 Welcome to the show, it's me, John Park. It's time for John Park's workshop here on Adafruit Industries Global Transmission Networks and Broadcasting System. And I want to say thanks for joining us over in the chats. I see we've got some people over in our YouTube chat. Hello, hello, as well as the, what's this thing called, Discord. If you want to join the Discord chat, and that's the place to be, especially if you're somewhere over on, I don't know, Twitch or Facebook or somewhere like that where there does not seem to be as much chat going on. There are probably people watching there, but the chat is probably happening here the most on our Discord. You can head on over to Adafruit.it slash Discord and just look for the live broadcast chat channel. And that's where these good people are. Hello. So, let's see, what else is happening here today? We've got a coupon code for you for today, if you want to save a little money on some stuff from the Adafruit store. I've also got a product pick of the week recap to show you. I've got a brand spanking new Circuit Python Parsec to share. A little project update on the next iteration of cat meowsic synthesizer MIDI keyboard action. This was the first one. Who knows how deep this series will go, but this was the first one and the guide is out for that one now. So, you can go check out the guide on adding your own line out. I've got two of them on here, I got ambitious, I actually wanted some photos of using the 3.5 millimeter stereo out, so I added that, but there was my original quarter inch jack. So the guide is out if you want to go and do that. By the way, a thought I had could be kind of a fun mod. I don't think I'll do this one, but a fun mod on these would be get yourself a $30 guitar pedal. One of these Donner brand or Amazon branded, you know, Amazon makes guitar pedals. They're clones of a few common pedals. I think they have an overdrive and a fuzz and a distortion. They probably get a little more expensive as you get into reverb and things, but fuzz pedals are really cheap to make, so integrate one end of this. That might be kind of fun. They just come in, they're those little slim kind of pedals. It might be fun to try to just add fuzz right to the thing and add your buttons and knobs right there in an LED. Integrated effects. Why not? I'm a cat piano. But I'm done with that one for now, but we'll be looking at the MIDI, a little update on the MIDI meowsic that I'm adding the accelerometer to the ice cream cone. Spoiler alert. I got the ice cream cone open. It was not easy. You probably won't want to do it, but we'll look at it anyway. And I'll also give you a little intro and preview to an upcoming project, which is going to be a hexagonal beehive keypad kind of thing using low-profile kale chalk switches. So I've got some stuff to show you on that. And hopefully some PCBs coming in on Monday to start playing around with it. So we'll talk about that. Let's get into it. First of all, this is the Adafruit store. Just go to Afruit.com. It's the first page. It'll come up. You can head on over there and look for fun, interesting stuff to get. And if you want to get yourself a nice discount, then just type in this coupon code on the way out. It is ToastyToes. Toasty-toes. And that will get you 10% off. That's good until midnight tonight, East Coast time. And that is my coupon code because I have a nice heated floor mat to put on my concrete, poured concrete floor here that keeps my toes warm. Even here in sunny California. It was raining earlier today. It's sunny again. The slab is so cold. Have I told you about this? I got, like, Wayne's Rubber heated floor mats. And it's about a 20 or a 30-degree difference. I checked with, like, a little no-contact thermometer. It just warms it up just in that one little spot. And no matter what HVAC you've got going, you're never going to warm up these concrete garage floors. So my toes were always cold. Now they are less cold. So Toasty-toes is the coupon code that will save you 10% today in the store. Let's see. What else have we got going on? The product pick of the week show. I do that one on Tuesdays. And I like to take a product, often a new product, in the store and give you a nice half-off, usually, half-off discount while I do a little 15-minute song and dance on it and show you how it works. Do a little demo. This week's product pick was a really cool one. And boy, this one sold out quick. This was this Reverse TFT Feather, the ESP32 S2. Let me give you a little recap. It is the ESP32 S2 Reverse TFT Feather. This is the 240 MHz Tensilica processor on here. We've got 4 megs of flash. We've got 2 megs of PS RAM. This can do Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth, but this can do Wi-Fi, 2.4GHz Wi-Fi. It has the native USB. It has a USB-C on it, which I love. One of the nicest features of it is this panel mount option that you've got. And you can see there's the 4 little mounting holes, so I've mounted it into a little case that I made. I cut this out of acrylic on a laser cutter, and it gives me a kind of a neat little way to very quickly add an ESP32 S2 Feather to your ORAC project and mount it all in one. Here you can see it's just sort of a temporary solution here and the jacks aren't connected up to anything. It's sort of a proof of concept. It is the ESP32 S2 Reverse TFT Feather. It just won't stop. By the way, I do want to say apologies for complaining about cold toes here in California because I know there are some areas in the country and the world that are