 It's me John Park and it is time for another JP's product pick of the week here. We are and you may have seen it I showed it right away That's the URL you want to go to you want to head right here or point a camera at that little qr code And that's going to take you over to the product page on the product page You will find not only this video embedded within streaming live But also It's going to be a big big discount. Uh, in fact, let me go there right now. Let's check it out. Here's my Browser, I'm going to refresh this. This was from a little bit ago and boom 50 off on today's product pick But hey, I'm getting ahead of myself. So, uh, let's let's get back with the program here for a second. Um And I will Let lady aida Take us through a little bit of this product pick of the week Then I'm going to go grab one myself from the mystery cabinet of delightful drawers of wonders and uh, do a little bit of a demo. So Get ready Here comes lady aida The prop maker wing. Yes, let me explain what's going on here So we had people who were making uh props and projects with The feather and it was like they always had to take a couple boards and put them together to get what they wanted done So we looked at a lot of the projects we wanted to build. Um, look at the lightsaber that we made with the hallowing We thought What would we want to add to a feather to make it really good for making props now? It doesn't do everything But it's also only like about 10 bucks. So it's like, you know, you get Enough going on that you can make some cool projects. Um, especially keep it nice and small in feather size so You get an audio amplifier. So if you're using the feather m0 and 4 we have um circuit python has great audio support It's really easy to play audio files and we even have polyphonic audio coming soon So you can have like background and foreground sounds So this will drive a 8 ohm or 4 ohm speaker It comes with a triple axis accelerometer. We use the list 3dh Now some people are like, well, why don't you have like a 9 doff sensor with like Acceleration and gyro and magnetometer? The answer is a lot of props don't need it. Um, the extra cost for a 9 doff sensor Doesn't usually pay out because a lot of people don't have the code that can really read that 9 doff data and do something Complicated with it for a lot of props You just want tilt or motion or I shook it or I hit it Um for those things the accelerometer is plenty like if you saw with the Lightsaber you you don't need a gyro magnetometer to do the swing or the hit or like the you know, basic motion Output so you can do that with just an accelerometer and the list 3dh is a low cost But really great accelerometer and we have tons of good support code for it Uh, it also has a three watt led driver So you can drive rgb leds if you have like a really bright light you want to add You don't have to use a three watt led you can use smaller leds too, but it can drive up to three watts With three powerful MOSFET transistors Um, it has a level shifted neopixel output with our jst connection Because I know it's like a lot of times you want to be able to disconnect the leds from the board while you're taking it apart What are those holes right there? Oh, we have breakouts for the enable pin So, you know, you probably the prop the wing in your prop and you want to bring the on-off switch outside somewhere So we made it really easy for you to connect two wires To make an on-off switch and there's also another switch input that is just easy to break out to and you can connect a switch And I'll show on the demo And then another thing that you it's not labeled here, but there's a power pin So a lot of people when they make their props, it's like well You want to have the accelerometer on to detect motion and read the switch, but you don't want The neopixels to be all lit up because they do take up a lot of quiescent current and maybe the rgb led as well So we have a power pin that when you Activate it will shut off power to The neopixels like that v plus pin so it'll reduce the quiescent power and we did some power measurements So this means that instead of taking up a milliamp per neopixel It takes none and the quiescent current for the whole wing is about a milliamp That you're still going to have to put your feather into low power mode if you wanted to But if you don't that will really save you if you've got tiny neopixels on your project And you want to like lower the power but still listen for button presses You don't want to turn off the whole thing. You just want to turn off the the high current speaker and neopixel But so let me show My demo we'll see if I can get my demo up and running So you still want to power your project portably. So of course you use the feather battery power supply and then Um What's interesting here is I have the enable pins connected up to this toggle switch So this is how you turn on or off. This is really nice. It's like it's fully on off Um, but you don't have to splice any cables And then you have this button. So I have this here a panel mount button and this is really really bright um But it's playing audio from the speaker And it's got the neopixel. Sorry the gigantic three watt RGB led And then when I tap it it changes the colors of the neopixel. So