 Welcome to the show. It's me, John Park. It's time for John Park's workshop. And guess what? This is the final one of 2021. This is gonna do it. In fact, this'll be my last live stream of the year. I'll be on vacation for the next couple of weeks and then back after the new year in 2022. So time to recover and recuperate and rest and do other things that begin with R, like crossword puzzles, ignoring the C. Did everyone get their mega, super mega puzzle edition? The New York Times Sunday, last Sunday. You can order just that section on New York Times site, I think it's a big, huge puzzle section that includes a like four times larger than normal life Sunday style crossword. I love it. It's what I do over the next two weeks is all the different puzzles in there. So I'm excited about it. If you're wondering what I'm talking about, I think I posted a picture up on my social media. So go look for that, John Edgar Park on the social media. What else is happening? I wanna say hi to everyone over in Discord. We've got chat happening here. And if you're over in YouTube, that's another spot where you'll spot some chatters. We've got a Santa Claus. I don't think I have a Santa hat in here. We've got a Lars. What's he up to? Just chilling under the band saw. Let's see, what else is going on? I'm excited about our project today. I'm gonna be using this thing on my journeys over the break to make a piece of gear portable that's currently not super portable. So we'll see how that goes. That should be fun. And hello to Andy Callaway, Z Grover, Todd Botte, who else do we have in here? Gary Z, thanks for stopping by everyone. All right, let me pull that out of there because that Lars is distracting. What else? Hey, Gary T is over in the YouTube as well, hello. So let's see, what's next? Let's do a couple of our standard things, a little bit of housekeeping. First of all, I mentioned our job board. We have a help wanted sign up. It's actually, in this case, not our help wanted, but there are people looking for some help. And so consider helping. If you head to jobs.adafruit.com, these are some of the positions that you'll see that are open right now. There's a Adafruit IO and Arduino programming gig, contract gig from Engineer Ally. And it looks like you can do that one from anywhere. USA. It's also innovation senior software engineer at Walmart in Bentonville, Arkansas, Arizona. Oh geez, what's AR? I think it's Arizona. No, that's AZ. I'll say Arkansas. Sounds right. Let me know in the chat. I don't know all of my states. I'm not gonna do so good on these crosswords, huh? Another couple of positions there that are open and it's free to use, free to post your positions. So if you're looking to hire someone, you can also look through resumes. You can post just your resume and CV and job info up there. Tirely free to use. That's jobs.adafruit.com. I'll also mention Adabox. We have another one coming up. It's gonna be a winter edition. As you've probably heard, we're calling these based on seasons so that we have the latitude and leeway to deal with fluctuations in supply chain that can wreak havoc on dates. So we're not putting a fixed date on this, but it's gonna be a winter edition box. We're just getting some cool things ramped up for that. So that's gonna be exciting in the new year. So go to adabox.com. You can subscribe. You can also get a subscription for someone else as a gift if you want. It's not usually that many free slots. We make about 4,000 roughly of the boxes and a lot of people up their subscription or subscribe to it for a full year. So it's not always a lot of empty slots, but if you're interested, head over there and check it out. It's usually a good deal. A lot of great stuff and tutorials and entertainment and education value in the Adaboxes. What else have we got? Not that, but no, not that. That's just the Adafruit site. What's going on there? We got some cool holiday stuff going on here. New products to check out. As well, I really want one of these feather pink RP2040 feathers. You can only get them right now with a big order, but hopefully those will come into regular stock at some point and let's see what else. So Tuesdays I have a show that some of you come and watch. I recognize some of you. It's called JP's product pick of the week. It looks like this. This was this week's product pick, which was the Cricut featherwing. And I encourage you to come by on that show because during the live stream and during the live stream only, we always have a big, big, big discount available on the product pick. This week it was 50% off on the feather Cricut wing, so they went like hotcakes. And I usually give a little rundown of the product, do some demos, talk about it, show it off. And then I make a little one minute recap and that is this. And this is that. Check it out. It is the Cricut featherwing. So just like all of our other Cricuts, this is an all-in-one robotics platform. It accepts any feather in the feather ecosystem. What's cool about that is it means that if you wanna use an RP2040 feather, you can do it. If you want an M4, go for it. If you need Wi-Fi for AIO types of connectivity, you can use an ESP32-based chip. If you want to do some Bluetooth things, you can