart. So that's another design tip. Here is the cat. This is kind of a silhouette of the cats. And you'll notice that the channel here kind of does the same dealie where it just goes into a single shape. But then at the end here, I added some, a little bit of a connecting bit here to connect this to that. And I still have a nice exit hole for the strip to kind of come out of. So yeah, there's some quick looks at the, the, the signs and some tips on what to consider when designing a sign with these constraints. Yeah, Blink is back there. I was like, where's the other one? Oh yeah, she's back there. So it really depends on, like the, the sign depends on a couple factors. For me, I wanted this to take up the entire bed of our 3D printer or 3D printer is fairly large. It has a bed of 300 by 300, which is like 10 inches, right? So it's fairly big. So if you have something, you might want to scale this down. I think it's 12. You think it's 12 inches? Okay. It's 12 inches. You might want to scale this down or just kind of re-massage the sketches. If you want to use Fusion 360, you can take the original designs and kind of try to scale it up or make one from scratch, which is cool because I'll show you folks sort of the tips on how to use Fusion to make a custom sign. All right. Next little pause here. Take a look at the chat room, inspiring our watchers here. We have Seeker, who was saying that they're working on a Pikachu shaped neon style light. And this is a perfect reminder to get them to finish it off. Yeah, right before the show, we were joking that it looks like Pikachu's tail with the lightning bolt. So this would be a perfect, one thing that you didn't mention, perfect for cosplay. Like you could actually add some little tabs on here and like sew them on or maybe just a necklace to adorn that on your costume. It's a really good way to have a portable neon like sign. Yeah. Like hats. Mickey ears. Oh yeah, that's exactly what we used for the Mickey ears. And then one of the questions too from Vince is asking how cuttable is the strip and we'll cover that in a, we've actually did a whole guide on that exact thing with the exact same strips. We'll show you what the pads on there look like. They are very friendly to cut up and reattach, make different shapes. Yes, that's very true. Yes, and Rosanna saying that the radius on the cat ears looks very tight. This will go over what the maximum diameter or the radius is for the curbs and how to measure that out. Yeah. You know. Yeah. John is asking, yes, these are reprogrammable. These are just new pixel strips. We'll take a look at the code and what it actually looks like underneath the sheath and the diffusion that is creating that nice super soft. Yeah. I love the LED animation library because the stock animation is just so easy to string together. You can customize the spacing and the speeds of whatever animation you want to play with. So that's really cool. Yeah. So let's, I guess, drop into the learn guide. We'll walk through it a little bit. We have just a strip by itself. Rolves is asking, how do you bend the neon tubes? They're not neon tubes. They are strips. What happens in my overhead? They went wild style. All right. So what I'm going to do is do a quick demo of taking out the strips. Yeah. So it comes with this little tie you can take out. Oh yeah? Yeah. That's cool. So yeah, this just first fits in. The silicone is grippy. So it's not a tube? Yeah, it's not a tube. Yeah, it's not a tube. You're going to see the whole strip. I'm just pressing, fitting it out, just removing it. The silicone gives it a nice grippy grip, but this is what the strip looks like. It comes in a nice little coil. When you get it, it'll kind of look like this. It comes in a nice ESD safe bag. But yeah, you can flex this guy. It is fairly thick. We're looking at six and a half millimeters thick and about 13 millimeters tall. These are the end caps there, so they're a little bit bigger. But this area here is where the LED actually is. So here's a strip. You can kind of see where the strip can be cut. You'll want to cut it at these little markings here. This area here is see-through so that you can see where to cut it. But these are the segments here. So right here and right here would be one LED, I think. Is that right, Pedro? What's that? Is this one LED? These two segments here? I'd have to go look. I don't remember. But I believe it is. But there's 96, right? I believe it is. Yeah, that are two. So we're going to insert it into the cat now. I recommend doing the out. This is the last strips. If you wanted to connect multiple strips together, you absolutely can. You would just connect this bit to the other end of the other LED. So you can totally chain as many as you want together. But yeah, so to install it, you want to have this being the front face. So why don't we just go ahead and connect it back to the microcontroller so we can get a better look at it. What happened to the microcontroller? Where did it go? It's right