 Right here. It is time for John Park's workshop. Thanks everyone for stopping by. We have a bunch of people over in our chats, both the YouTube chat and the Adafruit Discord. So if you're looking for chatting, those are good places to check. If you're wondering where the Discord is, go to adafruit.it. That's our URL shortener. Adafruit.it slash Discord. And look for the live broadcast chat channel. And you'll see this kind of shenanigans going on. Also checking out the YouTube chat. So thanks everyone for stopping by in those places. And let's see. We've got a jam-packed show today, and by we I mean me and Lars. What should we do to start that off? Oh, I think the thing to do is to give you a bit of a discount if you're thinking of buying some stuff from the Adafruit Store today. That's your coupon code, SPIRITS. The spooky kind. Not the liquid kind, the spooky kind. Well, it really works for both. But type that in when you're on your way out from the checkout at the Adafruit Store. And you will get 10% off of your order. And that's good on any stuff, excluding gift certificates, software, and subscriptions. And you can use that until midnight tonight. So that is today's John Park's workshop coupon code, 10% off. Just type in SPIRITS over at the store. The store has all kinds of good stuff in it. Some new stuff that came in last night. I was not quick enough to grab one of the five, is it five or more? The multi-port I squared C hub that multiplexes the I squared C, the multiplier. What's that one? Let me go check my, where's my chrome window I'm looking for? Right here. Let me bring that up. I'm talking about, oh, broadcast software is jumping all over the place. Come back here. Here's the store. And cutting it off. Let me bring that all the way in the picture there. There it is right there. Actually, you can see it. It's the Adafruit PCA 95488 channel. It's an 8 channel STEMIQT quick I squared C multiplexer. I could use one of these. These look really cool. This allows you to deal with having one sensor board or other I squared C board that has only a single address. You might remember from the split keyboard project, I got around this. The TC8488 only had a single I squared C address. So I used the two I squared C channels on the QDPI RP2040. That's it. That's the limit there until you use something like this. This little, I'll click on it here. This little gizmo is very clever and it does all of the routing of or holding the info and passing it on to the board. So we could share eight. Where's my calculator? Do some math here. Just opening up a calculator app because I can't find a good physical calculator. Let's see. That's going to be eight. So we can do 80 keys on the TC8488. It's got eight by 10. I think it's eight by 10. Yeah. 80 keys times eight of these. 640. Is that right? We can do 640 key keyboard. We use this thing. That'd be cool. Anyway, excuse me. I got distracted there. But again, the reason I was telling you about this is if you want to get a thing that, not that one. That one's out right now. You can sign up for the email notification when it comes back in stock. But this discount is just good for stuff that you can get right now. So head to the store. Find something that's in stock that you want and on your way out, type in spirits. Get your 10% off. Let's see. What else have we got? I have a help wanted sign right here. So Adafruit has a job board. And if you head right over there to jobs.adafruit.com, you can see all kinds of interesting positions or postings that you could sign up for. This one looked really cool. STEM program instructor at White Mountain Science, which is a, I believe, full-time and on-site position. A lot of the ones that we post are part-time or contract work, freelance, remote. This one is right there in Littleton, New Hampshire. I've never been a Littleton. I don't know where that is in New Hampshire. This is a STEM program that's all around New Hampshire and northeastern Vermont. And they're looking for instructors. So that's just one of the many jobs that's here at jobs.adafruit.com. If you check this out, you can see these are all free to post. So if you're looking to hire someone, you can post here for free. They're all vetted by Lamor and Phil. So we know they're good. And it doesn't cost anything to post them or to go check them out. So that's jobsadafruit.com. Have a look. All right. Next up, I have this show that I do on Tuesdays. Same time as this, Tuesdays. It's called J.P.'s product pick of the week. And during the product pick of the week, I pick something cool and I demo it for you and give you a huge discount on it. This week, it was this NRF 52840 sensor board, Bluetooth or BLE sensor board. And I like to do a little recap of it. So here's a one minute recap. It is the NRF 52840 sensor board. This is also known as the LED glasses board because it was originally released to drive our LED glasses. This is an incredibly cool dev board for all kinds of wearable projects and remote projects. It has Bluetooth, BLE capability. You can use that for things like Bluetooth MIDI, Bluetooth HID. It has an accelerometer on it. So you can do tilt kind of stuff. I've got my little phone there that's listening over Bluetooth to what I'm doing with this neat little package. I've got a little lipo battery under there. I am using the accelerometer and that's actually turning one of the knobs. Listen to it as I move the fader. Little add-ons we want using I squared C and you can chain them so you can have a bunch of stuff. I thought this was really cool to consider this board as just a dev board and not worry about the glasses part of it. NRF 52840 sensor board aka LED glasses board. So yeah that was the product pick on Tuesday and hopefully some people grabbed some. I think we sold a whole bunch of those. The half price thing is hard to resist sometimes and