get an NRF52840 feather, for example, and plug it into there. If I take my phone, and I'm using the Bluetooth Connect app right there, if I press the up button, I'm moving a servo motor that's plugged into one of the four servo slots on the Cricut. And the way I'm controlling it is that I have a feather NRF52840 plugged into there, so it's Bluetooth-friendly and easy to control. It is the Cricut feather wing. I said, hey, that was gonna loop, I caught it. And then I forgot to actually turn my audio back on. But now it's on. Let's see, I'm just gonna fix one thing over here. The YouTube wants to play a little preview of the show that is distracting, so I'm gonna hide that over there. And let's get with our next thing, and that's gonna be a little thing that we like to call the Cricut Python Parsec. Yes, Cricut Python. Hey, all right, let's get this rolling. This is a neat little tip here that I wanted to share today. For the Cricut Python Parsec, I wanted to show you how you can use pretty much any GPIO pin on your microcontroller as a ground pin. Why would you wanna do this? Well, sometimes you wanna plug things in. Like you can see here, I've got a couple of LEDs with resistors plugged in, and they're on either side of a little cutie pie board. There's only one pin marked as ground on this. Point at it right there. That's the ground pin. Well, you can't share that too easily with a couple of these leads if you're going into a breadboard. Great, but sometimes you just have header pins on your board and you wanna plug things into them. I have some little right angle headers that I've soldered into here. And so what you can do in this case, if you don't wanna kinda crowd things in, is pick another available GPIO pin and set it at a low value, which essentially acts as a ground. Now, this isn't as high a current ground as the ground ground pin. So you only wanna use this for things like LEDs and buttons and switches, nothing higher current. But it works really easily and really well. So watch this. You can see here in my code, I'm setting up by importing library for board and digital IO. Then for this red LED, I'm simply setting the pin that the high side is plugged into, which in this case, I'm plugging into the RX pin. So I set that to be a digital in-out pin with the direction set to output. And I set the value to true. If I set this value to false and resave, it'll turn off that LED. If I set this back to true, it lights it up because it's setting that pin high. So we're getting three volts out of that roughly. On this other side, what I'm gonna do is same sort of thing. I'll set up one of the pins, in this case, the TX pin for the high side of the LED, the positive side. But then to fake a ground, what I'm doing here is I've created a variable called fake ground pin. And here I'm setting up a digital pin. It's a GPIO pin A1 in this case. And I'm setting its direction to output, but then I'm keeping its value low. I'm setting the value to false. This essentially acts as a ground pin. So if I, whoops, let me redo that. So if I hit save now, what you can see is our green LED lights up as well, even though I didn't have to clutter things up by using a single ground pin. And so that is how you can fake a ground pin on your microcontroller inside of circuit Python. And this has been your circuit Python parsic. Last one of the year, in fact. Well, I hope you found that one useful. I wish I had remembered this a long, long time ago. I knew it many years ago, and I think I did this on Arduino. But it's particularly helpful on boards like, let's say a metro or let me grab an example board here. What have I got? Go through some drawers of boards here. Where are all the metros? Are they inside? They might be. I can demonstrate this, the mechanical side of it, actually with a kind of cool artifact. This is a special Make Magazine Edition Arduino Uno. And you can do this in Arduino as well. This board isn't gonna run circuit Python. But you can see we've usually got just one or two, boy, there's a lot of dust on here. One or two ground pins on the board. In this case, I think there's three. But as you're plugging stuff in, little sets of buttons and switches and LEDs, you kind of want to use other pins there as ground. And so this is a way that you can fake that, which is super helpful, I think. All right. Yeah, I'll dust blink and lights. And of course you could use that for blinking and other things. What else? I think it's time for us to get into our project of the day. So let me jump over to the workbench here and talk a little about what's going on. In fact, I'm gonna stay right here, but turn on that camera. So that right there is a groove box, essentially a type of little drum machine. This one's called the Electron Model Cycles. And it's something I just got. It's my Christmas present to play around with and hopefully make some songs for some of my videos on it. And as you can see there, it's got a couple of things plugged into it. One is that big thick cable with the yellow heat shrink on it that is a audio output that's going into a little amplifier. And you can see that black cable there. That is a wall power that is five volts and it is one of those little skinny 1.3 millimeter