here. Connected to the rainbow. All right. So let's go ahead and connect it up so we can see the light glowing. It should be safe to install while it's on because we're being very careful with our bends. So I'll start with adding this end here to the tail, press fitting it in, and then just kind of molding it in there and being cautious of your bends. The wall thickness of the print is just about the right length to be all perimeter and no infill. So that makes it really strong. So as I'm getting here, I'm being really cautious about press fitting it in. I'm just kind of getting that press fitted in there so you can see here that you're not going to conform those really, really sharp angles until you press it all the way in. And you can see here, yeah, it starts to kind of lift up slightly, but that's okay because we're not too excessive on that bend. And then closing it off, you can see here that I'm actually have a little bit of excess, so that's just fine. So you can leave that there or you can cut that if you'd like, but I'm not going to cut it because I don't have to reconnect this wire here or you can cut, you know, make this start over here however you want it, right? But this is just like kind of seeing how to install it and thinking about it, you know, at this point, you can cut this off here and kind of clean it up, but this is just me leaving it as a stock thing. And then another thing to consider is like, do you want your sign to be hung on a wall or do you want it to stand upright? It's kind of challenging to make it stand upright just because of the shape. I was able to get it to stand upright. Yeah, it's kind of hard with the cable kind of all over the place, but it does stand upright depends on your shape, right? The lightning bolt won't stand upright, but the blinker does. You can see here in the back there, she ends up standing up okay. So yeah, so that's a quick look at installing it pretty easy. Take it out, put it back in. You don't need to glue it in place unless you'd like. I didn't. It's just kind of grippy in there. But yeah, that's how the corner ended up working out. So there's a kitty cat. Okay, that was cool. We got a good look at setting it up. Any questions about that? Yeah, so far, Joan is asking or just commenting. There's a really nice array of these for a art light installation. Yeah, this is one. So imagine doing one letter per sign and then kind of doing a whole word or a whole sentence so you can really scale it up. Yeah, but yeah, it all kind of depends on the size of your 3D printer in the bed because it's all printing flat. There is some ways to get a little bit more length out of your printer when you do diagonal. Which we'll show that. I'll show off. Printed section. Another comment over by McGruffin is saying that they prefer these E-L wires because the inverters scare them. Yeah, the inverters are, they can be. The high-pitched noises. They can be annoying and I never get brightness. The brightness you cannot compete with the brightness. E-L is so like not bright, unfortunately. This stuff is, this is only 0.8 of, so like 80% brightness. You can make this even brighter. I've toned it down for the camera, but you can make that really, really bright. Again, 96 neopixels in here. So you have plenty of pixels. Here you can kind of see in this rainbow chaser how you can create cool separations. You could make this audio reactive using our code for this guy here with a PDM microphone. Remember our little VU meter? You could do the exact same code and then just wire up the microphone to this and then you'd have a reactive neon sign. So that could be a neat one. Maybe you make a cool shape of a, I don't know, of a record player turntable or something iconic and then like make it audio reactive that'd be a really cool one. Some shape like Mr. McButtpants is saying that continuous looking signs will make RGB monitor TV backlighting look so much better. Yeah, so you can adorn mirrors and other type of signage on your wall or wherever to make a really cool accent stuff, accent stuff, accent outline and silhouettes of your sign or whatever. And then what MCU has recommended? MCU, that's the Marvel, I'm going to guess it was MicroPython? Yeah, MicroPython. Yeah, we have MicroPython support for the QDPy RP2040. That's this, how much is it, like $7 or is it $10? They want to drive eight of these in an array, so maybe something with more pins, maybe the Pico? Yeah, I would recommend a Pico, a Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi, yeah, that has enough pins definitely for controlling multiple strands for sure. We also have some dedicated hardware if you want to do more than eight channels, you can do a bunch of channels with our, is it Neopixel 8? Yeah. Is there one if you want to do some hardcore Neopixel chains? Yeah, all good stuff. So let's jump into the learn guide, take a look real quick at some of the stuff. We do have these in stock right now, it's about $35 for this meter of neon like skinny