slightly colder than Los Angeles right now, so my apologies to anyone. Greg Billings says you're in Michigan, huh? I bet you need to keep your toes warm in Michigan. Yeesh. I hope you're all doing okay with your ice storms and whatnot. Let's see what else. How about let's dive into Circuit Python Parsec. All right. Let's get set up here. I'm just going to get my coding window up. All right. For today's Circuit Python Parsec, I wanted to talk about unpacking tuples. First of all, what's a tuple? A tuple is essentially a kind of list in Circuit Python and it is a list that can, it's a variable essentially that can contain multiple entries in it. It's not the kind you make and change, but it's often the kind that your sensors are going to make and send you. In this case, I have a magnetometer. It has this command I can ask for the, what is it? Ls, the list to mdl.magnetic. If you ask for, hey, what's the value of that? What it returns is this tuple. So it contains multiple values. Sometimes I just want one of them. Let's say I want to, I have a little magnet here. I want to just be measuring the value on the y-axis of this thing. I don't need to get a bunch of different values to fuse. I just want to know one value. So I want to ask for, hey, not dot magnetic. That's what the library tells me to say, but I want to say I just need to pluck one of those values out of there. I need to unpack this tuple and just get one of those values. So the way I'm doing it right now, you can see I'm saying magnetometer reading is equal to this list to mdl.magnetic. That's returning a tuple with a length of three. So I can say, hey, what's the length of this tuple? It tells me it's a length of three. Okay. I'm going to go ahead and comment that out. One way to ask for these individually would be this. I could say, okay, I'm going to make a variable called magx and say, give me the magnetometer reading index zero and another in index one and a third one in index two. But in this case, I can cast them all at the same time, which is really convenient. Then you can do things with the different values that come back. So if you've ever seen this kind of notation before, it's actually three variables. Magx, magy, magz, those could be any variable names, is equal to, and then I say whatever that tuple is. So that tuple returns those three values and casts them into the three variables. So now if I go ahead and rerun this code, let's see, I've broken something. Let me just ask for it right here. There we go. Okay, so now you can see I'm casting the magx, magy, and magz as the three values that come back from unpacking this tuple, which is the list to mdl.magnetic. Now I'm just dealing with one of those by name. I'm saying, hey, go ahead and just print the magy. And so now you can see if I take my magnet and start hovering that over this little magnetometer here. I can reverse that and get those values to increase and decrease as I move that around. So that is how you can unpack a tuple inside of CircuitPython. And that is your CircuitPython parsec. All right, so, and hey, hello, I just saw a couple of other people join up in the chat. Hey, DJ Devon3, good afternoon. Thanks for joining us. Okay, so let's see. Before I forget, because sometimes I mean to do these multiple times in the show, I forget. I will say again, our coupon code today, if you want to get 10% off, actually I know DJ Devon3 is a good proponent of saying, hey, you can find these coupon codes throughout the week. So don't panic if you miss one. Here's the one for today for my show. It's 10% off. Just type in toasty-toes, toasty-toes, and that'll get you 10% off over in the store. The actually the next thing I want to do is actually take a quick look at the new guide. So I mentioned the Miowsic Cat Piano. So this guide came out and it's actually a pretty quick and easy one because we're not doing any microcontroller stuff. There's no code, two-page guide. So I've just got a little image of the finished guy there running the Miowsic into a guitar pedal and into an amp. And then I list out the parts that you need. You've got options here, by the way. I used, as you saw before, both a quarter-inch mono jack as well as an eighth-inch or 3.5-millimeter stereo jack. In mine, the stereo jack is helpful if you're going out to little, like, stereo Bluetooth speakers that have an aux in that kind of thing. Those will only come out of one speaker if you use a mono jack, like the second one I have listed here. So internally, I just shorted the tip and sleeve, or rather the tip and ring, essentially left and right connections inside of that. It's got three tabs on it, so one's ground and the other two are sharing my audio output from the Miowsic. The rest of the parts there, you can pick those up. Make a decision between those two or get yourself a quarter-inch jack. We don't sell any of those, so you can go find one. I actually have a link here to, I think, in the build page, which is the only other page, I have a link to the place where I got both the foot switch, pedal switch that I'm using, stomp switch, as well as the switch craft, really nice open frame quarter-inch jack. Those are from Love My Switches, which is a nice resource for guitar pedal builders, but also for people doing other electronics stuff. So Guy'd have got a nice little fritzing chart here, diagram here, as well as the schematic, with a little imaginary part there for the Miowsic's audio out, so I could connect it to something. Removal of all 21 screws, you've seen me do this on