barrel connectors. So this thing has no battery in it and it does not power over USB. It has a USB port just for exchanging data and it can be used as a USB audio interface, but it won't power over USB, which means you don't get away with the usual trick of just, hey, I'll bring a power bank, which works for a lot of equipment, a lot of music equipment, you can grab little power banks to power them. So what I wanted to do is come up with a neat way of making a discreet, small, little portable power bank for it. I don't think I'm gonna go inside of it yet. I just got this, so I don't wanna hack it open and try to fit a lipo inside of it. But I want to have a really neat, easy, rechargeable battery solution for this. And part of, let me talk a little bit about what some of the history of this unit and portable power is. In fact, let me jump to this view here for a second. So this is the device, actually a Swedish company called Electron. This is the, it's a frequency modulation groove box that has six tracks of different sound engines that you can be running and doing a bunch of sequencing. If you scroll down here into some of the specifics, you'll see here there's the USB for data, there's the Power 5.1 amp. And under the specifications, it, let me see, does it mention, yeah, so the power inlet, this is the interesting part. If you look here under hardware, power inlet, there are actually a pair of them. There's the power inlet, so center positive 1.35 millimeter barrel jack. And then there's the battery in. That's interesting, you don't actually see that on the back there. So center positive 5.5 by 2.1 millimeter barrel jack, sort of the more normal size that we're used to, same one you plug guitar pedals into, except it's center positive, so don't go plug in guitar pedal power because it's usually center negative. And it's anywhere from four to 10 volts DC that it accepts. So when this thing launched probably two years ago, there were no battery options for it. They probably didn't even talk too much about that, that battery port. But then they started to tease this thing. So this is a power handle, they call it. It's essentially a tube for four AA batteries that hooks to the device and you can see it acts as a handle and it also plugs into the side there. So this is a little, that's where that 2.1 millimeter power jack goes. One side has just sort of a screw hinge and M3 screw hinge. The other side allows the jack to go in and that's where you pop in your batteries. So this thing, they teased it, it took a couple of years for it to come out. And it's kind of interesting because they decided not to do a rechargeable, not to do lipo. That's what a lot of people were kind of assuming is that when the company said they were gonna have a portable solution, they assumed it would be a USB lipo type of thing. They didn't go with that and I can imagine for a lot of reasons, one of which being it is much safer and cheaper to not be sending lipo's around the world and easier for them to get it certified. However, they had a problem. The thing in some very limited cases was overheating so they had to recall them all. So that's actually not on the market right now. This is a site that just has it preserved for posterity but you can't buy it new anymore. They had to pull it off the market. And so what I wanna do is my own lipo plugged into that side port. So I wanted to show you kind of the process of figuring out what I can do with this and what's safe and then try to come up with a little finished solution here. So let me jump over here and I'll give you a little demo just for fun of a couple of things it does. I don't know the machine very well yet. Let's see, what's this on? So this is just a preset set of instruments and preset pattern that's on it, little chain pattern. We can switch out to a different one. Okay, so you get the idea. And what I wanted to do in kind of figuring this thing out, first of all, here's the side situation. So you can see we've got a little protective rubber cover on each side. I've peeled this one off and you can see there is our little sort of standard looking barrel connector there. And that means I should be able to plug in things like little battery packs for either alkaline or nickel metal hydrides. I think I've got some enoloupes in here. So I was gonna try that out. So first thing I did was of course, double check the spec sheet and the center positive to make sure that I'm providing that and I'm not gonna short or ruin anything. Probably has diodes. So next thing I'll do is turn this off, shuts down. I'm gonna unplug my amp from there and I will unplug power. So that's the, that's the wall wart power. And then what I wanted to do was kind of figure out what it was drawing current wise if I fed it from a sort of phone battery type of bank and checked the current. So really short answer to this, if you just wanna power it off of a standard pretty much any power bank is one of these cables that takes a USB-A and converts it to center positive 2.1 millimeter barrel jack. Adafruit sells this, you can buy them all sorts of different places online. You may have one already. I had one, it was hard to find but I've had one for years and this is the