Neopixels. Yeah, so it's meter long, 96 pixels, very, very beautifully diffused Neopixel strips. The RP2040 is $10, it has eight megabytes of flash, so you can have all sorts of code in libraries when you're running SergerPython or MicroPython, and we have a power supply as well, a nice little cheap 5 volt 2 amp power supply and a micro USB-C cable, type C to type A USB, and this is a nice long one, so if you're doing a sign you're going to want a nice long one and this is like a nice pink woven USB cable, so it might match your color scheme. And real quick you can jump into the product page for the silicon Neopixel strips, silicone, and they can tell you there the current draw per meter, you want to check out the specifications, the data sheet is linked right in here, there it is, and it even tells you the connector type is a 3 pan JST SM, here it is, here are the folks that make it, iPixel LED light, it's got some sort of IP rating of 65, it's a little bit water splash proof, whatever, there's some more stuff here, wattage per meter is about 13 watts meter, oh it is 12 millimeters tall, 6 millimeters thick, I mean for me I made a little bit, 96 pixels per meter, yeah there's some wattage stuff here, 13 watts, temperature operating stuff, this is a nice, look at this data sheet, this is really nice, really nice, you rarely get so much detail, but they even have like, the accessories, yeah, I've never seen that in front caps, oh look they even tell you to bend, don't do it this way, there you go, 60 meters, okay, well I'm a little bit, I think you're doing like 30, yeah incorrect bending, yeah you don't want to bend it that way, here's some power supply, oh nice, very cool, yeah the user is doing the array, this is a great data sheet, wow, because normally there isn't one, dude yeah, well even if there is one it's like in a different language, well you know I guess 60 millimeters, that's a lot man, that's a lot, you all want to be careful, I don't want you to break yours because I did break one, because I just flexed the crap out of it, particularly with the lightning bolt, the lightning bolt, if you're going to flex the crap out of it, just be very very careful when you're doing those bends, so you can get away with it, but the data sheet warns you 60 millimeters, that's a lot, Mr. McButt, a pants is saying current is 2.6 amps a meter, so 2 amps of power supply on Adafruit won't drive a full meter, I mean it's doing it now, is this some sort of magic illusion that we're doing, no it's just because it's not using like the full brightness, yeah if you were to do full white, I suppose you would probably cap out and would probably tell you hey I need more, like the circuit python will warn you and tell you hey, man this is only 5 volts, yeah it's only 5 volts, 1 amp out, but yeah that's, yeah normally you're doing colors and not using all 3 of the 96 colors in white, good point, I could try that, but yeah maybe just turn on the brightness, but yeah you can, you can pick a bigger power supply, I think we have a USB, a power supply that's adjustable so you can get more amps, but you want to stick with 5 volts, cool cool, alright moving on, let's look at the circuit diagram, pretty simple, you got 3 wire connections, voltage ground and a data pin, you can swap out the data pin for any of the available data pins, but you want to use the 5 volt pin because it's using 5 volt logic, so there you go, the strips like 5 volts, circuit python is fairly easy to install on any of the RP2040 boards, you can get into the boot loader and then drag and drop a UF2 file that you can download from the site and it'll automatically flash and install and then it shows up as the flash drive on your, oh thanks, yeah so here in the learn guide, do we need to go back to the circuit diagram or skip it, yeah skip it, alright well there's a circuit diagram, really easy, you can download fritzing and get some Adafruit parts to make these type of wiring diagrams it's dragon drop, it's really nice, it feeds the software for doing these wiring diagrams, installing circuit python on any of the RP2040 boards is fairly easy to do, you get the board into the boot loader mode, using the boot and the reset buttons and then you can just drag and drop the UF2 file to automatically flash and install circuit python onto your RP2040 board, then it shows up as a USB drive, we just drag and drop code and libraries and assets like if you had bitmaps or wave audio files, you just drag and drop, that's one of the beautiful things of circuit python, okay and then into the code part, this is cribbed code from one of the demos for the LED animation library for circuit python, here you can import the various effects, here we're using the rainbow, rainbow chase and rainbow comment as well as the animation sequence module which allows you to string those animations together, then you want to set up your pin and tell how many pixels you're using and then here when you create the new pixel object you can tell how much