 Okay, did a preview on the socials today these are the boards that we showed off and you know the names are on some of them so you can see them Scorpio is the name of the board we have a cute little RGB glowy scorpion and then we also have a feather floppy wing and this is our rabbit friend that has floppies not a rabbit named floppy rose kid and then this is the official logo of the of the of the floppy wing but what Lady Aida are these boards what do they do all right well starting with the Scorpios is an RP2040 board and it actually has it does dual duty there's two things that you might want to do with this one it's you know your standard feather you know with USB-C and this is a prototype it's not going to be green in the end but you know prototypes always come out not black necessarily because it takes a longer and more expensive to get black prototypes and at the edge where normally would have like an SD card slot or something we have eight IO pins that are going through a level shifter and this level shifter takes the USB input and gives you you know five volts to the level shifter so it shifts eight of the GPIO and they're in consecutive order to the output and the design the idea here is you could use the neopixel 8 library or any other time you want to like bang out eight bits at a time in parallel and especially if you want to have them level shifted up to eight volts good for neopixels but there's probably many other use cases as well and there's also a little steamy QT port up here if you want to connect sensors and then the rest of these IO pins you can just use as a plain feather so it's also a you know an everyday feather and on the back the direction and the voltage I didn't label them but one is you can change the voltage output from five volts to three volts and the other one is you can change the direction and the reason you might want to do that is you can also use this not just as eight pin output but eight pin input so if you want to use this as a logic sampler you can do that as well using PIO because again these are going to be these are eight pins that are in consecutive order so you can use PIO to read eight bits in a row so you know for you know people do a logic analyzer project or if you're doing data capture you know you can use this and then it has a buffer so even if you have five volt signal in it would level shift it down to three volts for you Scorpio okay yeah all right next up you want to show next up I can show the floppy feather wings I finally did that revision hop on by so we've actually done a bunch of work to make a floppy interfaces for Arduino and circuit Python I just got super distracted with a lot of part shortage stuff so getting back to this so this is what's really neat is a two by 17 headers exactly one feather wing wide so this is for your standard floppy IDC connector I also give you five volts from the USB if you happen to yeah you guys recommended to power a floppy drive from USB actually needs more power than a USB provides but you know you might be able to do with some low-power floppy disks and then on the bottom we have the level shifters because floppy disks are five volts input output and so this would do the level shifting from the three-volt floppy from the three-volt floppy two level shifters that will take the three volts from the floppy convert to five volts and back and there's also a little five volts little mini boost converter that will let you take the three-volt logic level to make sure you have a really good clean five volt logic and then the way enable pin with the way protect pin we have a switch on it so if you are doing floppy archiving you want to make sure you absolutely never even accidentally right to the floppy drive you can simply short the right enable pin high permanently or low whichever one I can't remember off top my head by setting the no right versus the right okay direction so that'll that'll be good for floppy reading and archiving so we have the code for this at Arduino in circuit Python already this is just yeah and you're probably wondering like why in the world would you want to do anything with floppy isn't that old tech well one of our friends and you know had the original Prince floppy which is a piece of history this is when Prince stage name formerly ours knows Prince is a symbol here's a article on hackaday but you could see this we had to figure out a way to get this off and we had an original power book but that's not going to last forever either and so there's a lot of things that we want to archive and put somewhere in this is our history of computing for the last you know it'll soon be like 20 30 years so we wanted to have something for people to be able to read and write floppy disk from all types of computing and hopefully put it in a more permanent place or more people can share and access it okay and then last up lady what's your last okay so last up I've got we had all these people making cute little boards with five by five new pixels and I thought you know you I'd make a little add-on that you can just kind of attach the back of your QT pie board and you know this I'm gonna try to do this just by like press and holding it yeah yeah yeah so yeah you can you can sort out directly yeah and then yeah it doesn't like yeah they go so if I if I tilt it so you get you know five by five new pixels you can have a little messages or animations displaying and then you can use it with you know your ESP 32 C2 or S2 or S3 or this QT pie or an RP 2040 or whatever seed shall board it's a little add-on you just plug up the back and now you can make a little glowy rainbowy friend okay and that is this week's top secret lots this week okay