 You are about to embark on a journey to another dimension. A dimension of curiosity, wonder, and creativity. A journey in a wondrous land of electronic invention. Next stop, the Eight of Box Zone. This Halloween, we're going to strap in and face a future so bright we have to wear LED shades to compete. No matter whether you spend all fall working on a costume, or if you throw on a party hat before stippin' out the door, this Eight of Box will complement your look with style. We're at the forefront of wearable technology with wireless Bluetooth glasses bedazzled with 116 tiny RGB LEDs. Thanks to CircuitPython's new wireless programming capability, you can code up motion or sound reactive patterns over the air. With Bluetooth BLE connectivity, you can code even if all you've got is a phone or a tablet. This Eight of Box comes to us courtesy of Digikey. Like a magical artifact that can make your thoughts come to life, Digikey's encyclopedic catalog is there to help you pull your fantastic inventions from the land of ideas into concrete reality. In our first segment this evening, a delightful visitor has arrived on our planet to serve up a recipe for success, you might say, and command our own John Park to share the bounty of this Eight of Box with you, our viewers. Welcome to the Eight of Box 19 unboxing and thank you so much for joining us. If you are a subscriber, you probably have your box by now and you can join in in the unboxing. If not, be sure to subscribe to Eight of Box 21 coming this winter. Now I would like to give special thanks to Digikey for making this Eight of Box possible. I shall now command the earth human John Park to get his Eight of Box and show you all the insides of this mysterious alternate dimension. Whoa! Hey everyone, it's me John Park and for some reason I feel compelled to get this Eight of Box out and show you what's inside of it. Let's go ahead and do it. Hey, looking good. Some high quality bubble wrap by the way. When we open up the Eight of Box, the first thing we'll notice is the content sheet. It's very mysterious and spirally. Inside it will let you know all of the contents of the box. It gives you some URLs to head to for tutorials and projects and there's a coupon code that you can use on a future order. Some people like to save this tissue paper and keep this little sticker intact. If you want to, you can actually slide the contents out of the side of the tissue very crinkly. All right, let's get this stuff out and start having a look. All right, get ready to get a load of all this good stuff in here. The first thing you're going to notice is the big pink bubble wrap package. This contains the Eight of Fruit LED glasses. We're going to go into lots of depth on these in a little bit. First, I'm just going to get them out and see which pattern. I got the bug. So there are four patterns of these. This one is the big eye bug. Super cool. Set that aside. Now next up, let's talk about this right here. This is the driver board for the glasses. So these glasses can work with lots of different microcontrollers. This one is special built for use with the LED glasses and I'll talk more about that in a little bit as well. But for now, let's set that right there. Now there are a bunch of accessories to go with this. First of all, we have a STEMA QT cable. That's how we're going to connect the driver board to the glasses. We have a battery pack. This takes three AAAs, has a JSTPH connector that can power the board. To go along with it is a set of three AAA batteries. We'll insert those later when we get that powered up. Now we have an extension cable for the battery pack. And this is a battery pack that has an on-off switch, by the way, as well as a little belt clip. You can run that to the glasses with this long extra extension cable. Here's a handy lanyard for your glasses. Now you'll notice the glasses themselves are more like a face plate, right? There's no way to attach them to your face. There's no need for the lanyard, except we happen to include this really cool set of fashion glasses and a little carrying case for that little nylon bag. So these are perfect for, in fact the board was designed to fit right in front of these that we can see through those when we get those put on. So we'll explore that a bit later. You could attach these to lots of different things, headbands inside of the hat, brim somehow, to your own glasses, but these are really perfect for that. So you might want to explore those first to get an idea how that works. And then we also have a couple little extras in here. There are some ways to attach things. There's some double stick foam tape. Love that stuff. And there are a bunch of zip ties. So we can use those for attaching the LED glasses to the frames and for attaching the board to the glasses as well. And then finally as a little bit of a bonus here we have some creepy little rubber flies. You can use those for some very unlucky trick-or-treaters or a prank. It's up to you how you want to use those little guys. So what even are these LED glasses? They're a form of wearable technology. They have 116 RGB LEDs on them which are controlled with a little controller chip and they are programmed using a microcontroller board. So you can plug them in via STEMA QT into different microcontrollers. But we happen to have the LED glasses microcontroller special built for this purpose. Now this is able to run Arduino or circuit pythons. You can customize it in code and we'll even be able to program it over Bluetooth using the NRF 52840 chip that's right on the controller board. These LEDs are arrayed in two 24 pixel rings and an 18 by 5 matrix so that you can control patterns that look like the outsides of the eye sockets. You can run images across the front. You can even write words across them. There's a lot of possibilities for customization and this is going to be a really terrific costume prop for let's say Halloween or really any occasion where you want