that's a cool one. So let us know what you use it for if you do some Bluetooth projects or even just sensor onboard sensor projects. It's a cool little board. A nice alternative to some of the others such as the cutie pies, feathers, itsy-bitsies. Another one that comes in this flavor. Let's see what else. Hey this is a great time to do a circuit python parsec and it's related to that product pick. How you may ask? I'll show you. Okay here we go. For the circuit python parsec today I want to show you how you can change the advertised name of a Bluetooth device inside of circuit python. So this you may recognize is my little Bluetooth sensor board and I've got a stem of QT slider on there and a battery. I've got it plugged in right now just so that I can code it in real time as we go here and so what I'm going to do is I'm going to open up an app on my phone. This is the app I use when I want to use Bluetooth MIDI and I should be able to see that. So this is looking for Bluetooth devices and you can see it's found one. It's called circuit pi 9ca6. Oh that's not a very nice name but that's what this is advertising itself as right now. So what I'm going to do is in my code I'm going to add just this one line here. I've just uncommented it actually and this is BLE which is the name of the Bluetooth low energy object here, the BLE dot name. That's it BLE dot name and then you give it a string. So in this case I'm calling it BLE MIDI fader. I will go ahead and save my code here to the board and then I'm going to reset the board so I'm going to press oh I didn't even need to actually just showed up on its own. So you'll see there my app which is looking for advertised Bluetooth devices now found something called BLE MIDI fader which is much more descriptive, much more helpful and this way you can distinguish if you have multiple objects available instead of just this generic circuit pi name and so that is how you can customize the name of your Bluetooth device using circuit python and that's your circuit python parsec. Just to finish the demo there what happens here is this MIDI wrench is now going to route that any Bluetooth coming into it right into the app of your choice. So just so you can hear something with this I'll open up what was I using animoog. So this animoog software here actually I think this one has the option to do it directly but a lot of apps are just looking for a kind of a system MIDI and so that's how MIDI wrench is used. Let's see if this is connected right now let me turn up the volume here. Oh I'm not hearing it I don't know what's going on there all right I didn't really have that demo prepared but you may see here if I go into setup same sort of thing under my MIDI inputs get the glare off of there you can see BLE MIDI fader Bluetooth is showing up and then there's the MIDI wrench actually showing up as well as an output. So really helpful I don't think it's in some of our default code and it probably should be so we'll take a look at some of our more basic examples so that people know that they can use their Bluetooth devices and have a nice friendly name on them so you can distinguish them and uh turn that off there. All right what else we got going on uh let's see not choppy on YouTube said Paul was it choppy earlier on YouTube or maybe that's just just something we say hey guess what yeah good thank you Paul I appreciate it good to know that it's not choppy sometimes it is uh it was advertising to me a high degree of confidence in the stream health actually the little YouTube panel I probably cursed it I should never have said that we'll see what happens okay uh so next up what's going on uh I have a couple things I'm working on today so I wanted to show you just a little bit a small bit of hands on progress uh or work on the step sequencer that we started working on last week and uh let's let's jump over there and get into that so uh let me pop up my main cam and get over here looks like that's in focus so I don't think I had these little breakout boards yet last week so this is uh what the little breakout for the step switches looks like and this is actually designed to be snapped off of here uh so you get nice uh point one spacing so they can basically be butted right up against each other let's see that's too close for my focus there we go uh and what I've done is I've started soldering on some switches here uh you can see on the back here these have uh all of the connections of the switch so if we take a look at one of these little step switches here you may remember we have I think it's two commons normally open and normally closed so those four legs there are all about the uh the switch that's built inside of it and then we have the anode and cathode legs of the led so to make life easy solder the board in and then when you flip this over you can see we have pins which we can use sort of standard uh pin headers on I happen to have some fancy red ones here although not enough I think for the projects at the moment and we have five little connections there and they are uh replicated at at both sides of this so you can bridge a gap on a on a breadboard or proto board if you want kind of pick which side you're using but these give you the uh led minus led plus uh the normally closed switch normally open and common so the way these are meant to be used is first we solder to them and I I just started the soldering on this one and I wanted to finish this up so let me get focus as good as I can okay so these you just want to make sure the legs are straight and then they basically just pop in like so there's also two pegs that have holes in the PCB and then the trick here is let me just set something I can rest it on the trick here is I need to hold this uh you could use some tape or something like that I'm just going to try to get it all done with um pinkies and what not and I'm