this is just a demo showing You know audio playback through the speaker RGB led neopixel button switch and then you know, of course, I want to Shut up and be quiet to turn off. So this is everything Do you circuit python you can make all those props you wanted to and you know, just to be straight up We looked around there's a ton of expensive complicated bizarre hard to use cranky Like here's how to make a prop. It's only $500 and like they're not open source And so we just said let's go in and like let's do a good job But I think this will make you know, this is not just for lightsabers But we thought about lightsabers when building this but I think there's a lot of other props that we thought of Since we designed this are like what can we build? Um with the prop maker wing and it's it's low cost. I mean like it's pretty cheap But you can add to any feather and with that goes your products Hey, yeah, all right, uh Wrong song. So, uh, I'm convinced. Let me go grab one right now and uh, and then we'll take a look at it. Hang on All right, there it is right there Let me get it out of Lars's mouth here Yeah That's the product pick of the week this week. It is the prop maker feather wing Uh, this thing is great. I love it. So, uh, as lady Aida mentioned It does a few very specific things that will cover a whole lot of the types of props that you'll make if you're doing cosplay props theater or stage props any of the Star Wars light savory types of things phasers ray guns if you're making props out of out of games If you're making toys a lot of good stuff in there you have easy plug-in neopixels with the jst plug right there You have those neopixels are being driven at three. Sorry at five volt logic. So there's a um Level shifter logic level shifter there Uh, it has high current on that so you can drive a whole lot of neopixels We have that rgb analog pwm. It's actually pwm not analog, but that rgb three watt led Uh connector which you can use for other things in fact I'll show you using it for a laser instead of an led It has a little amp on there class d amps. You can plug speaker directly in which is perfect You don't want to add a whole bunch of boards to it. In fact, I'll show you in a little bit the Uh difference when I went from my original build of the lucio blaster to my new 2020 version Which uses the prop makers. I reduced the number of boards a whole lot by by using what was built on What else it's got the tap detection, which is really useful In fact, I'll show you that's how larris works. We can Use tap detection on larris to make him say stuff Uh, and it also has accelerometer that you can use for essentially tilt detection types of things Uh, I use that on lucio blaster for uh reload just by pointing up or using your ultimate by pointing down Uh, what else i'm probably forgetting a few other things. There's the very convenient Uh additional button. It's called the switch on here There is the low power mode and there's also easily broken out enable pins. So What i'm going to do is actually drop Down to this overhead view where i've set up a simple little demo. So Here we have the prop maker is plugged into a feather m4 And then i've got a strip of neopixels running right there. Oh that was dramatic. I have a very tenuous Jumper for for turning that off rather than soldering a switch on there So now it's on you heard it did a nice big sound effect when it started up It has the i'm just using this little speaker here Which is nice and compact and you can take off the adhesive from that and and mount it to something as a sound board Which is really effective I'm powering this by battery right now. So it uses the feathers Battery charging lipo circuit and then I also you can see here. I plugged in a switch I actually used a little mechanical key switch and soldered to one of our little Sockets there Onto the sort of built-in switch output. So when that gets grounded I'm using debounce to detect when I press that and that'll turn my laser pointer here on and off So it just flips flips the Value there there every other time you you hit that So you can see here. This is a nice little little laser pointer. I have there. I probably shouldn't point that at the camera Why is it leaking? Something weird's going on in the workshop here Uh, it's probably that I hope I'm not let me know if you see that big hornet. Is that hornet trying to attack me again? It's a yellow jacket or something paper wasp in here the other day Uh, I'm doomed. I shouldn't have angered Lars earlier and uh, that's about it So then the other thing I'm doing on here is I'm using the tap detection So every time I tap it. I am playing a sound effect as well as Switching my neopixel colors to something random and you can see here it responds really quickly Which is kind of cool and in fact you can imagine for some props It might be easier to just use tap detection as a trigger rather than mounting You know a real trigger like button or switch type of trigger You can just kind of tap the tap the thing and if you have it Layed out properly then it'll it'll feel that if you mount this sort of inside if you're you're prop using the uh the mounting holes Um, so let's see what I'm going to do is pop over to the uh product page for this for a second. Let's