brightness, by default I have it set to .8, maximum brightness would be 1 and then here in these next lines of code you can customize the animations, each animation is going to have its own parameters that you can modify, the rainbow has speed and period which you can change, how long and how fast and then the rainbow chase allows you to change the speed, the size and the spacing and the comment allows you to change the speed and the tail length and then you can tell either to be a true or false on bouncing back and forth if you want that effect or not and then in the animations array here you can see I'm just stringing them together and then you want to say how much of an interval do you want, I want each one to last about five seconds and then you can do auto clear and then in the loop I'm just saying animations, animate and it just runs through those in that list in that array, there is a lots more information on the LED animations learn guide which is a prerequisite guide if you look here in the list of prerequisite guides, certified LED animations library guide by Katni Rembore has all of the things that you would ever want to know about animations so here under the rainbow section you have all the kind of parameters broken out for you and there's some other ones you can do like step and some other things so check them out you can even reverse them apparently which is super cool so definitely check this out if you want more customization out of the animations it even shows you how to do matrices so if you want to do something like this do a whole grid of animations yeah and there's some other ones that I don't have here so you can check those out yeah okay let's go back to the code so that's the code in nutshell pretty simple here's a screenshot of what your your sugar pie drive looks like your code is a python file and your libraries are in a lib folder yeah when you use the download project bundle it downloads all the dependent libraries the dependencies so it just it's one zip file and you just drag all those file and folders into your circuit pie drive and then you're ready to go so that's a really cool way to do it instead of having to manually grab the libraries from the bundle it all comes here in the project bundle excellent the next page shows you just some notes here on wiring up the strip so kind of locating the in and the out luckily the latest ones have labels but if they don't this is a good way to kind of to know which is which we're basically cutting off the data out cable and wiring it to our QT pie we got three wires for ground voltage and a data pin you can power it off with a 5 volt USB battery no problems it seems to work just fine all right now on to the 3D printing section I have some slight settings here like nozzle and head temperature but it's going to vary on your style of PLA we recommend PLA you could use something else like pet G you're going to print a little bit hotter with pet G but PLA is is safe bet the bed the build volume right you're the size of the bed should be a minimum of 300 by 300 and here is a screenshot of our lightning bolts you to kind of fit that I basically just rotated it 45 degrees on the bed that way you can get the diagonal length diagonally you get a little bit more length out of your printer so you file and here are all of the available designs cat lightning bolt Rambo snake right cool so now I'm going to jump into 360 and then take a look at a little bit of a little bit of a cat chat post up a Twitter yeah this is a really good way to visualize how long your shape can be to accommodate the entire meter exactly so here I got a sketch and in this square I basically sized it to be the bed of my 3d printer it's 300 by 300 so this gives you a good representation of you know how my design will look like on the bed so if you have something a little bit smaller like 250 by 250 you would see with this design fit update our dimensions and see with this fit yeah it would this would actually fit so what I've done here next is I've made a series of lines and then I connected those lines with these arcs so one thing that's cool is when you click on a line a sketch line inside a fusion 360 and if you scroll down to the bottom here it'll tell you the length of that line currently that single selection that I made is only 110 millimeters long but if you double click that line it'll select the whole chain the whole path and that gives you an idea of the total length of your path is about 974 millimeters now when I was designing the signs I know that my strip is a meter long that's 1000 millimeters but those end caps aren't gonna fit through the channel as you saw me install so you want to make it a little bit under you want to make the total length under if you if you don't plan to cut off those end caps that's this one tip to know so double double clicking your path your your sketch curve will tell you the total length so it's 174 millimeters with some change cool now I'll go back in the timeline to kind of