 Welcome to the show it's me JP and this is JP's product pick of the week and we are here once again with a cool product pick that I'm going to show you and the first thing I want to do actually is jump forward in time to when you know what the product pick is even though I'll pretend I don't yet because that way I can head you to the product page where you will find a massive 50% off on this week's product pick. So head to this URL right here or point your device at that QR code that's going to take you to the web page and if you head there you will see we've got 50% off and I think it's a maximum of 10 per customer I'm going to sneak on over there real quick myself and I'm going to refresh this refresh this page. My goodness yes maximum of 10 and it is half price what the heck also by the way you can watch this very video right inside of the product page so do that we recommend it all right that's enough revealing what's going on in our future so now let's get back into the current time stream and have Lady Aida tell us a little bit about this week's product pick. Take it away Lady Aida. ITZY BITZY RP2040 this is the RP2040 based ITZY BITZY so people like the ITZY BITZY inspired by teensy boards but I wanted to have them with different chips bite size but has a lots of GPIO pins the GPIO pins go all the way around I want to show and compare so you get the M0 express the M4 the blue fruit and now new friend is made RP2040 so the ITZY BITZY it's four well there's actually two more the 32U4 ones which I didn't even bring down because these are nice and popular but what I tried to do is I try to make them sort of similar I try to have the neopixels over here and you know these have the buttons on the end this of course has the antenna here so the buttons have to move up to the ITZY BITZY if you want to have a lipo battery of a lipo backpack that you can use with it there's a single-sided board it has an 8 megabyte Q-Spy flash it has the reset button it has the boot button I did the cute primary hack where the boot button is also a user button after booting so when you're running code you can use this as a single button input it's got a neopixel here I wonder if I still have the neopixel one program yeah I do it's got one red LED for blinking it's got the crystal power supply lots of little capacitors I had to use a 402 components to make everything fit but it did all fit in the end and then on the bottom we have the GPIO pinouts so this is if you're using with pico SDK or with you know micro Python or something where you need to do the raw pin numbers these are labeled on the bottom and then there's one pin d5 that's special purpose and that pin is level shifted up to about 5 volts so if you want to drive neopixels if you want to five-fold up but there's some there's just some times where people are like I need to to to control something that's a 5 volt input it really wants 5 volts particularly neopixels that pin is level shifted out to 0 to 5 volts you've got one pin over here it's 5 it's got the exclamation point to remind you that it's the output pin but otherwise it's what it's nice about the RP2040 is you know it's it's dual core cortex and zero it's running at 130 megahertz it's got circuit Python and now Arduino supports coming out micro Python support you can do pico SDK and you've got a lot of pins and I made sure that you know you've got not only a lot of pins but you got all the analog pins there are eight pins in a row if you want to do like camera projects where you use the PIO to drive eight GPIO at once they're not all in a row because I wanted to match like the SDA and SPI pen and UR and analog pins match the other itsy-bitsies but they are available you can get to all those pins if you want they're just if you look on the bottom I think it's 26 27 28 29 and then 24 25 18 19 20 you know whatever basically you got lots of pins are in a row so if you want to use PIOs to drive many pins in parallel you got it and you know it's nice is that you can swap these between the two you got a project with an M0 and M4 you want Bluetooth swap between it you want RP2040 swap between that as well so you know so one of the original RP2040 boards that we said we would design and so we've we fulfilled it we got the QT pie itsy-bitsy and the feather so this is a great tiny board with lots of GPIO pins and if you want you can add a lipo charger onto it by soldering on one of our lipo backpacks all right I'm convinced I'm gonna head over to my mystery cabinet of wonder drawers and go grab one very back it's a busy RP2040 that's our product pick of the week this week it is the itsy-bitsy RP2040 this is really a terrific board it is small and yet it's got more GPIO pins available on it than most any other board that we have so for example way more than a QT pie but you knew that right this is this is meant to to be small this one's meant to be big but then the feather board actually while it has a lot of really great features it has fewer available GPIO pins than this guy right here you'll also notice that it's quite a bit smaller than a Pico the equivalent RP2040 chip so this little board here what I want to do first of all is have you jump over to the page here where there let me switch camera views where you can go and pick one up so I mentioned this before if you refresh right now you're gonna see this is a $4.98 for an itsy-bitsy bitsy which is terrific incredible price if you take a look in here you'll see some info about the board a lot of its stats so important stats on this it's a we've got a boot and a reset button on it so it's really easy to get into bootloader mode and deal with that without adding any extra pins like you would with a Pico it's got eight megs