 Welcome to the show, thank you all so much for stopping by, it is time for this week's episode of JP's product pick of the week. And I'm really excited to have you here, I'm very excited about this week's product, it's a fun one to talk about and to show off, and it's going to be a fun one I think for people to get at an incredible discounted price because we have it for half off this week. So if we were just talking in the chat about jumping guns, if you want to jump the gun and head right there, do it. This is the QR code and the URL for this week's product pick. If you head there, you can watch this video from inside of there and you can buy this week's product pick for 50% off, no coupon code is needed, just put it in your cart and buy it before the end of the show, after the show we will shut down the discount. So head on over there and check it out. Before I go any further, I'm going to first of all say yes, it is not exactly what you think, it's kind of what you think, I definitely have a blue tooth there, but it is not 100% exactly what you think. And so what I'm going to do is have Lady Aida jump back in time a little bit and talk about it and then I'll tell you why it's not what we all think. Alright, take it away Lady Aida. The LED driver board for the LED glasses panel that we released last week. These will be in the shop very very soon, we're just wrapping them up, but it's kind of like a cross between itsy bitsy and a feather, but it doesn't have any GPIO, it's meant to be very slim and it's designed for the LED glasses, but I'll tell you it's actually kind of a nice dev board if you just want a blue tooth programmable dev board that's very slim and very minimal and it has a couple things built in. So I am, I'm modeling, I'm wearing, who are you wearing? I am wearing the LED glasses driver. The glasses driver is on the side here and again it's designed to be very slim so it sits on the side of the glasses and as a STEMI QT port so it plugs in and you know you can then plug it into your your LED glasses through a STEMI QT connector. It is just an NR 52 840 board. We love the NR 52 840. It's a Bluetooth module. It's Arduino compatible, it's like a Python compatible. It's very powerful, BLE is supported by like you know every mobile phone, many laptops, desktop computers. So let's go to the top down and I'll, top down and I'll show the details. Okay so here's what we get because it is a little bit interesting because it's not a standard format. So again it's as slim as possible. On the right hand side down here there's the Bluetooth module so we've got the you know certified NR 52 840 module. Here there's a little mini NeoPixel so you can do RGB indicating on the side. It's good for the boot loader and stuff. There's also a single LED called LED for blinking. On the bottom there there is a 2 megabyte QSPY flash and so that's used by CircuitPython for file storage. It's also used by Arduino. Above that is an accelerometer so you can use it for tilt and motion sensing. Above that is a microphone, a PDM digital mic, good for if you want to do like machine learning projects, very minimal ones, audio reactive projects. There's an on-off switch so it'll turn on-off power to the entire board. There is a battery connector in the center there for LiPo batteries or AAA battery packs. I'm using a AAA battery pack. So there's a LiPo charger circuit but it's not activated by default. That's because you kind of have to pick one or the other. Either you're going to have LiPo charging or you use alkaline batteries or nickel metal hydride batteries but you can't have both because the LiPo charging circuit should not be activated. If you have LiPo charging and you have a non-rechargeable battery, you're pushing current into the battery. It's not a good idea especially with alkaline so they could damage them, they could leak. So by default the LiPo battery is not activated to the LiPo charger so if you go to the bottom of the board which is the next photo, you'll see on the bottom there's a little thing that says optional LiPo charge. You short that closed with a bit of solder and that will put power to the LiPo charger. Voila, you can now use LiPo batteries and charge it through but we thought for the glasses purpose and wearables purpose, a lot of people don't like using LiPo batteries. Okay, then even more to the left there's a reset button and then there's a right angle button labeled SW that's a user switch so you can click or double click to have it select things. There's a USB-C for programming it, debugging it, dragging files, charging up the battery if you want to use it and then all the way to the left there is a STEMI QT port so that's what you would plug into if you want to add external sensors or devices and then there's four slots that you can use to attach it mechanically to whatever you're doing. I mean again it's designed for the LED glasses but I think there's a lot of people who are like I just want a simple small Bluetooth or energy board. I can program it with Arduino, I can program it with circuit python, it's the well-known NRF 5840, it's got USB-C, battery charging USB-C on off and just a couple sensors right just enough that I can do motion projects or audio projects and then over the STEMI QT port which are feather and it's you don't have you can add other sensors if