show up how I how I designed it what feature I used so if it's just a single line you can use the extrusion the thin extrude oh fusion screen is not up oh boy thank you womp womp all right let me kind of redo it not redo everything we're kind of all right so infusion 360 you'll want to create a sketch that that is the size of your bed of your 3d printer as a starter just to let you know is my sign gonna fit in my bed my sketch was 300 by 300 but I dropped it down to 250 to 250 just to show that this still fits and then what I was showing was if you select one line you'll see the length of it down here at the bottom right corner you'll see it says length of your one sketch line is 110 millimeters if you double click that line it'll select the whole chain of the path and that gives you a total length so it's at 975 millimeters roughly so that gives me an idea and that it should the design should take up the whole meter length with some change and you want that change if you want those end caps to kind of be there so that's why I'm trying to make it a little bit under the full meter okay so to extrude a single line like this you can use the extrude feature which is the most basic feature in Fusion 360 but there is a type so normally you do a regular extrude right to a profile but the thin extrude allows you to select a line a single line and the main thing I did here was made my wall direction center based so if we look at it top down you can see how the the location from one side and two side are rather different but then the center will flare out your extrusion and keep your path in the center line of your total extrusion another thing is that it's 12 millimeters tall and the wall thickness of my extrusion here is 9.6 that's accommodating the thickness of the strip plus 1.2 millimeters on each side so that's kind of how I'm doing it you could do a user parameter if you want to make it a little bit more easier but I have a fixed value here just for kind of simplicity sake so after that I make another extrusion using the exact same path but this time I've reduced the wall thickness from 9.6 to 6.4 that six millimeters is the thickness of the strip but that point four millimeters is just to give me some clearance so that it's not so tight on that strip it's a I'm also doing an offset of 1.2 millimeters so that I have a little bit of you know you want to have a bit of a backing to your wall to your channel so that's why I have it offset it here the operation is cut so I'm cutting away and I'm using the same tallness so it's 12 millimeters tall and then the wall thickness is just different at 6.4 but as I'm holding down the command on Mac or control on PC you can kind of see how this how this cut is kind of just following along the path so that's kind of how it's doing it right and then from there that's kind of it you can see my wall thickness here is 1.6 millimeters actually not 1.2 but 1.6 it's just a little bit chunkier normally I do 1.5 millimeters but 1.6 here is because I've updated my my extrusion width so that's just one thing but y'all can change that as you'd like so yeah that's just a quick look at that I want to show off some of the other things here so some things to consider for the cat here's what the sketch for the cat looks like again it's a let me do show just can you see my screen and everything everything's good there right yes good good alright so for the cat you can see I combined several paths for this one you can see as I'm double-clicking it's not doing the whole one so I have to hold down shift to select the entire group here and this in the total length here is 884 millimeters so a little bit under so it could add some more to it or not but I found that it's okay so you'll notice that in the sketch I don't actually connect the line together so after I extruded it I'm left with this right and when I printed this out originally it was really really floppy because you know it it's just a single kind of path and there's nothing really kind of holding the structure together so I ended up doing was just sketching out some additional lines like this I projected in the extrusion in its own sketch and then I added these lines to these points that way I have a profile that I can that's that I can then extrude and merge into my shape give it a little fill it to round it off and now I have a compounded shape that has a little bit more sturdiness to it so that's one tip there for that one for the blink of one I ended up doing the same thing here on this end I just added some more lines and added a little fill it there to combine these two ends so that they're a little bit more sturdy for the rainbow very similar added all this stuff here to the bottom to close it off and make it a compound or sort of manifold shape so that's the rainbow and then the lightning bolts same thing it's kind of like blinka the the tail at the end kind of joins emerges into itself so that's cool now one thing to note about the lightning bolt is the lightning bolt actually