 and welcome to the show it's me JP and it is time for JP's product pick of the week. Thank you so much for stopping by and by you I mean not only people watching but also people in the chat. I've got my YouTube chat over there I can say hey and I can see you or at least what you type and our Discord chat if you're wondering where our chat is happening that's the place to be if you're on Twitch or Facebook or somewhere like that and you're like boy it's awful quiet here why don't you head on over to adafruit.it slash discord you will get an instant invite and then you can jump into the live broadcast chat channel which is that one right there uh hello and welcome so let's see before I go any further what I want to do is let you know here on JP's product pick of the week I like to send you to a URL or a QR code and that's going to take you to the product pick so you can see what it is and more importantly you can get a huge discount on the product pick I'm going to clean my glasses and that is going to require no coupon code or secret password or a puzzle to solve a room to escape from none of that all you have to do is put the item in your cart up to 10 of them no resellers please and you will get the discount during this show there's no discount after the show just during the show so get ready if it looks like something you're interested in but before I go any further on this what I'll do is have lady Aida tell us all about it take it away lady Aida this is a feather accessory I just love having a feather accessory every week and this is this week's feather accessory um this is a terminal block wing so um this is kind of like an underwing it has prototyping area but um more importantly it has terminal blocks for everything and so you it comes as a kit you solder together and when you're done you basically can plug in your feather and then you have two big screw terminal strips on either side that break out all of the pins and there's also an on off switch a gel demo and it's just like really handy as people just love this stuff for wiring fast um we have permanent or temporary connections you can do either um if you're if you have an installation and you want to just like have wires going to motor control or to something else and and size is an important you don't mind it a little bit bigger this is great you get a little bit of prototyping area all the terminal blocks um extra power and ground connections and then an on off switch so this is um so this is it I just have the the haza feather plugged into it so yeah you have terminal blocks and then you have headers to plug in you can solder it directly in but this way you have space for like the battery connector and I just have it with um an led connected so this is um the screw terminals they're pretty easy to use you just use any phillips head or flathead mini screwdriver and then you can connect and disconnect stuff so like wires and components you can use probably like I think like 16 to 30 gauge wire something like that you know pretty much the most common wires that you'll need and then um so you can you know you basically just plug into usb on your feather as normal and then um you can turn it on and off with this switch so I wasn't going to add the switch but I was like ah you know what that might be handy to actually have a mechanical switch on there so it cuts power on and off to the feather so it could be handy if you're if you're prototyping and you want to power cycle the whole setup so that's it I mean terminal blocks is nice it's just like it's really nice I mean like it this is one of the things that's like the benefit of having the feather standard because it's all of the feathers have the same pinouts I don't have to worry about like oh like I have to make one of these for the the the bluetooth one and one for the phone and one for the ethernet and one for the wi-fi all of them are completely compatible it's completely like use whichever one you want they will all fit and I'll have the same core pinouts and then the rest of the pins aren't labeled you'll have to just look those up okay this is also an update this is the terminal block feather wing which we made you know almost a year ago but now it comes fully assembled so we before we had as a kit and that was fine people would put it together and we never heard any complaints but you know if it's a terminal block adapter it's probably for people who don't want to solder you want to plug and then have wires connect to it so it now comes fully assembled you plug any feather into it works with all of our feathers or even our feather wings if you if you so wish there's a little prototyping area and yeah just comes soldered up same price okay yeah that's the stuff right there so here I've got one right here I will reveal and then let's talk about this so ta-da this is the updated version which actually sometimes I think these come with blue sometimes with black terminals screw terminals when it's the kit when it was the kit form now I think we're just sending them out with black looks super cool so let's let's have a look at this and do this right my product pick of the week is the terminal block feather wing this is fantastic this breaks out all the pins of your feather plus some extras onto screw terminals so you can add wiring and get a really nice and secure connection so looking back again at the down shooter on this there you go so check this out this is your typical feather socket and then if you take a feather like so and just set it down into those little pins or little socket headers now every one of those pins that you might be tempted to use on