 It's me John Park and it's time for JP's product pick of the week. Thank you all so much for stopping by. I love that song Welcome to the people in our chats. You may be watching this on one of the many platforms to which we stream, but the Chats that we look at our our own Discord server you head to a to fruit i t slash discord and jump jump on in over there That's what our server looks like Look for the live broadcast chat channel or head on over to YouTube keeping an eyeball on the chat there Hey tackle the world and Dave Odessa welcome. Thanks for stopping by. Hey Mike P and Kyoshi and C Grover Dexter, I think Todd Kurt was there Jim Hendrickson. Hello. Hello. Welcome. Thanks for stopping by so If you're not familiar, this is the show where I picked something that we have in the store sometimes a new product This is a fairly new one today And I demo it for you. I give you a humongous discount I think we got 50% off this week on the product pick And if you want to get a jump start on things head on over to that URL right there or that QR code and that will That will take you to the product page for this product inside of which this video is still playing But your discount is right there. You just refresh the page if you haven't in a while if you're over there I'm gonna do the same myself right now, and we should see that drop by 50% All right. Yes. Wow So we've stashed a bunch of these in the back Just to sell on the show. You don't need a coupon code Just put them in your cart buy them during the show during the time period of this show And you'll get the discount. You've got a little bit of a grace period afterward But it's not all day long or anything wacky like that. It's just during the show. So you are You're getting your discount by Jumping in on this now time is of the essence so Before I go any further this is one for which we did get a lady Ada new new new right before she took off to deal with other matters So I'm gonna play that for you right now. Here is the more to talk about this week's product pick take it away lady Ada The Neo pixel driver BFF so it's actually I designed this after Aaron did that project with the She was she's doing the Jelly fishes and she's like why I wanted to have a cutie pie And cut the new pixel and I was like, oh, you know, there should be a little board that kind of does all the the tough work Of that for you. So looking on the the back here In the middle is That little chip in the middle is a 74 hct 125 1g a single gate level shifter that will take the three volt logic level and Shifted up to five volts, which I thought was a nice little add-on and it uses the USB five volts to do that It's by default using pin A3 and there's jumpers you can cut inside of the jumpers So you can use like most see your RX or TX. There's no like, you know, dedicated neopixel pen Instructions are on the back. You saw it back to back You can use sockets or of course you can solder it directly if you like I perhaps like sockets and then the connector that's on most neopixels is not This is JST SH does not come in a surface mount version. So we put in a JSTPH connector And I'll show it and then I'll show you how you would connect to a neopixel strip That's not So hold on let me find my Great, here's my Okay, so let's go to the overhead So here I've got it RP 2040 QDPI, which is a great neopixel driver. It has PIO support And then you can see on the back here. I've just we've soldered a little socketed Versus I can remove it, but you don't have to you can solder directly if you want and for short strips you can power it directly from the This cable like this is a this is we stock these neopixel strips that have the JSTPH on them You get five volts from USB ground from USB and that level shifted data So here's the neopixel demo a lot of neopixel strips like you know, they don't they've come with raw wires or they come with JSTSH and again, there's no Adapter there's no surface mount version of that connector. However, you can use JST to socket Cables and then you just plug these in to the wires. Just plug the wires in and they're they're color-coded So red is power green is black is ground and white is signal. We also have a version with Plug male headers. So you know those you plug it in and then now you have a Removable plug version if you're powering a ton of neopixels like more than 30 honestly I wouldn't power it from the USB port I would have a separate five volt power supply In which case you would just connect the ground and signal and then you could cut the red wire off or just you know Tie it around here and ignore it and then you would power the strip separately But have the signal and ground still come from this board, you know, we have Wi-Fi versions of the QDPis if you want to make a W LED project. This would be a great plug-and-play way to do that It also works with the shower boards from seeds. So you want to use their Bluetooth board Make a Bluetooth neopixel project. It's just you know, it's a very inexpensive little add-on But it should just make neopixel projects a lot easier Hey, and who doesn't like easier? so Let's see. This is a cool one. Let me let me jump to the down shooter here and We can take a look at that right there flip that over we've got some a