 Welcome to the show, it's me, John Park, and it is time for John Park's workshop, the Ask an Engineer time slot. So if you're wondering what the heck's going on, if you haven't been here in a couple weeks, here I am. So fill in the more are off and away. So I'm helping out by moving my show from Thursdays to this time slot. That's why I'm here. And when I say here, here is both a physical thing and a virtual construct that also includes our community. And one of the main ways that we stay in touch with our community is through our Discord. So if you're wondering where's the chat? If you are on YouTube, we've got the YouTube chat up and running, and we're keeping an eye on that. But if you're over on something like Twitch, and you're like, hey, there's no chat going on here, check out our Discord. You can head over to Adafruit.it slash Discord, and then look for the live broadcast chat channel inside of our server. That's where we're at. And we have plenty of other channels that are active all different times of the day. This one's mostly particularly active during live streams, but we have a bunch of different channels where you can discuss different things that you're interested in, answer questions, look for help on things, show things off, all that stuff on our Discord. So let's see, what are we going to do here? Let me see. We've got stuff in our store. Maybe you want to buy some of it. Maybe you want to pay less than full price. Well, I've got a coupon code for you. That'll do it right there. Swashbuckle. That's just a cool word. Swashbuckle. That'll get you 10% off in the store. So go grab some stuff, stick it in your cart. This coupon code will be good for this evening. I don't know exactly what the cutoff time is going to be. So get some stuff in your cart and check out, put this coupon code right in there. Swashbuckle. Before you check out, you get 10% off. That's good on stuff, physical stuff I mentioned, right? Not software, not gift certificates, not subscriptions, but good on stuff. So head on over there. We have lots of cool stuff. In fact, I'll be talking later about some new products. We also have, I'll mention this right now, I just, since I had an alert set up for it, I never got one of these micro bit v2s. They were in short supply. We just got about 50 of them in the store, I think earlier today. So if you want to go grab one of these, in fact, let me open up my browser. Where'd you go, browser? How about that one maybe in there? Let me go there before I bring that up. Eat a fruit. Let's see if this is it. Is that it? Yes, it is. If you head over here and do micro bit, you'll see we don't have the bundles or any of that, but the micro bit v2 itself, which has been super hard to get, these are in stock. We have 40 of them in stock. They're $17.95. We'll be able to take 10% off of that. So subtract $1.79.5 off of there. I don't have math works with this coupon code, swashbuckle, and do some micro bidding. I actually haven't paid much attention to it, so I don't even know. What's it got on here? Is it an NRF 52840? I'm not even sure what the processor is. I didn't pay too much attention when they updated it, because I couldn't get one. So I was sore about that, but now I have one, so I'm excited to play with that. We're just with lots and lots of the accessories that we have, so you can reuse a lot of your micro bit things, but this will give you all the new, new myths, so please go check that out. What else? Let me get that coupon code off of there. We had a great show and tell. It just wrapped up. Let me tell you, I was watching that show and tell you some of the things that I saw that looked amazing and awesome. We had Jeppler come on, our own Jeff Epler from the Adifer team, to show a update of a classic guide that Lady Aida wrote about 10 years ago on making a next keyboard, the brand next, Steve Jobs thing when he got fired from Apple. Next keyboard work on a modern USB computer, USB for plugging in your keyboard and using USB HID. Lady Aida had done that one. I don't know what microcontroller she'd used, actually, but it was in Arduino. Jeff updated it to work with, I think it's a QT pie in Circuit Python, so he talked about that, showed that off, really nice looking keyboard. In fact, he's got a Lamorous keyboard, maybe to send that back, but he's got her actual keyboard that he used to make that work. Noe and Pedro showed off a really cool looking noodle snowflake. It uses four of our LED noodles wrapped into looping sort of petally snowflake shapes and it's 3D printed with channels to press down the nudes in there and then light them up with a battery. They also showed a little bit of a sneak peek, little preview of a project Pedro's working on, taking a clamshell case from an old iBook, one of those translucent candy-colored ones, and retrofitting it to show an iPad, to use an iPad instead of the monitor in there and any of the other guts. So he's got some work there that he's working on for his wife who requested this, including some 3D printing of spacers and brackets and things, but the fit looked amazing. Fits really well. Weird. Scott was on to show some work on the ESP32-S2 and S3 co-processor, there's a little sneaky third processor off to the side that is getting some support, almost like PIO-like stuff to have a little side processor doing work for you while your rest of your code is running. Flavio came on, connected Ethernet to an RP2040 microcontroller in order to get on the network and augment a ringer to paying a couple of relays, which was really cool, really nice looking project, used some neat techniques including some liquid electric tape, 3D printed a nice looking case for it. What else? DJ Devon 3 showed the couple things, both LED noodles based project, they have a dragon mask and wanted a bunch of ground points using a cutie pie and a little BFF for the driver and so they made a little proto board, little PCB rather that has a bunch of ground points, one per pin, which makes it really convenient for keeping this dragon mask electronics contained in a small space. It's called parent because it grounds things, which I thought was cute. DJ Devon 3 also showed off the TR cowbell, which is a step sequencer, actually similar to the thing I'm going to show a little later, progress on the thing I'm going to show a little later, and that's getting some updates to accommodate extra ground points on the chips for the matrix. Make It Hackin showed a bot they wrote, which is to send out tweets for the digikey digiwish, which is fantastic, automating that, everyday you can send