a breadboard and have wires fall out on you and then it's sad instead this is happy because you get these nice secure terminal blocks that you can screw down wires that works best with stranded wires I find and a whole bunch of extras so as Lady Ada mentioned we have a nice prototyping area there so you can lay down a little circuit and some of that's even accessible so depending on your needs you could probably put a little extra output for something like midi down here below and you get extras like I said there are some pair of three volt and grounds up here that you don't normally get access to on the board we usually just have three volt and ground down here we get the power switch this is actually I believe this is connected to enable so this will turn turn off the board without it needing to be a high current switch it just sets the board to shut down disables its own three volt connection on the board and you've got mounting holes here so you can connect it to a project it also has mounting holes so you can use some standoffs like nylon standoffs are particularly good for this to connect the feather to the board so the whole thing ends up being really secure and before I do a demo actually I want to talk about how this thing came to be so actually I just noticed Todd bought mentioned in our discord hey it looks a lot like a wing shield so here's the history of this if you step back in time a little bit uh gosh I don't know what the year was maybe 2009 2010 something like that uh the arduino due emila nove was the king and I was using these there was kind of no easy way to prototype with these other than running wires to a breadboard or to a proto board uh and then building your project then along came proto boards shields so you could put a shield on top of that and have some proto area solder directly to uh but I had been playing around with the make shield or rather the make controller which was a controller and breakout board that had a had a short little life there which used screw terminals for just about everything I said hey I'd love to have that on arduino so I chatted with a friend of mine Brian Jepsen and Todd Kurt we got together and built and sold these little kits here these were the screw shield wing shields and you can see just what they do they give you stacky headers you could plug them into your arduino but leave the middle of it the juicy center available so that we didn't have to worry about things like the reset switch and some of the additional connectors there still get to everything but you had this area where you could still plug in jumper cables if you had to for some reason but really the idea was to use these little terminal blocks then lady aida revised this at one point as did spark fun both of them sold these and some other places they both came up with this idea of okay forget your little wing thing let's actually just use a big proto board in the middle and put these terminal breakouts there these are super great we actually still sell these disclaimer I get to split one dollar with Brian and Todd every time one of these cells through aida fruit so if I promote this too heavily I could I could get rich the product we have here today is really the natural extension of this but more into the feather format world so as you can see there I still plug in the the microcontroller in the middle but now you get these great screw terminals to plug into so for a little demo I want to show how you use these what what's what's the point of this right so here's a nice example I put together I think it's a nice example I put together yesterday so I've got a feather here and I want to connect a bunch of stuff to it so I want to try out this really cool analog throttle here that we've got analog potentiometer throttle and this needs to be power ground and a an analog pin so I've screw terminal it into there and those are going to 3.3 volts ground and a zero on my feather and then I wanted some neopixels to control so I have those going to a ground power and digital pin over on the top side of the board there coil these up so you can see these and then the the extra things plugged in on top there because I wanted to use one of these right how are you going to plug one of these into your feather project well this is kind of a nice way to do it it may not end up being your final way you may end up soldering stuff to boards or it just may well be depending on your needs this is going to be secure enough so long as not yanking on these wires a lot to stay put and it's a lot more secure than something like a breadboard in this case I put on the neopixel I put some wire ferrules and crimped them down so that those have a really nice connection in there and so if I plug this in in this case I'm just powering the feather now I have the nice on off switch that I can turn on and it's going to light up my little demo there so I've got the neopixels plugged in I've got the analog throttle plugged in which I've got controlling the red component of the RGB LED so it goes from a sort of pale blue through cyan up into a sort of magenta as I use that and then I also have some controls here with the d-pad just lighting different numbers of LEDs on here depending on which which buttons I press and so for whatever your prototyping or maybe even like I said your final product you may just want to plug into something like the screw terminal feather wing I love them I think they're great there's also an idea that I'd seen in the arcade cabinet world so there's a lot of breakout boards for getting all the bazillions of buttons and joysticks and things on the input side and