nice silk screen action on there and This is my product pick of the week this week. It is the Neopixel driver BFF for QDPi and jou boards This gives you level shifted 5 volt logic and a really nice easy JST connector for plugging in your neopixel strips You just attach this to the bottom side of a QDPi or jou board and you are off to the races lighting up your neopixels There's a great way to power it, which is over the USB from your QDPi and that's gonna allow it to use the 5 volts You can also run this off of a battery. However, I've tried it. It works and what I'd like to do is first of all Let's take a look at the product page This is it right here. You can see we have a nice Little example of it. They're plugged into one of our JST cable-ended neopixel strips We have these in a few flavors and this is The simplest way to do it really if you get one of these you just plug and play it's it's wonderful You can see here the some nice images of the board And here's an example of it being plugged to the underbelly of a QDPi using some sockets and header pins as Lady Aida mentioned You can also just solder it directly if you want to get a really nice tight little package for that And you know actually I've got some nice big pictures Posted right here. You can see it. So some things to mention about this It defaults to using a 3 as the data pin so in your code you would say hey I'm building a neopixel object and it's gonna be on pin a 3 now if you have other plans for pin a 3 if you're using it For something else, maybe you've got some bunch of potentiometers and you want to read those analog ins on your analog pins Don't worry. You can simply cut the trace on that one little you can see there's a Jumper that has a little connection in the middle you can cut that trace And then solder across one of the other sets of jumpers. So you could make this connect to TXRX SCL Mosey or SCK and then the default being the a3 You'll also notice there's a pad there. This is SIG You can see this from the Sure the bottom side of it as well So that pad right there that circular pad that is the signal pin. So that is the pin That is going to the neopixels So you could solder to this directly if you needed to if you're doing some other kind of setup but normally what you'll do is just connect it to the cutie pie and Then use either a3 or connect up these jumpers to pick something else now as Lady Aida mentioned This has the 5 volt regulator or rather this has the 5 volt level shifter on it So it is really up to spec on neopixels I know a lot of times we abuse things and we use 3 volt logic on our 5 volt neopixels and things mostly turn out Okay, but sometimes you can get flaky behavior This is really the proper way to do it is to get that level shifted to the same voltage as we're driving it with which is 5 volts in this case and You can drive around 30 to 60 neopixels with it So this type of strip right here. This is a 30 neopixel strip. This is a great one to drive as you Work with neopixels what you'll find is that you can roughly say it's 20 milliamps per Neopixel per color So if you're just lighting up red on one neopixel you're using 20 milliamps if you light one up as white So that's rg and be all full blast now you've used 60 So you can do some math there to figure out what it'll handle and I think it says in the spec sheet Which we'll look at in a second with the with the maximum is recommended for that so Now let's take a look at it in in action. So I'm gonna jump back down to my down shooter and Let's Off of there. I'm gonna pull out just a little bit on the camera. So Here is this was this idea that Liz had for color coding these so that you'd have less less Likely chance of plugging things in backwards because it is symmetrical and you'll see here on the BFF It says USB so it says the USB is up on the QT pie. So that's proper orientation. So I just picked some color color matched headers there so that I could plug that in and know that everything was in the right orientation and Let me focus this a little bit better Back this way So you can see here. I've got a QT PI RP 2040. I've got the BFF and then I'll plug in The the neopixel strip here that I have with the JST connector So only can plug in one way. That's a keyed Connection there and then I'm gonna simply plug in a USB C cable. This is going to a Powered hub on my computer And you can see there I'm lighting up some neopixels Lighting them away, and I'll show you this actually let me zoom out so you can see this a little Little better here because it's a it's a big strip and look better with More coverage. Let me see if I tilt that down. You can see a little bit better So this is running the Cable up there. This is running on circuit Python using the LED animation library And this is the simple comet using a few of these comet animations in different colors to zip along the the neopixels there so it's a fun way to to light things up and the other example I wanted to show you if I I'm gonna go ahead and unplug power on that and Lady to mention that we have some cables that you can use to make your own So here's one of these neopixel surface mount rings that we sell I don't know if we still have these in stock, but we had these at one point and I took one of