 Welcome to the show, it's me, John Park, and it is time for JP's product pick of the week. And I am excited because this week we have a, what do we call this? A combo discount extravaganza. Those were Lady Eight's words. That's right, we have two product picks this week which go well together. They play very nicely together and I'll show them in some demos in a second. So thank you for stopping by. Thanks for hanging out. We have the chat over in the YouTube, hello Devo Dessa, and Fish Up Bishop. Welcome, thanks for stopping by. Hope you're having a wonderful day too, Fish Up Bishop. Thank you. Also if you're somewhere where there doesn't seem to be a chat going on such as Twitch or Facebook, you might wanna head over to our Discord. So that is right here, it looks like this. That is at ateafru.it slash discount, not slash discount, slash discord. I have a fuzz on my glasses that was just distracting me. It's never gonna go away, it went away. What did I say? It's at ateafru.it slash discord. That's the discord that you see right there. And if you are coming over there for the first time, check out the live broadcast chat channel. That's the one that I have highlighted there and that's where people are hanging out during the show. People such as Sam J. Ohio, Super Daddy, DJ Devon3, Jim Hendrickson, Gary Z. Hello, thank you for popping on in onto the chat here. Hope I didn't miss anyone. And what's going on? What do we have here? So like I said, there are two product picks this week, which means you've got some choices to make. You can head to both of those QR codes there or to these URLs. It's products 5882 and 5888. Jump on in there. This show is, this actual live stream is taking place right inside of those pages. I'm double checking there, but the product team, Jelly, Travis and others have been hard at work. I know it's harder when we have two products like this. So thank you so much. We appreciate the extra effort and they have stashed away some of these so that there are a bunch of them ready for sale and they are half price. So head on over to those two URLs there. And before I say much more about it, what we'll do is jump back to the new, new, new product segment from the Ask an Engineer shows where these first appeared and Lady Aida is gonna tell us about these two products. Oh, my volume is a bit low, A. Let's see. Let me put that up a little bit. I don't want it to peek out. So let me know if that's good there, Jack Frost. Hey guy, volume is a bit low. Aida Fruit, right there. Thank you. Thanks for the note. All right, so here comes Lady Aida with the new, new, newness. It's the Power BFF. It's coming soon. We didn't quite get all the demos in, but I thought we would at least highlight if people could sign up to just chat about this on IonPI. But this is a board that lets you have five to 12 volts DC input and it will let you plug in your shower QT PI board on top. You also have a terminal block which you can use to get that power out or you can have power come in from the terminal block if you have a battery pack. And it features the MPM 3610. So it's a DC-DC buck converter. So it's very efficient and it'll give you a nice clean five volt 1.2 amps out. I'll be honest, I actually got 1.5 amps out when I did my load testing, but it's weighted for 1.2. And then there's a little mounting tabs because if you're gonna plug it into a DC jack, you wanna have some mechanical strength. So the version you'll get in the shop, you see has these four little mounting hole legs and you can break them off if you want to be more compact. And they'll show just the prototype real fast. And next week we'll have like a bigger, better demo. But this is my prototype before I added the legs. You can just plug into the DC power here. Maybe I can plug in here, see if this will work. And then boom, now it's running circuit Python, it's blinking, focus. Yeah, and you can do, like this is I think a nine volt, but we wanna do some projects where we wanted to power the QDPI from like a car or from a DC or battery pack where you wouldn't necessarily get five volts clean. So this will convert it down to five volts for you. So it's coming soon, but you can sign up and we'll have in the shop maybe later in this week. Yay, it's the Neo RGB Stemma board. This is the board I designed for myself because I was so tired of wiring up analog RGB LED strips with transistors and resistors and power connectors and like whatever, whatever. I wanna make it really easy to control analog LED strips. That's LED strips that don't have Neo pixels in them. A lot of them use five, sorry, these 12 volts or even higher, but 12 volts is the most popular. And so now I have a board where you have Neo pixel signal in like your standard Neo pixel that comes from any microcontroller or even a Raspberry Pi these days. And on the output, you have three common anode RGB channels plus power and ground to connect to the terminal block. And it acts like a single very, very bright, very large Neo pixel. You can also use this with anytime you have like an LED array that has PWMable inputs. This will basically do the PWMable control eight bits per channel, 24 bits total. And then you just treat it like a Neo pixel. So, again, wonderful if you have