first time I've used it. So what I did was I have a little battery or USB tester here that allows me to check out voltage and current and some other things from a device. So if I power on my bank here and this is a pair of or a little lipo pack. I think the 4,000 milliamp hour one that Adafruit has that looks like two blue cylinders. And I made this three printed case a few years ago. This is a power boost 1000C which has charging and charging port there and output. This thing is also nice because it doesn't turn itself off when it doesn't detect much current draw unlike a lot of phone bank ones. And you can see here, I'm gonna zoom in. You can see here that I'm reading out my voltage. Voltage, it's 5.14 roughly and the current draw right now is zero. So I'll plug this in to the little side port here and power it on. You can see it's drawing about 0.3 amps, about 320 milliamps. There are, if I hit play, it's not, let me plug it into audio actually so we know what's doing that. So most it went there was about 0.35 somewhere around there. You can do some adjustment of the brightness of the screen and the brightness of these LEDs which will bring it down just a little bit but we'll call it let's say 0.35. So 350 milliamps is the draw. So I gotta be able to provide that and then we can also do some math to figure out the amount of battery life we'll get out of different arrangements of batteries. So I will power it down. I'm pressing a button on the device to power it down and unplug that. So you could say, okay, that's just solved. You can just use this cable and absolutely, absolutely right. Get any phone power bank, plug that in, you should be good. But I wanna make it a little cooler than that. So couple of things. So first of all, I have, I found in my junk drawer of phone and other Gizmo chargers, I found a wall wart that is, I think it's five volt and one amp. So it's basically the same as what this thing wants. And I think that is that same little plug. Let's see. Yeah, so I could build a little device with a nice little right angle plug, which is pretty cool. Keeps your cords out of the way here. But like I said, one of the interesting things is this is actually a pretty tolerant four to 10 volts, which is nice. I don't wanna use that five volt one if I can use this four to 10 volt one. Why not future proof it? And I found one of these also in a box of junk that I don't know what I cut that off of, but some Gizmo I got rid of or battery pack or something at some point, I got a really nice quality right angle plug here that fits really nicely. And this gave me the idea that I could build my battery pack solution just off to the side here. It means it's not protruding off the back. We could just have something slim and aligned here, perhaps. Or if I needed to, we could put that somewhere else. But I kind of like the idea of making it pretty minimal there off to the side. And then that means I could use something like a right angle connector for headphones and then I won't bump up against the tray table on an airplane or something like that, which is nice. Let's see. So what I wanna do then is start from here. So I've got one of my little power boost 1000 C and this will provide, I think, a little more than an amp normally and you can set it to fast charging if you need to, it has battery charge level indication and a bunch of other good things. And then I've got some choices on batteries. So this one is really, really tiny and it's a 420 milliamp hour one. So we could plug that in like so, maybe connect them together like this. Heat shrink tubing around the board. I'll leave that port free there and then connect our cable here right to the back and that means we could have a little gizmo that just kind of sits on the side there, which is neat. It'll also fit up here pretty well, same with some of these bigger batteries. So here's a 1200 milliamp hour. So it's pretty slim. Again, this could fit pretty nicely inside the box. Off to the side here, it's a little bigger but maybe it goes like that. So we can plug it in and keep it snug. And so what I'll do next is think about the charge time. So we've got, let me see if I can switch cameras here. Hold on, did this track pad die? It did, all right, hold on one second. If you've got a camera switcher, you wanna do some camera switching. I've gotta make this. Yes, that's right, I just saw C Grover mentioned that on one of the TRS connectors, he saw a white dot of paint, which is his signature move. Which one was that? Oh, it's this one. Yeah, these were from C Grover. Let's see it right there. Good eye, C Grover signature. So can I switch cameras now? Yes, I can. All right, so the roughly 350 milliamp draw means that with a, if you had a 350 milliamp hour battery, you'd get about an hour out of it. So this is a 420, so just a little more than an hour. This one is about four times, about three times bigger. So this could be about three, three and a half, maybe even four hours. Here's a 2000. So you can go up and up and up. These are 4,000, but they start to get pretty big. The one I wish I could find, I've used these in projects and I think they're, the ones I had are all inside of projects right now are the single cell round ones. So