just going to get one of those uh legs soldered in place then it won't fall out I can kind of double check the fit so this iron is warming up it's almost there getting closer by the way I have a little detail on the soldering iron I wanted to share too okay so get one soldered in place and then I'll check and see if it's if it looks square uh and I'll press on it now and reheat the solder make sure that it's nice and square that looks good to me uh the detail I wanted to share about this iron uh let me zoom out a little bit this is this cool little pen iron and I was having problems uh with its voltage dropping and I decided this morning it was the really cool silicone cable that it came with I think it has uh has a shorted wire or something after not too long if I moved the iron around this was uh glitching out it could also be problematic connections or pins or conductors in here so I'll take a closer look at that but in the meantime I switched it out for one of our right angle usb-c cables and while this isn't very long it is kind of nice because it gives the thing um kind of handle you can hold on to there and it sets it in my little uh iron holder prevents it from sliding all the way through I don't have a good holder for this type of iron but this stops it from going through and touching the desk so um that was a little hack I discovered this morning so let's uh finish soldering those into place and so long as that yeah that wire seems to be much happier uh so go ahead and get the leds on this one I have air conditioning running it's still hot here and uh that's blowing the fumes right past me I don't think they're headed up to my face so while I don't have an exhaust fan that you're used to seeing a little typical solder fume extractor it is workshops large enough that these are being sent far far away from me almost there so you can see it's pretty quick work uh these come in packs of three for the switches for made of fruit and uh the PCBs here have 12 break off PCBs uh I actually want to use 16 switches so I this is why I've got these extra four uh on here so now you can see we got these four we got these 12 so now I'm set and now we snap them apart I haven't done this with these so uh before so let's see how how that goes um usually I like to put these in a bigger vice and snap them so I might you might be able to see the one back here sort of let me get this out of the way sit down there and let me switch cameras uh so uh so I'm just going to take um I'll just remove let's say the bottom piece here on this one just to see how that goes so I have a a vice here bolted to a bench that's basically the same size you might uh be able to just do this with some pliers your hands the edge of the table and a book um but I'm gonna try it like so yeah so just wiggle back and forth and that's clean clean off of there uh these ones I'll leave I'm actually gonna remove the the set of these now and I got a tip from Lamor about putting these together which is you can go ahead and snap uh these individual PCBs off of here and then solder them to a strip of header pins that have not yet been uh broken apart so don't break off little sets of five but instead put this in a breadboard set them all on here and that'll get you a nice even row out of these so that's my plan uh but again you're seeing me do it all for the first time with these here um you could probably also do this by soldering the switches after uh break them off and then saw the switches after that would probably work fine too uh and then the individual switches you can just snap those little PCBs off of there like so if you have a project where this is exactly what you want then great because you've got mounting holes on there so depending on your needs uh that may be all you want uh but I'm gonna try to lay I think either two rows of eight or one row of 16 and we'll see how elaborate this get I this gets I've got um Todd Kurtz Pico step sequencer as inspiration and that's a eight step sequencer uh going to 16 could just mean we get more subdivisions or longer patterns or I could go really wild with it and maybe do multiple rows of 16 let's say three of them or four of them which would be uh great for drum lines to to send out different kick drum snare high hat open hat and have it all right in front of you and see it which is which is kind of the dream right if you if you think of the drum machines like the Roland 808 you only got to really see one pattern at a time uh on them but if you look at digital versions of the 808 such as on the iPad they will usually display many tracks at the same time which is ideal but drum machines that do one track per voice get big get expensive too okay so now the idea with these is I'm gonna let me switch cameras again and refocus on a big breadboard here ignore the circuit that's on there this is when I started putting a breakout of a teensy audio DAC board uh so now what you want to do is set a strip of header uh let me get some more you find some more header I won't get to oh wait I do have the multicolored header here yay okay uh not that it matters but but I wonder how many are on here 36 uh so divided by what these have five on them what does that give us uh seven I can't do math what's 35 divided by five I can't believe I'm saying that live on the internet uh calc this is a 36 strip yeah 36 five seven point two uh so seven switches could go on there I want eight so let's add one two three four so let's go right here this is a I don't think I'm gonna jam that well I don't know if I want to jam that all the way in this this is a breadboard that isn't fooling around you know what this might actually be easier on a perma proto I'll just have to suspend it uh oh by the way I should check the chat to see if people are laughing at me about my math or have other questions let's see where's the discord let's