analog neon or LED strip or something you're, for some reason you want to, so definitely for long extensions, they're cheaper than using Neo pixels. And you don't have individual LED control within the strip, but maybe you don't need that. Maybe you want to like do a single collar for the entire thing. So I have a demo on overhead. So this is my standard at Mega 328 Metro Arduino compatible. And I'm powering it from a nine volt here. So this is nine volt power. I connect the red wire to the STEMA board from VIN, so that's nine volts, ground to ground. And then the Neo pixel signal, it thinks it's connected to a single Neo pixel pin six. This is a bright power LED telling you that the power is good. You can barely see it because it's only one LED, but there is a little bit of blinking going on on the signal, red LED over here. And then you just use the terminal screw block to connect red, green, blue. And then this black wire is VIN, so it's the 12 volt power. And then this just acts like a Neo pixels doing the Neo pixels world. So it's great because this can handle three amps per channel up to 16 volts. So if you have like a gigantic star RGB LED, or again, like you have a gigantic plate or an LED strips, and you don't have to be RGB LED strips. If you have white, like, you know, cool, warm or natural white, or sometimes there's LED strips that are analog that have color mixing. So you can have, you can change from cool to warm to neutral white. You could basically have this act as if it was a Neo pixel. And again, make it a lot easier to control. If you're using more than two amps total, we recommend not going through the JSTPH, just go through the terminal block. So you just power directly from the terminal block here. And you can control, again, you have nine amps total between all three channels. One thing I will mention is that if you're using RGBW LED strip, this only supports three channels. I haven't quite found a chip that supports four channels yet. That is Neo pixel compatible. So you have a choice of either just controlling three of the channels, or there is, you know, an output pin here. If you want to chain, you could connect the fourth channel on a second one of these and then just control it as it was the second Neo pixel afterwards. You have to do the logic for it. You can, you treat it as two Neo pixels. The first one is RGB and the second one is just W. But I'll let, you know, or sometimes again, some strips have five channels. Again, you'd use two of these one for each set of three. So I think this will make wiring a lot easier for people, definitely make my demos a lot faster. So hopefully folks enjoy it. I know Erin who does a lot of Neo pixel projects has already been excited. She's like, yeah, I can't wait to use this to already simplify some wiring on a project I did for a Tiki bar. She had me at Tiki bar. So these are my product picks of the week this week. It is a dual combo discount extravaganza. We have the Power BFF and we have the Neo RGB Stemma. So the Power BFF is made for your cutie pie to stick onto the top with some header pins. And in fact, it comes with the sockets that you need. So you'll solder those onto there and then you'll solder some male header pins on the bottom of your cutie pie. Slot it right into there. I'll show you a demo in a second. And what that allows you to do is plug in five to 20 volt DC either into the barrel plug here. This is a 2.1 millimeter barrel plug. Pretty typical for a DC power supply or to the terminal block. These are joined. So only plug into one of them as far as an input goes but you can use the other for output or kind of a pass through. So you'll plug in power up to 20 volts. It will use the buck converter to give you a nice clean five volts to drive the cutie pie. But this means that you still have that same 20 volt, 12 volt, nine volt, whatever it is that you gave it available to run another gizmo which is really the sweet spot of using this. Another really nice feature of this is it has some mounting holes on it so you can screw that down onto your project. I'll show you that in my demo. And the reason that we combined these is the other one here, this is the Neo RGB Stemma. So this is a really cool board, really clever. Normally when you have analog strips particularly analog LED strips that have the three LEDs mounted in them, red, green, blue, they're not Neo pixels. You can't control them that way. So you have to set up three FETs in order to control them, these transistors. And then the code can get a little complicated. This is really neat. What this does is it allows you to take your Neo pixel code, send it to this as if you think you're using one Neo pixel and it will then split out those as PWM signals onto the three common anode. So red, green, blue outputs that we have here and then you'll have the voltage pin also connected. Usually you'll have four wires on these types of strips. And then you just talk to it like it's one Neo pixel. The whole strip will change colors, fade, blink, anything you wanna do just like you're used to using your Neo pixel code. And you can do that with the Arduino, with the circuit Python, even WLED makes it really easy to use. So let me show you a few things here related to