a tweet about something you want, people can comment in there and some lucky winners will get an item up to $100 in value, so go check that out, also go over to digikey and check out the digiwish that's happening. Mark Gambler showed a beautiful giant LED board, I've shown this before, this one is a bunch of LED strips, I think maybe it's like 300 neopixels, something like that, running some display matrix code that's super fast now, there have been updates that make this super fast, he's now got a snowflake animation on a Christmas tree, really fast, incredibly fast looking text, I mean slowing it down, but it's smooth as heck, saying happy holidays, Merry Christmas, things like that, and also the dripping icicle demo just looking incredible, with some augmentation to that, and that is going in his window, which is great, it's going to be one of the best displays on the block I'm sure, and then finally, Jeff Epler came back, we went all the way around the horn, and Jeff came back with a really interesting demo of ChatGPT from OpenAI, which is this bot you can have conversations with, and he asked it to write an Adafruit Learn Guide, and it did, it created Adafruit Learn Guide for creating a automated bird feeder, bird seed dispenser based on, it decided actually to use a PIR sensor I believe, and a servo motor to let out bird feed, and then Jeff had a conversation with the bot to give it a little bit of a guide review and critique, the bot came back with some improvements, so the bird seed wouldn't just all dump out, but actually could close, and then even asked it to rewrite it in Circuit Python, since it was originally writing it in Arduino, which may have been an example it found on the net, I'm not sure exactly how it works, and that's when it got a little creative, it wrote some fictitious Circuit Python, but if we keep plugging away at it, it'll maybe get to the point where it can do some actual legitimate guide writing for us, and then we're just going to be sitting back drinking martinis, I don't know. So thanks everyone for coming on to show and tell with those great projects, that was a lot of fun. Let's see, next up, I've got a show on Tuesdays, that was just yesterday, it seems like it just happened, like hours ago, and that's JP's product pick of the week, and on this show I like to show you a new product, give you a humongous 50% discount on it, do a little bit of a demo to show you how it works, and this week it was this one right here, this multiplexer, really cool, PCA 9548, 8-channel I-squared C multiplexer, and here's a little demo or a little one minute recap. The PCA 9548, an 8-channel multiplexer, you can use multiples of the same board that have a conflicting address on I-squared C. I have a cutie pie plugged into the PCA 9548, and then I have two of these Vemol 7700 light sensors, there is no jumper for addresses, we just have one address to work with, so I've got two of them plugged in here, this is a little graph that's showing the light sensor reads from the two sensors, I've got one facing down and one facing up here, so now you'll see a big difference between these, and let's say my light comes around to the other side, and now it's pointing up at that bottom one, so now we can detect light in two directions with this really great light sensor, it is the PCA 9548 multiplexer for I-squared C. Yes, in fact that's what it is, and there was actually some interesting discussion in the chat during the show, and we were talking about the creative engineering team we were talking about earlier, about what sort of, as Ann Borella said, what sort of inception could you create by linking enough multiplexers to enough multiplexers, probably you would create different phases of time as it slows down further and further and further, but not sure what the hard limit is on it, theoretically someone suggested you could do something like 2048 sensors on enough multiplex multiplexers, but who knows, so if anyone wants to try it, I would love to see, please write up your findings on that. Right, so let's see, the next thing I want to do is a little circuit Python Parsec, so let me get set up for that and away we go. All right, so for the circuit Python Parsec today, I want to show another way to time things that's even more precise than the last one I showed, and this is with using the ticks inside of the supervisor library, so these are similar to the way that we use time monotonic, but even more accurate, so what you can see here, if you look at my console, right now when I run this code, it tells me that basically zero time is elapsed because all I'm doing is checking the time and then repeating the time or printing out the time, so what I'm going to do now instead is I'm going to make one print statement, so you can see my program imports the supervisor library, it checks what's the current supervisor ticks milliseconds, it then is going to do something, going to have it print the line, and then it's going to stop, create a variable that's the end time, and then I'm going to print out the one subtracted from the other and turn it into a decimal, which is a little easier to see, so if I save this, you can see it now takes .001, I believe milliseconds to do this. Now by contrast, I'm going to import a fairly robust library, I'm going to import Neopixel, watch when I hit save, now you can see that takes 20 something times more time, now you may not always need to time such precise things, but one of the interesting things about using these ticks is that they can give you more accurate time over long periods of time, such as running a thing for days, this tends to stay a little more accurate than some of the other methods, and so that is how you can use ticks to time things in CircuitPython. And that is your CircuitPython parsec. All right, so yeah, that's part of our continuing series of timing stuff in CircuitPython, let me know if you have other methods that you like or that you'd like to see, and thanks to Todd Bot for this example, the simple example of getting this up and running, and that example is actually available over on Todd's GitHub in the CircuitPython tips and tricks page, so maybe he can throw a link up to that in the chat over on Discord. So let me get that out of the way there, and what's up next? Hey, how about we take a look at, let me go grab another window that I have prepared here. Oh, hey, I'm getting another tip here. This is from Jepler. Let me throw up my Discord. It says, use the Adafruit ticks next time. Okay, good. This gives me one more thing to show. And I'd love to