 Welcome to this show. It's me, John Park, and it is time for JP's product pick of the week. So thank you so much for joining me for this. I am excited about today's product pick. If you don't know, if this is your first time on this show, I'll show you a new product from the Adafruit Store. You'll have the opportunity to buy it for, I believe it's half off today just by heading to that URL right there or point something at that QR code, some sort of device. And you can pick up up to 10 of them at the discount no coupon code necessary. We just slash the price. And let's see, before I worry you that, hey, wait, I'm watching this show and then this guy's coming along and telling me to click on a link or point my browser somewhere else. That's madness. Who would do that? This show broadcasts from within the product page. So you can be right there and you will see this embedded right down at the bottom there. You can watch it from inside. And there you are surrounded by this show and the product, if you like, if that's what you're into, you don't have to. But you can do that. So I want to thank you for stopping by. I want to thank our people over in our chats. So we have the YouTube chat up and we also have our Discord, if you're wondering if you're over on Twitch or somewhere wondering where the chat is at, head on over to adafrew.it slash Discord and look for the live broadcast chat channel. It looks like that right there. And apparently there are shenanigans. Who's this guy? I don't know what's happening. Oh, nice. DJ Devon 3 with the photoshopping. The ship needed more cowbell. Poor Jack. I love it. Thank you. And yeah, hello to interstellar surfer Devon's workshop NYC kid, Davodesa Gavin, Belle, Boba Lu, Georgie, Jordy Yee, Dale Echols. Thank you for stopping by the YouTube chat. And then of course, the thanks to everyone, Yanisku and DJ Devon 3, Jim Hendrickson, Blitz City, Liz, Paul. Hello. Thanks for stopping by the chats. So let's do this. What I like to do is have Lady Ada go back just rewind time a little bit and talk about this week's product pick when it was brand new, not so long ago. So take it away, Lady Ada. Okay. Next up, just a very simple breakout board. I needed a breakout board for this connector because I started to use it. It's a TRRS connector. So it's tip ring, ring sleeve. And if you go back to the headphones, so you can see on the headphone jack, it has four contacts. There's the tip, which is left, the first ring, which is right, the third ring, which is going to be microphone, usually on headsets, and the fourth ring, which is ground. That's for like headsets. But you know, I actually think that these audio jacks would be used for whatever you want to have low cost cabling to connect for data lines, say I squared C, or maybe your power ground, RXTX, whatever, over a headphone cable, you can use a TRRS jack for that. And these photo cables are really, really cheap and they come in like every length. So, you know, could use it for that, maybe I don't know, or you could just use it for the audio. This breakout board has this connector, sorry, the jack has, in addition to the sleeve, right and left has two switches. The R switch and the left switch. The R switch is when the jack is not inserted, goes to the right. And the left switch is connected to the left. When you insert the jack, the R switch and left switch pins float. And this is basically, you know, on old stereo systems where you plugged in the headphone jack and automatically turn off the speaker. That's because the audio would no longer be routed through the switches. You could also use it to detect when a jack is plugged in by having a very light pull up. And you can detect whether it's like grounded or not. There's tutorials that we've linked to, or you can use Google for jack detection to determine how to do that. But basically came free with the connector, so sure, we add it onto the breakout. Oh, yes, indeed, it is. That's the product pick. Whoa, hold on. I'm clicking things right there. That's the thing. This, this right here, this is my product pick of the week. This week, it is the TRRS jack breakout or the jack breakout. No one calls it that. I wish they did. So this is really handy. This gives us a nice breadboard friendly with the pins broken out for the TRRS jack, which actually has more than just four pins on it, because like Lady Aida said, we have ground, we have the three rings for data, or whatever you're going to use them for, audio, microphone, stereo. But we also have two more pins on there that are for switches that can detect essentially if a cable is plugged in to the left and the right channels, the traditional left and the right channels. So what is this for? Well, first of all, let's talk about the arms race of this type of cable. So this is specifically a 3.5 millimeter plug, and this type of nomenclature TRRS that exists in other most notably quarter inch jacks for audio applications. But you've got things like banana plugs, right? That's just a single conductor right there. This is kind of a fancy one with a little retractable sleeve, but that's a single conductor. Okay, so that doesn't