started off like this so you can see here my paths are very very jagged and sharp um so what I ended up doing was just adding fillets to all those very sharp corners section by section so kind of starting off with the internal corners then the exterior corners and then doing that for the adjacent um in corners so I kind of added all those fillets and as you saw um you know I didn't even my radius is here aren't even enough like they need to be bigger but as you saw um with a little bit of extra slack your your strip will just fit in there so I also have a screenshot in the learn guide that shows that but yeah there's some quick cat tips and a quick walkthrough of uh some things to consider if you're designing your own infusion 360 or other apps any questions there was one here's the mickey um Charles brand afford is asking what can we use to plug up the ends of the strip that you cut into pieces I suggested that you could use hot glue to seal yeah hot glue sticks really well to the silicone mm-hmm it's hot it's hard to take it off though yeah um you when you cut it off snipped off already uh you know they're they're pretty separated so they shouldn't interfere with anything but like I said we're out or anything yeah like if they're close together then yeah maybe add some hot glue just a little bit to seal it off a little dribble that are the um tape e6000 or e6000 some tape mm-hmm that should do otherwise cover yeah yeah you can print cover yeah they apparently have those accessories yeah sweet good good good stuff let's um go back to the learn guide wrap this up here we're getting close so yeah this shows you me installing it yeah so look at this photo as you saw the strip won't conform to very sharp angles so in this lightning ball you can see just how much deviation it has is that the right word I hope so and uh a nice warning here excessive flexing and bending can damage the neopixel strap so be careful that's it one thing do we go over how they look like when you actually cut them up and the yeah that's right so a learn guide to be a completely different learn guide for this one yeah so this was the idea from Pedro is to take a lego base plate and make little clips that just hold the strip in place these little clips have like the connecting studs for the lego and they just they just plug into the lego bits and then these little clips you just press fit um the strip into the clips but Pedro made it so that you have to connect these letters um so this is like a busy sign and you can see how like the y is uh two two strips join together but the whole word is one continuous strip it's just separated so we'll jump into the assembly page you can see what they look like when you cut up each one there it is the video it's actually really good in the video you do a live you see a lot more of it actually be actually cutting it as you can see there how um I am uh exposing just the back side but leaving the front side so you still have that diffusion uh that's attached on the other side you know and these markings here plus is uh voltage the minus is positive and this is data in the little eye there but yeah you would want to use a hobby knife or an exacto knife and just to trim away but leaving some of that yeah I actually use the flush cutters flush cutters okay that's a better idea the length of the blade is perfect for getting that um just enough to expose the pads that you're gonna need with a little bit of slack so you can get your soldering iron in there and you can see there that you want to leave up on that uh that top part that's diffusing everything right here you want to leave that you want to remove just where the pads are right those are soldered together yeah cool yeah and you can see here that they are going in a spin-off strategic you want to cut them so they flow in uh the way that you want it like from going from the b to the u to the bottom of the s and up around and then to like the little um little edge of the y and then finishing off into the tail of the y right that's another way you want to take a look at how is it gonna flow it's almost like your finger drawing it exactly that flow is is really nice and as you see in the sign or in the gif it really shows it i should probably play this video see if i can get it running and then it's really good video i was like watching this it's great uh for these when i cut them up i didn't add any like dabs of glue or anything just because of you know they're not touching we have broken safari i could just post the link to it yeah sorry like safari is just like nope i'm gonna so many jobs i will stop working now you have a pdf loaded yeah it's it's all busted sorry folks learn guys heavy on java scripts all those uh movies every uh product is like a movie yeah huh but uh yeah link to the guy this is our third project that we've done with this neopixel neon like there's a good one that we haven't done here's the uh day for star going in here are the mickey ears very very cool they are also