know, maybe we can talk offline about the differences between Adafruit ticks and the, I guess, the MicroPython ticks that I was showing there. All right, so let's see, what I wanted to do next is, got to check and see, do I have, I'm going to copy a URL over into the Chrome that I had up here. So let me paste that into here, because as you may know, CircuitPython is code plus community. And one of the best ways we have of celebrating that is with the Python on microcontrollers newsletter. So this is a weekly newsletter. You can subscribe to it by going to AdafruitDaily.com, just put in your email address, request the newsletters you'd like to get in your inbox. And you can also go and check them out here on the webpage itself, right down on the homepage is a link to this. And this is this week's episode or edition of the Python on Hardware newsletter. And I'll just point out a couple things that I thought were notable from this week's edition. First of all, there are now 100 CircuitPython Blinka compatible single board computers. So this is things like raspberry pies and onion pies and rutabaga pies and asparagus pies. I don't know all the all the different ones. But if you're like me and don't know all of them, that's okay. Because this newsletter has you covered, you can go and click on the link here and check out all of the Beagle. There's another one, all of the different boards that are now compatible with Blinka. Let's see. Also, we have let me check my notes over here. This out of the way. Oh, there was an advent of code calendar. This looks interesting. These are some small programming puzzles that you can open up one little nuggety bite sized little delicious puzzle every day as an advent calendar. So there's a link there that'll take you to that. Speaking of holidays, check out this, you guessed it, Hanukkah light lightsaber. So this is great. This is a circuit playground, blue fruit and a strip of 30 Neopixels doing a persistence of vision method where you can use long exposure photography and draw some different Hanukkah based things in the air and take cool long exposure photos of them. There is a menorah and some dreidels and there's a nice little explanation of it in here. And this was found on Instagram. And by the way, if you find things that you think belong in any of our newsletters, there's a link at the bottom that'll tell you how to go and submit those changes or submit those news items. This is also another nice one. This is a three printed Plex server using a Raspberry Pi, but it also uses Circuit Python, I believe for all of the display stuff to give you systems, statistics and and other information IP address, temperature and other readouts there. So really cool looking Plex server or media server. And here's another really nice one. This is our own Todd Bot. Everyone's Todd Bot. He's not just our own. He's the world's Todd Bot. And Todd Bot created a really cool Pico touch synthesizer, another in his ever growing series of small PCB based synthesizer things. This one has an octave keyboard of capacitive touch and also has reverse mount Neopixels pointing up. And he's got some tests up there. This was a link on mastodon. You can go there and check it out or just enjoy this gift of Todd touching it because it's a touch synth. And let's see. Another one actually somewhat related was this one which is Bobricius, if I'm getting that name right, created this Armachat touch computer and it also uses TouchIO to create this full QWERTY keyboard with backlighting and it's a PCB with a under glow type of technique where the solder mask has been told not to go. And it's a really cool looking project. You can go check that out on Instagram and then find other links for more information. And the last one I thought was really cute clippy there. And then the last one that I was going to call out, but of course you can see there's lots and lots of stuff here. I'm skimming over so you should go check it out yourself, was where to go. It was the Pine 64 Pico sized single board computer. I think I blew past it, didn't it? Where'd you go? Where'd you go Pine? Nope, nope. I'll keep going. Keep going. That was a little macro pad. There it is. So this is a, I don't know much about this and I must admit I haven't followed the link yet, but that is a Pi Pico form factor single board computer. So if you want to learn more about that and all of these other interesting things, I'll just tease. There's another little new board right down there, the M zero cents risk-based computer or micro controller. These are all in the Python on microcontrollers newsletter. So go check that out. All right. Jump back here and grab a little water if I have any left. Let's see. What else have we got going on here? Another thing I will mention, I've mentioned it before, but it's the return of Adabox. So Adabox will be coming back next year, as you know, due to the global supply shortage of parts. We didn't do any in 2022, but 2023 is going to be the year of the Adabox. We have a lot of great stuff planned. So come and check out the Adafruit.com slash Adabox site. You can sign up there to subscribe or to be notified when you can subscribe and you can also subscribe other people. Let's see. The next thing I'm going to do is learn guides. So we have some new learn guides in the learn system. You can head on over to learn.adafruit.com and you'll see we've got thousands over 2,000, closing in on 3,000. I think it is guides in the learn system. Here are some new ones since last week. So Liz wrote a guide on the QT, so STEMA QT, 5 volt to 3 volt shifter breakout. It's just a simple level shifter so that you can use things in the quick side of the ecosystem with little breakouts that are using that 4 pin connector that don't necessarily level shift on their own. You've got a 5 volt thing on the other side or a 3 volt thing. So there's a little guide about that. Lady Aida wrote this guide on the SPI F-RAM breakouts, which I didn't know anything about F-RAM, but now I know a little about it. F-RAM is a type of RAM that's really useful when you want to very quickly write data that is persistent such as the save state on a game so that the user can power the thing off. You've got a little bit of data that's been written to it that you can pull back up when you power back on and you don't need a battery. You don't need any batteries to save your state like you would in an old game cartridge. This will write to the F-RAM. There is a guide from Catney on using the Mastodon API with Circuit Python. There's also this, I love the GIF here. You can see this