 and welcome to the show, it's me JP and we are all here for another episode of JP's product pick of the week. Thank you for stopping by, thanks to the people over in our YouTube as well as joining in our Discord. I see Thin Man has joined us. Hello and welcome and over in YouTube, Gary T and Derek Treywick, Sarah Pierce. Hello, thanks for stopping by and I'm glad you're excited to see what we've got selected for today. It's a good one, I'm really excited about this one. Hey, Starman, hey Jim Hendrickson, welcome, welcome. So, let's see, the first thing I'll do is I will say, if you wanna get a jumpstart on things, head over to that URL or QR code right there because that's gonna get you to the product page for this week's product pick. You can watch this show from inside the product page because there's a little YouTube embed that has been placed in there. Thank you so much to the new product team and Jelly and everyone for helping get this stuff all set up as well as I know Jelly stashed a bunch, like a hundred of these so that we have them on hand if you wanna get them at a great discount because this week's product pick is 50% off. I'm just refreshing my product page and it's an inexpensive one to begin with but that means you can stock up, you can get up to 10 of these, that's the limit at the special price and you will be able to prototype some cool projects I think with this. But before I get ahead of myself, why don't we jump back in time a little bit, not too far, it's a pretty new product and have Lady Aida tell us all about it. So, take it away Lady Aida. Next up we've got some chalk breakouts. So, we have done lots of keyboard projects and if you have used any of our keyboard breakouts or macropads, whatever, you know that we tend to use the MX Cherry MX compatible switches and sockets but some people want something thinner. So, if we go to the overhead, I'll show the different. Yeah, I'll show some of these. So, this is, yeah, go, we'll get back to them. We'll get back to them. We'll get back to them. Okay, so this is the, well, I'll get this out of the way but I love did you keep it, it's a little confusing to see it. So, this is like our feather wing with NeoKey and it's got two MX switches and you see they're quite tall. There's two different keycaps. This one's kind of like the shortest keycap you can get and this is gonna standard keycap but it's very tall. A lot of people want something nice and short. So, this is the chalk by comparison. So, it's like, you know, definitely more than, less than half the height of the MX. It's a very, very slim style and the keycaps are very slim. So, if you want like a low, you know, laptop keyboard like key height, the chalk switches are where it's at. They're totally incompatible in every way from the MX, which is the keycaps. You can't use MX with chalk or chalk with MX. The keys are totally different. You can't use them in different sockets. So, this is a completely separate breakout just for chalk switches and I'll show even on the bottom, the socket is totally different than the socket that we use for MX switches. You can see the two sockets here. But, you know, so we made a little breakout, you know, to account for all the differences so you can quickly breadboard chalk projects. Another thing, just to note, compared to the MX breakout, these breakouts are one wheel taller. So, they're 0.1 inch taller longer because of the way that the socket fit for having the neo, sorry, having the socket fit on the PCB because it has to fit a little bit higher, I had to extend the circuit board. So, just FYI, it's even though it looks just like the Neo-Key for the MX, it's like a totally different configuration and a totally different pinout. The pinout's the same, but totally different PCB size. So, let's go back to the... The photos? Yes, the photos. Okay, so that's the demo. You're gonna connect as many of them as you want. They come with diodes built in. So, if you would like to have an array of them, go to town, they're diode connected. There's also a little reverse amount, Neo-Pixel. A socket, we stock both the clicky and linear chalk switches, but of course, you can use any chalk compatible. Neo-Pixel shines through and then breakouts on the left and right that connect the Neo-Pixel input outputs, the Neo-Pixel power and ground, and then the switch anode and cathode. It goes through a diode, so that's why it's labeled anode and cathode. Yes, indeed. This right here is it, that. Look at that, that right there. That's the product pick of the week this week. It is the chalk Neo-Key breakout with socket built in. This is a tiny little PCB. That you can use to add a chalk key switch. So, chalk is a brand name from Kale, the switch manufacturer. It is their own particular, I don't think there's anyone else who makes one that's exactly like this or compatible with it, unlike Cherry, where there's a lot of knockoffs of a Cherry MX. But I think this is a good demo here of the size comparison. So, what I'm gonna do is lay those out there. Let me put something behind them. This is a small piece of chalk. Let me put something behind them that is a little higher contrast. So, there you can see on the left, this is a chalk switch with a little low profile key cap on it. You know, I'm gonna bring up the exposure on this too. While I'm at it, hold on. Yeah, there we go. So, this here on the left, this is a chalk breakout with a chalk switch and a little low profile key cap. Here is a regular