air before a couple times now, I think, and then identifying the audio out you'll need to find the ground, which there's ground lines in various places, the easiest one I found was the center common pin on off switch on the piano, and then the speaker connection where the audio line goes in is where you'll be splicing in basically the rest of the circuit. There's a few sub-assemblies to build here. I think I pre-made these on the show, so you didn't see me put these together, but I like to make these little assemblies with easy connections until I'm ready to finally solder stuff down. In this case, most of it I just left as these easy connections that actually ended up working out. At one point, I thought I had a little bit of noisey connection, it turned out I had a bad potentiometer, so I actually ditched that one. There was just a pot that somehow had gotten really noisy and crunchy, so I ditched that one, but using the DuPont connectors worked out fine for these connections. And there's a little circuit being put together on our little Mint-Tin perma-proto, nice size board for this type of build. You don't have to use it, you could go sort of dead bug or air-wiring things if you want, but in this case I went and put it on a little perma-proto. Some little indications of how I drilled those out. You can get stepped drill bits or you can just work your way through progressively a couple sizes in soft plastic. You can usually just do a pilot hole and then your final hole unless it's one of those really large stomp switches. That's fairly big, I think it's like a quarter inch. Something like this, a little tapered reamer is great to have. I don't know where I got this. I've had it for years and I also put a ton of sugrub on it at one point to make it a little, I don't know what I was reaming that required that much force, but it is nice. But these are great. It's essentially I think five or six blades running around this way and you can tape off or just place your finger at the diameter you want to go to and just work your way in. That's actually what I used for most of those holes on there. You've also got choices since we don't carry those stomp switches and those stomp switches are overkill because it's actually three position or rather three poles of dual position. I just put in the guide, one of our typical toggle switches, single pole dual throw. There's the addition of both my quarter inch and then later that 3.5 millimeter. For these potentiometers, let me see if I can grab one. These usually will have a registration tab on them to prevent them from spinning around. Since what you do with the potentiometers turn it, just gripping the shaft with a nut and maybe a couple washers usually isn't enough. You'll see there they have those, let me switch to a down view. Nope. There it is. Boy, this is very, sorry, this is very, very warm exposure or color balance today. There we go. That's a little normal looking. You can see here this little tab on the pot. Sometimes you'll see build instructions and say, oh, just go ahead and snap that off, which is fine in some cases, especially your pot is mounted in something like a PCB, but in this case it's just wires running off of it and so the danger is that the whole thing gets loose pretty easily. So don't snap that off. Just make a hole for it. What I did was I first made the hole for the pot shaft and threading there and then just lined that up, put that into the outside of the case and made a little mark next to this, actually just scored up the paint. The Miasik exterior has some paint on it, so I knew where to drill a little second hole, tiny little hole in there so that you can feed that in and prevent that from spinning around in there. So you don't really want to snap those off if you don't have to. You can see it actually in this image right here, that's the little hole. I don't know if I ever cleaned that up, I think I did. There was a little bit of chipping of the paint when I poked the hole in from the inside out. That's the downside, you will see that little hole, maybe you could paint over that if you wanted to fill it with some putty. And then put that all back together. Hopefully those images will be clear enough for people to make the mod and then I got a little demo there. So that's the little recap of the learn guide there and I would love to see people do some of their own mods. Like I said, there's more you could do with it, it would be really fun to integrate super cheap effect pedal or two inside of there so the thing has effects built right into the cap piano and then just plug it into whatever output you're using. Alright, let's see. So next up, speaking of cap pianos, so last week I got into adding an accelerometer so that we can adjust either a pitch bend or some other CC value with that little ice cream cone. So I wanted to show you, got the ice cream cone open, make this window a little smaller and run over there and show you. The next step is wiring and integrating that accelerometer into the whole retraction mechanism. So over here, oh wow, that is really that camera get bumped or zoomed. It's really missing the top of that. Oh, there it is. Alright, it just got way, that window got very big. Right, one second. Tell this not to shut off so I can see the chat. There we go. So first of all, ice cream cone, if we look at, this is the, this is the one from the line out mod one. As you can see, there's a little retraction lock there. This is on a little spring loaded reel like similar to a retractable keys, dog