to get some cool blingy lights right up there on your face. Also you'll notice this horizontal pattern that's cut into the PCB means that you can see right through it really easily. It's barely obstructed at all in fact. It's a really nice way to do this type of design. And another thing you'll notice is that we have this custom silk screen on here by Phil B. The one I got here is in the bug pattern but you'll actually find that there are a number of them. There's actually four different patterns so you'll just get luck of the draw. Either the bug, the wolf, the cat, or the dragon. How very curious this all is indeed. For the next segment a mystic seer offers up some juicy technical details on the LED glasses and driver board. Maybe if we're lucky he'll also make one of his famous predictions. LED glasses have 116 artfully arranged 2x2 millimeter RGB LEDs all controlled with an IS-31FL3741 I squared C driver that handles all the PWMing so it's plug-and-play with almost any microcontroller. If you're looking for the perfect companion for your Adafruit LED glasses check out the LED glasses driver. This board is designed to be a thin bluetooth enabled driver board for the glasses. That said it's a perfectly good standalone development board for the Nordic NRF 52 840 with a very slim design, a few sensors, and a Stenna QT port for adding other devices or sensors with ISC plug-and-play. Each board comes with a LIS 3DH triple axis accelerometer that can be used for motion and orientation sensing and a PDM digital microphone for audio sensing. Board features include ARM Cortex M4F with hardware floating point acceleration running at 64 megahertz, 1 megabyte of flash and 256k of SRAM Bluetooth low energy compatible 2.4 gigahertz radio, 2 megabytes external q-spy flash for circuit python file storage, built-in LIS 3DH accelerometer and PDM microphone, red LED for general purpose blinking, plus a tiny new pixel for colorful feedback, Stenna QT connector for plug-and-play i2c support, JST PH2 pin battery port with optional lipoly charger, four mounting hole slots, reset button and user button can be used with Arduino IDE or circuit python. Now if the human here likes to follow good advice perhaps he will assemble the glasses for us now. There's definitely a fly in here. Let's go ahead and put them together so that we can try them out, check out a demo and then do a full assembly with the glasses frames. So the first thing we'll do is actually take the battery pack and set this up. You can slide the back off by pushing it upward. You'll note there's a little screw in there which is great if you want to make sure that that stays put when you have these in action. And then we have our little battery pack here and this comes with a plastic wrapper around it. Load those in and then we can place that door closed and you'll note the battery pack has an on-off switch on it which is really convenient, allows you to have this maybe in your pocket if you want to turn things on and off that's nice and easy. But we also have an on-off switch built right into the microcontroller board, the LED glasses driver board right here. We have a little on-off switch so you have a couple of options there. Next thing we'll do is plug in the driver board to the glasses and for that we'll use the little stem of QT cable and that plugs right into the end here like that. And then it can go on to either side of the glasses. There are a set of stem of QT connectors on either side. That also means that you can plug in the driver board on one side and some other stem of QT based i-squared C accessory on the other side. Plug that in. You have a few options as far as powering the board in the glasses goes. First of all, when you have it plugged in over USB-C to program it that'll be giving it power and you could potentially use a USB power bank like a battery charger with you if you want. Then the more convenient way I think is the JST connector here and use that with the 3 AAA battery pack or you could use a lipo battery. You just have to bridge this little solder jumper on the bottom and then it will allow you to use a lipo battery. In the short term we can use this little length of cable here but when we do the full setup we'll add the longer JST extender. So with the battery pack powered on I'm now going to flip on the on switch on the board. You'll see that powers up and immediately gives us a little demo here and I can flip that around hit reset on there flip that around and that says digikey and ate a fruit present ate a box 20. You can see these are pretty bright these are definitely not at their brightest right now you can control that in code and they have that terrific RGB LED look to them. So now let's go ahead and do the full assembly of the glasses so that we can wear them. What I'll do is power this off and I'm going to unplug the JST connector from the batteries and I'll go ahead and unplug the connector to the LED driver board there and now let's go about connecting these to our fashion glasses. So you can see these here are kind of excellent just on their own but let's go ahead and add LEDs to the party won't we. So these as you can see fit very nicely on the glasses and they have some slots for the zip ties to go or some other type of connector you might want to use. So what we're going to do is take four of our zip ties and connect them through the board to the frames. Now we have a bunch of zip ties here they're sized really well for the driver board here with these oval slits nice heavy-duty zip ties you may find that they're a little bit large to get through the holes of the glasses you can get them through but you need to be really careful with them. I'm just going to for the sake of ease grab four smaller zip ties that I happen to have on hand and I'll go ahead and feed those through the glasses then back down across the frame and I'm going to pull that through I won't pull it fully tight yet just so I can get them all kind