 and welcome to the show it's me John Park and it is time for this week's episode of JP's product pick of the week that's me and in fact this week the title is a lie because it's JP's product picks of the week plural we have two closely related products that we're going to have featured today as well as on the deep deep 50% off discount so the first thing I want to do is send you to not one but two web pages so you can go to either one of these QR codes or check out these URLs down here to head to the product pages and you will see pretty much the same setup we have half off pricing which you don't need a coupon code for just put it in your cart you can get I believe maximum of 10 I'm not sure if that's split across the two or if you can actually get 20 of these in total if uh if that's what you're looking for but you don't need any sort of coupon code just put them in the cart they're 50% off during this show so you'll want to check out right about by the end of the show a little bit of a grace period there but that's how that works no coupon code necessary and the next thing I want to do is have Lady Aida go back a little bit into our not too distant past and tell us about these products so please Lady Aida won't you take it away we have neopixels with alligator clips by popular demand um some people especially teachers and students and people doing workshops are like hey I don't want to have to strip cut wire screw solder whatever neopixels I just want to clip them on and be done so um in fact so we have these in what two different colors we have two different lengths different lengths um now explain the first length is 30 leds per meter so it's kind of like this you know big um like two inches apart or so and um you get a full meter and at the end it's sealed because we want to make this kind of durable uh you get red black and white red is of course uh three volt power so you can clip that on here black is the ground pin so I'll clip this on slippery here and then white is the signal pin and we use the sk 6812 which is a um neopixel compatible chip that does not need this is really slippery hold on there you go um does not need a resistor or capacitor so you can just plug them in directly and then if I reset this look at that it comes up it's a neopixel strip with rainbow in it so maybe hold up the strip I'm gonna I'm gonna right here I can just show it yeah oh yeah there you go so one meter long of 30 leds per meter so you get 30 leds um neopixel works with like you know every neopixel whatever library um you can use these chips with three volt logic and power so it works fine with the micro bit even though it's only a three volt regulator I haven't had any issues with it and then we also have another version which is 60 leds per meter just when you thought it couldn't get better um pick up better and to keep the cost reasonable because I thought thinking let me start with like you know basic strips it's twice as dense so they're about you know one inch apart um but you only have half a meter so it's a shorter strip but more dense you have the longer less dense shorter more dense same number of LEDs you get 30 leds per um just different lengths so I thought you know this would this would cover a lot of people's projects um honestly just even the micro bit you don't want to power too many leds because again that regulator isn't really designed to power a ton of neopixels so but this was like you know a pretty safe number of pixels 30s like a pretty you know you're not going to go too crazy with that you're not going to overload your your micro bit or your circuit playground if you want you know a five meter long strip um you're already a more advanced maker or crafter anyways so we're going with the circuit playground as well just again power to the red clip ground to the black clip and white to the signal clip and then you can use it with circuit python arduino make code whatever that just really really easy to get going and then um reusable recyclable so make it with one project just connect and then connect to another project hey there's the song again uh so yes let's check these out these are these are really fantastic i'm going to jump to my overhead uh or my down shooter here for a second here's the first uh exciting reveal we've got a couple of these so here is my gosh there's a lot of threading on this okay whoo there we go so there oh yes ah that's one and let's see let me let's switch to the other view what do we have here ah there it is yes that's one whole meter of it uh yeah so these are our alligator clip neopixel strips and we have two versions of them you can see uh one of them is quite long that is one meter and that is the 30 neopixel per meter this one is the half meter and that's 60 neopixels per meter so what that means is they both have 30 neopixels it's just one is quite a bit denser than the other and that will be useful depending on the type of thing you're trying to make so let's have a look at uh a demo of these what these are really useful for like lady aida mentioned these use the sk 6812 chip on them and that works with three volt logic so these are perfect for things like our circuit playground express and circuit playground blue fruit boards as well as micro bit because they have these nice alligator clip friendly pads on them so let's fire one of them up i'm going to grab a little dense strip here and you can see what we have are a ground a power which is good for three to anywhere from three to five volts and a data pin so i'm gonna let's switch back to the overhead for this and i will connect those up you can see how this connects here so we'll go that's labeled really nicely on the board there on the micro bit there's ground there was three volts and i have this hooked up to the pin zero data pin try to keep those straight there and then we can power that off of directly off of a lipo if we want so i'll do that and you can see i've got a nice little animation running there on the strip i made that using uh make code for micro bit and like lemore said these are really terrific for educators for people who are doing props for people who are doing costumes because they are essentially water resistant almost waterproof they're