have a look Uh, right here if you Scroll down you'll see we have uh some of the some of the info about it as well as a link to some guides And one of those guides, uh linked in here is the Main guide for the product. So if I click on that that'll give you overview Tell you the pinouts We click on this page here Tell you all the pins that you've that you've got broken out there Beyond you can see there's a lot of unused pins Those are the those are just the normal feather pins that you could use for other things if you wanted to And also this is nice because if you mount it using the header You then have that inside row That is still available for mounting other things So you could solder to those another set of headers if you needed to right angle or something like that Um, and then there's code examples there for uh for using sort of the basics I put this demo together today just pulling together a few of our little code snippet demos So neopixel playing a wave file And uh reading a button and then I added a bouncer to that and uh then I substituted the PWM code for uh just changing the value of that pin. I think I have pin 11 being used for my laser pointer If you look at some of the guides that have been done with this so first of all we've got Our good friend lars and some of you might not know that lars actually has a prop maker Right inside of him. I know he doesn't want you to know that but So you can see I've got a little switch on his hand there. I'm going to click that And that's going to turn on the uh the board. There's a lipo, a feather, and the prop maker And now I'm using the tap detection. So when I touch this back here He makes gross noises. He okay, so each time we tap him there We get a new little uh new little phrase from him so I can turn that off and then I have uh broken out the usb there to update it uh code-wise as well as just to charge the lipo Uh so that's an example of putting the prop maker inside of a friendly stuffed annular toy Um lucio blaster 2020 so this is uh if we look at the circuit here Oh actually let me go back to the oh yeah there it is there's a nice picture Uh so you can see here I have my um prop maker in here and then I've got a feather Uh and then I think I have a little space on there for an extra amp just kind of so many Speakers running off of that, but otherwise I'm able to just plug in neopixels to this Plug switches in plug the enable uh into a another switch couple of triggers So all of that reduced down significantly the number of extra boards that I needed before Here is the classic of course this lightsaber or laser sword as disney lucas Uh star wars entities and lawyers would like us to call it Uh but that's a that's a lightsaber made using the prop maker feather wing and uh one of the nice things is that that's pretty small once you once you pair that using those low-profile Feather headers uh pair that to a feather and then run a couple of your buttons off of there It doesn't take up much space uh in fact there's even uh some batteries that'll fit Between the two boards some smaller batteries and there's also a really cool uh this Darksaber which also uses prop maker and this one also has a ble feather uh connected to it Looking at a couple of questions that I see coming from the chat over on youtube uh John os does the propelling work with the feather rp 2040 I almost did that this morning But I don't know if I'm not sure what the state is of the mp3 playback on it I couldn't remember if we had that I think it would work and I think uh that works with uh wave output for sure but I'm just not sure about uh what the mp3 state of things is So if anyone knows uh in the discord chat please let me know um I would like to try that though so so uh I will I'll make an update on my workshop show on Thursday uh I'll let you know because I've been wanting to check that out also Mike Gibbons asks what's the difference between the switch pin and the enable pin so the enable pin on a feather board is what uh powers it down but rather than having to sort of splice in a beefy switch into the circuit of the battery or the usb it is uh sort of a software power down it just tells the the thing to shut itself off so uh in my case here I'm just using a piece of jumper wire and you can see here when I when I short the ground pin or the enable pin to ground it just shuts it off so you could attach any kind of switch or or a clicky toggle switch oh you can see there I am just sort of delicately touching those now it'll power back on so enable pin is what you'll use as on off uh switch pin is right here uh let me show this one closer it's just a pair of pins broken out they say switch and ground uh and that is actually just I believe uh is that like d10 it might be digital pin 10 so it's just a conveniently broken out digital iopin that you will set as an input you'll read it the way you read any normal button and then it in your code either arduino code or circuit python code you can just do whatever it is you want to do with it um let's see I'm seeing it in the chat someone said the rp20 40 mp3 playback does work uh and catney wrote a guide about it recently thanks cat catney uh so yeah I think it should work I the the pin compatibility with feather is is very normal on