 All right, what is this everybody and welcome to show and tell so we do every Wednesday at 7 30 p.m People from around the community Digikey and Adafruit included come on by and show us what you're working on give us updates shows your 3d printing You're soldering your DAY keyboards, whatever you got. We're gonna kick it off with Kevin We're gonna call people on time. We'll be out of here at 755. So Kevin from Digikey From You changed my name. Yes now Kevin Digikey. Okay, that works, you know, as long as it has digikey in it That's no you got the digikey logo. So you're So It is what it is. That's fine What I'm working on this week. I finally got these in today. I got a couple of these the Pico's in yay I am really looking forward to the feather Pico and all the other Pico ecosystem So you guys have coming down the pipeline of checking them out on your website Really excited about it. Okay checking like a half an hour because there might be some going in like for the show. Oh Only between you and me and the rest of the internet Okay, I am gonna have my finger on the clicker So I couldn't wait, you know, I know everything's excited. So I just got the Pico running with simple circuit Python Neopixel code and This was the easiest Product that I was able to get circuit Python running on I was extremely impressed It was smooth quick easy example code was great. I'm really looking forward to it Awesome. Yes Um, it's it's super cool to see a new chip Come into the ecosystem and it's I mean, I'm sure digikey will stock reels of those chips as well So when people are waiting for them When they're available, that's where you get them make your own RP 2040 boards we got a couple So yeah, we have this feather coming out a couple other boards that will soon be stuck to each key as well Yes, I'm really looking forward to it and speaking of the RP 2040 the Pico ecosystem We do have a Kind of like a podcast. We're going to call it another helping of pie. It's going to be a round table panel discussion with A bunch of people from the industry one of them is going to be john park who I'm Assuming will be on the show here in a little bit This is going to be on pie day. So check the digikey socials for more information on that Okay, you've got nobody better JP's exactly He's a workshop. He's just going to run the show. He's gonna. Yeah, watch out JP. They're gonna make you run the podcast All right. Thanks for coming by the digikey corner And uh, yeah, we'll we'll keep checking in on rp 24. You keep building those projects. Check out JP's guide. They just published on making your own diy mechanical keyboard Yes, he's got some great stuff. Thanks guys. Take care. All right. Thanks, Kevin All right next up melissa. What's you got going on? Hi, I have this little device is called a micro kin back one And uh, it's just like a little replica of a computer that was built in the 70s And it has a few programs on here. You can program it to various Uh programs, uh, can hold up to 256 bytes of memory Yeah, it has some interesting like programs that you can load on it like if you hold stop and hit five And then hit start it has a little blanky one here. All right. All right And I have a youtube video on my channel coming out where I build this and kind of demonstrate it That's coming in probably a few days. Okay. So this is like a modern recreation of like this old Simple led button based computer where you like load programs and by pressing buttons. Yeah, exactly. Cool All right, so people are like, how how did microcontrollers get programmed before circuit python? We've like this Exactly dragon drop makes it a lot easier, but uh, it does I mean, this is cool. Did you put that on your bag? It looks sweet. Yeah. All right Nice work melissa. Thank you your retro computers Um, okay next step scott Hello Perfect timing. So I've been working on Uh, how we define flash, uh settings in circuit python particularly for the rp20 40 boards that are imminent Uh, such as this one that I that I will tease Oh Um, I was I got an early one because I was helping fix it. Um So, yeah, this is toml toml is something like yaml or jason Um, it's better than jason simply because it has comments If I just uh, show you this giga device one We can see here that there's two comments about uh, what it's for and then some settings around that specific device Um, but there are also also settings that are common to all giga device Stuff along with all flash stuff. So I made this tool called cascade toml And what it'll do is that it will kind of squish together a series of toml files to give you like the overall settings So if I just go up to my Uh, autocomplete here or my history you can see we do cascade toml cascade filter and then I give it a skew And when I do that I get a bigger toml file back That includes both data from the path and data from like a higher level file Um, I think this might actually be broken a little bit. So I'm gonna have to fix it But the idea is is that once you have this file you can load it into another python script and generate Kind of like whatever specific form you need. So it might be uh, Like for the rp2040 it's that like 250 ish bytes of flash initialization code or on the imx It's this other struct that they've defined or in other circuit python. It's another struct that we've had So this is centralizing kind of all those settings for all the different flashes that we support in circuit python And hopefully in a way that people can use it in their own projects as well Yeah, as we do more execute