GIF animation of Aaron's new guide on Neopixel Remote IR Control with WLED. This was something entirely new to me. You can check this out. There's a really great video to watch actually that will explain it all, but Aaron builds these beautiful LED pieces of art and costume pieces and in this case is lighting up an aquarium that she does some mermaid swimming in. I believe I think this was that aquarium. This is a guide on taking Neopixel Strips and communicating using a sort of standard off-the-shelf IR remote and this WLED library and web page that allows you to create or use a library of existing animations and get them running on your microcontroller. It's sort of a melding of worlds of commercial Neopixel Strips and the Neopixel so you can build your own microcontroller based projects the way you want to. Go check that out if that's interesting to you. Here is the LED noodle snowflakes that the Ruiz brothers were showing off at show and tell. So you can go look at that. It's beautiful. You can go and check that out and learn how to build your own. It's just a bit of 3D printing and some LED noodles, a little bit of soldering and you've got a really large scale snowflake to check out. The Bluetooth TV Zapper Guide. This was the one I was working on last week and the week before. This is going to show you how to use a circuit playground Bluetooth or bluefruit rather and our IR Stemma breakout board which has a couple of high-power IR LEDs on it and you can communicate to it from your phone in order to have it send some turn-off commands to TVs, turn off and turn on commands to TVs remotely from a safe distance. And last guide in here, this is, we mentioned the next computer keyboard guide that Jepler showed off in the show and tell. Here's the guide on how to build your own in case you find yourself either with a next keyboard and you want to use it in a more modern computer or if you're just curious about the process of creating something like this it might be helpful for you if you're if you're doing other investigations into obscure peripherals and those are our learn guides. All right, let's see I'm just going to check in with the chat and see what's going on over there as well as the YouTube chat. Let's see, back to this view of the world. Oops, here we are, discord a little closer. Let's see, DJ Devon 3 said, Katniss Mastodon API guide is excellent, that's great to hear. Yeah, what's WLED? I should dive into it further so that I can explain that but it is its own thing. It's kind of like fast LED, if you're familiar with fast LED from the Arduino world, it's a easy to use LED library that gives you really fast, beautiful animations and in this case you don't have to code them yourself, you can pick from UI elements or pre-baked animations if you want. I need to look at that guide closer and try it out actually, that's really cool. All right, let's see what's next. I'm going to actually take a moment to do a bit of a gear report thing. This is kind of cool, this is, let me see, let me jump back to this page over here. This is something that I just picked up, actually built it for someone, this is a kit to build this little Eurorack module and the reason I was interested in it is this is based on a pro trinket 5 volt, so if you take a look at this little module's build guide, you can see here it's kind of a nice build, it uses mostly surface mount components which I really like on these kinds of builds so you're not constantly threading resistors and capacitors through and clipping their tail, so it's a reasonably intermediate level build if you're getting a little more comfortable with doing some surface mount components, this is a cool one, so it's got a couple ICs on there, got some passives, a couple through-hole capacitors and then as you can probably tell from that outline on the board there, there's a microcontroller that's going to get plopped into there, there go the three potentiometers, four jacks and switches, really beautiful looking, nicely done aluminum faceplate and then here comes the pro trinket 5 volt, so what does this thing do? It is a module that will generate random melodies for you that are musical in that they are quantized to a musical scale so that they can be anything from diatonic, semitones to certain intervals like only octaves or thirds and fifths or sevenths and ninths and it takes in an impulse, a trigger that says okay generate a new one and every time it gets a trigger it has a bit of a roll of the dice to see what note it gets and if it's going to trigger it or not and then there are some controls for choosing the the length of repeatable looping patterns, how many octaves it should be allowed to use and so on, so I wanted to show you this and give you a little bit of a demo of it, I got the module built, I'm actually sending it off to the guy who asked for me to build it for him tomorrow and here you can see there's a little user guide to it, I'm going to actually hold, maybe I'll keep that open just for myself so I remember what some of the secondary functions on it are but let me go to my down shooter here and I'm going to move a couple things out of the way and show you this and actually this is a, I've got a couple, I've got a few modules to show in here that I think are kind of interesting and if you're wondering what is this and you haven't watched my shows before I often show these Eurorack modular synthesizer thingies and this is that, so I'm going to, oops, I'm going to focus here and then I'll show you the down shooter so I'm not trying to focus while you're looking, okay so here is, move this over to the side here and I'm going to plug in a audio jack and I've got a little amplifier back there behind me that might reach, it'll just reach, all right, so what's going to happen here, I'll just focus on this guy, I'm going to give it a little bit of a regular clock so there's going to be an incoming impulse that says trigger, do something, so you can hear right now I've got this loop going, I think it's eight notes, I can change the step size, so I've got four of them, I can go all the way down to just one, so this is a little loop that it created and then I said capture that so it's just repeating that loop but I can change how much of the loop I'm going to listen to and there's a shift control here that lets you sort of slide through the loop, pick a different part of the loop to go through, I'm going to turn off looping, you'll hear a change now because now it's able to pick from the constraints that it has of a certain range octave-wise as well as a scale, so if