you'd like so I think this could actually be a good dev board for other wearable projects as well. Yeah that's right, see it's not what we think, it's somehow different and I like it. Let's let's have a look. Here it is, hey oh hey Slapy what are you doing here? Let me just try to safely extract that from your mouth, thanks buddy why don't you get out of here, never speak of that. There it is that's my product pick of the week this week it is the NRF 52 840 sensor board. This is also known as the LED glasses board because it was originally released to drive our LED glasses like these in fact let me turn these on you can see it mounted there on the side it's got a AAA battery pack plugged into it right now it's doing some cool sound reactive stuff but that's not why I'm here for this today so forget this thanks Slapy you can have that. The reason I'm looking at this today is this is an incredibly cool dev board for all kinds of wearable projects and remote projects because it is kind of like LeMore said it's sort of like a feather except there's no pins on it there's no headers for pins or no sockets for pins anywhere on it so it makes it small it's got great mounting holes on it that's one of the things that is tricky about something like the QD Pi this is no easy way to mount it this one's got these nice big zip tie compatible mounting holes so you can run them right through there and lash them to stuff and it has Bluetooth BLE capability you can use that for things like Bluetooth MIDI Bluetooth HID it has an accelerometer on it so you can do tilt kind of stuff it has that little user switch button there so you can click on it you can code it in Arduino as well as circuit python you've got a neopixel for status an LED for status you can plug into USB-C for coding and power you can also plug into your battery right next door there and actually another really nice thing about it is that the ports that you want are both on the same side so it makes building small enclosures for it really easy if you have to plug into USB easy if you're then keeping a battery plugged or unplugging it for some reason it's all right there what else so unlike a feather we don't have any pins on it to plug into things but we have so many products now that allow you to plug over STEM a qt port for i2c that this is starting to become really viable for a lot of projects if you look at a lot of the types of boards that we've been coming out with sensors and inputs in particular they use the stem of qt so you don't need to solder stuff you don't need to put pins on and stick it in a breadboard so really interesting to consider this as a general purpose dev board i want to show some demos of it in action so here i'm gonna switch to my down cam and i'll put a little miniature me here and i might need to refocus the camera but what i'm going to show is here's my phone and it's running a little synthesizer program it's either free or cheap from mode called anamogue and then over here i have whoo it's making noises all right it's going to make noises i have our nrf 52 840 development board there little sensor board i am using the accelerometer i'm using that sensor and that's actually turning one of the knobs it's the drive on this filter in fact you can watch that knob maybe you hear that if i lean a little closer and i'm using a nice and easy little plug-in stem of qt fader here so you'll uh if you watch those little circles on there and listen to it as i move the fader all right and so in fact let me show you from a different perspective on here uh you can see i've got my little phone there that's listening over bluetooth to what i'm doing with this neat little package i've got a little lipo battery under there i haven't sort of um zip tied this together or or made it into a neat little bundle but you can see it's this little handheld controller for ble could be something for h id for a game input device uh for changing the volume on your computer all over bluetooth and we can add whatever little add-ons we want using i squared c and you can chain them so you can have a bunch of stuff but i thought this was really cool let me turn down the volume on that thing there or turn off the notes uh i thought this was really cool to consider this board as just a dev board and not worry about the glasses part of it uh so let's have a look at some things if we jump over to the web page for the product you can see here this is product id 5217 uh i'll refresh there hopefully they're still in stock we had a lot of them to start with uh so you should be good i think we had over 200 of these in stock uh 12 dollars 48 cents us great price for this board considering all that's packed onto there uh and like i said you may already have one if you got the eight a box that came with uh these glasses here um well maybe leave this uh connected and use your glasses as the glasses but now get yourself a spare uh dev board or two that you can use for different types of cosplay props wireless projects uh little tiny gizmos um another thing i wanted to do is show you a learn guide that charlin g did uh this is a really cool one this was using the accelerometer uh to measure when you stop pedaling your exercise bike uh and using the bluetooth ble it's sending consumer control to pause your video so if you're watching something on your ipad while you're