 Welcome to the show. It's me, JP. It's time for another JP's product pick of the week. Here we are. It is that day. It's Tuesday. It's this week. It's time for a product pick. And hello to everyone over in the YouTube chat. Anthony Becerra says this groove is infectious. It is. That was written by our own Bartlebeats, who is the composer of many great Adafruit songs. So thanks to Tom for that song. I love that song. And hello to people over in our Discord as well. Hello, NDRU. Andrew. Dr. Andrew. Maybe that's what NDRU is. Sneaky. See Grover, Cup of Coffee, Dexter Starboard. Hello and welcome. So let's see. I've got a bit rate of 904.99 kilobits per second, which is giving me a little bit of a warning on YouTube, but we'll see if it holds true. So let me know if we get out of sync. I can just hit the little restart button there, and we should be good. Peaking at 0 dB. Good grief. Let me lower that a little bit. And let's get started. So before I get into the meat of it, I want to send you to this page right here. If you head to the page you see linked right there, that QR code or that URL will take you to a product page, and you're going to see a 50% off. In fact, I'm going to spy on it myself and hit the refresh button. What have I done? I hit the wrong button. And yes, wow, 50% off. Head to that product page. You will see what it is before I've officially revealed it, but we do things in a weird order here on this show anyway. It's all backwards. So in fact, before I go any further, let's jump further back in time and have Lady Aida introduce us to this product back when it was brand spanking new. Take it away, Lady Aida. It's a pie ruler. So this is a lot like the six inch engineers ruler that we've stocked for a bit, but it's smarter and better. This one has gold plated capacitive touch pads and it's got that trinket built into the edge. So it's basically like a trinket M0 built into the ruler and it's got four capacitive touch pads as well. In addition to you get all the trinket stuff. This is still like all exactly like a trinket. And then the extra pins that aren't used on this chip turn it into these four pads and they have LEDs. So you can program it just like a trinket M0 in circuit Python, which it comes with. This ruler shows up as a USB drive or it can be a keyboard. And yeah, you can edit it comes with code that when you turn on, use one little flag that you comment out because we don't want to give people something that like turns into a keyboard, not expectedly. It'll become a keyboard and this was to solve a problem that we had to just I always have to type the letter the letters like ohm, mu and pi, but I can never remember the alt key code. So now when you press these capacitive touch pads, it'll type that out on the keyboard. And then did you keep sponsoring this ruler? They love our ruler. So when you type this when you press the did you key button, it will type in the URL for digikey.com slash Python, which is our Python on hardware page. And then on the back, it has the little instructions telling you to plug into the USB port and open code.py, edit it and save. And then you still have all of the goodies from the old ruler, the packages and helper, but it's even better because now it's a circuit Python ruler. So check it out. This is a nice update. It's this best, most useful circuit Python ruler in the world. That is a bold claim. The best circuit Python ruler in the world. It may very well be. In fact, I want to go grab one from my mystery cabinet of awesomeness. So hang on one second while I walk back there to that side of the shop, change my shirt real quick, grab it, change my shirt back and return. Hang on. Hey, yes, there it is. It is the product pick of the week. It is the pie ruler. Oh, wait, that's a fake one. That's just a trinket stuck to a ruler. Try that again. Hey, it's my product pick of the week. It is the pie ruler. This is a really cool little ruler. It is a six inch or what, 15 centimeter rule. You've got those two sets of markings along the edges there. It has a reference on the back for a whole bunch of different SMD parts. I find the trace width one really useful if you're ever laying out PCBs and you're wondering how thick it's going to really appear to go with different traces. That's kind of hard to tell just looking at your software. So that's a nice little bonus on their trace widths and a number of other engineering references. But then the things that make this really unusual and special are the fact that it essentially has a circuit Python trinket M zero built right into it. So this is an M zero based board or run Arduino or run circuit Python and beyond just being a regular trinket. So beyond that, it actually has four of the pins that are normally not broken out on the trinket running to these four capacitive touch pads, as well as four bonus LEDs. So what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to use this in its intended way. Let me show you a demo of what this can do pretty much right out of the box with a couple of small modifications. So what I'll do is let me let me jump to this overhead view here. Oh, let me fix that. That one got funky. That's a little hang on. Better. There we go. So you can see here on these capacitive touch pads, we have some suggested uses as Lamar said, there are some special characters that you use a lot when you're writing about electronics that you often want to use, but you either have to learn a funky key combo or a unicode that you can type alt and then type in three numbers or something like that, or grab it out of, you know, a copy paste situation. But this is a way to set up a little special keyboard that's really purpose built for your engineering writing needs. And that is this Ohm character, the Omega, we have the Mu there for micro thingies and we have Pi. And then also this digikey logo here on the end, we'll actually type in the URL for digikeys circuit Python site and go there. So let's let's see this in action. What I'm going to do is drop into view here where we can see just a nice big text edit window. And when I go here and tap this first key, you'll see we get we get some omegas is actually getting a bunch of me type tap it once. There we go. And you'll see as I tap that, we also light up the little LED that's right above it. On the little ruler view you can see there. If I head down here, I'll type in my new or Mu character, I never know how to say that one. Funny looking you. And then let me put one more space in there and go to Pi Pi Pi Pi all you want. So that's acting as a USB keyboard is no special drivers on your computer. So you can plug this into any computer probably even work on an iOS or an Android device if you just the code to type the proper character. And then of course you can modify it to type other characters or do wholly different things doesn't just have to be USB keyboard stuff, it could be a MIDI controller, it could be lighting