I change the scale now you're in different intervals in that scale and sorry I need to, I need to reset this this little trigger which I'll talk about, I'll set it fast, slow it down a little and now I'm going to lower the odds that it actually triggers so now it's got a little bit of uncertainty, is it going to pick a note or not? We can go from zero to a hundred percent so on a hundred percent it just always plays a note every time it gets a trigger and that's pretty much all I want to show about it, the outputs that it has are the the volts per octave that my oscillator is using and the gate that it sends out to say yeah I triggered so we can open and close a little VCA, a little amplifier, one other input it has is it can bring in a volt per octave itself from a keyboard so you can kind of shift the whole thing around, play root notes and this guy, let's talk about this guy now, this is a side thing, this is from Todd, our very good friend Todd Bot, this is, I'll bring up his guy there, this is called the Trinket Trigger so we have old and new Trinkets, we have one in here written in C and this one is in Circuit Python and they're very good friends so if I bring this up for a second here you can see Todd Bot slash Trinket Trigger on GitHub and you can build your own, there's all the open source files that you need to to create that so this one's running Circuit Python and it's got, if I turn it off here you can see it's got just a little Trinket M0 running on there with Circuit Python and then this one here I'm going to take it all apart now because I got to box this up and ship it anyway so I'll show you what this whole little module looks like, pull it's a little ribbon cable for power so there it is, there's a Trinket 5 volt, our good old friend right there and the other thing I'll say in case this is a little confusing to use, this isn't actually creating any sound, this is really playing the piano for you, it's just deciding what notes to tell something else in this case, this this Braids module here was what I was using as the actual sound maker but that wants to know hey what pitch should I play and that's what this one's doing is when is it going to play it and what pitch and that kit you can get that on funk.co.uk I think they're they're back ordered right now but just just check check for the Seb songs odds module and they have a few different modules but I thought this was a really neat module really cool fun to build so if you like to build your modules you can also build things cheaper than you can buy them in many cases this was a nice one to build so there you go that's the odds module I'm going to set that somewhere safe and that's going to go to its owner and I will miss it because it's it's a really cool module. I'll show this one off sometime too this is a neat little kit from Tom Whitwell Music Thing Modular and it is an overloading drive module like on an old amp using an incandescent bulb to to gnarl up your signal like like a gnarly distortion so all right I'll plug this and set that over there and let's let's say yay nerlies these are these cute little knurled screws for being able to move modules quickly without grabbing a driver I like those okay so let's see what is next hey how about new products let's do a new products so uh new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new products let me open up a not that window but this one okay we got three new products this week uh and here they are get ready for it there we go uh so three new products the first one is this pack of the little slide potentiometer knobs or rubber nubbins um and I thought I had one right here I forgot it so these are the nubs that come on some of our potentiometers I think some of our when you buy some of our slide pots they come with these little nubs but maybe you lost one maybe you need extras maybe you've gotten some slide pots that don't have them uh this will uh this will solve that problem for you it's cheap you get a pack of three for 95 cents uh I'm just going to check one place real quick two places real quick hold on I might have I have some little demo projects in a couple bins right here if you've ever wondered what's all that stuff behind me some of these demo projects and any of them have a slide pot oh wait wait wait wait hang on no I don't think they do actually oh wait hold on last one I'll check no all right sadly I don't but you get the idea there they're a little cute knob uh nubbins that allow you to not put a dent in your finger because the uh what the slide pots have is a little metal stabby bit that you don't really want to hurt yourself on uh next up this one I actually do have um this is oh a little little question from the chat DJ Devon 3 so whatever happened to that line on the Alps cap touch nubs uh we haven't found anywhere to buy those yet I bought a few off of like a eBay seller in Germany or something like that but we haven't we haven't found any of the capacitive touch ones in the wild uh from a wholesale distributor uh next we've got this 2.8 inch tft lcd with cap touch uh and this has eye spy on it uh I've got one right here let me show you this beautiful look and display we can do an unboxing of it in fact I don't have any code running on anything that I can actually start it up uh but maybe I'll uh maybe I'll have that next time so let's take out this uh by the way if you're not aware of this usually this pink uh bubble wrap or pink bags are anti-static um so that's why you'll see a lot of Adafruit stuff coming that's a little safer than your average plastic uh this has a little uh peel off on there I'm gonna leave that on uh so this is a gorgeous uh what did what do we say it was a 320 by 240 pixel display I think it is uh just checking here we'll have that listed it is a mystery I think it's 320 240 it's probably in the learn guide we can go check that in a second this is a uh eye spy compatible so you can use this little ribbon cable here a little ribbon connector to plug that in rather than dealing with all this jazz all these pins here it has the sd card slot on it that also goes over the eye spy ribbon cable and this has capacitive touch so you can use this for little interactive projects drawing make a display that you can pick buttons on all those good things so this has previously been I think we had a version of this without the eye spy connector now we've got eye spy connector on it as we eye spy connector all the things and yet kiyoshi in the chat says yes it's 320 240 or 240 by 320 if you go that way or that way um so that is our new display and let