this is, you can see this is three of them next to each other, but we sell one that is, I think, what is it, 1,800 or 2,000? It's that divided by three probably. And that would be kind of nice because a single tube there would work out pretty well. But I'll work with what I've got. So let's see about proof of concept. Actually, the battery won't matter too much at the beginning because what I'm gonna do is solder this up. And I think I'll do a direct connection from the cable here to the power bank. So the first thing I'll do there is figure out which wire is positive and which wire is negative. So we can just grab a continuity checker. So this should beep when we have continuity. And then I'll just go into center. That's gonna be the positive. And I'll touch the cables, not that one. That one, okay. And I actually did this earlier and I put a little silver paint pen mark on the ground wire. It's just a convention I use. So I know that's ground, which is gonna be the barrel, the outside of that. So if we touch the wire on that silver line, okay. So then with this little power boost, we can, you can see there's silkscreen on the USB port there. Let's see how far I can zoom in. So you can see here, it says plus, here it says minus. Those are the four slots for USB, but then there's also these two in front that are also positive and negative. And if we wanna double check that, fix my focus. What I'll do is put the multimeter into voltage reading, plug a battery in, and then we can just probe what should be the positive and negative. And there we're getting 5.13 volts, which is great. That's what we want. Again, anything from four to 10 will work here. And so let's get that cable soldered onto there. So I'm gonna crank this vice and fire up the soldering iron. Just using this little cute pen soldering iron here. Here's another interesting battery choice, by the way, we'll wait for that to heat. This is a 500 milliamp hour, so just a little bigger than that 420. That might be nice. So I'm just gonna tin this up a little. Are you hot yet? Heating. Oh, I convinced it to stop heating. These things heat quick though. Check this out. From cold to about 300 pretty quickly there, maybe 20 seconds or so. Okay, so let's see. I don't think there's any reason to make this particularly long. So we can get that to be a short little run there. So I'm gonna snip these and trim them. I'm gonna leave that little silver mark there for right now just so I get started on the right foot. And then I'm gonna clip only the positive. This is a pretty thick wire for this. I don't know what this was from, something pretty beefy. We'll see if I can successfully strip this without yanking too much of that wire. There we go. Yeah, it's not even gonna fit all into that hole is that we'll see. You know what, I might have left. Let's see if I can still do this. No, that's not big enough to fit the wire. Okay, sometimes you can go through these mounting holes as a little strain relief and wrap the wire through. But I think we'll end up trimming away a little bit of this wire so that it actually fits. So I'm just gonna untwist this for a second, trim off a little chunk and then get that to fit into that hole. I don't know if I'll even need to worry about heat shrink now. I think I'll put a large piece over all of this and these should stay isolated. They're far enough away that I'm not too worried about it. Okay, so positive, negative, negative also has the white writing on it so we should be good there. Oh, sorry, I have not switched my camera back. That as close as that wants to get, sorry. There we go. Okay, so let's trim off wire there. I'm gonna peel off these strands and get it even smaller because I don't want any strays messing things up here. Like that, stripped a little insulation off there, a little extra, a little more to work with. Okay, still too thick. So half of me is thinking I could just go like that. Oh, you know what though? Yeah, I can still twist this, okay. All right, bear with me. I know this is a little bit exacting but I don't wanna, it's the only right angle connector for this I've got for this side of the right size. And I'm not too worried. I think this is a fairly, again, it's a fairly low current situation so I'm not too worried about reducing the amount of wire that I'm using here. Hopefully that's not too foolish. Okay, so I'll twist these up nice so you can see that. It's not the best. Okay, I'm gonna get rid of some of this insulation on this one so that it is the same depth. And I don't have my better strippers for this job here. I want these twisted up really nice and tight so we don't get strays shorting up the works. Then I may use some Kapton tape between those two. Kapton is kind of useful when you, here we go. Kind of useful when you don't have a good way to add heat shrink. Okay, let's see, this iron is still hot, that's good. Two down, trim up the excess and I'm gonna sort of pull at it a little bit to the tool to find the little strays that are gonna wanna mess me up. There's two little strays there. It doesn't take much. Okay, so I'm gonna put a little Kapton in between those for safety. Has anyone ever tried liquid insulations? I think they make those right. And