just pretend the math thing never happened uh where is here we go live broadcast chat uh hey krypton it's just in time for synth flex big big drum machine all right let's see okay so let's find the spacing between these here and which row is that oh that's the one I broke some off of it's the sacrificial one is that the right one yeah there we go something like that and let's grab this back again if people don't know synth plex is a really incredible uh music electronic music synthesizer conference uh that happens about a what a week and a half from now uh in burbank california uh so let me add the extras is this a dumb way to do this I don't think it is yeah that should be okay so should get us eight across uh what color am I gonna do let's see red I won't do all of these but I'll just get it started first one is tricky there we go so now let's see these really oh my gosh check it out really dense that's not bad I mean I don't I didn't mind the spacing of the original board but this gets you a really uh just to keep the size of the thing down yeah they've got zero space between them but I think I like that that tell me your thoughts uh Devin DJ Devin says being bad at math would be worse if you were wearing a calculator watch whew at least I'm not uh as people have pointed out we lack the that one looks a little funny why are those not exactly aligned so I do some I can fix that actually I can try to reheat those and push that back later we don't have orange which would complete the roll and 808 look so I'm gonna do red yellow uh white and black uh so that's the idea there I won't do all of these but let me let me uh commit to this a little bit and solder solder uh one switch down I'm gonna do this first one because that'll help me span my broken off bit of header sorry I don't really have a good camera for getting super close up for soldering purposes yeah look at that I can wipe the tip now without it going to low voltage mode I think that cable was bad maybe there's a reason you don't see flexi silicone usb-c cables I don't know all right so we'll leave that at that um but you can see now uh that's sort of joined up it's very loosely joined up uh and I've and I've spanned across that little uh extra bit there so that uh is going to be the beginnings of that uh and I'll and I'll take some care to really align things the best I can um the let's set this down over here uh just a reminder of where this is headed I have um Todd's example here this one gives us uh eight steps and I'm sending midi out of it right now to this little guy this little uh wavetable synth the nano box from 1010 music uh and I can power everything off of this battery one thing you sometimes find with usb-based devices is that they can have noisy ground loop problems uh if they're plugged into wall sockets uh transformers and wall sockets so when you can batteries are your best friend for for uh avoiding ground loops so these are actually both running off the same usb battery I think sometimes that causes issues for people I haven't noticed it with this though uh but Todd's pico step sequence here is not a um sound source it is just sending usb midi and he's got it nicely uh uh optically isolated here focus will you focus yeah it's a little bright the screen's a little bright um so this will be the ideas that we'll be able to turn on just some steps and adjust their uh pitches that sort of thing look forward to that uh sending pitches like this great for melodic stuff baseline things um but the drums if I want to do this uh for drums I kind of want to be able to um just have like four channels of of timings or even more uh for different drum tracks that are each sending to their own voices so uh we'll see that's the idea there all right uh so let me get this out of the way and then give me a second to kind of clean up here uh rearrange stuff and then we will uh dive into a little halloween project that I've uh got cooking um so yeah this thing by the way this I just got but once I figure it out more I'll talk more about it uh it's a incredibly cool little tiny baby synthesizer uh that does wavetable synthesis and they have a few others in the line uh that do other other types of synthesis they have three of them now I think they will be at synthplex too uh so if you're thinking of checking out some synth stuff in the LA area you could do worse than going there okay that that and let me throw the extras I've got a little project box here uh that's I am putting oh you know what those are non those are non pcb ones I'll leave those there so I don't mix these into it that'll be the row two I like these little boxes for carting projects around though okay so let me now move us on to uh the halloween project so you may remember last year I did one of these um how to modify a store-bought haunt prop types of projects uh and I got this doorbell right here I don't have my power supply for it or battery pack so I can't demo it uh but this is one of these haunt things you press the button eyeball opens moves around has a couple motors uh and what I did was I took over it's got a little microcontroller in there that's got a blob don chip that has sound files and the animation patterns all the code is on there so I basically took it over and plugged the motors and sound and lights is there a light yeah there's a light uh into a cricket with a feather rp2040 running it so that I could do my own custom stuff custom sound files custom animations and so on so I decided hey wait it's halloween in like a couple weeks right so let's let's uh see if they've got any cool new stuff at the halloween store so I went down to my local halloween store and I found this thing so let me zoom out a little bit uh and demo this and tell you tell you how how it works we'll take a look inside and uh look at maybe doing a some modification sort of takeover stuff to