me bring this window back up over here last thing whoa what happened to go back to products oh we got new things we got new new things that I'm even aware of okay we'll go back and and play with those those have gone in the store since I uh since I was prepping for this uh this is a cool one this is actually a more info and more coming soon uh but this is a product that's a collaboration between Adafruit and Kelly Heaton which is a I think it's a six oscillator songbird song uh uh generator so it creates bird song uh using uh I think it's 5a stable oscillators and a sixth one that's a different type of oscillator uh this is gorgeous you can see this beautiful uh pcb here and uh this Kelly has done a bunch of projects in the past about bird song and using a deep fake algorithm to analyze the the bird song that our oscillators were creating to find out if it was similar to a bird in the wild which it is it's actually the night jar which is how this got its name um and this one also has some inputs uh that'll allow it to be controlled by outboard gear such as Eurorack so so for example I am guessing that this odds module right here could be a very interesting way to inject some different notes into the bird song sort of fundamental pitches to work from which is pretty cool um and what else that's all I'm going to say about it so so this once we get one of these in to to demo we'll show it to you but go check out Kelly Heaton's work uh if you're interested in more more about these gorgeous bird song generators so that's a that's a coming soon uh if you want to get ones I'm not sure how many we're going to be selling but if you want to get one uh you can click on that notify me link in the uh in the description there and put your email in and then you'll you'll find out as soon as that's available um so new stuff hey these are some new snap action wiring block connectors these look great I know nothing about them because I'm seeing them right now they remind me of the wego connectors um and we have a three to nine wiring block connector we have a two to six uh so this is a way to sort of y splice off one into multiple uh so you can go from one to three with three different inputs or one to three with two different inputs or uh just one to one and uh I'm going to pick some of those up those look great I love these types of types of connectors for uh for wiring up projects uh and then last one on here we have is a mosfet driver for motor solenoids leds etc this is a uh jst three pin I believe this is uh similar to one that we have had in the past for our um bonsai uh which is a a water pump driver for for plants so uh that's another one that's coming soon um and uh I will uh I'll find out more about those because those are pretty cool pretty uh pretty useful for driving powerful stuff without having to construct your own circuit uh and that is all I can say about new products I don't know how she does such great songs every week uh all right so next up this is uh a great time to remind you uh having just looked at new products a great time to remind you that I've got a coupon code for you right there so if you want to order any of that new stuff the stuff that's in stock unfortunately this won't help you for the stuff that's not yet in stock we're out of stock but uh that'll do it right there that'll get you 10 off in the store all you got to do is swashbuckle uh and 10 off coupon code will work on any of the stuff you can get it's not good for gift certificates subscriptions or software but it's good for real real stuff like snap action connectors uh and uh nubbins and a really really gorgeous big touchscreen tft display that has eye spy on it so go load up your cart with cool stuff um one thing I forget the details on and and probably I should commit these to memory or add them to my notes is the free stuff that you can get when you order if you uh order more than $100 200 300 we have different free things that get thrown in with your order um so it uh sometimes pays to gang up uh wait till you have quite a few things you want to get and uh and then you'll you'll get some free stuff thrown in the order which is cool uh so yeah swashbuckle will get you 10 off just until the end of tonight or something maybe midnight maybe sooner um and uh oh that's a good reminder dj devin three the the christmas shipping shipping deadline is getting close let me see if I can um if I refresh the shop page if it'll bring that banner back I closed that banner how do I get back to that banner let me let me see more announcements no that that won't do it hold on oh jebler found it it's at adford.com slash holiday let's put that on thank you adford.com slash holiday you can guess a lot of these things I should have guessed you can guess a lot of these URLs which is nice reminds me of the old fashioned web where you could just think hey that's probably what they called it and it is uh so the shipping deadlines for holiday 2022 that's this year right now domestic orders for delivery by thursday december 22nd uh ups first class priority is tomorrow ups ground uh or rather postal service priority first class is tomorrow uh ground is monday three day is the 16th that's friday uh next friday uh two day you can do on the 19th next day you can do on the 20th uh international orders we are out of luck unless you want to do dhl express worldwide which is going to be this monday uh and that's no guarantee that it'll arrive by december 22nd so uh deadlines are coming up if you want to get some stuff get some stuff uh oh thank you so much kayoshi in the chat said half size perma proto board is your uh your freebie with the uh hundred dollar level keyboard is the next one and then circuit playground ble uh and free ground shipping of the perks thank you i bet those perks are here somewhere too hey i'm gonna try this let's see what happens if i do adford.com slash perks nope it was worth a shot who knows who knows what that is what what's there what's our url for that probably in here somewhere there's things i should know right sorry okay uh let's see next up i wanted to uh dive back into my 16 step drum trigger sequencer oh it's free adford.com slash free thanks jebler so head there to find out or check out our chat um so i'm gonna let me show you my overhead over there uh i'll put my little head here uh so you can see the the beast has grown so i've got uh the keyboard 2040 i have the aw 95 23 is that its name i think it is uh excuse me which is the constant current driver that i'm using to light up 16 leds if you remember last week i had been planning to