 And hello, Rudy, Lady Aida, what's up? What's this? Hey, what's up with this? This is time for show and tell. What is it that to begin? It's me, Lady Aida, Mr. Lady Aida, and we're gonna check in with people from the Maker and Hacker 3D printing and more community to see what they're up to. Everyone is welcome. We are on Discord and the podcast on StreamYard, but the link is in Discord to join in. So, yeah. And just a reminder, Asken Engineer is usually every week for over a decade on Wednesdays at 8 p.m. That's where you can ask questions in the Discord chat. If you need detailed technical support, make sure you go to the Aida Group forums. That's 24 seven. And then every week, usually, we have show and tell if we don't let you know, but you can pretty much assume 7.30 p.m. Eastern time and you can show and share just about anything. And you can tune in to what our team's doing speaking of, Scott, what you're working on this week. Hello, I'm in a new space, which is exciting and a little echo-y, but we haven't moved the carpet or the couch in, so that should help with the echo in the long term. But I got a little excited, deep-dive-y distracted on boxes. So these are some box samples that I ordered. And the reason I did it is because I was thinking about ways of storing a bunch of flat stuff, particularly dev kits, so that you can open a box and see all the different dev kits here. So let me just take my headphones off. I won't be able to hear you, but I'll show you. This is an IKEA bookshelf. This is the older version, but there's a new version that has the same dimensions supposedly. So I'll just show you how I'm picturing it. A box? Oh, yeah. What was that? Okay. So that's kind of the idea. You just swung out whatever boxes you need. Right. So I don't have many of them labeled yet, but I did get myself a labeler at Goodwill. And yeah, Jim has the pizza logo. They definitely remind me of pizza boxes. But they're custom-sized boxes here. You can fit 10 in a single cube, and they're under $2 apiece. So it's a great way to get a lot of kind of surface area that you can just lay stuff out, lay it out on. And I figured I got some different examples. For different cardboard thicknesses and strengths. So they do free samples as well, so they labeled it. So this is like a 23B corrigate, apparently. So it's thicker, but it's weaker. So the number is like the strength of the paper that's involved. And then I tweaked the dimensions a little bit to see what would fit there, but I went conservative and I bought 20 of the one that I knew would fit. And it actually works pretty well. Though next eighth inch up does fit, but it's a little tight. So I think I'm gonna stick with a slightly looser version just to always be on the safe side. I love this idea for storage because it's true. It's like for a lot of boards, you don't want them to crush each other they're flat and thin. So this is a good solution. Yeah, let me. The anti-static in there. Yeah, so I have a feather wing one down here where I took like the black anti-static foam and just threw it in there. But because it's cardboard, you could totally just like, Elmer's glue it down on there and all sorts of stuff. So you could sharpie the side or whatever. And then when you're done with it, it's recyclable, which is cool too. So I'll write up, what is it, a playground? Not a learn guide, but a. Yeah, like a notes. Notes thing. So I'll be able to share the deets with folks. A learn, a learn note. I don't remember that. Learn light. Learn light. I don't know where it is. You should use your names a bunch of times. So like in my head, I'm like, which one did we pick again? Yeah, totally. But basically folks, I'll fill out all the details, give dimensions and stuff. The site I ordered from has a minimum of $20. And so they're $2 a box, which is really awesome. Which is actually a pretty good deal. Like that's how much a cardboard box costs in general. Right, yeah. Yeah, and if you order 50 or more than they start giving you a discount too. I only ordered just over, I did 20 of the safe size and then the samples on top of that. I do like the one that I grabbed that has the pin headers is like a double version. It's so it's like two inches high and not just an inch, which is kind of nice. So you can, I think I'm gonna do this one just a little taller. So it takes like the slots of two of the shortest ones. Okay, all right. Thanks for all the news in cardboard. All the news cardboard. All right, next up is Jephler. Hi, good evening. So yeah, a couple of months ago, I talked about my Xerox 820 computer, which is over here out of frame. It's got a monitor and a keyboard and some disk drives. But at the same estate sale, I got two more, three more of the motherboards. And I'm working on getting them to the point where they can do something useful, but without having any of the peripherals. So it's got serial ports on the back, which you could type to it like if you had a VT terminal, but the system is not designed to do that. So these are the two, two kilobyte ROMs that are the built-in code of the thing. And you can get modern programmable double eProm chips, which you can reprogram with custom code. And I think I talked about this before because I brought this little breadboard monstrosity, ton of wires, but you drop your chip in and put the lever down and run a little Python program. And it's kind of awful because you're always navigating around the wires. And I had been wanting to do a PCB design for a while. And I realized this is so simple. How could you get it wrong? And ordered this guy from JLC, started on a RP2040 and the ZIF socket. These are cool. These are for if you are taking the chip in