quite count, because that's not in this 3.5 millimeter range. But you do see these, right? These mono that has the tip and the sleeve, and I use these for Euro rec modular synthesizers. They're really popular for that, but you can also find them used for accessibility switches and other uses. So there's those. Then there's the most common one, I think, the one that we're most used to, which is the stereo 3.5 millimeter jack, which has the tip, the ring, and the sleeve. And so one of the nice things is you can use the TRRS jack for mono or stereo or the quadruple TRRS. You can use them for all of those. That's fine. Actually, I shouldn't say you can use them for mono. I haven't tested that. Sometimes that'll short things. You don't want shorted. But you can use this with stereo TRRS jacks, and that works great. And in fact, I have demos that I'll show you using that. And I've used that for audio and other things. And you can use them for TRRS. And as Lady Aida said, that's often used for stereo, audio, and microphone. So a lot of your Android headsets and on Apple devices prior to them ditching the 3.5 millimeter jack, your headsets would actually have this set of four contacts or conductors on it, TRRS. You can also find them in use in some interesting places. For example, this is an accessibility controller from Microsoft for the Xbox. And I've built some alternate input devices for this before, because that's what it's designed for. It has all these 3.5 millimeter jacks. Some of them are mono. Some of them I think are stereo. And a couple of them are TRRS. And those are the ones that are used for some of the analog stuff. So if you want to interface different types of potentiometers for the variable trigger controls that are on an Xbox controller, you'll be using a couple of those jacks. In the past, to interface with those, I've had to make my own breakout. So there you can see, I've got four pins. I've kind of spaced them weird here. But I've got four pins going to a TRRS cable. Let me give you a down shooter view of the world here. So there you go. There's a TRRS. Is that a TRRS? One, two, three, four. Yeah, it sure is. And that allows me to use the analog controls that are accessible on that controller. Well, this, I've lost it already, this little guy right here will do the same job for me. And it's actually a better layout with more going on. Also in the chat, someone mentioned a new beast said that a DSLR shutter also will use that. Oh, I didn't know that. Okay, so yeah, that's another case where you can use this type of cabling. And if you want to use a microcontroller in the mix, this is a really great breakout, you can also use it without. If you want to just hook potentiometers up to this thing, that's fine. It just is a breadboard friendly way to access all the points on that jack. Here is an example. This is actually kind of my prototype version of the Tyrell desktop synthesizer. I'll zoom out and focus here a little. And so you can see in this case, I'm running, I believe, to power ground and the right channel for the stereo audio that I was doing on that. You can see it here. I'll leave that one there, but you can see it here. Not as well, but this is the actual synth in practice. Looks like the Tyrell building from Blade Runner. And there it is. I've got the little breakout on there. So I'm sending audio out on that example. And then the example I wanted to show you here is a little Altoid tin MIDI converter that I built yesterday. So this is cute little Altoid tin. We have these little perma-proto boards that fit an Altoid mint tin, little mini mint tins. And you can see here, I've got a cutie pie and I've got my TRS jack, TRRS jack. I'm using it to send MIDI data. And so for that, I'm using a TRS cable and that works fine, stereo cable. And then I got fancy and added a little screen to this. But if you take a look at what I've got going on here, this is actually sending classic MIDI over that TRS cable to a nice little synthesizer here. This is this Roland JX-03. By the way, today is 808 day. So happy 808 day for those who observe or practice 808 being Roland's famous classic drum machine. This is not that, but this is a little Roland synth. And what I'll do is turn on a mic here to hear the output. So what I've got going on here is I'm going to use the cutie pie to play a little couple of arpeggios and then change the patch or program. So you can see, you can pick all these different sort of preset sounds. There's actually three sets of these. We've got like 48 sounds on here that we can switch between. I've written a little program that will just automatically run through those and write their whole name out to the screen so that you can sort of sample the capabilities that are built into this synthesizer. So let me go to a screen here where you can see what's going on there and restart the code. Okay, so you get the idea with that. And so that, if you look at the code here, oh, and I should ask, could you hear that? Because sometimes I need to adjust my mix. Let me know if that mix was okay for here in the basic demonstration of that. Let me turn that down. So what you can see