use pwm and i thought i had 16 pwm i could use i did not there were only 15 i think it was that i could use or 14 uh so i switched over to using gpio i do have enough gpio on the kb20 40 to just do direct i don't need a a breakout for that so i got 16 uh normally open switches there using the um step switches there as as buttons uh and i'll show you the code for what i'm what i'm using right now uh yeah uh question todd about said is that sitting on top of a crt that would be amazing i wish i had dug out a big hole in my workbench and put a crt it's not it's actually an old vga uh lcd very old ibm think something what do they call this think something not think pad but yeah so that's a copy of uh virtual modular software and by the way i always like to mention even though i love showing off this hardware these hardware your orac modules you can get into your orac for no cost at all other than owning a computer as long as you have a computer of some kind which many of us do these days you can download vcv rack for free and there are probably other things out there these days and forks from that but vcv rack is what i have there uh so that that works with the your orac standards and some of the modules think vision thank you think vision uh is the monitor uh so i've got a copy of vcv rack running on an old macbook air ancient like it's nine years old or something uh and i'm using that kb2040 as a midi input device now this is uh the next step in the evolution so you can see i've wired everything up uh on on the breadboards there and so i have the switches and their leds and i just have them each sending their own unique midi notes so it's acting basically just like a midi keyboard right now next step is i'm going to uh work on turning it into a proper sequencer with maybe four channels of drums so i'll be able to have 16 steps of bass drums 16 steps of snares 16 steps of hi-hat snares 16 step steps of open hat or something like that um but just to get the the sort of proof of concept going uh this is what i got so let me let me run over there and i can just uh do do a little bit of brief demo and then we'll look at the code running on there so let me get that view that'll work and i'm also going to re-plug my little amp here into that laptop yeah i'm a fan of having old monitors around uh you can just set stuff on and not really worry about scratching it up or anything like that so here is uh you know what i'm going to open up the chat right here tell me if uh the volume needs to change on this i'm just going to open up discord here we go so these modules essentially all just want to get a trigger impulse um and when they get one they are sort of little self-contained drum voices and each of these has two uh so i've got 16 so top row one two three four five six seven eight bottom row is the second half of these nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen uh i had to get two of that one because it's big uh and the way this is set up is really similar to the project i did that was um the eight by eight grid using the neopixel grid uh to drive using this uh i think it is stower st o e r stower melder which allows you to bring midi in and just trigger stuff with it so it has a nice little setup there's no wires coming out of that one but it's it's what's triggering all of these little trigger push buttons so let me i can hear anything uh oh what i break let me see if this is unplugged if it works okay that's working there we go uh so i can turn that up a bit loose wire okay uh so what you'll be able to see here when i zoom in a little closer just on this top row in fact so when i hit any of these uh you can see first of all i'm lighting up their leds nice and bright so um with this constant current driver it's really nice i i'm telling it a um i think i've got it remapped to values of zero to 255 so this is i think at a value of five uh or maybe two is this sort of dim light and that brighter one is a value of 20 and if i do it to 200 it's super super bright so those will be things i use to show which steps are lit up in the sequencer versus what note we're on or what beat we're on in in a measure so in the way i set these up since these are these pairs i just have kind of tuned the same drum two versions of itself for variety that makes me want to get a bunch of tom drums and do the fill colons thing except i don't have four tom setup um so that's that's pretty much all it's uh doing right now the idea will be to again set this up so that i can uh have that looping just like a uh 808 style drum sequencer i'm going to add uh the using i squared c i'm going to add over stem of qt our little rotary encoder so that i can uh change which track i'm using and probably a little oled display so this would be really similar uh in a lot of ways to todd botts eight step pico sequencer except i'm not doing pitch stuff i'm just doing triggers so just whether a trigger is happening or not on different um instruments different drum instruments uh so let's let me take this here unplug this little guy right there you can see i left a a gap in the program uh just so i can set my device on top of it there let's take a look at what that code looks like over here let's get oh you know what let's use this setup this will work well here we go that's too many of me there uh and i can expand this a bit and second that should work and what i'll do is just open up the code dot pi that's running on oh i broke it is it gonna recover it might recover it might not oh darn that works a little differently than adam it didn't like me uh closing that hold on one second let's see if we can fix this oh no all right maybe i've got sound and picture let's see thank you blitz and kaoshi uh and glenn for letting me know there was no audio lara's gnawing on cables again all right uh so all i want to show you here is the uh way i'm using this uh aw 9523 constant current driver breakout uh to control all 16 of these leds and then um the switches to send out the midi signals that i'm saying so you can see here when i click these they are lighting up a little brighter um so in the code here i've got some little setup here where i'm setting up all my switches and i'm using keypad with those to read those uh and then over i squared c on the board stemma i squared c port i've set up the leds object as this aw 9523 uh and then you set two things the led modes to constant current mode using this little uh bit mask and then the leds directions saying that they are outputs and that's because you can use uh this as a uh as a input uh if you want to use it with