in place, this is going to be essential, you know, we we kind of skirt it around doing this But now it's it's we have to we have to do it Yeah execute in place makes it hard because everybody has their own way of like defining how to get it going um, so yeah for sure and uh, if people want to check that out You can go to github.com slash ader fruit slash cascade toml or github.com slash Slash ader fruit slash nvm.toml. So this it's nvm for non volatile memory because we actually support mram as well Max added that for the satellite stuff. I think i'm like, that's what we're saying Yeah, the kubesat sees that Yeah, I mean, absolutely. You can you can use mram and you don't have to worry about your uh chip getting frazzled Okay, this is a really good stuff. Thank you for for kicking this off Yeah, we're really making circuit python a very fully featured Um programming system Yeah, and hopefully breaking out the best pits best bits for folks doing other embedded stuff Just we were talking about this earlier just like tiny usb So hopefully this will be one of those things people build on as well All right. Thank you scott. Thanks scott and uh, check out my stream tomorrow for all the details yeah Okay, we'll get a get the word out on uh ask an engineer as well. Yes Awesome weeks deep dive with scott is thursday Yep all tunnel all the time Okay, thanks scott except jb Hey guys So I have appeared something i'm very proud of which is this guide Uh, I just published this guide on building my little uh macro keyboards using the pico And I so I've worked on this a couple of weeks of of the past couple Thursday shows of my workshop show. I showed how to design the Circuit to use the pico as mechanical keyboard and took it all the way through to having pcbs made. I have these I sent off for some pcbs that came in put them together They worked and built up the keyboards and then I had the uh the pleasure of Making an epic mega guide that really shows every single step of the thing I left no stone unturned and i'm really proud because I think that It can serve as a good intro for people who are wanting to make the leap from prototyping stuff on a breadboard Or maybe hand wiring it on to a perma proto board or or a perf board and want to actually have a pcb made without necessarily learning a steeper learning core Curve more robust program like eagle or or key cad chi cad however that's pronounced And so a lot of people are use fritzing and so This guide here. There's many many pages that'll take you through But here's one where we've taken what we've learned in previous pages and done a just a four switch Uh version of the board and we go through both the the breadboard view and the schematic view to kind of optimize and clean up our circuit and learn some concepts about Things like net labels and some symbols And then take it up through to building up the board properly and checking it to make sure that it's Manufacturable and then sending off gerber files to have them made so I'm really excited about this and i'm hoping this will lead to Some some more people grabbing fritzing and using it for for this type of purpose for for really building out a project Yeah, I think it's great because you know a thousand people have these pico boards. They're low cost And you know, you still might want to have a complicated enough project that you want to have a pcb But you don't want to solder in that raw rp2040 chip. It's not it's not the easiest chip to solder for beginners Yeah, this is a really great Intermediary, right? It's like you can still make custom boards. Yeah And you know made a keyboard, but I think you know accessibility projects also You know you solder on this big thing that's easy It takes care of the tough stuff and then go to town with fritzing, which is yeah, you know a great beginner program for circuit board design So this is a quick plan. Everyone should go check it out. It's live now on the learning system Yeah, go check it out. It's there and then I'll give a little teaser for something that's coming up on my show tomorrow i'm going to be doing a A project that involves a visual effects trick Sort of a chroma key visual effects trick, but one little element of the project that i'm excited about is My buddy Todd curt built a project last week that plugged a Rotary encoder knob directly into a cutie pie There's a way to to tell the pins to be what you need so that you can plug in all five pins of the rotary encoder And it just it's almost like a smart rotary encoder. It's a it's a That runs circuit python basically at this point. Uh, and in my case, it's also going to drive some some neopixels Todd made a media knob and a midi controller some other projects out of his And it's probably probably published that in the uh, micro python on hardware python or hardware guys So you can go and find that but i'm i'm gonna i've grabbed that idea and i'm using that to make a little controller for this For this vfx project. I'll be showing all right. Thank you jp. All right. We got a lot of people So we're going to all people came in so erin Hello, what's your project off? uh, I this week have a shadow box project and I don't know if i'm going to be able to show it too Well in this light but uh, it is it looks okay. It looks much better in the dark But um, I'll I'll show a share my screen so you can see what it looks like But just so you can get an idea It's got a mag tag and a neopixel strip just plugged into it going around the edge of just this shadow box frame That I got at the