in silicone they're kind of the wires are are potted in silicone here we have these silicone covers on them they are capped at the ends there so these are pretty good for durability we also have this longer one here i'll go ahead and hook this one up to my circuit playground express so i've got power let's see where's the top of the board here three volt up here we'll do i think i have pin a2 in my circuit python code and ground and i'll power that one also off of a lipo that'll work off of usb it'll work off of batteries and this one i have one of our nice led animation scripts running that does a a nice little sparkle pulse there so let's have a look at the web pages for these since there's two of them there's the difference you can see pretty clearly there in the lengths even though they're both 30 pixels they're they're about uh half the density for one of them if we take a look at this main page here i'll bring back a little glowy demo there you can see this is product 3811 and that is the denser 60 leds per meter and here is product 3812 and that is the 30 per meter longer strip and they're about the same price you can see it's seven dollars 48 cents for the longer one six dollars 25 cents it's a really great bargain since that's the uh same density of neopixels just depends on your needs if you scroll down towards the bottom you can see we've got some links to guides such as our neopixel uber guide as well as some projects that have been made with these here's one i did a while ago uh it's a slightly different one but you could do this i think with the feather the the circuit playground uh blue fruit i think that one has the horsepower necessary to make one of these sort of light stick um painting light sticks so this one it fires up will run patterns and then you can do long exposure photography to do sort of persistence of vision stuff you can also make some fun lightsabers and uh other other led toys with them but the flexibility of it is is it's flexibility i think you can you can you know mount that inside of your cool cyber hoodie hood um mount this on the back of a prop that sort of thing uh if we take a look at the code for this sparkle one just to show you it's really easy to clip in physically it's also easy to code inside of circuit python in this case but these will work with arduino this will work with make code as well uh here is adam code for that uh let's see yeah so in this case i'm importing the board for pin definitions neopixel adafruit led animation sparkle pulse and uh there's some preset colors you can grab from that library as well i'm using this jade color and then i'm setting up which pin i'm on how many neopixels i have uh then i'm setting up the sparkle pulse to do a certain speed a certain period will run through all of those leds and then the main loop just is run sparkle pulse animate now one of the fun things is since these are both 30 per uh strip you can go and swap these around even while it's running pretty straightforward to go and say we'll run that uh sort of vu meter code on the longer strip now there you go and it's up and running it doesn't even mind being hot plugged like that and now we have a nice long vu meter strip a little too long for for fitting under my my camera there i think um and you can mix and match these now since these don't have a uh an open end like some neopixels it's not so straightforward to add them together and like again as lemore said if you're looking to do much longer strips different densities different types you're probably not looking for alligator clip style connections but these are really great for classroom situations where you want to pass these around and uh not have to worry about breadboarding soldering different types of connectors on which boards you can use it on these really versatile uh so let's see i'm gonna jump over to the discord for a second and see if we got uh any sorry c grover had to stop eating lunch for a moment i should have had him lit when i did that shouldn't i have been kind of fun uh also since these are this is ill advised but since these are um covered in that silicon coating you can kind of use them to glow the insides of human bodies if you want i guess i don't know uh so yeah that's gonna do it thank you everyone for stopping by over in the youtube chat as well as in our discord if you're over on twitch and other places by the way check out our discord it's ate a fruit dot it slash discord go to the live broadcast chat uh i will head back here someone pointed out that i covered the bottom qr code with the um yeah geordi geordi g said i covered the bottom qr code with that watermark there that logo so sorry about that but those are the two pages three eight one one and three eight one two uh product pages and if you had there you can go and pick up one or both in multiples of these neopixel alligator clip strips by the way i mentioned uh make code for micro bit this has a neopixel extension for it so i added in a strip there you can see i was starting to rebuild that that sketch so it's fun for plug and play drag and drop style graphical editing as well as for things like circuit python uh and arduino all right well i think that's going to do it for today uh so let me see how about i hook these back up so we can get a little light show on the way out i'm gonna try to remember how i have this one plugged yeah there we go okay those are the two product picks of the week today they are the alligator clip neopixel strips in both the one meter and half meter length both with 30 pixels so two different densities and uh that is going to do it for today so i'm gonna just drape these how about over my wall here and i'll arrange those later but we can get a little little light show going there uh thanks everyone for coming by for it for industries i'm john park this has been jp's product pick of the week don't forget to head over to our website to pick some of these up at the discounted price and that's good just during this show so i'll uh i'll play the song uh the the outro the outro music and you'll have a a bit of an extra second there to to go and check out if you're picking up some of these and some other stuff thanks everybody i'll see you next time