leash, tape measure. So this is on the wire, which has two lines running up to a little microphone in there. And this little microphone is essentially glued shut. There's a dome on the top, and then there's two halves here. So these are not easy to get open. Odds of doing it without just totally ruining it are fairly low. Oh, geez, sorry, I never pushed the fix to the camera positioning. Hold on one second. Hey, there we go. So, yeah, I'm still slightly decapitated. Getting there, zoom that camera out just a little bit. Sorry. That's the wrong way. That's better. Okay. So odds of getting these apart kind of low, what I did was I went in. So this is what it looked like to start with. I first used a little metal sort of spudger tool, both a really thin sort of flexible one, and then a slightly thicker one. You can see these are actually from one of these iFixit kits. I think this is one that Adafruit sells. I have a couple of these in my shops. So I went through here and I could feel that I was essentially breaking the seal of a little bit of glue and paint probably around there. This is a painted bit here. It's actually funny, by the way, now that I've started to get very familiar with these meowsics, if you look online, you'll see a couple of different minor color differences in some of the buttons on different models. And also this cone is painted in some versions. There's all of these little molded details in here. I don't know how well you can see those little molded details in here. You can't see them much, right? In some versions of this, those are painted up in darker colors as well. So anyway, I went through, broke that seal a little bit, then got in there and really carefully, you could see a seam line in the ring here and a little bit in the orange part. I actually went through with a exacto, mounted this thing so it wouldn't slip and I wouldn't cut my hand open, and just very slowly worked my way through getting down in, then I went in with a chisel, just so I could get a little bit of force on that. Eventually, I could tell I had that mostly open, but there were pegs in there that I had to cut, actually cut with the exacto blade. Two of them were on each side, got it open far enough to pull the dome off, then I could see inside. So these two pegs are what got cut. The one on the bottom I didn't have to, I was able to kind of wiggle that one out, so I don't know if these ones were glued in there. I think they were, there was also one little drop of glue there. Anyway, you might ignore this entirely and just forego this, 3D print this thing, drill some holes into it, I don't know, but I did manage to get one open fairly, in fairly good shape. So what was in there? This little microphone, which has a little rubber, like a lastimer, shock casing around it, that was shoved up into the ice cream scoop there like that, and then this little bracket held that in place, so unscrewed that, pulled that out. This ended up breaking this a little bit. This is the cable it was on, so one end here was soldered into the board there, I just desoldered that, pulled that off. The reason this is kind of snapped up here is that there was a nice little strain relief that I was trying to see if I could yank the wire through, but I think it got molded in place, so there's no, so this just kind of popped off when I pulled hard enough. I was hoping to reuse this, maybe I could probably slice this in half and reuse that, which goes at the base here, I believe like this, to give really good, like, way heavy engineering here to keep kids from breaking it, strain relief on the mic wire. So that's kind of a goner, maybe reusable. The mechanism that it winds into, so wire goes through this little cone holder here, this little hole at the bottom of that, so cone is all the way, I've got these backwards, but all the wood ends, so that gets, when it gets retracted, cone will sit there like that. And then this is the spool that the wire gets wound around, has this spring that you would twist a few turns before setting it in place there, and that's what gives it the retraction, pulls that out as you grab it. It stayed pretty intact, so that shouldn't be too bad, and it's got a nice little post molded into the base here that this fits over. There's the little retraction button, lives in there like that, and that pushes against this little hinged release that allows, that's what this is locking against that allows this to fly forward again. And then there's a little cover for the whole thing that'll sit on top of it, one way or another. So what I wanted to do is figure out, could I make a cable that'll work well for my accelerometer. So there's my STEMI QT accelerometer, and it's what the MSA 311. So this is running over I squared C, we've got pins on there, you can solder to, we also have STEMI QT ports on there. So I figured up here in the ice cream cone end of things, I can probably mount this right inside of the cone, just using one screw, it'll stay in there, and that means we'll get a fairly consistent, this isn't gonna be flopping around in there, we'll get a fairly consistent orientation for that, which will be kind of nice, you'll have, you have to find certain pitches for it, but tilting it, we can probably get a consistent orientation. I will probably feed this through and maybe tie a little knot or use a zip tie for some strain relief here, or maybe I'll find a way to reuse this nice little guy here. And then on the other end, what I did was I soldered a STEMI QT, sort of half of a STEMI