spliced together so you can see in the assembly how um page actually exposed it a little bit to go inside of the hat that's very strategic because then it gives you more um ability to wire the damn thing but yeah this was really fun and cool as well this is on a jemma m0 i believe yeah hand with make code hand with make code yeah you shook your head and it did a different animation it's very cool it's one of the best disney strips we've had with this one post the link to that one since we're already there and where the discord discord yeah get really assembled for this quad yeah so neon strips neon like because it's not somebody in the comments said like maybe we should start a new terminology called leon yeah i like it you guys you guys like leon i think that's it for this week's project yeah um yeah it was again it was supposed to be really simple a good a good lesson in like uh designing with constraints in mind and what's your end goal i didn't want to do any of the complex stuff so that's why i made it simple but hopefully y'all can take this as a jump off point and make some really stellar uh signs i still kind of want to finish up that mickey thing because oh yeah it's funny that's what the designs that just dropped this week is the making balloons yeah and you'll see a lot of i just remembered you'll see a lot of these signs like at the target stores like target they have like simple signs like that especially the um so i didn't want to rainbow yeah they have the rainbow but it's like cut here in segments trying to figure like how do i make it different than target so that's why i went with the different lightning bolts in a different rainbow um in the blinka blinka is really cool um although she is kind of detailed how do i capture a shape with like the most simplest of shapes and that's what i got i got blinka there so it looks like we got 10 minutes left so let's kind of just jump into this week's community make since we had a skip it last week yeah since this one's so cool we have to show it off right um the one from last week but this one's pretty cool too just skip all of this skip all the videos and just go straight into it all right so community makes this week very awesome because it is uh circuit pythons birthday right it is yeah i think it was like last week micro python yeah some pythons we all got snake icon so i was like this is perfect to print out um this super cool snake storage with the quantum filament so we can really show off the effect that it does yeah so you can see it going from purple which is of course in blinka's color it's a gold down to the gold great contrast color yeah and i really like the uh the the detail of all the scales on the inside you can see you have plenty of room for the head is separate okay so the head comes right off like oh cool that's a little way to attach to that no separate time i am impressed that the um the filament keeps going with the head uh because i did realign this to for the time lapse i had to read you know just rotate it in a different way so i didn't know if the the alignment of the filament would continue so super surprised with that this could also be like a planter if you had like a drainage hole but nice simple super themed storage for all of your what we're using it for is like your um tweezers and like pliers and whatnot flush cutters all that all the tools we'll use around 3d printing so nice snake here by 3d nido yeah it's nido um here is the site it's on cold 3d it's a free download is this different Pedro i think it's a different one that's what's linked in the youtube video sir whoops i believe this is it's the same person right i don't know go to their designs 3d nido so yeah it's the same designs it's a paid though it's not free yet um so i don't remember paying for this okay well i'm just telling you what the website is yeah the website says two dollars so i don't remember the first two dollars and support the artist because it's a really cool design and uh i guess there's some info here on dimensions and stuff very cool yeah support the designer so support and then the head even comes as a maybe i did pay for it i'm pretty sure i'm not sure but the it also comes with like the eyeballs so you can print this out separately or do like a multi material print cool but we'll update that youtube video so you get the link in there that's fine cool and then uh we have the c dragon from the week after c dragon definitely another sweet c dragon this thing is so freaking cool we have to print two of them different color than the one that is in the timelapse because of course it failed even with the uh z hopping on and just knocked that off why it failed or i mean it prints with the the um what are they called uh the flippers it prints with the flippers up so as it's moving across yeah you're gonna strike so as it's parking its head to take a timelapse photo that's when uh we can have some problems but look at these horns articulating mouth it uh snaps into place it prints two two