up LEDs, sending color codes to a string of Neopixels, kind of whatever you want. Let's take a look at the code that we have running for this. I'm going to switch over to my atom view, atom being my code editor here. So this is essentially the sample code that comes with the ruler. It's shipped to circuit Python on it has this code right on it. Plug it in. You can open this up and take a look at it. You'll see what we're doing is we're importing a bunch of libraries that we can use to bring in board definitions OS for some system info USB HID digital IO so we can touch the buttons time and touch IO so that we can do the touch sensing. Then we have a variable here called enable keyboard this is false at first so it won't work as a keyboard will just light up the LEDs so that people don't get confused when they plug it in and see weird stuff showing up. And then I added this little thing here this is enable Mac. So by default, the ships with code that'll work primarily under windows with the Unicode alt and then number keys. I've added this little switch that says if we're doing it on a Mac, we're going to type some different things that are just a little easier to get at and these are some option key things option Z for omega option M I believe from you an option P for pi. Then we enable this if the keyboards enabled we enable the USB HID keyboard setup and keyboard layout. We have a little bit of info there that will print your info about the board to your serial port. We set up the LED and there are a number of LEDs involved here this the LED on board for usually used for power there's a neopixel actually it's a dot star so RGB dot star built on that you can use for some color coded things. And then we have all of those pin LEDs over the cap pads. Those all get set up here. And then we set up this little function for reading cap touch pads. And these are three of these are actually hardware cap touch I believe based on the Cortex M zero chip samd 21. One of them is actually a normal non cap touch pad that's being used as capacitive touch using a little trick here of checking. I can see here is a spunky idea we can DIY the one non hardware cap touch device by hand reading dropping voltage on a tri state pin. And so that builds up voltage and then drops it when you touch it. And then we also have these alt codes that are set up to either type in alt keys or in the case of the one that I have running on here type in the option keys. And then we go to the main loop of this where we do this caps equals read caps so we check all the cap touch pads. And then we run through them and if we have this not Mac enabled thing will do the different alt codes that type in Omega Mu Pi. If we do have the Mac thing turned on then I'm doing keyboard press option Z and then release option M and release option P and release. And then you can see the fourth one here. This types in digikey.com slash Python and then a carriage return. So that one's kind of cool actually if I head to a Chrome view real quick make a new window here add this and type in that last that last touchpad it will bring up the digikey.com slash Python that goes to Python and hardware which is pretty cool. The way that's working in code you saw if you look at my little screen capture software here we can or rather my text edit software here we can just hit that you see just types that all in and it hits a carriage return. So let's see I showed the the main Chrome page here for the product you can see right now these are at half off so 598 will get you one you can get up to 10 of them if you want to put them in people's stockings or give them out as gift gifts that you might want to stock up right now. And some nice close up images here of the reference section of the ruler as well. And then there's a link about the guide for the ruler you can click here as well as this little added PyRuler Simon says game that you can download and play around with. There's a PyRuler panic buttons link. If we click on that. You can see this will allow you to set it up as a panic for things like muting on zoom and turning off your camera and things like that. David Dyke asks how long before RP2040 shows up on the rule that's a good question that would be a cool modern modern update to that but for now we have these with the M0. Let's see what else I think that covers the bulk of it you can of course use pretty much any circuit Python code that would fit on a trinket M0 on this plus you get the added buttons for capacitive touch. I'll also point out if we take a look at a close up here of the board. Let's hide some stuff. You'll see that there are a couple of pads here above each cap touch these little holes that you can use as a connection point for a piece of wire or a clip or something like that if you want to use the cap touch further away from the board so you could solder a wire to that. If you had some really small alligator clips that might work these are smaller than sort of your average clip spring clamp something like that then you can run your cap touch off to other objects and you'll notice the pins are broken out on the the trinket section of this and even as a little trinket outline you could solder in some header pins on that if you wanted to you could put some on the bottom side if you want to plug this into a breadboard for some reason. I even as a little bonus on here set up one of my pins as an output to light up an LED so you'll see if I just plug this LED into ground and pin four which was conveniently next to ground you can see I'm just lighting up a big huge fat 10 millimeter LED there you could blink that you could do interesting things with that so it'll work pretty much like any circuit Python board would it's just it happens to be built into a ruler. So that is the product pick if you want to go and grab one head to that URL that you see right there and you'll get that discount during this show so throw it in your cart maybe along with some other stuff why not that'll help keep the lights on here at Adafruit and we can keep making cool stuff and creating neat projects and tutorials for you so that I think is going to do it. Let's see any questions over in our chats. Let me let me check over on the discord as well as our YouTube. Yeah doctor says you can pull up the character map in Windows is a similar character map in Max's ways to get to these things but none of them are as convenient as a preprinted thing that just says omega I need omega right now. All right I think that's going to do it for today. That's the product pick of the week it is the pie ruler and let's see I forgot to attach some wire to this so I can hang it from my let me grab that grab that LED that also makes a convenient hanger for my little board here little gum drop LED let's hang that right there and that's how that goes. All right thanks everybody I will see you next time I'm John Park and this has been JP's product pick of the week bye bye