QT cable, so that can just plug into the board, and that's just nicer when assembling something like this that's gonna get fed through some things to not have to solder it in place. So what I used here was some RJ14 wire, and I've lost the ends to it, but this is essentially two-line telephone cable, so there's a few different specifications for these, there's like, I think the RJ11 is the two-line, RJ9 might be the the handset line, which has actually a smaller connector on it, modular phone connector on it, but this is, I believe the RJ14, someone tell me if I'm wrong, I always get some of these mixed up, but this is meant for two phone lines, essentially, when you had two different lines in your house, it was often running over this, and so this could go from the wall to the phone, and then the phone could have a button for picking line A and line B, so four conductors. Snipped the ends off, turns out this was some really nice stranded copper wire per connection, look at these here, these are some nice stranded copper wire, not that nonsense kind of foily stuff you sometimes find in these not twisted pairs either, so this has the has the potential to work well for I2C. I was a little concerned, this is a pretty long run, this is about three feet, I chopped off here, which is actually longer than I think the microphone started with by maybe a foot, so this is a little excessively long, but I figured, yeah let's just try that, I can cut and re-solder this end pretty easily, and then I'll be able to have, I kind of need a little bit of a longer run because I'm going to be mounting the KV2040 that's doing all of the reading of the keyboard matrix and sending out the MIDI and all that good stuff, that's gonna be mounted up in here where there's a nice space I think, so I needed this extra bit of run, because normally the mic just goes right here, so otherwise that may, we'll see that may spool nicely around this, this is a bit thicker wire, so I could end up being in trouble with that, we'll see once I put that together how that works, but it would be cool, if not I will bail and I'll just have a short little slack run that can come out, I don't necessarily need the the mechanism there, so let's test this out, this is, I was originally running over one of these nice 400 millimeter long, it's the longest ones we have, this could be too long of a run for I2C and then what you can do is start lowering the frequency of the I2C channel, it's a fairly simple command when you're setting up the I2C device to say, hey let's just use this at a lower data rate and then we can get accurate reads again and let me just switch back over to this camera view here, a little down view, oh yeah, somebody's got real big, there we go, put this side there, put this in frame, so what we'll do actually, let's bring up, I'm going to plug this in, should be able to put a little print statement in or just look at a MIDI output viewer and see what kind of info we get, yeah, in fact let's do that, so what I'll do, let me just open up MIDI monitor and I'll add a little window of that here, second, let's see what view can that go in right here, yeah, so let me do a screen capture, always tempting fate to add screens to this while it's running but not good, I've got another one I'm going to add later too also for the keyboard project, so let's be tempting fate here today, let's change that from a monitor to a window, thank you, DJ Devin3 looked it up, it is RJ14 for the four wire four conductor telephone cable, okay, so what you'll see there is the MIDI output of my KB2040, so I'm reading the accelerometer data of this board and then I'm unpacking a tuple and I'm just grabbing one axis of it and then I'm mapping that to be a range of 0 to 127 of these MIDI CC values, so if you look at, I'm going to go ahead and clear, oh that's huge right now but you know I'll leave that huge for a second, so you should see that's living at about 64 and then as I tilt it go down to 0 up to 127, what am I rolling this here, yeah, okay, so let me push this view so you can see both at the same time, so oh man that thing got weird resolution wise, let me try to make the software happier, that's better, okay yeah, so you can see here running over like three feet of telephone cable and it looks good, it looks stable, you can see here if I just rest it, it's just staying at 74, let me try to get it totally flat, there we go, 64, right, so just sitting there on its own, it doesn't seem noisy, it seems responsive, let's see if we can, I'll attempt fate further, let me open up a piece of MIDI software, I'll close that window actually, let me take that off of there, I'll just run Helm, free open source software, let me pick a lead keyboard sound here, monster lead, what does that sound like, okay, that's great, that's good enough for what I'm doing, so getting the long length of cable there, still I squared C was happy enough with this, in this case, not always the case, but worked well, didn't have to change the frequency of the I squared C or any of that stuff, so okay, so Todd's saying you shouldn't see noise on the data from a long I squared C run, just the bus will hang in your sketch will halt, well that's no good, okay, so I will do a lot of testing before I publish this, but if I need to I can drop the frequency of the bus and hopefully prevent that, I think we also may still have, there was a Adafruit product that was a I squared C terminator, which helped with long runs, but it's looking like I won't need that, in fact, let me