and out a lot and you don't have to pull and there's less risk of damaging the pins. You just put it in and flop it down. And so now if I plug this in, I could program the chip with my updated version of the firmware. And so I hope that someday soon I will be able to actually do something useful on one of those bare boards. And the other thing that I have related to that is it's got a weird power connector. And although these are like 30 years old, you can still actually get them and crimp the pins on yourself. And so what I'm doing is I've got an ATX extension cable that I took off the 12 volts, the minus 12 volts and the five volts plugged them into the correct spot. So that will sort out the power for this computer. And yeah, so it's kind of in the middle and it's not doing anything yet, but that is kind of the stuff that I need in order to continue with that little project. Okay, I love that you're picking up new skills. Yeah, if anybody wants to know how electrically erasable e-proms work, ask somebody else, but I do know a little bit about it now. Yeah, okay. You get the start. I think so. You got it in the first half. Okay. All right. Next up is... Good night. Good night. Next up is Noe. Noe, and then before Noe gets started, I wanted to say congratulations Noe for 10 years of doing 3D Hangouts today. Yay. 10 year anniversary. The longest running 3D printing show in the known universe. That's right. I think so, yeah, it definitely could be. And we checked. How do you check? We asked the watcher. We checked. Thanks for showing something new and unique every single, like I know lots of people, they email us and they say, I learned all the things I learned about 3D printing and designing and making things from Noe and Pedro. Thanks for doing that. You're making makers. Yeah. Awesome. My pleasure. It's been a great 10 years. Here's to 10 more. Yeah. So we started working on a new project. This is a 3D printed synth guitar. It's using circuit python synth IO and Liz Clark put together the demo code for it. It's got a couple of Neo keys. These are the one by four Neo keys that are running off the STEMI QT port. We got a Neo pixel strip. We got a little strum here. So folks can strum it. And then it's running the prop maker feather RP2040 because it has that really nice ITOS digital audio out. We got a speaker in the front here and the headstock. And we have a couple of rotary encoders that are also STEMI QT. So a lot of it's STEMI QT and it was a lot of fun to put together. We play a little something. So we got the keys going. Polyphonic so you can play multiple notes. And then we're going to use the rotary encoder to kind of change up some of the effects. So that's kind of like a tremelo. We can turn it up. Make it also turn up the volume if it's too low. Cool. We're still prototyping it. We're going to add some more features. We have a third one here. Third rotary encoder to do the melody changes. So we want to change different notes here because we only have eight of these keys. But it's pretty fun. We think it's a good kind of different take on like a synthesizer, traditional synthesizer because it's got the format of a guitar. Yeah, it's like a guitar. Yeah, it's like a guitar, exactly. We're using the alkaline batteries in the back here. So folks will be able to swap those out. What else? A lot of features. The speaker is in the head of the... Yeah, in the head of the guitar. We thought it would be a good spot for it instead of putting out like gears. It's like, oh yeah, obviously like that. Yeah, right, yeah. You kind of get like this Doppler effect when you do that. It does have the accelerometer. So we're probably going to do like a pitch bend or something else where you can do that. Yeah. You're like, yeah, you bend back or you're like, yeah, you're doing it. It's fun. Yeah, so that'll be a really nice one. And it's already built into the prop maker feather so it's kind of easy to kind of add it on there. Yeah. And then we'll get the strum working as well. So you'll be able to kind of strum it like a real guitar because this is sort of inspired by the guitar hero controllers. Yeah. Yeah. And then we have some... It's like more than four keys. You can actually like do stuff. Yeah, totally. All right. But is that guitar weighted? Is it weighted? Is it weighted? So like if you roll it, will it... The reason why I'm making that fun joke is we have some great photos in our 3D printing section this week of the clear talking die that you all work on together. And for whatever reason, usually it's like, you know, Twitter, no, no, it's actually like, but what about, are they weighted? Are they competition ready? It's like, well, you rarely wouldn't go into a competition with a giant 3D printed talking dice. However, you can build it, learn from it, do some cool things. Just like that's not a guitar that you would probably want to go on tour with. But maybe you would, maybe you're in the type of band that would. It's about the process and the journey and learning. And then we have a speed up, a creepy spider speed up. We're going to show that in the 3D printing section this week. Okay. So, all right. Thank you so much. Thank you. All right. And the guitar. Yeah. We're going to go to SeaGriver and then retired wizard. Hello. Hey. I just want to say, you're a great person and I really like all the stuff you do and you're always really helpful to other makers. So I just want to say thanks for you. Well, you know, we're all in this together. You know? I think so. I try. We try. Oh yeah. I thought that was the agreement. Yeah. You encourage a lot of makers and you help them out and it's notice. Thank you. Well, I appreciate hearing that. You