pieces here so that snaps in allows you to have some nice articulation on the mouth and i love the horns i like a little twisted horns and it has like some sort of more mosasaurus feel with its flippers there so it's a water dragon yeah sea dragon sea dragon so nice sort of spikes fresh water but super articulated looks like the way they're doing the joints is with the uh these hooks yeah hook in it's a very nice way to do that on the bottom you can see it prints nice and flat no supports needed and uh yeah very very clever uh i calculated prints in place one of our favorite places so far so cool yeah because of course once one of the kid sees them the other kid is gonna want it too so here is another one in i forget what rainbow color this is it looks like a taco does it feel like a taco yeah with the uh corn tortilla did you scale this at all no no scaling since it is um pretty much as big as the bed and even have offers an even larger one if you have one like a cr 30 like the continuous belt printers so there is a design that is included not infinite but just bigger than this which i don't know if you can tell it's pretty freaking big like when you stretch it out long ways but on the bed it curls up yeah it curls up like that the mouth is separate separate yeah it's very very strategic uh so it's uh four it's just about four bucks totally worth it totally worth it for this design and it takes about uh do you know like three days to print so divine 3d designs is the creator so support them out by purchasing the stl this one is so cool many many times and it does float they already took it in the pool yeah not cool we should have some shots of it yeah maybe uh i know i didn't get that underwater housing for the phone until later all right so that's this week's uh community makes very very fun stuff we'll uh catch up on more community makes next week but uh yeah that's it cool any cool comments from folks watching live neon is online it's good thank you yoni uh yeah blink of storage you got it that's what i should have named it all right i think that's gonna be it for the make a show cool all right well we invite you to come on and share your projects with the community and us uh on ask it on show and tell tonight at 7 30 p.m eastern time it's gonna be hosted by Lamar and phil this time shout out to uh jp and liz for hosting last week maybe we'll host another week i'm gonna say probably next week yeah and then ask engineer shortly after starting at 8 p.m eastern time tune in for full hour of Lamar and phil new products open source hardware uh the great uh not the greatest of ion mpi and it's a chip shortage let's see what uh whose chips it'll be this week every way not rp 2040s those are those were nicely and readily supplied sorry i'm just clicking around um so yeah we invite you to come in you can uh get invited by uh joining the discord and around 10 minutes before the show we'll drop in the link for folks to join in discord cool if you got john park tomorrow at 4 p.m eastern time for john park's workshop get some live building going on tim foamy guy on Friday thanks scott is back scott's back you're right welcome back scott shellcroft the circuit python engineer extraordinaire yeah he might be on show and tell so definitely yeah i think he was already on the uh ticket python oh he's got something to show off for sure baby baby to show off yeah so he might be back to streaming yeah but you know tim thanks for 10 for yeah maybe i think uh they might like do the schedule switch again but co-hosted by tim maybe co-host by baby co-host excellent well that is going to do it for us we do the show every wednesday at 11 a um eastern time i haven't gone through the whole slew of show sorry monday's no no no sunday's lamar and phil no no lady aida from this lady island sunday's and then monday's is uh circuit python meeting and then tuesday's jp's tuesday's jp's product pick of the week now at 4 p.m eastern time you get up to 50% off select items only during the live show so definitely make sure you are subscribed and get that notification hit that notification to get alerted when he comes on yeah thank you everybody so much for supporting the show by getting more stuff made of fruit and you're supporting everybody not everybody's here in the in this photo but there's a lot of folks that uh make this thing go so we appreciate y'all um buying the thing every now and then speaking of buying the things go and check out aidfood.com slash new to pick up all the awesome new things coming out oh i need that i know i want that now that cable with the magnets some cool magnetic cables some cool new i spy cables all right everybody's already saying like goodbye like hurry up on your shelf go to slash new quick because i'm yeah look at this blinker goodbye well thank you everybody so much we hope uh you guys make a great day and we hope to see you in the show until tonight until then what was the other one we used to say make share repeat okay see you next week bye folks