buttons uh you can use it as a sort of more simple output or you can use it as the constant current uh mode so i'm telling it i've got 16 leds to go ahead and loop through uh here you can see these are these brightness values that i set so 220 and 200 you can see these are that's at 20 uh so particularly for this camera but even for your eyes when you're working on these things you just don't need it very bright one of the nice things is that you don't need to put resistors in line with these if you're using constant current however and i need to figure out if there's a way around this when this starts up it does light them all up and i uh and it's crazy bright and i am thinking i probably should put some inline resistors just to avoid the scenario where it draws too much current on startup um then i'm doing some midi setup and then here's the main loop of the code so keypad makes it so easy you just say switch is the name of switches.events.get so the just checks through it pulls through all of the uh pins that i told it are switches and said hey did something get get hit if something does it'll return uh yeah there's a thing called switch now and if it's a pressed event then i'm finding out okay switch.key number which one was it then i'm sending out a midi note uh based on whatever my zero one two three four five six up to 15 and then i'm adding to that 35 just to get the the midi note numbers up into the um general midi note range for drums so if you're driving a general midi thing like a sound card or a simple synthesizer web synth uh on channel 10 there are drum sounds one per it's not pitches it's one drum sound per note for i don't know 40 notes or something like that uh so i have this in that range but i'm not i wasn't using that over in vcv rec and then i set the constant current driver to that mid value which was 20 for that id number so my switches and my leds have the same little numbering set zero through 15 and then i'm just for my own debugging right now printing out if something was pressed or released and then when i release something it sets the note to off uh and i'm also setting the velocity to zero which is redundant there uh and then i'm setting the constant current back down to uh to its dim level which was two so that's what's going on with this this was the the sort of the big improvement over last week was deciding to go ahead and use this uh constant current driver for the leds since i had run out of pwm and it's working great so i'll i'll be updating this uh hopefully finishing it up soon by getting it to actually work as a uh a running sequencer uh probably using ticks maybe eight of root ticks we'll find out um and uh i'll be writing up a guide for this and then we'll have a cool little 16 step sequencer that we can use and hopefully the guide is also useful for you if you're doing other types of projects and you want to use maybe a bunch of these switches drive the leds read the inputs and then do something entirely different with it uh all right so let's see let me know if anyone has any questions in the chat um and i can uh i can get to those in a moment before i do that uh let's see do we have any other business that might be it it might be all the business that i had to get to so yeah let's um let's take any questions you might have that i can answer for you i'll wait a second since i know there's a little bit of a lag between broadcast and uh the youtube picking it up and i'll scroll back let me scroll back through my discord now and see if there were any questions that i missed in the course of the show yeah people heard oh no right before my stream died earlier it's uh it's asking a lot of the poor computer uh glenn verbeck says tactile touches nice and cool but all could be done by cap switches or touch panel and lcd you're absolutely right um let's see oh yeah someone was at uh ks she was asking about this think vision monitor i think that's 17 inch that's a 17 inch uh and has a few different vga resolutions on it that was a freebie i got that through uh someone was just donating it which was nice let's see anything going once going twice oh the jeff jeppler posted a nice uh difference between micro bit v1 and micro bit v2 link i'm gonna check that out see does it have any uh oh yeah this looks like a good good uh site let me bring this up so check the chat uh you can ask lars some questions i don't know you can answer them he's mostly just terrifying that whoa that page went weird didn't it yeah i don't think i have a good way to recover okay i'm gonna i'm not gonna tempt fate by going to that but yeah check out in the chat uh there's a link there that actually yeah jeppler posted of uh differences between the different micro bit versions but yeah those are in stock does lars have family yeah lars is a lars is someone's child i think i don't know was lars constructed in a lab we don't have a lot of details honestly but look up fuggler online and you might find out because he misses mom of course he does he's not a monster uh all right yeah dave barris says these step switches are perfect for getting precise performance on drum hits just like the old roland synths hey the roland ones by the way those used a alps tactile switch uh with just a custom switch cover on it and the led was just coming out of the pcb it wasn't a self-contained thing like our our cool little um step switches that we have nowadays these things these things are great and we've got a little breakout board on there if you didn't know i can unplug that so usb cable doesn't want to go uh i've got these on these nice uh breakouts because the the switches and leds the pins are all kind of on top of each other wouldn't work with regular breadboard or pcb spacing so we've got these little um little breakouts in fact let me show those can i oh no i'm gonna i'm gonna break my internet if i try to do that now uh lars is a bit of a cyborg because he's got electronics in him to make him talk now uh all right well hey thanks everyone i don't want to uh take up any more of your time i do want to i forgot last week very important uh end to the show but penultimate end to the show business is this coupon code if you are buying stuff remember you've got uh deadlines coming up on shipping so if you want to order stuff tonight you want to save 10 percent just type swashbuckle in on your way out in the coupon code slot that'll get you 10 percent off uh and i will say thank you so much for stopping by for ate a fruit industries i'm john park this has been john park's workshop not ask lars uh and this is your moment of zoro