show you the, just because I'm having fun tempting fate here, I'm going to add this and switch this window over from just being the MIDI data to being the Helm software view, because it has a nice visualizer of the filter that I was adjusting there, so I think it won't update super fast for the broadcast, but if you see that peak, a little mountain peak looking thing, it's actually very responsive here, but the frame rate isn't going to be great in broadcast, so that's what that accelerometer data is being mapped to right there. DG73 said, I think the terminator was for Ethernet, no it was I think just a general purpose I squared C terminator, I demoed it using Ethernet jacks, but you could, I don't think that was a requirement, that was just if you wanted to use a longer cable, you could add that terminator. Another suggestion, Cgrovers says a shielded four conductor USB cable may work as well, yeah that would be a neat one to try, there's some nice thin flexi ones that might be more flexible than this this PVC coated phone cable here. All right, yeah so that's that's what's going on with that, I just wanted to give you an update on where that build is going, that'll be the last thing I'm adding I promise, so I've got reading the keys, reading all the buttons except for the volume and tempo buttons that are built on the bottom, I may look and see if I can scrape some traces and and steal those as well. I've got a 3.5 millimeter TRS MIDI output and then we can also do USB, yeah over in our discord by the way thanks Todd posted there's a link to that active terminator extender thing I was talking about and with that I did I think a 50 foot run of 100 foot run of ethernet cable with cat5 cable or something like that and had had success with iSquare C over a very very very long run out of spec run of wire. Let's see oh hey pixel over in YouTube says if Adafur could do free shipping instead of 10% off that would be awesome, we do actually have some free shipping at I think we have some free things at different order sizes I think these are the ones that are still in effect if you head over to let's go to the main site here I can find you where'd you go is that you if you go to Adafruit.com slash free not fee free you'll see the deals and more so $99 or more in your order you get a free permit proto half size breadboard for $149 or more you get a kb2040 $200 or more you get the free shipping if you're in the US and then $299 or more you get a free bbc micro bit v2 these stacks you'll get all of them if you get the top one and that there's a question here about it how many do I get you get them all so if you spend $200 or more and you're in the continental us you can get the free us ups ground shipping and the kb2040 and the permit proto breadboard and I believe you can still stack this 10% off I don't know where the freebies happened before or after the the coupon honestly so that's maybe maybe that's answered in the in the questions in here but I'm not sure about that one so let's see so next up I wanted to talk about upcoming project and for that I want to show you I'll go back to the down shooter here and so key switches right we're all familiar with these nice cherry mx style these are actually kale box whites that I have here but these are keyboard key switches mechanical key switches we have linear we have clicky we have uh tactile and that size of key switch is great for certain things it's also kind of honking huge for other things if you're trying to do low profile uh keyboard things low profile sequence or things button input numpad calculator what have you um so there are a couple different manufacturers who make some pretty nice low profile key switches and one that I really like that we have here is this kale chalk choc like chocolate I think I don't know why they call it that but there you go um so kale chalk let me first of all I'm gonna try to focus this and boost that exposure a lot there we go try to focus that a little better too that's good so you can see here it has some similarities and some differences uh first of all just the footprint of it is pretty similar pretty similar size which means you can have a very similar typing experience on it as far as the size of the keycaps and the distance between keys which is great so this is good for making something that sort of lives uh in a in a place somewhere between a sort of laptop keyboard and a full size mechanical keyboard uh however the profile of it is quite a bit lower so you can see these both sit there on the board that's the base of them and the chalk casing if I press the switches down uh is I don't know roughly half the height something like that maybe a little smaller even uh of the cherry mx um and so we've carried these in the store for a little while they look pretty similar on the bottom too right but they are not compatible so you can see here the the pins are in different places uh there are some registration posts that I think are standard on chalk that are maybe optional on cherry mx or not even there at all so you get these three registration posts on the chalk there so you've got to account for those and then we just have essentially a completely different placement of the switch pins there so up until now we have not had a nice easy way to use these so I went and built a footprint for these in fritzing so that I can make some PCBs I can share the footprint for people who want to make their own PCBs we'll probably end up making some some stuff with these eventually but I wanted to try to