biking when you stop biking it stops the video so really nice project and you can see here she made a cool little enclosure for it which uses a small lipo battery the board and then uh that's about it you've got a couple ports on there for access to the usb to the battery the user switch and then the reset so if we take a look at the next page here you can see some uh some nice little shots of that and that was all velcroed around the crank uh on the bike here's a nice little stop motion animation i love this i should do this more this is a great uh great way to show how some things is put together so cute uh so like le more said you do have uh a little adjustment to make on the back of the board there is a jumper there and by default that is not bridged that means it is not going to charge it's not going to use the charging over usb and that's just to keep it safe if you're using alkaline batteries uh if you are going to use lipo then you'll bridge that little solder uh gap there and and be able to charge uh what else let's take a look at our code for this so oh i've just made all my screens go bananas all over the place uh one second uh dj devon said attach a bunch of you to yourself and go dancing uh it'd be fun so here is uh if we take a look in fact let me go to do i have a view where we can also yeah let me put this oh here's here's the view i wanted hold on that stuff out of there okay uh so what i'm going to do is actually plug this one in just so you can see uh some of the output i will uh tell the i'm not playing any notes you'll still see it it trying to do things you see that knob moving there but i'm going to plug this into usb just so we can look at the code and look at the output uh on it so with this plugged in you can see there that yellow light turned on it's now charging uh if you take a look at my code over here i've got uh basic bluetooth stuff happening so i'm importing uh the ble libraries that i need and ble midi i'm importing the seesaw libraries because i'm using the uh plug-in slide potentiometer there and also using the onboard accelerometer so this list 3dh is the little accelerometer that's built on right there right above that that flash i can zoom in a bit so you can see this better and if you look in the uh code window you'll see down below i am printing out just the fader values as they happen uh i can't remember i also yeah i'm also printing out the accelerometer so you can see i'm taking the accelerometer and remapping that to zero to 127 which are useful midi values you can also do things like i think you can do tap detection so if you just want it to like pause something for you uh might might do double tap i can't remember or really crude accelerometer stuff like basically flat means something's playing all the way tilted up means it turns off that makes it really easy to use it in wearable context without worrying about the the tiny nuances of the accelerometer creating a havoc for you uh and then there's actually nothing surprising about the rest of the code it looks like any particularly uh midi bluetooth type of code i i yank a lot of it from my midi ble power glove project and then made some adjustments and added the the fader on there but it is straightforward to use you can use it like i said with circuit python or with arduino and it is a heck of a board so let me see let me jump over and check if there's any questions or thoughts over in our chats uh in the youtube chat oh geez there's some very blue teeth going on there uh it was dangerous to just scroll through this without looking first not too dangerous uh yeah dj devin says if you need bluetooth and i squared c only for your project it's perfect probably also great for led strips change the color of your phone using blue fruit app yeah you can definitely use a blue fruit app with this i don't think we have an easy way to connect to non i squared c leds because there's not a break out for for a digital pin for using one of our like jst connectors however i believe you could tell the pins that are that are part of the stem of qt i squared c to act as a as a digital out so you would just need to make sure you have a small stem of qt connector to uh to your led strip but definitely doable uh i you see how i changed my mind about that as i thought my way through of course you can do that uh let's see what else uh yeah i think that's it okay so thanks everyone for stopping by uh i hope you like this one i hope you head on over here and get yourself a bunch because that's a that's a terrific price on a really cool uh board really great dev board and it doesn't just have to be for your um led glasses projects so i'm going to go ahead and prepare this one here throw a little zip tie through it uh and that way there's my product pick of the week this week it is the nrf 52 840 sensor board aka led glasses board uh that is going to do it for today remember head on over to that site that url right there if you want to get the discount because it's about to go away no coupon code needed just go and get yourself one or some i think the limit is 10 uh and have those on hand for your next bluetooth dev types of projects uh thanks everyone for stopping by for a different industries i'm john park this has been jp's product pick of the week and i will see you next time bye bye it's kind of what you think