it so looks like a Ouija board or a spirit board I think Ouija board is probably owned by Mattel or someone like that's uh Hasbro so you can't actually say that um but if you look online and I'll show you a link I found it on amazon uh they actually do use the the name Ouija in the in the amazon listing uh if we turn this on uh I'll put it in silent mode it's got two way or three way switch so it's off right now uh turn it on and you get mysterious Ouija action uh so you can see here it's it's lighting up letters as if the spirits are I don't know why the spirits are saying oh the spirits just said LPH I don't know what it's trying to say uh but then you get this uh little I don't know the the name of it spirit letter decoder finder thing that normally you put your your fingers on um moving it is sound activated kind of motion activated because of the sensitive little sound activation so you can kind of tap it or bump something uh and it's pretty cool so if you notice I'm going to switch cameras it's actually uh possible to mount this at an angle or even vertically and it still works which is pretty impressive I'm going to just tap it and get it going again works best flat but as you can guess there's a magnet in there and a linkage mechanism that's doing uh doing the business of moving that thing around and then there's also some code for for sound and lights uh let me turn on sound just so you can hear that so you can imagine the sound gets a little old after a while and I was thinking I was going to want to put a mute button in there or volume but turns out they've they've got a mode that just cuts the cuts the speaker uh but pretty cool so first of all let's take a look at how it works uh someone asked is there a fiber optic cable attached to the puck it's actually a piece of fishing line which I think is there just so this doesn't get lost when it's at the store uh or alternately if you did have it vertically mounted and for some reason it slipped it's just not going to go anywhere um but that's all that is so let me turn this off for a second um so let's let's take a look first of all at uh the magnet situation so I was excited that I happened to have on hand and could find uh this eight what do we call this hd magnet view film so this is product 4047 uh this is this little bit of uh switch the cameras again this little sort of laminated sheet that has some sort of um north south oriented particles in it and you can see if we move this around you can find magnets uh in fact I've got a stack of magnets right here so you can see magnets really clearly uh you can get a little bit of a feel for their power based on how fuzzy or sharp that is and it doesn't care which side so I flipped this over and it'll it'll always expose be kind of neat if this showed north south but it doesn't so we can see this thing only has one uh magnetic ring it's an impressively ringy ring uh uh so either that's a magnet with something like a large disc of a magnet with something in the middle it could be a donut shaped magnet uh I don't think it's individual ones that would probably not look as as uh clear as that let me actually zoom in closer so you can see that so I don't think it would look that seamlessly curved if you look in fact at the back of an iPhone one of the ones that has the charging mount whatever they call mag safe charging mount you can see it looks pretty similar I believe you can see some little steps in this because this is an arrangement of like 24 little rectangular magnets and then there's a long one or series of them down at the bottom here to help orient this so you don't get the circle off axis but this is actually really helpful I was actually trying to fix a kindle uh e-reader that was turning off all on its own and I wanted to try to figure out where the the magnets on the lid of the of the case are so this this really helps you spy on stuff kind of neat to look at the sides of an iPad which has all these magnet mounts for attaching keyboards and such so we have a magnet here uh and then the little puck guy for some reason I was expecting the magnets to be where the feet are but they are not uh they are one two three four of these magnets just kind of in a weird arrangement and then the feet are just a nice hard smooth plastic this top is laminated so you know the idea here is the less friction the better because we're trying to move it around with the magnet I don't know if there's a good material or lubricant to use on something like this if you wanted to use a stronger magnet to hold something heavier so I'd be interested if anyone has any experience with that oh yeah Andy Callaway says it's maybe a repurposed speaker magnet that's a great call yeah for stuff like this I paid $50 because I got it at a Halloween store online it's about $30 it's the price you pay for being able to walk into a niche store and get it but you know their cost on it I'm going to guess is something like five dollars so to keep it that low uh repurposing a magnet like a speaker magnet from an industry that makes a ton of a ton of them already is a good call so let's take a look inside so what I had to do is peel up these corners a little bit the nice thing is that it's already made to look distressed I could have done a better job in some spots I got under the adhesive and peeled it up and some in other parts I kind of delaminated the the little artwork a bit but there were five screws and actually to find those screws I did use a magnet so I just went around oh yep no nothing on the side good oh there's one right there so that's a nice way to if it's a ferrous screw to find find where your magnets are I'm sorry you couldn't see that let's zoom out a bit so backside of it has just a battery compartment and it takes three AAAs this I guess is the opening for the piezo I think they're using piezo to sense either a