standard Cherry MX size switch on our Cherry MX key breakout with a pretty standard key cap. So, you can see, this is like, I don't know, about half the height, something like this. So, these are great for when you have a project where you want to have a smaller case, a lower profile, something that's a little easier to deal with instead of big, tall, huge honking switches. And if we take a look at, let me jump over here, take a look at this view of the world. So, you can see, first of all, there is a socket built into it. So, you don't have to solder your switches down, which is great because we actually carry both the red, which is a linear non-clicky, whoops, that one. And we have the white, which is a clicky switch. It has a little sort of extra spring-loaded piece of metal in there and a little nub that it goes over and then clicks. So, it's a different feel. One's quiet too, which is kind of nice. These just plug right into the Neo-Key breakout here. You can just line up the two pins and the three little plastic nubs there and press that in and now it's ready to go. And you'll see there is a Neo-Pixel underneath that shines up and through it. If you look on the side here, you can see we have breakouts for one, 0.1 inch spacing, which is breadboard spacing or perma-proto board spacing, so you can lay them out on something like this. And so you can see here, when I plug one of these switches in, I'm ready to wire that up for the following. We've got the common and or cathode and anode for the switch, so you can use that in either pull up or pull down configurations. Those have a diode, so you can make a diode matrix if you want using our keypad library in CircuitPython is a really nice way to do that. We also have the power and ground for the Neo-Pixel, as well as the in and then on the bottom of the board, the out, so you can wire up a chain of Neo-Pixels with these. And so what I thought I'd do is show you a nice little demo here if we pull out and let me just fix this camera focus a little bit here. We'll put that on screen so I can see what you're gonna see. Here you can see I've got, yeah, in fact, you know what, let's zoom in. I'm gonna zoom in on the keypad first before we worry too much about the demo. What I've got is a little cutie pie here that I'm running six of these switches. And you can see I've wired them up on a breadboard really quickly and there's not a lot of neat super neat routing or anything going on here. But I've quickly breadboarded and prototyped something here where I have Neo-Pixels. So you can see I've got color changing happening when I press the switches. And these are going through a cutie pie to act as gamepad buttons essentially on my steam deck over here. So if I take this off of pause, you can see I'm moving my little character around there. So I'm sending USB commands and I'm jumping and I'm shooting. All right, so I'll go ahead and pause that again. So this is also a nice way to show some of the different keycaps that you can use. We have these, actually I'm not showing any right here. We have these nice, oops, there we go. We have these nice black keycaps, super low profile. I've got one of those honeycomb ones that I used on a past project. If I take that off, you'll see by the way that the chalk keycap is completely different from the plus sign that you see on a Cherry MX keycap. So this is not gonna, let me try to fix some of that focus. And I'm gonna lower the exposure just because my, there we go, my neopixels are pretty bright. These are a totally different type of stem. So you're not gonna cross-pollinate your keycaps between MX and chalk, but if I press that in there, it grips the two little sort of teeth that are on there and now that one's ready to go. So we have these, we used to carry these, they're not in stock anymore. They've kind of disappeared from our suppliers. So we don't have these clear ones. We are looking right now for a replacement, maybe a translucent one more like that style, maybe not that shape. Here are some that I bought online from a different seller which are also just sort of black, but they have a nice little circular divot in them. There are nowhere near as many chalk keycaps as there are MX, it's just a fact of life. But if you have low profile projects in mind, it's hard to beat without going to something like a laptop keyboard, which is gonna be its own whole beast and not really something that you can buy standalone that I've ever seen. So a couple of things to mention here. I have one kind of neat trick, you might have seen it here, fact that I'm sharing some vertical columns on my breadboard between these two switches here. The only tricky thing is I did not solder in a pin for the anode at the top of this one, but I did at the bottom and that's in a different section. But that means that these two are actually sharing every other pin, and since the Neopixel comes in on the top and out on the bottom for data, it's then going into this one and then out to the next one, or actually I've got that backwards. It's in on the bottom, out into this one, and then out and along. So you can do some kind of neat things in your prototyping, which might then lead you to some neat layouts when you're building your actual project. There you can see I've made like a little D-pad and a couple of extra switches there. If we, let me see, what I'll do is plug this in to my computer. I can show you the code that I'm using for that, which is gonna look very familiar if you've