maybe cabinet lights and speakers and such on the output side somehow talking to a controller board and this is this is one that you'll you'll often see in things like arcade cabinet builds is these these really nice robust screw terminals just to demo that if I take take the power off and pull out the connector there for a second you can see if let's say I want to disconnect the analog pin there and use a different pin it's as simple as going and setting that wire in there getting a nice little screwdriver screw that down good and snug like I said stranded wire works really well and now it would take a decent amount of tugging on there to come out so not as secure as a soldered connection would be but also much more secure than something like a breadboard so let's see let's hop over to the page for that for a second if you're wondering where where to go you can go to that you are all right there and that will take you to this page right here there we have the assembled terminal block breakout like I said we don't sell the the kit version anymore I don't know if the price changed I think it's the same cost it's just you don't have to do any soldering when you get it like lady it is said this makes a lot of sense for people who want to have a plug and play experience you can buy a lot of our different feathers preassembled with the with the header pins on them and so if you buy that and this terminal block you have a really nice way to put a project together this also has a I believe we have a little learn guide on this that'll tell you about the pinouts on it where things go a little diagram it also has an assembly section that doesn't actually matter anymore because we're not asking you to solder those onto there and we also have a number of projects in our learn guide that use these here's an example the the midi power glove I used that on this and if you look at let's see I think on the mod the power glove section you'll see how I used this I had a bunch of space in the power glove to connect my blue fruit feather and I had a bunch of things like the strain relief or or a force sense resistors bend sensors in the fingers to connect to and so I down at the base here have let's see there's a nice picture of it I have a lot of wiring going into this can't see it too well here as well as battery still fits because this is elevated above the terminals by a little bit and there are other projects in there so I think these are great I love them I encourage you to go check these out and what else I think that's going to do it let me see if there's any questions over in the various chats and pop open my discord and I'll take a look at the youtube chat there if I can find it where I move my there's my discord Susan it's not sure I connected enough stuff to this feather that's right look at all the extra room there we have plenty to go and you also depending on the feather you've also got some other connectors you can use such as the stem of qt i squared c on some boards you don't on some earlier feathers like a feather m4 there's not an i squared c stem of qt connector but you can use the serial clock and serial data power and ground on the actual feather wing terminal feather wing in fact let me move those out of the way here and you'll see those are even indicated on some some of these we've got serial clock yeah serial clock here rxtx some of the spi sorry that's the clock for for serial right there you have serial clock and serial data which are the i squared c listed here so a lot of these are are visible right on the on the silk screen of the board there let's see I think that's it any other questions let me know otherwise we'll wrap that up so I'm just going to go back to the original page and and refresh it make sure these are still in stock here we go there it is right there yeah so seven dollars forty eight cents today just during the show so if you want to get these throw them in your cart we still have them in stock you can get up to ten of them uh and you don't need a coupon code just buy it before the show ends or within a few minutes and you'll be good otherwise the price will automatically go back to the full price in a little bit so let's go ahead before I close it out I'm going to add a little hanger wire which is pretty easy on this one let me go to my overhead do that because that focus a little there we go so you can see here I like in in fact we've had terminals with Phillips or more more truthfully we've had the ones that are Phillips and flathead so they have one long side and one short side of that cross in the past right now these are just straight up flathead which I know I prefer because you don't slip Phillips is made to slip out of those and you really just want to get the screwdriver to bite nicely into that like I say use the ferrules wire ferrules crimp connectors if you want to make sure you got no stray wires because those can be a real bummer or twist that wire fairly well before you put it in and screw that down there you go now we've got a little built-in hang tag there so let's jump back here and finish it up that is my product pick of the week it is the terminal block feather wing that's going to do it for me for today this has been John Park for JP's project pick of product pick of the week that's what it's called and I will see you soon we've got a bunch of shows coming up shows on Wednesday include 3d hangouts ask an engineer show and tell I'll be back with John Park's workshop on Thursday and we have deep die with foamy guy Tim C on Friday and and I hope I didn't miss any there all right thanks everyone I will see you next time bye bye