tap on it or sound so I think that's what that opening is there for and then this is the loud speaker there so opening it up we've got some short ish wires so we can't go too far with it but we'll zoom back in in a second so here's what we have battery pack is here this is our piezo that's being used for sensing I believe this is our speaker I think the you can see a ton of things run to the on off switch and that's because it's a three-way switch so it's got to tell I think speaker on off and we'll take a closer look at what's written on here then there are LEDs so this massive black and white wires that's what four LEDs one two three four LEDs I think so it's probably resistors on board for those current limiting resistors and then we have this pair of red and black wires that are running to a DC motor here if we take a little closer look there you can see when this spins it's just turning this crank there's a gear tooth here and then there's like a crank arm which is moving through this little arced path and that mechanism which I think we should be able to yeah we should be able to unscrew all of this it'll just be like eight nine screws we'll take a look at the mechanism itself I think the top will lift off from it and nothing should fall out hopefully but let's turn it on watch that just that motion so you can see I don't think you can see the arm moving in there so but anyway this is just moving in one direction and then we get this reciprocating motion here based on the design of this linkage and then we have the other arm which is I think essentially a forming a figure eight pattern inside of there and there you can see I can tap it again to to kick it back on so the idea here for doing some modifications one is I would love to see if I can just take over powering the motor using bluetooth or a microcontroller running on a pattern if you want this on your porch let's say or in a window during trick-or-treating or some other halloween thing you might not want to rely on having to clap at the thing or yell at it every 20 seconds so if you maybe supplement the power with wall power and want it to run at certain intervals then adding our own microcontroller would be great even just to take over the motor I don't think I care that much about this the speaker sound sensitivity so you could I'm not I'm not certain that I'm sold on the lights either I don't know if I like those led lights but we could plug those all into a microcontroller as well so let me turn that off and let's dig in to I think what I'll do is I'm going to take this motor off or wait will I have to oh that's not bad okay I can kind of lean that there what I'm going to do actually is take a good picture of things right now before I screw them up which I always recommend for these types of projects just so I have a clear idea of whoops clear idea of how things were wired video can be good for this too sometimes so that you don't block things so sometimes I'll go in here and just do a little video tour sometimes it's easier than thumbing through photos okay and I just want one good close up of the board there great okay so now let's see about looks like all of this base board has screws going into standoffs that are in the lid so I think you can see here these little screws and I've got a little speaking of magnets I'm going to put a little tray with a couple magnets underneath it here to catch my screws sorry you couldn't see the video of me making the video the photos so these are a little fairer but this one is fairly unique it actually I've seen one other prop that uses a similar method and I will talk about that one in a minute after I try out a little trick with this one actually do I want to you know what I'm going to put this back together enough uh to show you this because we know it's working right now and it might not be once I start poking around too far in there so hold on bear with me um that's probably enough screws to hold it and let me put one more over here yeah DJ Devon says an entire premise on how my car youtube channel started was recording video of me taking stuff apart I'd never seen before I'm putting it back together yeah video and photos are so helpful for uh rather than I don't know sometimes you don't want to take the time to put masking tape and numbers on things uh so here it should still be working at this point yes um let me go to this mode so here is another idea I had for this which is okay the Ouija thing is is cool and it's it's appropriate for this um but you could also probably put different overlays on it and use different objects so um I thought what about one of these magnet feet these are little M3 screw magnet feet that come with our RGB matrix displays um and so long as this kind of grabs onto the magnet anywhere uh it's got a smooth surface it's metal um this should move around pretty well as you can see there and it's definitely happy to stick uh even vertically but in this orientation uh we can stick stuff on there so I'm going to take a feather this is actually from my uh goose costume that I used for something a couple years ago so now we have this kind of cool mysterious feather which I think the I don't know if it's the wind yeah I think the the air conditioning is blowing it I wasn't doing that before but we get this really neat uh effect that is like a mysterious handwriting uh and originally I was looking at a prop that was this it was a spell book uh it had a quill pen with a magnet on it same idea uh except the mechanism just turned in a circle it was just the the magnet on a uh a little turntable inside was just spinning a circle so the quill was just endlessly going in a circle this motion actually works uh works really well and the fact that sometimes the uh quill rotates sometimes it doesn't really is it is a great effect that that one I saw I think it was constantly rotating