 it's new product time new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new okay we're gonna just jump right in yeah okay coming soon it's not out yet but a lot of people have been asking about it so i wanted to get it in the store for signups is the new prop maker feather this will be out in a week or two hopefully um but you can sign up now and it'll be notified when it's in stock it's uh the latest in our series of rp 2040 feather designs but this one is designed specifically to make it really easy to make props animatronics and toys without having to do any soldering it's got an i2s amplifier so it kind of improves on the the prop maker feather wing by having digital audio as a little servo port so you can connect small hobby servos it's got a button input it's got a list 3dh triple axis accelerometer and a neopixel driver as well as of course all the feather pins um and all the gpio that you would normally want to use you've got the four abc's and like 21 gpios and battery usbc for debug and charging um and there you can even disable the lipo charger uh we'll show how to do that later if you want to run this off of double a's because we're doing some prop projects and we're like oh what do we want to reuse um existing but you know double a battery pack um you can probably do that so terminal blocks reassemble make it easy to uh uh screw terminal anything you want on it'll be coming to the eight fruit shop soon but i want to just preview it now uh we have an update for the eight of fruit feather esp 32 s2 like many of our other feathers that use the lc 709203 battery monitor that battery monitor has been discontinued so we're now uh revising them all to use the max 17 048 um this has the max 17 048 it's otherwise identical has a tft screen and buttons um semi qt port uh esp 32 s2 battery and all that good stuff but the battery monitors just change from the lc to the max um type and we have libraries for arduino and circuit python on both okay next up uh we have a new product from our friends across the pond at pin maroney this is an inventor hat mini it's interesting it uses a very seesaw like thing going on there there's a chip um from newton that is pre-programmed with firmware that handles all the timing for servos and motors so that you don't have um to do that on the raspberry pi or have separate i2c chip uh our cricket hats you know much more complicated but it's kind of same idea but this is uh less expensive and smaller so it's can drive um eight servos well that goes with the previous sorry about that everything looks black and gold i know it's got a semi qt port and a user button it's got two motor controllers with a drv 8833 which you can get again on an i2s amplifier everyone loves this max 98 357 um and it uses also ports you can use with uh encoder motors so you can have um something that has encoder motors for more precise motor control hence uh hopefully assembled uh mini hat bonnet um you can plug right into your raspberry pi computer all right and the story of the show besides you lady our team or customers our community um has a little bit of a story yes so we actually uh got this email like a week ago um they'd seen the video but they were like this is what it's used for and i'm like it is uh so this is a captain of a first team so it's a robotics team and they have a board that they're required to use and um if you want to do something funky with it that isn't part of like the first ecosystem it's very difficult uh so they want to use neopixels because they want to light up the robot but nobody's written a neopixel driving library for this chipset um but they do have access to isport c so now you they could use this to control neopixels which is a very common request this is it um so this is a bunch of neopixels but this is the board um so the way the board works is it also has a little helper chip on there and uh let me show it on the overhead because it's um it's not lit up but i can show how it works okay so let's again um so let's say you have a microcontroller or a board in this case i'm using an rp2040 because but it which does have neopixel support but maybe um all the pios are used on your rp2040 and so you want to uh control some neopixels or maybe you're using some exotic chip that again nobody's ported a neopixel driver for um but you still want to control neopixels you need that specific timing it's very hard to do so this chip on here the um at tiny 1616 will take um messages from i squared c over here uh from the rp2040 and then convert you know it'll say light up this pixel that color and then when it's done it says please show the pixels and it will write the data out to the terminal ports um so in the back there are five terminals one thing to know you will need separate five volt power the uh neopixels need about 20 to 40 milliamps per led and so if you're driving in any neopixels you're not going to be able to power them over this little thin wire here you'll need a chunky power supply and chunky wires and uh either connect them to this terminal block which then goes through and powers the neopixels um or you can do something like this where um you have a five volt power supply and you just power it directly into the red and black wires of your neopixel but then the signal wires the white and gray wires here are signal and ground um this data will come out of this chip and so you just have to send the i squared c commands and most chips you know do support um i squared c first easily and we've documented the commands so if you're not using circuit python blinka or you're not using an Arduino compatible chip we have libraries for those if you're using something else you could of course port it to that platform you can drive up to i think 512 pixels but i will note you're driving the pixels over i squared c so it's not going to be very fast you can run this at uh one megahertz uh i squared c and that'll do much better you know the default is a hundred kilohertz on many platforms i would bump it up to 400 800 one megahertz clock rate uh and you should light up as a few pixel let's start you should write as few pixels as possible before you write that show the entire strip because every time you set change of pixel color it has to send a message back and forth to say hey this is what the pixel color should be um so that will slow it down and you're never going to be as fast as native neopixel driving but if you have no other way of driving neopixels it does work just basically as you get to like 200 pixels it can slow down a bit but for um you know about 100 pixels writing uh the data you have 800 kilohertz or one megahertz um you'll get almost equivalent to native neopixel uh driving speed so um this could be a really easy way for you to add neopixel support to a chipset that you've got as long as it's got i squared c three volt or five volt i squared c it'll work with and it even has a little switch cap converter here so if you're running this off of three volts it'll generate a five volt signal for a nice clean neopixel driver and you can change the i squared c address if you want with these jumpers