 Welcome to the show, it's me JP and it's time for another JP's product pick of the week. Can you believe we've made it this far? It's Tuesday. Okay, that's not very far into the week admittedly, but I'm excited about our show today. And as is custom here in these parts at this time on this day, I want to send you over to a URL where you are going to find a tremendous 50% off discount on our item of the week this week. And if you head to this URL or go over to this QR code, you will find this page right here. And there you're going to see it's half off for the item. My goodness, that's just tremendous. So before I go any further in describing what our product pick of the week is, I want to let Lady Aida go back in time a couple of times, actually back to the year 2013 and then fast forward a few years to 2013 so you get the full picture, the full history of this product. So take it away, Lady Aida. Why don't you? Yeah, this is our latest, we previewed this actually and then John Jr. took some great photos of it. I have a little bit of video I want to show. Okay, show us the video. So pretty. You ready for this? This is crazy. So yeah, it's really good. So this is the 8x8 matrix and it's got 64 LEDs and it's actually like really warm from all this work it's doing and you should have it running the demo. So yeah, each LED is individually addressable but you only need one wire to control all of them. They're chained down and it even works with their Neo Matrix code that we have. And on the back there's these nice gold tabs. I designed this so that if you took multiple ones you could tile them and they'll tile dimensionally perfect. There won't be a spacing difference because it's like this is exactly one half of the spacing between these two. So this is as tight pitch as we could get it and I really like it because it's like you can get an 8x8 RGB matrix but it won't be nearly as bright you'd have to multiplex it. This is only one pin and it's like ready to go. It's 24 bit color. Super sweet. So yeah there's these tabs that I designed so that if you tile them you can solder the tabs to make it more mechanically stable. And then you can chain these and there's some mounting holes around the edges. So yeah super bright 8x8. And then we also updated the 8x8 LED matrices. So same thing you basically have 64 LEDs and you can chain these of course and they have you know a grid and they tile nicely if you want to have like a gridded display of some sort with RGBW LEDs. Go for it. This also is available in cool 600 degree Kelvin neutral like we're in space or something like this is the end of 2001 Space Odyssey or something. It's full of RGBW stars. So you have cool over there neutral and warm and then of course the classic. It is a little more expensive for the RGBW so if you don't need them like you don't have to pick them up but yeah you can have these beautiful LED effects. And let's just go quickly through them. Sure. Let's check it out. So this is 8x8 LEDs it's Neopixel works with the Neopixel library we have RGB and then warm white. Yeah what I can do is just go to the next one. And this is going to be neutral and then on the final video the same RGB and then cool. So three different options. Hey those are some pretty cool three different options but the one that we're going to look at today I've got it right over there in my cabinet so I'm going to go and pull open the exact right drawer and get one so hang tight. Hey there it is. Our product pick of the week this week. It is the Neo Matrix 64 RGBW in the neutral white. Do I have that right? Natural. In the natural white so we do have these in three different white diode colors and if you're wondering what's the deal with this and let's see if I can hey is it kicking back in. Hey okay I think we're alive again wow that was a weird one yeah my computer just kind of went blank and then woke back up in the same state it was but the stream didn't like that so alright so let's try that part of this again alright here we go so product pick this week is the Neo Matrix 64 RGBW in natural white. So if you're wondering what's the deal with this this is an 8x8 matrix of Neo pixels it acts like a single Neo pixel strip but the deal with RGBW is that it's not just three diodes on there on that little circle you see for the red green and blue it's also got a white diode a fourth diode and those come in three different colors typically a cool a natural and a warm white this is a roughly 4500 degrees Kelvin which is how how light temperatures are typically referred I'm seeing a lot of fun I gotta pop these up a lot of fun screen grabs of still faces that you had to have to sit there looking at so thanks everyone over in the discord chat for those and looks like we have decent decent maybe stream health right now so apologies for that so let me take that screen off of there for a second and get back to it yeah so if we take a look over at the product page I'm gonna jump back here for a second how about like this myself in the corner there you can see this is the product pick it's at half off right now which is terrific you can get these for $22.48 which is great it's a lot of Neo pixels in a cool form factor if you scroll down in here and get some info about the board and you will see there are links at the bottom here for the learn guide and right here this Neo pixel learn guide if I take a look at one specific project there are a few that we've done so if you if you look at this item in our learn guide system here's a really cool one this was created by the Ruiz brothers and it is essentially a 3d printed case for this board or any of the 64 Neo pixel boards that gives us really nice isolation between the pixels using a little grid and this means when you turn on one pixel you don't bleed into the neighboring ones and it uses a piece of our diffusion LED plastic or acrylic in the front so it's a really nice way to spruce up this board and you can use it with the I recommend the feather m4 which gives you a lot of power for doing the LED animation library but you can use a lot of different boards that'll that'll drive Neo pixels with this one of the features of this board by the way is that it can be tiled so you'll see it's got some little copper traces there copper pads there that give you something to bridge you can usually put down a little little header pin or something like that bridge across them to give it some mechanical stability and then you can hook up the out there's a Neo pixel out to the Neo pixel in as well as the 5 volts and the ground if you take a look at my down camera here I've got one that I built so here what you're gonna see this is a rainbow display so that's what we're used to and then I have some stuff in the natural white this one actually this is running my my monitor is making it look a little warmer to me than it is it's more really more of a neutral natural color so there we have some jade color comet or chase and here's a really nice one this is the pulse sparkle from the LED animation library and then I just have that cycling if you take a look at how this works in code I'm gonna pop up my Adam here for a second let me jump to that Adam ATOM that's my little coding app I use you'll see here I'm importing a bunch of these LED animation libraries I've