of arranged before we tighten it all the way so like that's pretty good and then we're going to trim the excess so let's go ahead and connect all of those up I'll do the top ones first and then the side ones so again coming through the top hole from the back then back in through the front and up into around the frame like this and now we can go around the sides as well let me tuck these in a bit so I'm going to come from the back side like so and then through the little notch and that'll connect that up there and last one again we'll come from the inside on this one around through the notch and pull it taught there okay now you can check out that fit if you like the look of things you can start tightening up those zip ties you don't have to go crazy tight with them what you don't want to do is flex the board because it's it's a PCB it can be a little bit delicate so you don't want to put any undue strain on it that looks good and now we can go ahead and take either some scissors or some flush cutters or diagonal cutters and trim away the excess zip tie just want to make sure you get those as tight as you want to get them before you trim that away because it's easier to pull on them when they have a tail now time to try on our glasses next we can connect up the driver board and you can use either the double stick foam tape for this or more zip ties you know what just for the sake of variety I'll use the foam tape for this you can actually trim off the foam tape into a slightly smaller piece this is a little bit bigger than you need even for this board so I'll grab some scissors and I will trim down this here you can save a little extra piece for something else and I'll put that on the back of the board and then you can peel off that blue sticky and set that onto the side of the glasses if you've gotten any grease or oil on the side of the glasses you may want to wipe that down maybe with a little bit of rubbing alcohol so that it'll stick nicely that looks good to me and then you're going to plug in the stem of qt cable right into here you can also wrap it around once if you want to get a more sort of stylish fit there if you've got enough slack for that that'll kind of a neat way to do it just got to be careful you don't pinch the wires when you're opening and closing it that gives you a sort of neat assembly and then we're going to attach our battery pack so for this we'll use the extension cable so this plugs into the battery pack on one side and then into the power port of your driver board like so and then you can put this in a pocket for example or maybe in the back of your shirt or if you have a hoodie it's a nice way to get that wire out of the way takes the weight off of it so you don't have a battery hanging off of your face either which is nice so we'll go ahead now and power this on gonna make sure both your battery pack and your driver board have power and now you have some nice stylish functioning led glasses and now with lanyards on you can hang that around your neck when it's not in use and then throw those on to get the party started well these sure are some gorgeous led glasses but there are those who would say that beauty isn't always when it's cracked up to be in our next episode we've got a fellow here whose parts wrap up is going to be a sight for sore eyes all right well let's have a look at a little recap of what came in the box with aida box 20 so first of all we have our led glasses and the frames that attach to them we also have the driver board that controls the glasses power in the form of three triple a batteries and the battery pack with belt clip and on-off switch we've got zip ties to connect the glasses to the frames also some double stick foam tape you can use for that as well there's the stemma qt cable that connects the board to the glasses and we also have a power extension cable there's the lanyard for hanging the glasses around your neck as well as a little pouch to hold the glasses finally we have some bonus rubber bugs very creepy now your glasses will have come in one of four different silk screen styles glasses are identical except for the different silk screens so we've got the bug wolf and dragon this has been the rather curious aida box 20 unboxing for aida fruit industries i'm john rod surling park and next we're going to go to the live segment take a look at some projects that you can build with the led glasses hey hello everyone uh thank you so much for coming to uh hang out tonight and check out what we've got in the aida box it's been a lot of fun uh playing around with the led glasses and as you can tell there are no negative side effects in fact i feel like i can see better than uh than ever before i can uh i don't really know what that's about but uh what i wanted to do is show you the learn guide and uh main tutorial for the glasses show you a little bit of a code example and some demos of the glasses in action um i also have to say someone i think it was maka laka in the youtube chat mentioned during the unboxing that the zip ties looked really good without being trimmed on the bug eye glasses and you're absolutely right i didn't notice it i wish i had because because i should have left them need a little little antennae come on that's great uh maybe that's a good use for some of the extra zip ties in the box uh speaking of zip ties like uh you saw me um in the in the live part uh talking about this we had some really nicely selected zip ties that worked for all of the uses going through the uh frame holes uh for the main uh glasses as well as through the pcb for the led board and then thanks to the pandemic and the global supply shortage and uh global warming and i'm not sure what else probably nfts and bitcoin uh we ended up with slightly large zip ties so if when you go to put them through they feel like they're just not going to come through easily i wouldn't force it just you can use uh wire wraps you can use smaller zip ties some string i'm