I've got going on here is I'm bringing in MIDI messages. And let's see, where am I setting up my output? Okay, there we go. So my MIDI messages I'm sending out over the transmit, the TX. And so on my little breakout board here, on the TRS breakout board, I am sending out the TX signal over one of the ring positions here. And then I have power and ground as a differential there. And so this is just serial UART data. So like Ladiata said, you can use these TRRS cables to do transmit and receive and power and ground, if you want to, between microcontrollers. This is kind of similar actually. It's just sending these MIDI messages, digital messages over to a synthesizer that's essentially like a microcontroller that's getting that information and then turning that into program changes and note on, note off messages. But you can do a whole lot more with it if you want. And in fact, I've got another example here, this is going to use some sample code that Liz wrote for her little MIDI buddies, MIDI serial USB to serial guide. And I'm going to save that. So what's happening now is my QDPI is actually going to translate USB MIDI into classic MIDI. So if you have an older synthesizer that won't plug into USB, this is a way to build it on a tiny little $7 microcontroller, which is pretty cool. So here what I'll do is I'll turn the... Oh, I don't know what it thinks it's playing. But what I'm going to do is open up Ableton, where I have a MIDI track. What do you think you're playing? So in this case, I can go and let's say I liked one of those programs that it switched to before. Now I can pick that using this interface or add more to my program so that it doesn't just translate the USB MIDI to serial, but also does some program change things. And you can see we also have a little STEMI QT display output. If you're curious, let me turn this down. This actually does kind of all pack up nice and neat. Let me stop this playing here. And go back to the down cam here. You can see this actually does fit in here. It's small enough to... It doesn't want to quite close at the moment. I think something is in the way. But it's not bad. You can see I just poked a little hole here for the TRS and a little hole here for USB-C. So there's my little Altoids tin turned into a little MIDI synthesizer. I can probably mount this a little more permanently, but I wanted to be able to show you the guts there of what this was. So let's see. You got any questions about... Thank you, Tim Orling. That was definitely a Stranger Things inspired arpeggio, and this synth is the right era for those sounds to remind you of Stranger Things. Oh, DJ Devon says it sounds like the buck rubante. That... I don't think I have listed here. That is a Moruske, M-O-R-U-S-Q-U-E is the name of the artist to release a bunch of Creative Commons MIDI tracks that are excellent. So that's what I was playing there. Moruske. So if you want to go and grab one of these, head on over to the site. Let me see if we got them in stock. Still we do. They're 88 cents, so you could just get piles of these things. That's quite, quite cheap for a thing that's nicely broken out like that onto a breadboard-friendly spacing and lets you access all of those pins on there. There's even a guide. So you could check out. Katny wrote this nice guide about how to use it, talks about how the switches work, gives you pinout, what's connected to what, and there are also some downloads if you want to get the files there. And there's a schematic there which might be helpful for you to visualize how the switches work there. All right, let's see. If there are no other questions about that, we'll wrap it up. Let's see. Jordy Guy said most phone headsets were LRGM, not LRMG. Yeah, it is confusing. So I should say you've got to do your research before you or do some testing with a multimeter before you assume what the tip ring, ring sleeve actually stand for. They're kind of very, I think there are things that are headphones with a mic versus headsets and those are kind of two slightly different terms that often have two of the conductor's swizzled there. So yeah, it'll really vary. It's really just four wires that you could use. You could potentially use them for I square C. Of course, getting really long runs of headphone cable might cause problems. Yeah, so I was going to say BlitzCityDIY mentioned you can use them to transmit neopixel data. So you could do as long as it's not super high current you're trying to do, you probably get away with sending power ground and data signal or just data and ground and you could have your power going directly to the strip if it's a higher current usage. But what a convenient type of little plug that is. I've got that example one there. So this is actually I think this example says it best. That's what I was working with before. Now we have that and you can plug in your TRS cable and get on with your life. So that is going to do it for today. That is my product pick of the week this week. It is the TRRS Jack breakout. Go and get some. For Adafruit Industries, I'm John Park. This has been JP's product pick of the week and I will see you next time. Bye bye.