build a little hexagonal uh sort of beehive themed keypad little seven key keypad so let me show you a I'm going to bring up fritzing here and I'll have to add a window so please bear with me for a second and I'll show you what the footprint kind of what that entails making the footprint uh a little bit I'm not going to go into great detail here as well as putting together a PCB using that so I will load up this fritzing document here and that's probably a good size so let me add a new screen capture and I'll show you there was an inspiration for this which was a um hexagonal key switch that was part of a keyboard as well as a like a device uh that looks really cool to have hex shaped keypads so I'll show you that too let me just fix this window that's become a black hole that's fritzing window there we go B board got a little smaller my view a little smaller here off to the side okay so you can see there's there's a few steps involved here so first of all Lamora asked me if I could make this with underlit neopixels underneath the keys and if you look again actually for a moment at the key switch you'll see there's a window molded into the bottom so that's designed to have a little underlit neopixel coming through and then shining under your keycap uh similar to you can see on this cherry mx there's also a little window so that's a kind of a standard thing in these um by the way you'll also notice it's a completely different stem so you cannot use cherry mx style keycaps that have that little sort of cross shape in them they instead have this little robot face two prong electrical outlet looking tooth thing uh designed so it's completely different different style of uh of keycap that'll fit onto that uh so you can see one of the one of the things involved here was I made a little breadboard icon uh sorry a bunch of this is not routed here so it's kind of a mess of wires uh but so so in fritzing you have these three views you've got your breadboard view uh you've got your schematic view and you have the pcb view so I've made a little breadboard view and I have these two sort of coming off to the side so you can see what you would connect to uh then I have a zoom in on just one of these I have a schematic these by the way I'm going to fix these up there's a really great uh fritzing forum user named van epp who I asked some questions sent the part and they made some suggestions and fixes to to get things onto the grid I had not built uh the schematic parts on the grid and and did some other weird things so I'll hopefully be using or modifying that that version he sent to to fix mine up uh and then there's the pcb view of this so what I'm going to do let me turn off pretty much everything and then try to just turn on my parts here okay so we're part and let's see and silkscreen top okay that's a little easier to see uh so this part now has a few things going on uh these are measured uh based off of the data sheet uh they have you can kind of ignore this green and now blue sort of connection here that's not real that's just an artifact of of fritzing not liking my having a through-hole part and a smd part kind of combined into one uh but these three yellow circles in the middle those are going to be drill holes that will just allow those plastic pegs to set on the circle up here is the hole for the reverse mount neopixel which even though it is rectangular uh it's a pain in the neck to make a cutout in a part that is rectangular it's also more likely to get weird when it gets sent off to the board house so I think I've made a hole it's four millimeter hole I think it's big enough to clear everything and still allow the part to be soldered down uh and then what you're not seeing is the pads which are actually on the bottom um so if I look at that's adding the bottom layer so those are the four pads for the neopixel so the neopixel has data in data out uh current voltage in and ground uh so I have those four parts on the bottom side of the board and then I have these three hole through hole um pads for the legs of the switch on the top and bottom uh side of the board since they're through hole uh so that's what the part looks like in uh in close up this is the idea for the board here um sorry zooming is being very slow and fritzing uh so let me turn on let's see I'll leave that off uh the traces I needed a couple of um vias to get underneath some overlaps uh and there's the ground fill copper layer on the bottom but essentially it's going to look like that I have uh I sent off to jlcpcb to get a set of five of these made and they're supposed to come on monday so cross fingers they'll work if anyone sees some obvious problems let me know but I'll also be testing these out on monday um dj devon three s does this design use the led as the diode for a diode matrix it does not know I'm just using um I have a cutie pie uh mounted on the bottom that's what these holes are here and I put it at like a 30 degree angle to kind of match the hexagon um it has enough i o for me to just do direct seven seven gpio switches and then one data line for the neopixels that'll be underneath those there so no diode matrix necessary for this one but you could you could do a diode matrix and make a huge board out of these um so the other thing I want to show you is the incredibly cool keycaps that were the inspiration for the whole thing let me um let me grab one other window here and show you how this whole thing started here open up no here uh so this is a midi controller uh the same builder also makes a