putting together one page in the guide that'll show you and alternate to the zip ties i happen to have some very small zip ties that i used and i would say this could be a reminder to put on your wish list for the holidays a set of assorted zip tie sizes they're great to have around um so let's see let's let's uh let's take a look at a few things first of all uh let me join the the modern era with technicolor broadcasting and now what i'll do is bring up the learn guides uh and we have since the shipping has also been an issue right we uh only have some of the boxes shipped we're going to be shipping as fast as we can i think we're still waiting on some stuff to come from uh overseas so it could take a little while we didn't want to put a spoiler on the front page of the guide so if you do go check out the guide we have this coming soon page but the rest of the guide or almost the rest of the guide is now live so if you hit introduction you'll see a little general introduction to aida box if you head to the unboxing page you can uh revel in the glory of all of the parts that we discussed during the unboxing except for the rubber flies they don't they don't get their own mention here um and then if you click on this aida fruit highlights led glasses link that will take you to the main guide for the led glasses so this is your one-stop shop this talks about uh the construction of it the drivers for the is 31fl 3741 i-squared c-driver that drives the uh the leds that's this little diagonal chip on here uh it talks about preparing your board the led driver board for use with arduino or circuit python and uh you can use other boards and if it's a board with a stem of qt port that makes it really convenient but any board with i-squared c can potentially talk to the glasses where we focus on our delightful little board there look at that beauty and then in the i-lights starter projects section you'll see a number of projects with the tap and look glasses these are from phil b as is a lot of this code phil did amazing stuff not only the silk screens but also code for this in libraries these are using the tilt sensor inside the glasses to adjust the lighting when you look down at something we have googly eye rings i'll demo those in a second we have music reactive lights i'll also demo demo that are actually sloppy will uh there are fire just straight up fire looks like a fun one to go just out dancing in or on your halloween laps around the neighborhood we have blinky eyes because there are always blinky eyes on our led i-like projects and phil did not disappoint uh he mentions it is actually the law and then also the bmp animation one which is uh i really appreciate him bringing this one from some of our other matrix projects to uh the glasses it allows you to create a single bitmap that can act as a multi-frame sprite sheet for animation and you can do anything you want uh the the demon head back there has a demo that i'll show in a second as well and then there are arduino versions of all of those projects plus one extra that our friend lars will show off which is the bluetooth message scroller and that allows you to use the adafruit blue fruit connect uh app on ios and android to control the message and color on your glasses which is which is terrific it's a really nice um just get up and running quickly project and one of the nice things about the arduino projects is that they come as uf2 files so uh we have code for all of these but we also have a single download uh that you can just flash the firmware so this ilitebluefruitscroll.uf2 you just drag that on the board and poof you're done no need for the arduino ide to be open to compile to to flash it it's uh just a drag and drop onto usb drive um and we'll look at a little bit of that code in a moment but before we go any further uh how about we do some demos i'm gonna switch over here to this view and let me turn on a bench cam as well i'll move uh remind me to move our our good friend uh lars there for his demo so uh wait first one i'll actually do right here i've changed my mind let me let me switch it back to this one uh this is let me give us a down shooter view as well uh this is the uh googly eyes project and for this one i did this is the only one i did this for but i attached a small lipo battery so that you could see how that works so i just soldered that connection before i attached the glasses is a little solder bridge and then you can uh charge a lipo and that's the difference without that you won't be able to charge the lipo um so now i can just use this on off switch that's going to flip it on uh and i can put these on here and this is a really nice demonstration of the uh let me get this view out of the way of the accelerometer in use really nice and fast and responsive you know it's got kind of a you can use it for a lazy googly eye thing it can also be kind of real sketchy and freak people out when they come to your door for tricking and treating uh and i love that now if you go into the arduino code for it or look at the circuit python version you could make some changes to that you could probably adjust which leds are being uh lit if you're if you're courageous you could just change the color which would be a little simpler um but that's a a fun one right there here's the code for that one since i've shown it let's uh you can take a look uh at the circuit python version that i have here and it is really nicely commented oh sorry this is the blinky eyes one okay uh so this is the blinky eyes one it's really nice to comment it and one of the things that phil says is that he'd actually written some squash and stretch code uh to change the shape but keep the sort of volume of the eye and uh that is just a little too beefy for the current um circuit python implementation but maybe we'll get get there someday so he's got some some exciting stuff to come so this is similar though in a lot of ways to any of the code that you'll see on this in