know, I get so much back from everybody else too. So. Yeah. Get what you give. Yeah. Yeah. All right. What you got? Speaking of, what you giving us? You know, we have a problem. Another problem is that we have a wind chime collection out on our patio. That's a great problem. Well, the problem is we live in an area where wind chimes get a lot of abuse. And so I'm constantly going out there and repairing the wind chimes and all that kind of stuff. And I just, you know, we use the wind chimes though because we have so much wind here that we need to know when trash cans and trampolines are going to come over the fence into our yard. Yeah. Ah, warring system. Wind chimes are really important. We hear them at night and, you know, that we know when the wind storm is going to, it's going to pick up. The problem that we have is back here in my office, I can't hear the wind chimes because I'm getting older too. And that's maybe that's part of the time. Anyway, so I decided I'd use SynthIO and come up with some wind chimes. And here it is running on a Feather S2. And so that's again, Simon. And how does it know that there's wind outside? Well, it knows what the wind speed is because it goes out to openweather.org. Ah. We don't have the word. Gets the wind speed, uses the SynthIO to synthesize the bells or the chimes in this case. And there's a wind speed algorithm there that simulates the randomness that we experience from our wind chimes. And so part of this was, I had to spend time on the patio, had to study the effects of the wind, the mechanical effects on the wind chimes. So there's physics involved, there's electronics involved, there's circuit pipeline involved, and you know. No project. And I love it, the chimes, I hear them. And they're like, it's kind of, it's not random. Like, there's a little, you've got the tones and they make it nice. Well, you know, they're periodic. Chimes are periodic. They're periodic. And so if you look at the way wind chime is built, it's usually circular, and the striker goes in a circle, or a portion of a circle. So you can predict that. This reminds me of the problem, solution, fun puzzle that we get to solve. There's a lot of things that humans are used to, but things have become digital or electronic, but we still need that type of feedback. From what I understand, some electric cars have engine sound, so they can tell what gear, you know, there's certain things that we still need to know the click of a camera. My phone doesn't. Audio feedback is so useful. Yeah, like why does my, you know, my camera makes a sound, and younger people will not even ever have a camera that had made that sound, but we seem to need this type of thing. So I think this is, it's a very cool example. I don't think I've ever seen someone do electric, IoT connected wind chimes. Yeah, it's neat. Well, somebody had to do it the first time. Yeah, good work. All right, excellent. If folks want to find out more about this, besides trying to find where you are, and just getting busy every time, what's the best way? Well, I'm gonna post in Discord, I'll post the links to the repo, and to a short video that shows a demo of it. Okay, you have my email, drop me an email, and I'll have the end of the blog post, if you have it on place, or you can send us stuff and we'll put it up on the blog. I think this is neat, probably other things too, that you can IoT connect and have the human interface for something that you're kind of used to being analog. There's probably something, this might get some other things started. All right, great project. Big shout out to the folks that did, SynthIO, Jeff, for just a fantastic job on it, and Todd Bot, and Kavni, and everybody who had worked on that, they just did a great job with it. This is neat, because when you're working on something, SynthIO, you're probably not writing it thinking, oh, this is gonna be for IoT connected with ties, and that's the cool part about it. It's like you don't get to, that's the neat thing is when you publish open source, and you do this stuff, you don't know what's gonna, that's the fun part. It's so soothing. Yeah, this is great. I need one of those. Yeah, cool. All right. Okay. Very cool. All right, retired wizard, first out. Hey, hopefully you guys can all hear me. Great. First, I wanna start off and just say, really appreciate all you guys do. Yeah, it's really been great getting into all this stuff again. But hey, let me switch over to my overhead. I'm basically gonna be taking advantage of a lot of Jepler's work on, he's been doing all this stuff with the dot clock stuff. He's doing Jepler, especially against Jepler. Yay! Also Kmatch, Kmatch last year came out with these hack tablets. And so now, because we posted up how to get some of the stuff going. So this is great. Thanks for coming by, Shona. Yeah, so now that we've got the dot clock DR and work, I've set up the hack tablet here to take advantage of it. And I've got a little, my PIDOS program running on here. And I've got it set up so that if you tap on the screen, it comes up with a virtual keyboard. And then you can just go ahead and type in a command. Oh, what? And then type enter. Wow! Alternative universe, like this is cool. Oh my God, this is so cool. Yeah, so, you know, you can take advantage of the screen too. I can type in something like turtle. And this will use the display IO turtle library and go ahead and bring that up. Oh man. High tablet, it's happening. So this is connected just using a power brick. So it's not connected to anything else. How stable the display image is, because, you know, it can be flickery. But it looks really good. You figure whatever magic numbers you picked. I'm just using