macro pad similar to what I want to make uh they made it with I think 10 nine switches um and kind of this hive shape almost uh so what I wanted to do is just make a seven key like you saw my design there so seven keys sitting inside of nesting nicely inside of each other but these keycaps are gorgeous so uh look you get this nice uh beautiful design I'll have you can see actually there's underlit neopixels under those and I'm guessing that's they're going to look pretty similar uh in mind because of where where they lie on the chalk switch there uh this builder also created uh their their name is sol s dash o l is their their online handle uh they're a designer and creative technologist living in Milan um they made these keycaps uh had them manufactured and for sale um I got a couple packs of them they turned out to be like the last two packs I could find anywhere on the internet but uh noe is going to actually already has modeled a 3d model uh it's very similar that'll work for anyone who wants to print their own uh or do them in different colors or can't find these that they'll probably come back in stock but um so that's going to be uh oh is that a 12 key thank you for for counting properly I didn't I didn't look at it closely um so yeah so mine you can just imagine a little seven key section a little hexagonal section of that uh is is what I'll be building and then you could use it for anything you could use it for um the idea behind this one I'm pretty sure is to do isomorphic keyboard which is a term in um music keyboards where there is a very different relationship between notes than the typical semitones of a of a piano keyboard uh instead you can do things like have um only sort of complementary notes next to each other and and uh you know minor versions heading this way and major versions heading that way I don't know a lot about them but but I've I've played around with like iPad versions of them over the years so I think that's what the idea for for this designer was was to do a midi controller that has this sort of unusual non piano style layout uh mine we can kind of do anything with it'll be usb hid and hid midi uh possible with it um so we're we're uh excited to to be getting that going once I get uh boards in I'll put those together probably show you the a build of them if they work or if I can bodge them enough for them to work next week uh and then uh kind of flush out a bit more of a design and uh the Ruiz brothers are going to work on keycaps and and some case stuff for it as well so we should have a cool collaboration on these uh these hex key keypads hex pads um that actually have seven but anyway uh that's uh that's what that's looking like right there so far um I may share some tips on the fritzing side of things I can't remember if I've shown part making I I did a guy actually let's go and look let's go let's go learn I I need to I need to remind myself did I show how I think I just show how to make a pcb um let's see what was that project called the pico midi modal midi keyboard whoa not found let me reload that I don't believe you modal midi it's gone why is it gone if you search a name click a name go to view all and let's see if this is a alternate route to finding the thing there it is I can see it please be there yay it's there um right where is it I I sure thought I showed how to build this and I think you have a different guide I really swear I had a huge section on oh wait is this it now I have to go through this guy sorry ah 21 key pico keyboard it was similar but not the same okay here's the one uh so making a custom pcb with fritzing so if you look up this one diy pico mechanical keyboard this will show you how to get um yeah I I had built a part but I didn't show you how to build the part did I yeah we're just importing the part here yeah so I may if people are interested I may do a little write up on building that part or another part from scratch it is a complicated part I may simplify it and just do the switch adding the um led maybe a bad idea I'm my I'm still out on that because because there is no one part you can buy that has that integrated so it may be better for me to just put them at a proper offset in or in their origins so that you can snap them both to a a course grid and they'll be in the right spot for each other that may be the better way to go because um fritzing really doesn't like me trying to have that bottom pads and top part based on how it's built um but it's kind of cool because the fritzing part is essentially just an svg and you can build it based on naming and hierarchies of the svg file which you can do an inkscape or an illustrator or just by straight editing the svg file and depending on naming and hierarchy a lot of the work gets done for you by fritzing there's also a parts editor in fritzing that works really well for certain things it kind of fell apart once I tried to get very complicated with this this mashed up part but uh yeah let me know if people are interested in seeing that I know kikad is very popular eagle cad but uh you can also do these things in fritzing which is kind of cool all right so that is gonna cover it that is uh that is what i'm up to thanks everyone for stopping by one last time i'll say if you want to get 10 off in the store today type in toasty toes toasty dash toes uh in the in the coupon code on your way out you get 10 off on your order all right thank you everyone for hanging out for a different industries i'm john park this has been john park's workshop and look there's lars