of flash on it which is terrific so sometimes you're wondering what chip you should use or what board you should use a cutie pie is gonna have less RAM to work with and in the case of the the itsy-bitsy you've got so much RAM on there that you can just pile on the libraries of course it's got the speeds of a Cortex M4 but it's a it's a dual Cortex M0 design and there are four analog to digital converters on there for 8x and then you can use 23 pins as digital IO pins if you want and the as as lady I mentioned this is a teensy form factor boards you will find there are a lot of cases where a particularly in the keyboard community where the pro micro and the teensy are two similarly sized boards that are really popular so this fits kind of in that in that category of really small dense board with lots and lots pins on it particularly great for projects where you don't need to use a lipo battery doesn't have that lipo charging circuit on it you can add on a lipo backpack if you want if you take a look if you scroll down here and head to the learn guide link down towards the bottom jump right there right now you'll find we've got this nice guide from catney which tells you all about the board gives you the pinouts for it so if you want to dive in a little bit deeper you can take a look at this one nice thing about this board is that it has the pinouts on the top of the board on the silk screen that you would use for things like Arduino and circuit python also has on the bottom the GPIO pin names that you would use in micro Python so you have sort of a reference there for any of that information as lady I mentioned there's a special pin on here pin 5 that gives you a 5 volt logic level so for things like neopixels particularly if you're doing some sensitive stuff with neopixels and you want to make sure that you get accurate data you can use the 5 volt coming off of the V in pin if you're plugged into USB or another 5 volt source as well as that that d5 pin and that'll give you the 5 volt logic which is really cool it's not a lot of boards that do that and then there's a circuit python info on this you can also use Arduino using there's there's a Arduino core that's working on this now and you can use micro python but I'm using circuit python in the example that I'm going to show here so let me switch to my overhead here and there's the board there what I'm going to do is I'm going to refocus and I'll show you a little project that I put together because you may ask yourself well what kind of project what I want lots and lots of GPIO pins for in a small form factor well I will answer that with this this is a MIDI key bed it's actually a key bed it's it's not necessarily MIDI it's a synthesizer key but that I pulled out of an old synthesizer now all this really is a diode matrix keyboard it turns out it's a 8 column and 8 row diode matrix that means I need 16 pins plugged into my itsy bitsy I've got 16 pins to plug into the itsy bitsy in fact I've kind of got eight across the top and eight across the bottom so I can sort of match the the wiring of this keyboard and I have some leftover pins that I decided to plug in a little neopixel strip here and what I'm doing is I'm reading that using our keypad library I can read the diode matrix and know which keys I'm pressing and then you can use that for kind of anything you want so you could turn that into HID stuff game stuff pure digital control of neopixels I decided to have it send off MIDI commands to my computer I'm just running some some synth software that'll read those MIDI commands and at the same time I'm also going to send commands to my neopixels to light up little chunks of these these neopixels so let's see we should be able to hear this so you can see there it's a whole lot of fun to play sort of moody blade-runnery types of pads with this especially if you stick to the white keys if you don't really know how to play the keyboard like I like me but you see here we've got some really nice fast response polyphony so our keypad library can deal with reading lots of keys all the keys at once basically could mash this and it knows they're all pressed and I have this neopixel strip that is no compromise plugged into five volt logic plugged into five volt power which is terrific let's take a look now you can see here I'm just in the prototyping phase of this so I've got my let me go ahead and adjust some lighting on here real quick I can boost the exposure there that's a little better so you can see I've got my little itsy bitsy plugged into a small breadboard there and then I'm breadboarding these wires into flip this over and probably wreck things in the process but you can see the bottom of this keyboard in fact you can see the keyboard matrix diodes there and this is this gives me a little bit of a clue of how it's wired although some of that I opened up the circuit board and looked at the traces to try to figure out the column and row situation all of them come off of this little IDC connector here jumper set here 16 jumpers and I'm going over an IDC ribbon and then plugging into my my little breadboard there I'm also putting some LED acrylic across there so that it's not quite as bright and that's about it I'm powering it off of micro USB now in the final version of this I may put it on a perma proto board make that wiring really short and concise and be able to fit it right up in this space there's definitely enough space in here I may cut a little notch in the side to put my USB connector but now I've got a sort of ready-made hackable keyboard that I can use for just about anything I could create a synth on board power a music maker feather wing just use it for USB MIDI stuff use it for classic MIDI stuff but