so um sky's the limit on cool things that you could attach to this I think obviously it needs to be pretty lightweight feather is ideal um but you could also drag stuff along if you took uh a little little magnet on its side there you know you could probably pull a little worm on a string or something but this is great this gives you a really nice indication of that path it follows it really well um and probably partly that's aided by the fact that this is a magnet on its side so we have the north south and it's it's you know repelling the back end of that I think and attracting the front end of it so there's just some options there you could build this sort of thing from scratch probably but the this linkage in here is just so well engineered uh let's have a look at it you know I think it might be the sort of thing you could build out of some popsicle sticks or a laser cut or 3d print let's see you could drag a snake that's right Johnny that'd be very cool a little tiny snake would be amazing I love that okay that's not too bad uh so let's get these screws out of here I'm hoping since I'm doing this upside down it doesn't all fall apart I'm probably trying to flip this uh and remove the top since things are attached to uh this groove here in the gear okay and we have just this corner one mysteriously everyone else is I don't know why they chose to add one more standoff there but they did uh and I'm just going to get a little look at it on the side here yeah it looks like it'll all come off and I'm going to flip it before I do that so this will be like so I'll hold that it's not going to go in very well tada so there we have it uh okay yeah so simple there's one joint uh and I'm sure you could go online or if there's any mechanical engineers in the audience and say what what particular linkage name this is that does does this kind of motion but it is I think a figure eight uh that this trace is you know maybe it's not yeah I guess the it's almost like uh yeah I guess it is kind of a figure eight uh but really interesting and and I'm sure this would be a fun one to model uh on a computer and just try different lengths of of the the various arms on the linkage and see what what kind of shapes you get uh so there you there you have it the uh it does look like a circular magnet here in this arm we can look back with our little viewer whoops we're nice and close to it yes that's definitely not made of individual elements uh there's a decent amount of grease on here to try to keep things uh running smoothly which is which is good and a good idea uh and that would be the I think the trick of doing a DIY version of this thing is you've just got to try to keep the resistance of friction low oh some nice uh in the chat mentioned that Disney research did a lot of experimenting with kinematic linkages and posted a a link to it I worked at Disney research and I worked with that group uh that that worked on all of the amazing linkage stuff out of Zurich out of the Zurich lab that we had that's a blast from the past but yeah amazing stuff uh that that uh Disney research did with with linkages and modeling uh modeling the linkages necessary to get emotion so you could feed into this is one example for animation you could feed into a motion path that you wanted something to take and it would solve uh what real mechanical linkages in real life could could be used to generate that motion uh okay so this I think is actually pretty stable it's not really going anywhere if I flip this upside down again um you know it doesn't want to be tilted that way forever um but now we know now we know what it looks like in there um you could probably add other magnets to this if you wanted to have a couple of things moving uh and and look at the the different paths that you get um you know something something here would just be a circle right just the screw there if you put a magnet on that you just get a circle running all the time which is probably more like that other quill one this elbow here just moves in a arc back and forth this smiley arc back and forth uh and then different points on this would describe different uh shapes of that figure eight I think so uh let's take this um DJ Devon says you're making me want to go from synths to robots I don't think any good will come from this I think lots of good will come from this DJ Devon all right so let's try to get this back on actually you know what this is a little easier to deal with while this is off I think uh and what I want to do is see if I can take over that motor using an a motor feather wing and a nrf 52 840 feather so last time I did this type of project I used the cricket which was great uh I don't think I want to do as much and this is a bit simpler uh this idea behind this is I've got a feather nrf 52 840 blue tooth right there uh I have it on a feather tripler just because it was convenient uh this would work on a doubler or stacked probably but this keeps the height low so it could fit inside of this box uh I have battery power running I'm actually using four uh double a's here but I want to measure voltage I think this was getting about 4.5 volts or 4.2 volts or something like that when I when I checked that motor uh so I so I probably want to match close to that just so I don't burn out that motor um but this is power going to the motor shield motor feather wing rather uh and then the nrf 52 840 can tell it what to do on up to four motors uh these are all h bridge so these can go forward and backward which is kind of interesting uh the the motor in the in the haunt prop only goes in one direction the clever reciprocal uh design means that it doesn't need to spin the motor backwards just one direction is fine uh but this would give me the option to run it oh good I just popped that out to run it from either just code on the microcontroller uh or over bluetooth