I'm gonna trim my tape into a small little piece and grab some tweezers. I can pull that through this, maybe. Just too attached to me. There we go. All right, so that's a nice little safety insurance policy right there. Avoid any shorts. And I can wrap the other extra bit. Okay, so presumably that right there, that little nub will now provide power. And we can do some stuff to clean it up, dress things up a little bit. But I'm gonna test this now out on just my multimeter and then the device. So let's grab one of our little batteries. This little one that I'm kind of partial to. Okay, that's a good sign, right? It's not smoking and I can also test charging it if I have a USB B plug anywhere. I have a lot of C laying around over here now. Oh, hey, here's this old friend. Okay, a coily cable. So I'm just gonna see if I can charge it. We should see either yellow or green show up depending on the state of the battery. Here we go, so it's still charging. I think that goes green when it's fully charged or does it blink when it's charging? I can't remember which it does. That's all good. And now we'll grab the meter and check. We should have center positive, five volts and we do. All right, so I'm feeling brave. Go ahead and plug that into my brand new little groove box here and see if I don't smoke the thing. Hey, ta-da. Let's see if it still makes sound. Cool, let's double stop that. All right, so let's turn that off. Now, I haven't done an update on this that brings it compliance with the battery accessory that they've now pulled from the market. That was just meant, I think, to show a battery status. When power is coming from here, it'll show battery status, but you have to set it to be either nickel metal hydride or, it's my meter beeping, or alkaline. And so I just don't think it's gonna tell me anything honest about my battery's value from this LiPo going through the power boost. So I'm gonna ignore that. And let's see, I think I'm gonna go for one of the bigger batteries and see how that feels to have the, where's the 1200? Let's see what that feels like. I could leave this port open and plug different batteries into it, but I kind of wanna make a, I wanna put some heat shrink around this part here, just leaving an opening for this power port and maybe for the battery port as well. Let's see, so you could get into arrangement like that kind of thing. It's not terrible. Keep it all off to the side here. Kinda cool. So let's start with that. Let's do the heat shrink thing and see where that leaves us. I think this tubing I have, which is three quarter inch is gonna fit pretty well, yeah. I wish I had put some over that too, but we'll just have a little sort of funny pinch there. So let's take a chunk like that and I've got a heat gun over here, I'm gonna turn on. Okay, so I want it to maintain this twist. I may be able to heat set that as well. So that points the battery port up, which is probably a good thing. Actually, that's pretty willing to maintain that position actually. So if I go like this, I can make a little, what you know what I'll probably do is shrink that on there and then cut out the port for the battery to go. It could also do clear, but since I wanna bring this on an airplane, the less electronic-y circuit board-y things look the better. Also, this has a blinding blue LED on it that I'd rather just cover, so like that. And the heat on this, I think around 130 is good. Let's see, about 185 is the temperature now. And you can see it'll kinda conform around the shape of some of the parts on there like that power port. You go a lot hotter, but I don't wanna accidentally rework any of the surface mount stuff on this board here. It's looking pretty good. It's sucked in pretty well. All right, we'll leave it at that. Let that cool a little bit. And now I'll just take a exacto and give you a closer view of this. So this is the battery JST connector right here. There's the buck boost converter there, whichever it is, boost, I guess. So if I put a little kind of rectangular slit in there, we should be able to plug in our different batteries. So let's get a big knife there. Here, a little battery plug door. Now, boop, you can still see a little blue glow. See the LED there from the top, if you need to. Let's see. Maybe something like that. In and it's ready to go. And I wouldn't mind wrapping some other, I don't have any bigger heat shrink or I'd shrink the battery in there, but this one, this is gonna give me like an hour and I want more than an hour. So I think I'll have to live with a bigger battery. Let's do a 12, almost 1200s. Let's see how to tidy this up. Like this, could just lay it there, maybe even with a little Velcro or something like that. See is that still working? Yeah, it is. Some zip ties on there, black gaffers tape. I might do that. I really wanna make it look airplane friendly. Put this on the inside. Oh, that's kinda nice. The battery can, this'll still plug in if the battery's right there. That's kinda neat. Let's go for that. By the way, we still got micro USB there for charging. That's not bad. All right. You know, for expediency here today, even though we could probably come up with some thicker heat shrink, that might be my mission or a little 