 This month on Maker Update, a robot xylophone, Adafruit's open for business, painting with light, tautla typing with glue, texting with Blinka, and the BBC microbit grows a tail. Hello and welcome back to the Adafruit edition of Maker Update for June 2020. I'm Tyler Weingartner and I hope you're doing well. The global pandemic continues to make our lives weird, but it gives me a little bit of relief that almost none of the projects in this month's show have anything to do with it. So, if you're down for a little escapism, let's check out the project of the month. If you've ever gotten me started on how much I love machines that make music, you know how hard it is to get me to stop, so it's no surprise that I adore the work that Liz Clark has put in over the past few weeks to build this robot xylophone. From a single itsy-bitsy NRF 520A40 Express, she's controlling 30 different solenoids in concert, pun intended. Each solenoid is responsible for knocking into its own individual bar to trigger a note. Enabling this are a pair of MCP 23017 I2C GPIO expanders and a gang of four ULN 2308 motor drivers. A pair of 2020 rails run across the two sets of note bars and a 3D printed bracket mounts each individual solenoid with plenty of height adjustability to make sure the engagement is correct. While it would be possible to compose and execute music entirely in code, the itsy-bitsy allows the xylophone to function as a MIDI instrument, so the music composition can happen in any digital audio workstation or DAW. What's more, the NRF 520A40 chip allows the instrument to play wirelessly over Bluetooth low energy. This is an impressive project on a number of different levels. Liz's project write-up includes code, 3D printed files, wiring guides, circuit schematics, tips for hooking it up to your MIDI software, and a demo video showing the xylophone in action. Even if you don't plan on building anything this elaborate, this is a wonderful guide, both in terms of how to approach a large-scale project or just how to set up a couple of solenoids that you'd like to knock into stuff based on MIDI triggers. Time for the news and this is probably the one you've been waiting for. After weeks of shifting their work to produce PPE and life-saving electronics, Adafruit is back to regular business, shipping your orders. They're keeping with health and safety guidelines to keep their employees and their customers safe, and some orders will ship with a higher priority than others. But if you've been patiently waiting for some stuff to come back in stock, you're finally in luck. More projects. John Park turned the Adafruit clue into a tool to translate text messages over Bluetooth low energy into the 5-bit Bodo code understood by Teletype machines. Teletype machines are used by the deaf and hard of hearing to send text messages over regular acoustic phone lines. Usually they consist of a keyboard, a small single line display, and an acoustic coupler for the phone handset. There's a really cool history of DIY Teletype machines that there isn't time to get into here, but in the meantime it's cool to see the same-spirit living on, even if it's just sending messages that will drive your dog crazy. Phil Burgess has also taken clue to build this light painting stick. The idea behind light painting is pretty simple. If you keep a camera shutter open in a dark room, any light source will be captured as an unbroken line as it moves through space. What this project does is use a whole lot of lights in an array to allow you to display images or patterns in space. The code allows you to program the RGB LEDs using bitmaps, and he's using dot-star strips instead of neopixels for their higher polling rate. There's a lot of cool stuff in this project, and the result? Well, they really speak for themselves. Thanks to the Internet of Things, there's no shortage of ways to connect with your at-home devices through your smartphone. Brent Rebell wanted to take a little more control over his data, so he's using an Adafruit Phona to monitor his in-home climate, and he's using SMS messages to manually poll for the data. Phona is a platform that allows devices to communicate over cellular data, SMS, GPS, and more. Even better, they now work with Circuit Python, making code updates a breeze. You would think that all the sensors packed into Clue would be enough for most folks, but that wasn't the case for Adafruit community member Kevin Walters. Using an inductance coil made from enamel wire and a small circuit to protect Clue's GPIO pins, Kevin has built his own DIY metal detector. The project write-up features a cool lesson in inductance and all of its different uses, and how to protect your board from wonky voltages. You'll also notice he's using a breakout for Clue. We'll talk about that later on in the show. There's also a guide for building this project for Circuit Playground. Time for some tips and guides. Ever since the Arduino Leonardo, microcontrollers have been able to emulate keyboards and mice using the human interface device libraries. However, most modern computer peripherals have begun the shift over to TinyUSB, a more modern protocol. Now there's a new series of libraries that help bridge the gap between the older, simpler code base, allowing them to behave like modern peripherals, including BLE. The TinyUSB library both unifies and simplifies the code process, which is what any library ought to do. If Brent Rebell's phono project caught your attention earlier, don't miss his phono guide for Circuit Python. It goes over all the phono libraries for Circuit Python, and the example code walks through connecting to various protocols before connecting to a mobile network and fetching the current Bitcoin value. There's no support for Phono 3G yet, but that's planned for later this year. If the idea of driving large RGB LED matrices is your thing, don't miss this guide to Protomatter, the awkwardly named library designed for programming an LED matrix that offers a lot more flexibility and size. It yields more options with regards to the pins used, so you aren't stuck with an Arduino shield as your interface, and you even have control over your color bit depth, making better use of your onboard RAM. There's also a new 64x32 5mm pitch RGB matrix in the Adafruit store that can be used with this code. This month's Adafruit featured product is the Dragon Tail, designed for the BBC Microbit and Adafruit Clue. While these powerhouse dev boards are packed with features, they're sorely lacking in breadboard compatibility, until now. The Dragon Tail fits over the alligator clip-friendly base and extends it with 17 GPIO pins, I-squared C, two ground rails, and two 3V rails. This should really help extend these two boards into tackling bigger and more elaborate projects. And that is going to do it for this month's show. Thank you so much for watching. I don't know about you, but I've been getting a ton of inspiration from all the projects in this month's show. If that's the same for you, give us a thumbs up or tell us about it in the comments. As always, huge thanks to everyone at Adafruit for all the good work they do and for giving this show a home. Take care of yourselves. I'll see you in July.