I've been waiting on this you might you might remember I showed this little keyboard that I pulled out on social media at least and maybe on my show a year or two ago and it was just yesterday that I thought hey you know what here's a perfect use for this itsy bitsy given all of the GPIO pins that it has so that is I think a fun way to use this but the the sky's the limit you can really come up with a lot of interesting ways to use a powerful little board it's running that RP 2040 chip which is inexpensive fast we've got lots of flash on there lots of GPIO pins can do circuit python on there all day long and it is half off right now so I'll remind you again if you head over to this URL the product number is 4888 so if you head over there you will get this really wild discount just during the show so load up your cart you might have a little bit of a grace period after the show ends but once it's in your cart don't hesitate too long hit by we've got a maximum of 10 per customer and you will be able to do all kinds of projects like this with the keyboard or anything of your own own devising using all that great juicy GPIO a couple questions from the chat over in YouTube chat Charles Burnford asks what keyboard did it come from this was a very old M audio oxygen which was a MIDI controller and a I think I had a mic phantom mic in so you could use it as a little bit of a mixer like audio input it had some problems one of which being the drivers just ceased being updated and stopped working with with versions of Mac software years ago is a really old keyboard so I decided to pull a few parts from it including this neat little key bed but these things are all made by just a few companies and you can pull them out of pretty much any thrift store keyboard you find there they'll be a little membrane underneath with the little carbon pads one interesting thing about this is actually there are two me show it while I'm talking about it there are actually two switches per key so this is actually capable of doing velocity sensitive velocity sensing because when you press a key it's actually one and two little switches they get pressed every time and so if you're able to calculate the difference between how quickly those are pressed that's how velocity is sensed on a lot of these keyboards it's just a difference differential between those two buttons being pressed says you hit it slowly because it took a while for the second button to get hit or it was really fast because they were nearly instantaneous but yeah any any thrift store keyboard you find is really really really likely to be a diode matrix like this and depending on how big it is this one being an eight by eight matrix it could do up to 64 keys this is actually 25 physical keys but because of the velocity sensitive switch it's actually 50 the matrix that we're reading is actually 50 different items I'm just I'm throwing away half of that because I don't don't need half of those to do what I'm doing which is this very simple non-velocity sensitive thing and and other questions by the way I'll say thanks for stopping by in the chat we've got our discord chat over here if you want to go join that chat you can get at adafru.it slash discord you get an instant invite jump in and that's where the party's at that's where people are hanging out and chatting over in the live broadcast chat channel in particular and let me just scroll back a little and see the see if there's any other questions oh yeah someone asked me about the the Blade Runner 2049 thing I finally realized what it was about RP2040 that was kind of tickling the back of my Android brain and that was the 2049 reference in the movie it's kind of similar numbers so that's that's why that happened if you're wondering let's see other questions I think there's some discussion about doing the velocity sensing thing let's see yes Arduino core that is the Earl Phil Hauer Earl Phil Hauer Arduino core if you want to run Arduino on these RP2040s it works really well yes these keyboards will work with Linux just fine pretty much anything that you can use USB HID or USB MIDI on you can tell the it's a bit CRP2040 to send those kinds of commands yes Todd it's Todd and Katnick we're talking about convincing Dan H to add a millisecond tick time stamp to the keypad library so we could do velocity sensing that would be cool be really cool okay well I think that's it let me know if there are other questions Charles Brentford says he has a v2 oxygen alright maybe you recognize the keypad there good for haunt hardware yeah hollow sweet that's right we got Halloween coming up and there's probably a lot of different haunt applications for something like this again like I said unlike a feather it doesn't have the lipo battery charging and connection built right onto it but you generally don't need it for for those types of permanent installations where you might just plug it into a USB power brick to power it or some other some other voltage source alright I think that's gonna do it so that jump back to the main camera here that is my product pick of the week it's the itsy bitsy RP2040 it is a powerhouse little board I love it so much I'm gonna go ahead and put that on my new product pickboard and that'll do it for today so again head to this URL if you want to go pick up one or ten of these at half price only now while this show is on you can throw those in your cart get the discount and off you go let us know in the chat what kinds of things you build with them we're really looking forward to all kinds of things in particular your Halloween haunts that's gonna be that's gonna be a lot of fun alright for Adafruit Industries I'm John Park this has been JP's product pick of the week bye bye