these. First of all, let's take a look at the product pages on these. Let me jump over to this right here. Okay, so here we have, if we refresh this, just wanna make sure they're in stock. So we have 78 of these in stock still. Half price, so you just throw that in your cart, you don't need a coupon code that's priced right now at $3.98. So there is, you can see on there we have the barrel connector, we have the terminal block there to screw your output if you're gonna be running something off of this besides just the QDPI. Here it is on the underside there. This also has a reset or enable type of pin, enable pin and a reset pin so you can wire up some switches to it if you want. And here's our second one. So this is the Neo RGB Stemma. You can see here this has a three pin Stemma connector. So you can use that to connect up to your power, ground and NeoPixel signal that comes onto this board and it's gonna output to that green terminal block there, the PWM signals you need to control the three colors of the RGB strip. Now you can power this in a smaller set right off of that voltage in from your microcontroller but more likely you're gonna have a bigger power source which is why I combined these two. So let's take a look real quick. Here is the learn guide for the Power BFF. So this will take you through, show you how to set it up. You can see there's a nice picture of a QDPI docked on top of it there. And here it's being powered off of a battery pack. You can use that on the terminal blocks or with a barrel connector or with a wall wart, regulated power supply, however you wanna control it or power it rather. And then here is the RGB, the Neo RGB Stemma in action. There you can see it's connected up to a Metro board and it's actually getting power from that but in my case I'm gonna be doing it a little differently using that Power BFF. And these are the types of strips that you'll typically run. So those look like a NeoPixel strip but they're not. These are single color or rather the whole strip is gonna be one color at a time but it can be, the whole strip can be changed multicolored. Typically you'll see these in room running LEDs around a room just to give it an overall color shift but it's not gonna be animating individual pixels. That's a NeoPixel and this is not that. This is an analog strip. Here's another nice example of one. So that's an RGB analog strip. You can control the whole strip, different colors. One thing I'll also mention is you can if you want to connect up multiple strips to the three different outputs on here so you could get yourself a fully red strip, a fully green strip and a fully blue strip and then combine those as if they are one big, huge NeoPixel or one big, huge analog RGB LED. So depending on your use you could drive all of those off of this still using NeoPixel code. So let's take a look at a couple of examples here. I'm gonna jump to the down shooter here. Actually let's go to the full down shooter view. So here you can see what I've got set up. I have the QT Pi plugged into the Power BFF. Power BFF is mounted to one of our little swirly grids. I have a 12 volt, I think five amp power supply plugged into the Power BFF. That is supplying power to the QT Pi, five volts that it needs and then you can see I'm running my power and ground from the Power BFF over the STEMA cable to the Neo RGB STEMA board and the white wire there is actually running to one of my GPIO pins. I just soldered it underneath there. So that is sending NeoPixel signals. It thinks there's a NeoPixel there. But we can see this happening here is my RGB strip is plugged into the red, green and blue and common anode lines. And so this is running through a nice little RGB type of demo or color fading demo. This one is an ESP32 Pico board. So it is on wifi and I'm actually using the WLED software to control it. So it's a really easy to configure, kind of no code solution. So here you can see I'll switch over to just a single color and now we can go through and just set it to individual colors. We can adjust that saturation and brightness. And then of course the fun part is when you go into some of these effects, like here's a little heartbeat effect and you can pick a color palette. So we can say I'm gonna use, here's the default color palette heartbeat effect, pick an individual color, pick color gradients. So that's all stuff that you can do here because even though this is not a NeoPixel, the little Neo RGB STEMA board makes your microcontroller think it's talking to one big long weird NeoPixel which is fantastic. Now what I'll do is I'm gonna switch out for a second setup here. And this one I actually, although I am, you'll see here, although I am still able to power this QDPi from the power BFF, I have a USB cable plugged into it so that we can code it in CircuitPython Live. So what you'll see here is I actually I'm just stealing one pin off of my STEMA QT connector there so that I didn't have to solder anything. And so that's acting as my NeoPixel out, but here is my STEMA board and here is a big giant strip of this analog RGB, analog RGB strip. Is that what we call it? Yeah, big analog RGB strip. Not digital, not NeoPixels, but we're gonna talk to it as if it were. So what I'll do is I'll