craft store and then a whole bunch of different layers inside That I cut out on my vinyl cutter and let me go ahead and share my screen so you can see what it looks like In the dark. I even made a little time lapse of it. So let's see here All right, can you see that? Yeah, okay So um as you can see the the mag tag up in the top is showing the time and its wi-fi clock is actually connected to the internet and um It is getting a data feed for what time and what longitude and latitude you are and the cool thing is that uh At different times of day it will change colors. Um, and this is a test mode So it still says 1140, but this is my sunset color Feature so every day at sunset and sunrise it will um Change the color palette real slowly to This and then it changes to a starry night at night So it basically knows what time of day it is and shows a different color palette based on what type of sunrise is In your location, which is pretty cool. Yeah So I'll go ahead and show this little time lapse. Um, and as you can see it's a super slow animation But you can see the minutes ticking off there as the uh the sort of daytime greens and blues are going to just start to fade into this Uh sunset, which is it's really kind of neat to watch it comes up with some really pretty colors as it starts to Sort of fade into this sunset color and then uh ends up at this little starry night Um, and the tutorial I just launched today It teaches you how to take your photos and turn them into these vector images to layer them up inside the shadow box And you can this is a picture of my mom and her kayak at the bottom there And this is the lake that's right outside my window here and and the and the mountain that's right up on the on the Ridge so it's it's pretty special Uh to be able to just take your your environment and turn it into our work like that. All right people can can cosplay as erin, you know home All right. Thank you, erin All right next up next up jebler Hello, I don't have anything a tenth as beautiful uh to show as erin But I was going to show my little neopixel here and tell you about the guide. I've been working on It's the raspberry pi rp 2040 And it has this pio controller for I o and we've got a new guide telling you about how to do it Starts with turning an led on and off progresses up to controlling a neopixel kind of trying to teach you the pio language and Teaching you about in this instance neopixels enough to understand it all and put it together with circuit python And then the other thing I want to plug which I don't have a demo for is The rgb matrix library now works on these guys. So that'll come out in the next release of circuit python beta really soon I got one here This is a little more nose my rp 2040. So Preview everybody. So this is working great. Nice work jebler All right, thank you. One can say beauty is in the eye of the holder jeff Thanks for talking about beauty and everything electronics are all beautiful. So there's a raspberry pi chip in there All right, thank you All right next up noe Hello Yeah, hello, let's do a quick screen share so we can look at the overhead here. All right So this is kind of a a preview project, right? So this is a project I'm working on with lis. It's a midi device. So It's using the raspberry pi picco running circuit python and the kind of hero feature is to be able to use this little five-way navigation switch to Change the the midi notes. So in this case, we have these circles with the numbers inside of them And they kind of represent the buttons so you can change them. So if I want to change this This here What open hi-hat? Let's see there we go So we're working on a learn guide, but we'll have it out next week But there's a lot of fun 3d printing stuff to it as well as some really sweet features in circuit python So, uh, yeah, we did a spoiler plate, you know Yeah, so we were of course you can you can use acrylic for it We also have a 3d printed version of it too. So I got this little guy here that's pretty printed So we'll have that available so folks can print that as well. It's beautiful. Nice work. I like the handle as well Also acts as a kickstand, which is really nice So it pops it up I thank you Thorough demo next week. All right. Yeah, go ahead. Everyone's looking forward to it. I'm sure awesome. Thanks folks. Thank you All right next up Listen here here effect. Hey, hey We can't hear you Right. Sorry. My mic has a button. Can you hear me now? Yeah. Yeah, all right. Um, yeah So this week, um, I finally wrapped up, uh, my first feather wing Which is this little device which is for connecting to some servo motors. Um, so, uh This I also put together a little kit. I've had these motors on a couple of times before um, but I put this together to just make them there They're a kind of smart servo motor that you can send all sorts of commands to and you can also receive all kinds of commands So they can tell you What, you know, their max torque rating is you can actually like set You know temperature limits so if they overheat they automatically turn off and you know read all sorts of directional information But um, that makes them a little bit complicated. Um, They have, uh, you know, they have to communicate over uart instead of using pwm Um, they have a whole little messaging protocol and they have some direction control So all of that is a little bit annoying to put together with, uh, you know An arduino or a circuit python board normally because you have to put in either a bunch of little diets and resistors Do you