done any keyboard projects. We'll watch just do them on here before. So let me head to coding environment here, and I will open up code.py on there. So you can see this is fairly standard Neopixel digital IO keypad, USB HID. I'm setting up six keys here, and then when I press them, I'm using keypad to look for events and send one of the preset key codes that I've supplied here. So A, X, left arrow, right arrow, down arrow, up arrow. So you can use these the exactly the same way you use any button or switch, or if you've used the MX keypads, identical. So these are just going to some of my direct available digital IO pins, GPIO pins, on my QDPI here. But this could be using a more limited set of pins if you're doing some kind of a diode matrix with rows and columns. So all that's possible. Just a side note question in the chat from Snakey Maker Cat over in, let me bring up the discord here over the discord. This is called Micromages, and it is a very modern game. It was written pretty recently, but it was written for the NES in assembly language, and with all kinds of crazy tricks, NES tricks, they sell a cartridge, they also sell the ROM, you can get it on itch.io and other places. So I bought that ROM, and I'm playing it in an NES emulator. It's a really cute, fun game, up to four player co-op as well. So I'm not affiliated with them and receive no kickbacks, but I love Micromages. It's a really fun game. So let's see, what else? Let's take a look over here on the main page for these. You can see this is product 5756, so you can head there. We have them normally for $1.75, so it's just a small PCB breakout, the little socket that allows you to plug in and remove and try different switches without soldering. Comes with some header pins. So if you look, there's the bag it came in, comes with more than enough header pins to break those and solder them and plonk them into your board, if you wanna use it that way. $0.88 today, so half price. You can get up to 10 of them and then you'll wanna get yourself some if you don't already have them. Some chalk switches. So we have a 10 pack here for $11.95 of the Linear Red. It's pretty standard and we also have these white ones which are out of stock right now. You can put your email in there and get notified when they come back in stock. $11.95 and those are the clicky, very similar to Cherry MX Blue. And these are those key caps that we have. Now one thing, I forgot to bring this to the workshop to show you, but one thing about these I noticed is these are actually a translucent white which has essentially at the factory been painted or a black coating has been applied. You can scratch that off. So if you wanted to maybe make yourself a little stencil or template, you could probably turn these into glow through maybe just use a little. Sound should be back, sorry about that. Let me know where, let's see, it was pretty recently we lost sound about two minutes ago, yeah. It squelched out, yeah, sorry. Sorry about that. Let me know how far to go back if you were interested. I was talking about these key caps and how to make them glow through. Right after glow through, okay, yeah. Thank you everyone in the various chats for letting me know. I typed the destruction code and destroyed the sounds, dun, dun, dun. Yeah, so the thing I was saying is with these black key caps, let me go back to my down shooter here. Show you actually, how about a little bonus here. Bonus session here, let me fix the focus. All right, so I'm just gonna sacrifice this key cap by doing this not very neatly. I like to do this under a magnifier of some kind, but if I grab, I'll just use this. This is a little exacto blade here. I will show you exactly what this does, okay. So there you can see, you could do that a lot neater but you get a really nice glow through effect. Refocus just by some careful scraping, which works particularly nicely if you're doing some sort of doom style death metal punk rock. There we go, it's a monster eyeball. But you can see that looks pretty nice. Let me change the exposure. Yeah, all right, so DIY glow through key caps for you there. Okay, well, let's see. If there's any other questions, let me know. Yeah, thin man, could you use acetone to take the paint off? Great question, I haven't tried it. So that'd be worth, I think worth a try. I can give that a shot sometime. Yeah, Todd Bott says stick those in the laser cutter maybe that's definitely a possibility. There's always the chance that you're gonna create something carcinogenic and toxic and destroy your lungs. So make sure you have good filtration if you're gonna do that. But I suspect that's, it might be with a fiber laser but I suspect that's how these are, the legends are put on those in the first place. It's the only reason that they've not just made black injection molded plastic for this particular key cap. Yeah, really nice diffusion. It's a great look. Okay, let's see. I think that about covers it. Let me know if there's any other questions. Otherwise, I think that's gonna do it for today. So that right there is my product pick of the week. This week it is the NeoKey Chalk Socketed Breakout for all of your low profile key switch needs. Thanks everyone. For Adafruit Industries, I'm John Park. This has been JP's product pick of the week and I will see you next time. Don't forget, head on over here to get these on discount before the show is over or within a short grace period and you'll get them at half price. Thank you, bye-bye.