the rp20 40 so I think that's a good bet because this is a $10 board you can get it today for half price if you if you check out over here uh on the product whoa I just made my browser window go flying get back here uh if you if you check this out during this show uh this thing is half off so it's $4.98 just during the show otherwise it's still a very reasonable $10 and rp20 40 I think is a $12 feather so together you've got a really inexpensive uh setup for doing prop based stuff um what else other questions uh yeah out uh john oh you're welcome and I will give it a try though so I just want to double check because I think that's a that's a powerful combo I'm using a uh feather m4 right now for this just because I know that one that one works it's tried and true it's nice and powerful um let's see so let's take a look uh at the code for a second here so let me jump over to Adam and I'll show you what I'm doing uh find Adam hey there you are okay so import a bunch of libraries digital i o because I'm using some of those pins to write out to things like neopixels or read in uh this this uh button press import the board for pin definitions bus ios we can talk to i squared c stuff audio i o that's part along with audio core for how i'm playing back uh the wave files neopixels so I can light up these beautiful neopixels uh list 3dh is the uh tap detection and accelerometer chip that's on there built right into the middle of the board in fact so that it's useful for pitch yaw roll type of readings uh random just because I wanted to change the colors somewhat randomly uh between different kinds of pinks blues and reds um I'm leaving green out of it just because I wanted to keep it keep it sort of constrained to some some color palette uh and then the debouncer because that's useful for my little turning on my laser pointer here mural uh so the next thing we do is we set up neopixels just like usual and you can see here I'm using pin d5 and that's the pin that's broken out to this jst connector so this is a this is a strand of neopixels here if you couldn't tell that has a jst 3 pin uh on the end of it then I'm setting up the laser and the laser is you can see it's plugged into two of the pins of my um what we call the sort of three watt led but this is really meant for any uh any digital use you'll just know that you have a plus pin and then essentially three ground pins which are labeled red green and blue and that's how those analog uh style non-neopixel style uh leds work um the laser is being run on pin d11 which is what that red of these rgb these three is so you could use 12 and 13 if you want it you can have three different lasers if you like um it'd be kind of cool to put your laser on a little servo with this one a little laser sighting uh next thing I'm doing is setting up my accelerometer and the tap detection so that it will easily respond to getting tapped switch in so this is digital uh d9 and that's that's just this broken out sort of labeled pin d9 here uh setting that as a pull up input as a debouncer uh item so that I can use the debouncer and that means we just don't get a bunch of spurious reads and then setting up audio on pin a0 which goes out to this nice little class d amplifier which is how I'm able to just very simply and easily plug in a speaker to that and that'll use four ohm or eight ohm speakers uh then I'm setting up a couple of wave files that I can play when it first starts up you'll hear it plays sort of a lightsaber startup sound so if I turn this off back on and then the rest of them are this kind of hit hit sound uh then this is the main loop of the program all I'm doing is really checking for two things has the accelerometer been tapped if so I change the colors of red and blue to some random value between 0 and 80 uh oops touch the wrong thing and play the hit wave and then when uh then the other thing we do is we check for switch updates and if that switch gets updated we just flip and flop the uh the value of the pin that this little laser diode is plugged into uh and that is it that's the code so uh let me know if you have any questions but I'll remind you if you want to go grab uh one or ten or somewhere in between of these I think we have a limit of ten at this half price during the show uh and that'll just be good during the during the time of this show so go ahead and and grab some and place an order I know sometimes people have them sitting in their cart for like an hour and then they go back and the price doesn't work so uh it is it is pretty tightly constrained to uh to the show length here so go grab some if you want and uh I will like I said make a little update on my Thursday show about rp20 40 usage uh unless someone knows definitively um okay John O says that they ordered five of them and some uh feather rp20 40s anyway all right so you're paving the way um I think you'll find a use for those those feathers one way or another so um I won't feel too bad about that all right uh I think that's going to do it for today so that is the product pick of the week it is the prop maker feather wing and I'll go ahead and set that here on the board thank you all for stopping by 484 Industries I'm John Park yeah I'm John Park and this has been JP's product pick of the week goodbye