our JST connectors that has pins on one end and just soldered it directly to that so that Gives me an easy way to plug this into My BFF there best friend forever. So now if I go ahead and plug this in you'll see it's actually got more LEDs on there than the code that I was using so it's only gonna light up 30 of them But let's take a look actually at what that looks like in code. This is a pretty standard neopixel code that will use For this inside of circuit Python or Arduino. So right now I've got Board imported neopixel and then the LED animation library. I'm bringing in comet I'm bringing in some colors and I'm bringing the animation sequence so that I can run multiple animation sequences one after another Here you can see I've picked board a3 and that's the default on here unless I cut that jumper and solder up a different one And then I'm saying how many pixels I've got on here. This one I think is 44 and then You know lower the brightness on this a little bit just because we've got it on camera and it's pretty Pretty dang bright about point two and the pixel speed is good the Interval speed I'm gonna set this to a second just to see if that Since we have more pixels on here if that gets us through the full comet before the next one starts up Yeah, there we go So now I've changed that to use the proper number of neopixels for the for the type of board I've got and it's all a really nice easy connection with that BFF on there So let's see. Let me let me let me know if you got any questions And We'll also take a look at the Library or the rather the learn guide for this one question We got from Kayoshi is what's the advantage of using this instead of just driving it directly aside from the removable three-pin connector? That pretty much is it other than the level shifting and the capacitors on there so sometimes you'll see in our our uber guide on neopixels really the proper way is to have a Capacitor and a resistor and five volt logic. That's really what the neopixels want. We get away with a lot So this makes it very very proper Can solve problems with the first neopixel being weird colors that that happens But that's tends to be on older neopixels the newer ones seem a little more tolerant And then yes, like you said having this this three-pin connector That's really the the big reason why Lady Aida built this originally for Erin was she was doing an installation with these LED jellyfish and she just wished she had an easy way to connect things up So instead of having to wire up your own connectors on to the cutie pie now you've got this purpose built for it and Let's see Any other questions in there Think so, so let's take a look here over at the learn guide Bring that up on my system Here you can see this takes you through All of the overview info on this gives you the pin out for it lets you know how to Adjust the jumpers Selections depending on the pin you want to send out on there's the list of pins that you can use And then we've got example code in circuit Python as well as Arduino And then we have the download section here, which will tell you Is data sheet for the level shifter we're using as well as the schematics and files So I guess we don't have info there on the maximum number Lady Aida said give it 30 to 60 neo pixels at max, but don't go full blast white So I'm guessing that 60 times 60 is more current than it can then it can draw 60 times 60 milliamps So somewhere in there your your mileage will vary Let's see Questions we've got I don't think so So head on over here. You'll see it is $1.98 today. So a significant discount And depending on the types of neo pixels you have you may already have some that have this type of Connector on there, which makes life really really easy We also have different flavors of these with with different ends on them. There's alligator clip ones There's sockets. There's pins. So you can pick up some of those cables as well if you need them and Let me see if there's Nothing else. I'm forgetting That is gonna do it. So that's the that's the site you want to go to if you're just joining us And you want to go quickly jump in on that discount action You can get up to 10 of them and no resellers allowed So you can get a whole bunch of these maybe pick up some cutie pies and some neo pixel strips along the way and do some some Do some props and cosplay and decorations holiday stuff. I believe we're past Pretty close to or past the shipping deadline for for any Christmas stuff. So I don't think Not sure, but I don't think you'll you'll you'll make that maybe unless you're in New York City They might be getting a same day I Think that's gonna do it. So thanks everyone for stopping by Just so you know, I'll be back tomorrow night for the workshop show And then there will not be a product pick the week next week, but there will be another workshop show next Wednesday Just take some time off for some of these holidays. All right, so That right there Pull this off here. Oh wait. Here's my spare That right there is my product pick of the week this week it is the neo pixel driver BFF for cutie pie and show boards and Hang this one Thanks everyone for stopping by for eight different industries. I'm John Park and this has been JP's product pick of the week. Bye. Bye