imported Neo pixel and I'm using LED animation sequence which allows us to string together a bunch of these animations I set up the Neo pixel as we always do by picking a digital pin on the output in this one I'm using D6 kind of a traditional one I'm setting this to be a 64 pixel display which is the 8x8 and then there's some neat stuff in the animation library for dealing with a matrix rather than a strip so we don't see one line after another or a snaking pattern which some displays will have this lets us do sort of logical groupings of things and call some of them rows and some of them columns and then I'm just once I've set those up you'll see I've got this line right here for some of the colors I'm using RGB underscore white underscore W and that allows me to specify just that white diode instead of lighting up red green and blue equally which gives you a kind of color tinted white it's never never a great white compared to this single diode that's in there and then I'm stringing together the animation sequence here and then my main loop just runs through animations so you can see here if I want to just let's comment out all these and just run that sparkle it's a really nice looking one I'll hit save here it's going to rewrite that and now I'll hide that atom coding window and now we can see just that nice neutral color white with this pulse sparkle animation makes for a really nice display a little mood display in fact whenever the Reese brothers are on video chats or doing live streams I see one of these in the background and I've always been jealous so I finally printed the parts for that yesterday and you can see here I did sort of a different I didn't add a switch to mine and I'm just running some header pins out from the from the feather with a little circuit at the bottom there into the input there's a little standoff there that holds it there's a slot for the switch if you add a power switch and space for battery but I'm just keeping my plugged in here so there's a lot of course that you can do in code other than just this you can really run any neopixel animation any neopixel code you can also run this I'm running this in circuit Python you can run this in Arduino and then you can use things like fancy LED if you like so pretty much the sky's the limit of what you can do with it and it's a really neat we need way to get color as well as white LEDs into one package I'll go ahead and re-save my code there this is really nice and fast to iterate on you can you can test out different code I have these running for five seconds each and then it advances to the next one so that's a little idea on how how to get that set up let's see it looks like let me see if we've got any questions here and take a look at the chat so doctor says the box moving across up down remind me of turbo lift lights and Star Trek when the lift is moving what else yeah a little jumpy but live it looks like the bit rate is a little low sorry about that I wonder how accurate these panels are yeah color temperature wise I don't have a good way to measure the exact color temperature so that's why you'll see there's a little till day in front of the 4500 degree Kelvin there probably I have some sensor up on this board that would give you a better idea of color temperature ASA is built to code asks what's the maximum number of boards you can serially connect together in assuming you take care of providing enough power to them oh boy that's a really good question I feel like maybe the limit for an M4 board it's a it's a memory issue so you will you know each each neopixel eats a bit of memory so I feel like maybe somewhere around practically speaking 1024 might be where a 1024 pixels not boards not that time 64 might be up there but I'd be interested to know if anyone in the chat has worked with huge numbers of of neopixels has an answer to that so it yeah doctor says memory constraint is is going to be the main issue here I believe you'll take a speed hit too I don't think that the the connection from pixel to pixel when that data reaches the last pixel it's going to take a while so if you look at our neopixel uber guide that may have a bit of a better answer for you if I jump back to chrome browser here this link actually inside the product page where to go this big link right here goes to the uber guide and this will tell you some things about best practices adding a resistor before the first pixel which you can do to be a little more accurate on that first pixel adding a capacitor if you're powering it off of well and anyway you're powering it powering them there's a nice section here on how to power them effectively when you start to get into large numbers and I feel like this guide may talk about your yeah here you can see the current draw I think on a full bright fully lit LED or at about 60 milliamps so you got to multiply that to figure out your current draw let's see does this say I'm stalling here for someone in the chat who just knows this off the top of their head but I'm not sure what the max number that's what we want to know all right well we'll try to get an answer to that maybe ask on ask an engineer tomorrow night I bet lady Aida knows the answer to that let's see well I think that's about it I have done to I've just made I've made a display before they had two of these side by side which was enough for my needs gives you 128 neo pixels which is a decent amount when you start to get into huge numbers of pixels it's probably more efficient to use a matrix an RGB matrix display rather than neo pixel then you're not going to run into the memory issues let's see JSH says they've driven about 400 of them in the past at 60 Hertz with an itsy-bitsy M zero wow yeah Todd says the uber guy talks about your frame rates as well okay the product is this lovely RGB W neo pixel matrix 64 let me jump back take you back to the product page for a second there it is I'm gonna refresh see if we still have them in stock maximum customer at this price per customer is 10 of them so if anyone wants to test that out and see if 640 neo pixels will will do the trick that would be great also know you can arrange these kind of any way you want you could make one really long one and on end you could make a grid of them you can make them in fun tetris shapes it's up to you it just acts as a single neo pixel strip you can also run them as separate ones so if you had a need to you can run as many pins as you've got on your microcontroller you can run a separate neo pixel strand per so you do have a lot of a lot of options with these all right well I think that's gonna do it for today let me jump back into big o vision here hey look that's me the product pick of the week this week is the neo matrix 64 RGBW and that is an 8 by 8 neo pixel grid go ahead and put that on my pegboard back here add a little adding a little twist tie there so I can hang it and those are by the way useful mounting points for adding some fasteners to your build so I'm gonna get and hang that there and that's gonna do it for today so thanks everyone for coming out thanks for putting up the weird technical glitch in the middle of it product pick of the week and I will be back on Tuesday for John Park's workshop so afraid of food industries I'm John Park and I will see you next time bye bye