switch over to my code view here. And so you can see what it's running right now is a sort of simple color wheel. It's running through a color wheel code. But what I wanted to do was interrupt that. So in my REPL, I'm gonna interrupt that. And then I'll show you just line by line how simple it is to talk to this. So I'm gonna go ahead and import the board definition and NeoPixel. I'm gonna create a NeoPixel strip here named strip that has a single LED. So that's what this one is here and a pretty low brightness. Just because I plugged things in wrong and screwed them down and was lazy, I'm going to switch the GRB order to BRG. It's just which one is red, green and blue. And then I'm going to go ahead and set the one NeoPixel that's connected to this to black or off. And then I can go in here and pick individual colors if I want this to be green. I still have it plugged in wrong, don't I? Okay, that should have been green, RGB, right? Oh, that's funny, let's go here. Yeah, and that'll be green. Okay, I still have the order wrong. What the heck order is this thing supposed to be? Here's red, red I think is actually connected properly. There we go. So you can imagine now any of your NeoPixel code if we go ahead and run this code this up there at the top again, that's what's on the board. You can see we're running through one RGB NeoPixel that gets sent out over the stem of QT or rather over the stem of board to adjust this giant strip as if it were NeoPixel. So really fun to work with and a really great combo. So you can see there, these two playing really well together, particularly happy about having a way to mount I can light that with this strip actually, a way to light the, sorry, I'm really happy about having a way to mount the QT Pi to something like this swirly grid here because we have the little mounting points on the Power BFF, so that's kind of nice. And you can also see if I unplug this circuit Python example that I had there from USB, it's still running because it's all running off of that Power BFF. So there comes 12 volts incoming to the Power BFF sending that 12 volts along to my strip here and it's sending five volts to run the QT Pi up top. So, and now I've loosened a connection and it's flashing at me. So we'll move that off to the side there. So let's see, what questions do we have before we go any further? I'm gonna check in the chats here. None, okay, good, we're good and clear. Yeah, so Jeff Hunt had asked if the standoffs come. I think these were what you were referring to, hopefully. Maybe not, oh yeah. These are nylon 2.5, M2.5 standoffs that I'm using to connect it to this if that's the question. So this did not come with those just because you might have different mounting needs and want different lengths of standoffs and such. So that's using our little nylon M2.5 kit that we sell in the store, but any M2.5 fastener will work. You can see I'm using one on the Neo RGB Stemma as well there. So it does come with the header pins or sockets, header sockets to plug your QT Pi down into. So yeah, so these are some of the different types of strips that you can use here. If you go to the LED strips page, you'll see some you don't want. Digital RGB LED, you don't want those. In fact, I don't know how you talk to those. They're not NeoPixels, they're a different digital RGB type. That's not what we're using. This you could use is the analog RGBW, so it has a fourth color that you won't be able to address from the one Stemma, but you could say, hey, you know what, I've got some, I want maybe just red, green, and the white LED and I don't need blue for anything. You could pick those three to plug in or as Lady Aida said, you could have a second Neo RGB Stemma connect it as if it's a second NeoPixel and then you'll be able to just plug in that fourth LED that's on those. So no digitals, this one's probably an analog here. Any of them that say analog for sure, side light flexible, analog RGB, those are great. That's similar to the one I'm using here. It's nice, sort of neon style one. This would also be great for doing neon style signs. So if you do, you know, Joe eats, Joe eats pizza. If you have like blinking single color strips, you could have each of those strips plugged into one of the connections on that Neo RGB Stemma. So nice way to do that sort of thing without having to wire up all your own transistors, which is great. All right, I think that's gonna do it. Yes. Let me know if you have any other thoughts, questions, comments in the chat. Otherwise we will wrap that up. Let me put that right there. I'm gonna crank it up because under this lighting, you can't really see that. In fact, let's turn this, let's turn that down a little bit. Are these, yeah. All right, so let's see. In WLED here, crank up that brightness. Woo, yeah, that'll work. And how about for a blink rainbow? That's pretty good. We can adjust the speed. Yeah. Yes, that's gonna do it right there. Okay. So those are, let me go to a single view here. That's gonna do it for today. Those are my dual product picks this week. It is the Power BFF for QDPI and the Neo RGB Stemma. For Adafruit Industries, I'm John Park. This has been JP's product pick of the week and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.