circuit python we uh import the board we import some other libraries we import is word c and we also import the is 31 f l three seven four one driver which is the chip that runs that led matrix and then we set up some uh little variables for some colors is the radius of it uh and then we get into the the terrifying mathy code that phil wrote terrifying to me i'm sure not as terrifying to others uh and but it works great and you can see there's some nice places to to get in here uh and dig around uh play play around with the brightness for example that's a clearly commented thing there so that's just one example of what code looks like in uh in the land of the led glasses uh so now as i promised let's let's jump over and take a look at uh some other demos so i've got uh to start it off so how about slappy over here so i'm gonna turn on his little battery pack and what you'll see is he's got let's see if these will stay on his head uh he's got don't fall over sloppy uh the sound reactive so you can see here it'll change the frequency response based on both sort of the volume and the pitch so this is doing some some pitch recognition of upper frequencies and lower frequencies i've got the ac running so it might be just picking up too much noise to to demo it real well but let's see if i can so there you can see a weird demo of some some pitch response stuff on our good friend slappy he's everyone's best friend let me set him right there um the seer here see this guy uh this is running a bitmap animation so i just did a simple larson scanner which is a lot of fun to have you could of course do something like this in code but i was playing around with the bitmap sprite animation stuff and got carried away so i made myself a nice little larson scanner there uh and then let's let's uh show off this one here i'm going to get that out from behind uh so lars here uh is running a scrolling message animation uh so there you can see it might be a little hard to see in the light here let me see if i can kill this spot for a second there you go uh so this is i see led people that's nice lars but we're going to change uh we're going to change that message so here what i'm doing is i'm running the blue fruit connect app and when i launch the app it will show any devices that can be connected in this case it sees led glasses driver nrf 52 840 and then it has a button that says connect so click on that and now it has negotiated a little connection with the chip on the led driver board and i have a couple of things i can do i can go into the uh uart panel and send a message so let's let's say lars loves you uh exclamation point hit send and just like that whoa that it didn't like that exploit that's a bad idea let's just do lars loves you i've accidentally hacked the system there we go lars loves you and if we hit the modules button to go back and then choose from the controller section we can go to the color picker and pick any color hit send and it now sends a packet so we have this beautiful fuchsia that really lets you know the depth of lars affection for you we can also let me make it red and dimmer so you can go in and start changing the brightness of it get it pretty pretty dark there uh full green lars really really loves you i liked that fuchsia so we'll go back to something like that so that one's really fun you can do that just from your phone i'm using an ipad here but you can do that from your phone while you're wearing the glasses which is a lot of fun and uh let's see i think that's all the demos i wanted to show this one here is running the uh digikey one that comes in the box and by the way uh i think it was australi who said nice job on the videography with the leds that can be difficult but i'm finding for some reason these ones really uh photograph and film well really that really nice something maybe about the type of lens that's on it or maybe it's just my imagination but i haven't had to do much special to to capture these on film which is terrific because that can often be uh a pain in the neck so uh there you go there's a bunch of bunch of happy demos there oh lars you're in the way of our devil friend which is probably not a great idea uh so let's see i've got oh he's still lars would you get over there we go yeah there's some happy glasses is all right so uh let me see if there's any questions or comments over in the chats um the uh mark d hi long says in youtube chat bmp animations are really cool yeah that's a great guide and it gives you a lot of freedom if you like to play around with pixel art uh you can look at any of our guides that we've done in the past on creating pixel art i used a sprite for these which is great for that uh let's you create a sprite sheet right there um and uh let's see third eye not blinking is it not no wonder it feels so dry and itchy that's probably why uh all right so again thank you for your patience with the shipping uh we want to thank someone who definitely didn't let us down that's digikey they really helped out with creating this box and they are continuing to be uh just gargantuan in their ability to keep things running and moving and keep parts shipping as much as is in their control so thank you to them uh and if you liked this and you want more then hey guess what we've got an ate a box coming in the winter it'll be ate a box 21 so head to ate a box dot com and go and subscribe or sign someone up as a gift uh and uh we are excited about that one but right now please be patient wait for this box to come and then have a lot of fun playing with it so uh that's going to do it for today for ate a fruit industries i'm john third eye not so blind park okay there was one one bad joke someone said we hadn't done any and uh yeah lady that says did you keep everything on time and perfectly so thank you so much and uh i'm gonna head out so thank you everyone and we will see you next time for ate a fruit industries this is john park with the ate a box unboxing bye bye