have to use a little buffer system? So I put it all on a feather wing instead So you don't need any of that um, and I also put in a uh voltage regulator so that you don't you can use it even When you're not connected to the computer you can just use the power supply Of the motors and it'll power your circuit python board to So and it has a little uh power supply selection for that. So this is a little simple beginner robot kit that I just put out um, so um Demo system, uh, it doesn't have I I couldn't get the buttons picked up. So you were giving problems, but um Yeah, so that's that's all together you could use this for like a Century gun like nerf century gun or a little camera pivot or a laser pointer for your cat or whatever whatever you really want It's yeah people love daggers missiles and now they have an easy way to add three of them So this is this is really nice work Yeah, they they they're they're probably hefty enough to lift about a like 10 pound brick or so So they're pretty okay camera controls and stuff too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Awesome. Good work All right, well we'll put it in the awesome feather guide and we love that dynamics of library So you can use it and stick a pipe on yeah, awesome. Thank you so much All right, so we still have a bunch of folks coming in so if everyone can keep it to Uh, just a couple minutes. We can still get to everyone. We're gonna go to chris young. I haven't seen christen We're also gonna go to chris and then we're gonna keep you around. It's gonna hear me. Hey Hey chris. Yeah, we can hear you. All right I'm from my screen chair um we've got um One of the things that we want to do in assistive technology Is to be able to create some sort of a configuration file That can be easily edited by the user Like if it's a mouse device, maybe the mouse speed or You know different kinds of things so You could do that really easy and circle python But i would screw out like Arduino and some of us at hd makers like Arduino So we wanted to have a way to do configuration files with Arduino Well, it turns out arcana library Everybody has that in it, but we don't want all of arcana So basically what I did is I took arcana And stripped out everything except for the file i o and the configuration files And if you look in this test for over here It read value one this one can value two is one nine If I go down here Go to my mastery device Open this up oops well It says the files kind of readable don't survive demos I know so you you're using a jason file to configure it and then Are you running like with teeny usb? So it shows up as a disk drive or like how are you how are people setting the configuration? Yes, it's a It's a it puts up your either an sd card or your cuspy memory okay as As a as master origin rights One other thing I think card is great because it's like you can just put it on your computer. It's like super human friendly Yeah, one of the things that's one of those uh don't ask it's not out yet this is a board that uh Bill and I have been working on We call it a acuity pie hat and basically It sits on a raspberry pie mostly a pie deputant It's got a cutie pie started on to it And then this is my infrared transmitter circuit And so we're gonna initially use it to make a wi-fi IR remote on a raspberry pi w but uh It's got all sorts of break up in there You broke out on the cutie pie pins Custom power and ground over here. So you could Do it use it for anything Where I do one of the arduino interface to a raspberry pie I used to have a wi-fi remote that was based on your arduino u And of course it was a a linear board was a linear sitting on top of it So this is kind of our version of that You said they're not a pi w and you put a cutie pie on top of it and the cutie pie handles Well, you can do pwm. You can do analog. You want to do the infrared stuff? Yeah, the kinds of things you can't usually do for the raspberry pie But then you got the pie underneath it Like it's a little Yeah, so that's in the works Awesome And thanks for stopping by and Good design lesson for folks if you're making accessible hardware or assistive technology hardware, one of the things it could Can do is also be user Updatable and that's one of the things We really like to see with um We did that with arcada for arduino stuff because having a file system with circuit python is a big deal I mean, so you just took circuit python I was like well, let's let's see if I can kind of like jam the circuit python user experience in But yeah, it is it is tough to like arduino is just not it's not Designed for having the usb show up as a disk drive. It's It works, but it's not but we made it work We made it work. So there's a couple of technical gritches. I posted a message in the form and We'll see what happens It's almost working Yeah, come on by whenever it's good to see you. I will All right. All right next up. We're gonna go to liz and then after liz we're gonna go to Any and then misha misha and then mark. So if you need to keep it to a minute or so each We can get to everybody How's it going? I won't take up too much time because uh nae um kind of talked about project So we're making this pico midi fighter. Uh, my pico is also peaking there Um, but I have it hooked up via raspberry pi usb host to the uh robot xalapam So you get some chords going Once you have a robotic xalaphone everybody everything is a robotic xalaphone controller Exactly and is it really a midi controller until it controls a robot xalaphone? That's right That's