or other types of sensors so let me screw that battery pack it's a pretty thin wire so it popped out easily I should crimp those little feral's on the end oh it does not want to grab you there we go I think it got off to the side uh so this is powered up I'm just going to reset my feather wing here um you could power this from a second battery pack it's good to keep the logic battery and the and the power battery separate um and what I have just for testing purposes is one of our little DC motors in here uh so I'm going to grab my phone and open up the Adafruit blue fruit app uh so this is the blue fruit app and you'll see oh I should follow my own advice and give this thing a good name right now it's just showing up as a circuit pi y e 7 a 9 uh but that's this this one right here uh I'll hit connect and then the code I have running on here is uh let's me do three things so I'm using this control pad right here and I can either spin the motor in one direction I can stop it I can spin it in the other direction and I'm running at its top speed right now uh so one of the interesting things is that you can probably find a range um a lot of times DC motors will go happily down to about half speed half voltage and then up to full uh we could probably alter that by by giving it more or less uh juice so higher voltage battery pack uh would allow us to have a higher top speed and then um vary things more but that's the the sort of basic idea of what to swap into here is again my own microcontroller that I have full control over I can code it code it circuit python code it in arduino uh and ignore whatever little blob of epoxy chip is doing in there uh because I can't change that thing uh so I think you know what we've run probably out of time for me to to do that transplant but I will uh work on that and probably show you some updates next week maybe we'll have the the full thing uh and I'll take some pictures along the way and do a guide uh because I think this is a neat one and it will really apply to most uh types of haunt project that use a uh a motor in them so if it's a a battery powered DC motor usually I've never seen a stepper or servo in any of these kinds of projects uh it's pretty straightforward to take it over using your own little motor driver uh microcontroller and now we get to add things like bluetooth to them which is a lot of fun um so yeah I'll leave that I didn't even pull any wires out of it so I'm pretty confident I didn't break it yet um and hop back over here so thanks uh for coming to the chat uh Stephen Franklin mentioned earlier when I showed this image that he liked my bluetooth uh yeah that was kind of obvious what that product was going to be wasn't it um and uh Dave Odessa can we get in touch with Elvis with it that's I haven't tried yet so I can't answer that uh and by the way uh if you look around and I mentioned I would I would show um first of all the product as I found it online uh here it is on amazon there are they just say in stock so I don't think there's a huge um worry about running running out of them 31 dollars it's much less than I paid I paid 50 uh so that name didn't yield much one holiday lane animated haunted Ouija board that's pretty much seems like only amazon is calling it that uh if you look up motorized Ouija board uh it's kind of hard to find this thing it shows up mostly in the shopping results but what you will find is uh people who have built their own uh in fact here's one that looks like it uses a similar uh type of linkage that's that looks like a cool one to check out actually let's let's hope this video is safe I didn't check it out before uh yeah look at that that is a similar I don't know if that'll do the figure eight because it's can't go all the way yeah that's going to give us an arc at least let's see is he got yeah so that's cool that's uh that's one way another thing I've seen some people do oh look at this one there we go mechanical oh it's on Pinterest uh oh uh yeah that's that's cool but I think that figure eight pattern is pretty excellent uh so what this person did was a partition x y uh mechanism similar to a 3d printer or cad he uses 80 20 aluminum and arduino I didn't see the finished result but but it's basically build your 3d printer two axes of your 3d printer and uh you've got something you can control to go to any letter which is great so his allows you to move the thing to exact positions which is fantastic not going to happen on a 30 to $50 plastic toy but really cool uh aspirational project for that uh all right well I think that's going to do it unless anyone has any other parting thoughts or questions things they wanted me to address before we get out of here um I mentioned I think that I am just about finished with the learn guide for the split ortho keyboard so that should be out soon uh and then I'll be jumping on this uh so that hopefully some people who want to do a little modification have time before uh halloween you can use it for anytime you have a seance or a spooky situation seed rovers at a hall effect magnet sensor could help to synchronize movement too oh yeah you could start getting feedback uh to where the thing is so if you're if you're controlling it and want it to uh very finely tune the speed then you you want to know when it when it gets to a certain spot which is kind of cool uh any other things yes some good links in the chat for linkage stuff there was both that disney research one as well as Todd listed a youtube channel for linkages all right I think that is it then thanks everyone for stopping by it was great to hang out with you and thanks for giving me an excuse to pull apart a a fun toy and take a look at it and uh now we'll get to work on modifying it thank you everyone for uh coming today to john park's workshop for a different industries I am john park and I will see you next week bye bye