Jebler's numbers. But the tearing that he talks about happens if you do a IO to the SD card. So for instance, if I copy a file here, I'll just... It's just so hard to do it. You're using CircuitPython to do CircuitPython on CircuitPython. Let's see, copy, I don't know, code. I love that the back key works too. Yeah. Yeah, normally you're holding it and it's a lot easier to type, but let's see if I get a little bit of tearing with this. Okay. No, the file was too small, but if you do any IO, the screen flickers a little bit. But it recovers nicely. It kind of has a cool effect. I kind of like it. But I can understand that it might bother some people. We were doing some stuff on the very unusual shape displays, compared to very little displays, I guess. And there were some neat glitchy things when we were experimenting. And I'm like, that's a neat effect. I kind of want to keep that. This is cool so you can make a portable word processor. Like there's a lot of things you can do with this now. Yeah, this is neat. Good work. I love the on-screen keyboard. Where is that, is it a library? Or how did you implement the keyboard? Well, and I did this real quick. I just went out to the internet and found, we looked around for some, I think it's a bitmap. So yeah, I just did some bitmaps and I got lucky fairly quickly, found one that didn't need any, you know, much scaling. The library is giving it a scale option. So I just scaled it to the right side, centered it. And then I wrote a little routine that gave back the X, Y position when I touched it. And then I just roughed in where all the keys were. I mean, I didn't measure anything. If I was going to do, you know, at some point it'd be nice to actually come out with the dimensions of where each key is. And so that the key presses are a little bit more accurate. This is great. This is neat. We wanted to have people start off at something very basic. Like, oh, I made, you know, a little keypad, you know, a mechanical keypad. And then work up to like, I made a bigger keyboard and then I made like a mouse and then I made like a clock. And then I made like an IoT display and then eventually make your own computer all with Python. So it's like, you're on your way. Well, thank you so much for showing us off this week. If you post up anywhere you can email me ptnatorford.com and get the word out. But if you put it anywhere in Tagus, we'll point people to it. Okay, thanks. Thank you so much. Hey, Jebler, can I go to you for comment since this was mostly every, a lot of your code? Yeah. I'm just in awe. I love, I mean, I do the basics and then people take it so much further than I imagined. I just went and found a picture of a keyboard and 30 seconds later, I had an on-screen keyboard. It's amazing what you can do. You know, the one time stuff too. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah. Now I'm like, oh, it would be so cool if there was a built-in keyboard in Circuit Python for these bigger displays. That'd be cool. But it's also like, there's a lot of smarts that go into like the phone keyboards that you don't realize if they do. They do kind of know what you're intending to do. What a cool, you know, if you're a person who's starting their journey into computer science or building displays for anything or just like learning any of this stuff, being able to cobble together and get something going very fast with a keyboard and have it like that. What was that? What was that? A tablet? The OQO I had. No, the one that was like, it was like, not in gadget, it was like. The Crunchpad? Crunchpad. Yeah, I don't think that was shipped. I don't remember. They couldn't build a Crunchpad. You can make... That's a deep cut. If you remember the Crunchpad. But this is something that's really advanced. I think it'd be neat for especially technology classes, make your own computer, make your own tablet, make your own phone. And this can get you there. Yeah, I remember being a young programmer and I approached everything with, I can do this. And somewhere along the line of working as a professional programmer for many years, I got jaded and everything started taking a long time and needing endless discussion and coming back into this world of Adafruit for a few years where it's like, let's go out and do this. And sometimes it works out and there's great fruit like this. And you can get stuff done and do amazing things. And I feel like a superhero again in a way that I didn't in more traditional programming role. I like the unexpected things like the, okay, I'm just gonna make a wind chime that's connected online. And it's gonna like, okay, like, that's just... Yeah, like it's interesting. That's a use that I didn't think of. I didn't think of that use at all. Like, oh, it's Wi-Fi and then you synthesize a wind chime based on the... And it's like musical, it's art. It's like, it has all those, it has all you can like have a little 3D enclosure. Like that's, that hits all the tastes perfect. It's a perfect vibe. All right, well, thank you so much, Jeff. I just wanted to break for comment. Y'all have a good show. I'll be watching. Your new show that we have. Okay, all right, everybody. That's our show Intel for the week this week. We thought it was gonna be a pretty, pretty quiet chill show Intel, but it was jam-packed with some amazing projects. Oh, there was some good stuff. That wind chime and the on-screen keyboard, it was so good. And why that we got to see them. All right, thank you so much, everyone who came by. Thanks for making this the best happen hour ever week. Every single week we'll see everybody next week in some way, shape, or form. And we'll see you on Ask an Engineer five minutes from our mic.