3D printed case or something else, I'm gonna go with some gaff tape for right now. Let's off again. That lays a little flatter like that, yeah. And this'll, if I shove this up higher, it means I get more room for my USB port down here at the bottom. So I think this is the way to go. I'm gonna tuck these wires in, not too shabby. I don't love that little piece of tape there. I might cover that. Let's do another round, like so. And then I'm gonna clean that. All right. I don't know, maybe that looks terribly suspicious. I'm not sure. We'll find out at the airport, but now means I can just kachonk a battery right into the side of that thing. Super small, nice and easy. What do you think of that? Let's pick a different pattern. I don't know what this one is. It's called milk crate. Wait, we already heard that one. Yeah, there we go. So super tiny battery pack. Now all I need is my headphones and I'm ready to go. Hope you enjoyed that solution to make in the electron model cycles be portable, functional. I don't call them MacGyver for none. Just checking out the Discord chat. Sorry, I couldn't see the chat while I was over there because my iPad got logged out of it. So Velcro strips for managing cables around the battery board, yeah. Five minute epoxy it, that says. Excellent. Yeah, and this is, yeah, Bergen Gamer says it's gonna make a portable Pi 3B. Yeah, you can, depending on the current draw of the thing you need, this little lovely, let me go to that product. This little lovely power boost is your friend because it just solves so many things all in one. The fact that it has charging built on to it, so you don't have to unplug a battery and go plug it into a charger. The fact that it'll convert your 3.7 volt lipo up to a little more than five because some things like a Pi hate it when they get below five. So I think it's usually like 5.2 roughly. And it'll not turn itself off when it's plugged into things like iOS devices. Really good little gizmo for this kind of thing. I love these, I've been using them on projects for years. All right, let's see. Anything else? Any other questions or thoughts in the chat? Let me know. Oh yeah, Dale Echols mentioned I should have wired the enable port for the power switch. So yeah, that power boost has a enable pin on it. If you look at this illustration of it or photo of it, you'll see there's EN next to ground, enable next around. If you short that, it turns off the power boost board. So you can put a little slide switch there. You can even kind of fit one right in there if you remove one pin, one leg. I have one actually on this. As you can see it, I did exactly that. In fact, on this one I've got a little slide switch right on the power boost and you can see in this case I've soldered on a USB-A port to the power boost. So let's see, turn it on and off. I don't really need that, I don't think for this project because you can't, it's not safe to just pull power on that groove box because there's a bunch of stuff that gets saved when it shuts down so you actually are supposed to hold its own button for powering it down. So that was my thinking on that, Dale, but maybe there's something about that I'm not thinking of as far as quiescent charge and trickling power loss or something like that. So thank you for the suggestion. I'll definitely keep that in mind for the future. All right, Tyeth asks if you know anything in the four amp range similar to that? I do not. I have wanted something more like a three amp to be able to deal with a Raspberry Pi 4 and I think I've seen one or two cases of those available on like Aliexpress. I think Tom Whitwell did a project where he added battery and charging capabilities to the fates board. The fates is a DIY sound machine based on a Raspberry Pi and you can use a three or four in there. So I know that there's at least some out there that'll deal with like a three amp. I'll give you about three amps available. All right, well thank you so much everyone. And also I have to say thank you so much for hanging out and being part of this community for the past year as we get ready to glide right into 2022. Thanks for supporting us both in the community by being good fun friendly people who are sharing the stuff that they're working on and their enthusiasm as well as of course keeping our lights on by purchasing stuff from Adafruit and contributing things to things like CircuitPython and other code. We have a lot of give and take which is really satisfying and makes it a lot of fun. So I think that's gonna do it. Thanks everyone for stopping by. I will wish you a merry Christmas, happy holidays, happy new year and so does Lars, he means it from the bottom of his black and shriveled heart. And we're gonna, I think there'll be some shows happening. You'll have to check, you can go in fact to the Discord chat here, the live broadcast chat as well as to the live broadcast announce to check and see when things go live. I think P.T. and LaMoure are gonna be taking a little bit of time off as well but there should be shows continuing to happen here and there in the next couple of weeks. That's gonna do it. All right, thanks everyone for Adafruit Industries. This has been John Park's Workshop. I'm John Park, bye-bye.