super fun Yeah, I'm really I'm really excited about this and the screen gooey was I'm really proud of with the High road and sugar python. So I'm glad that we were able to get it working I know we had like a little bit of like how are we gonna make this and then it's like we're like wait Try this try that and it's like ding it like came together It was a beautiful thing and a rainbows unicorn. Yes. Yes, definitely All right. Well, congrats. Liz is gonna be live next week. I can't wait. Thanks for adding the gpa expander for the led Uh buns. I really wanted to add the leds. I thought that would be cool And I was like good time to use this new expander. I agree and I love that expander super awesome. Yes So good All right, thank you. Liz Next up misha Or mika Hi, so my name is mica and I've been working on this um system. I'm calling it a box So it is yet another midi controller. Yeah, that's right. It's midi controller. Yeah Based off of the raspberry pi pico again Cool And the reason I have it is because I've been learning to dj with this turntable And although it might look kind of fancy It's actually pretty old and it doesn't have all the latest bells and whistles. So I decided I wanted to add some things. So what this does is it adds three buttons um a potentiometer Or three effect buttons a potentiometer a switch Yeah, I my video is mirrored and um Uh a row of um buttons on the bottom this one actually says fire missiles on it I don't know why there's fires and missiles. That's why So Yeah, and I think I can actually share my screen. I've never done this before but I'm gonna try So, uh one sec. Um All right So if I hold this up, yeah And I press this button press it. Oh, there you go Yeah, it enabled it this button triggers that this button triggers that yeah If I turn this potentiometer um on the bottom. Oh, yeah, the volume changes Yeah, that that's the gain for the microphone. Okay, and this switch will turn the microphone on and off But I can't leave it on because it's gonna cause feedback if I don't have an actual microphone plugged in And these just by samples, but that's obviously just gonna make a lot of noise So I'm not going to do that. You're gonna launch the missiles This is amazing great work. Thanks. Love it I always love more MIDI controls. Congratulations. All right, cool Well, as you work on this come back and play us some tunes next time. All right. Yeah, I'm sorry. Transfer name one It's fine. Bye Welcome back. Uh, so, uh, we please come back when you um do more projects with DJing and MIDI because I I love to see those projects So that's not so cool. I'll do. Yeah. All right. Thank you. Good work building your own DJ gear is 2021 I know it's so much fun Okay, next step any in a Hi, uh, thank you for having me. I'm inna from the Netherlands And I've been working on some soft robotic stuff for some time and I finally made a Uh prototyping setup so I can program it more easily. So it's a rush reply picot plus a uh silicone bubble and uh with a neopux underneath So the picot controls a motor plus solenoid files Which make it inflate and deflate And because the pio, uh functionality actually, uh, it doesn't block the uh rainbow Adafruit rainbow pattern from showing which you previously did with other microcontrollers. So this is a great improvement Uh, and I I really love, uh, the pio for a soft robotic stuff. I think it has a lot of potential Can you see it? Yeah, it's like cool and kind of creepy. I like it. Yeah, so it was an art installation It has like lots of those uh art art installation And uh, yeah, and so now I can more easily, uh, test the patterns on uh on this bubble All right. Well, it's beautiful and and it looks like it's alive, which is really nifty In the darkest way it's it's it's even more intense. So yeah, send us a link if you have a link or video of it the installation We've you know, it's especially in the dark. I think this would be really cool. We could post it up Yeah, I'll I'll try to write something. Uh, and then I'll uh, I'll send link. Thank you. Please do All right. Thank you so much Living robots mark place out mark place out. I will keep this quick. Uh, so on the of course now it's not turned on Okay, you're on the whole circuit board thing. I have made my first real circuit board. Um, yeah, I looked at items that you've made I just grabbed it's a Atmel temperature sensor Put it on with the resist pull up resistors capacitors and the best part about this is it actually worked once I'm figured out of a solder on it and Yeah, uh I don't yeah, it's displaying. So there's the temperature in my room right now. Uh, hovering just below 22 celsius Uh, yeah, so super thrilled that this thing worked. Uh First time and I actually made that easy make oven that I was asking about from people last week about how to solder on these things and how to reflow Um, yeah, and that worked great. So I think I can't remember if this was the first reflow one or the hand soldered one I've refined my process a little bit. So it's not as messy as it was but yeah, um Now I've got a $25 toaster oven that I will never cook in again, but But you can make circuit boards and yeah, that's even better All right, well congratulations on on your first board. Yay The beginning of a expensive but fun hobby. Yeah, the board is fun. It's like a lot of hobbies All right. Well, thank you mark. All right. Thank you everybody. We had Until this week Big march kick it off with a bunch of folks. We'll see everybody on ask an engineer in a few minutes. Thanks everybody