 That's the song. Hey, it's me, John Park. I'm here for another episode of John Park's workshop and hopefully you are too. Thanks for stopping by live, live streaming. We've got people over in our Discord that I'd love to say hello to. Hello people in our Discord, thin man, Todd Botts, BlitzCityDIY, Johnny Bergdahl. Hello and welcome and thanks for stopping by. And thank you for stopping by over in the YouTube chat if that's where you are. If you're somewhere else like Twitch and you're wondering where the chat is, head on over to our Discord. It's at adafru.it slash discord. Look for the live broadcast chat channel and that's where it's happening. Let's see what else is going on today. I've got some fun stuff to show you, some progress on the sci-fi computer perfection ambient synth thing. So that's happening. I wanna show you some of that, some of the wiring and some updates, a few updates and coding and more to come, especially as Synth.io continues to progress. So thanks to Mark and Jepler, Mark Gambler and Jepler who are doing great work on some of the cool features in Synth.io. I've also got a coupon code for you. I have a product pick of the week recap and I have a Circuit Python parsec to show you and I've got a little bit of a gear report slash teaser for a future project that I wanted to show. Hey, Dave Odessa, just showed up over in the YouTube chat. Welcome, thank you for stopping by. Well, let's see, first thing I wanna mention is the coupon code. It's space orb, space dash orb. If you type that in in the coupon code slot right over here at Adafruit.com when you're checking out, that will get you 10% off of your order. So head on over to Adafruit. Check out some of the cool stuff we've got. Look in the products view all next to new products. That'll show you the latest cool stuff. We've got a few of those chalk key switches in stock, breakouts for the key switches. We've got the new ANO Rotary Encoder Board which is an I square C Stema QT version of that which is super cool. And a few other new things as well as some of the great old things. So if you wanna buy some stuff, head to Adafruit.com, throw things in your cart on the way out, type that right there in space orb that's gonna get you 10% off. That's good on all physical things, not on software, not on gift certificates, not on subscriptions, but yes on everything else which amounts to thousands of items we have in stock. I don't know exactly how many we have. I think, is there a counter at the bottom? I can't remember. I got thinking of Learn Guides. But we're in the thousands. Some of these product IDs are like 5,000 something. That doesn't mean all of the past stuff is in stock. Some things get discoed or discontinued. But I'm sure there's some stuff there that you might like. Head on over there and you can use that coupon code to get 10% off, which helps. All right, so product pick of the week show, that's the logo right there. Show happens on Tuesdays. That's what this week's episode looks like right there. That's the product pick. And here's a little recap. It is the Feather RP2040 with DVI for HDMI video output. An HDMI port that can be used to send DVI video out to your HDMI or DVI monitor. Feather RP2040 DVI, it is running Circuit Python code. This is a really lovely demo that Todd Bot created. One of the screensaver demos that Phil B created. This is the Max Headroom 1 variation on some Todd Bot video synth demos. I've got sliders to control things like the size and horizontal position of a triangle. As I move it, it's doing a nice little sort of fade effect. And I can also change the colors on that and set it rotating with a, let me set that to a nice slow speed. Oh yeah, look at that. It is the Feather RP2040 DVI with HDMI video output. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. All right, that was that. And then the next thing I wanna do is jump into a Circuit Python Parsec. Before I'll do that, I'll say, if you've got some suggestions on things you'd like to see in Circuit Python Parsec, some topics I haven't covered before, either just in pure code stuff like today's gonna be or using some specific sensors or outputs, inputs and things, microcontrollers, displays in Circuit Python, let me know and I will put that on the list for upcoming episodes. But for today, we've got this. Yes, Circuit Python. All right, here we go. So for today's Circuit Python Parsec, I wanted to show you how you can use the enumerate command in order to get a list of items and their index numbers or indices. So here you can see in the code I have importing time and OS and that's because I'm gonna grab a list of files that are on this Feather RP2040 right here. I'm gonna call that list the song files list and then I'm going to go ahead and use this command right here for index comma file in enumerate song files. That is going to create two variables. One is gonna be the index and one is gonna be the name and those come from this enumerate command which is gonna enumerate through that whole list, whatever that song file list was. In this case, what I do with them is I print them out and then later what I do is I ask for user input on one of those index numbers and then I'll print that number. This is just a placeholder for actually playing a file. So here you can see I've started up the Feather and I'm gonna go ahead and restart it. What you'll see is it says, okay songs available and it goes through and it gives me this enumeration of an index zero clay guys, Bartlebeats MP3. One small selective Bartlebeats, two daisy Bartlebeats and then it says pick a song. So I'll say, how about two, press enter and then we could pretend that goes and plays the song there. So this is a really nice way to work through lists, especially really large lists if you want to and get yourself in a really simple piece of code, the index and the value right out of your list. And so that is one way you can use enumerate in circuit Python and that is your circuit Python parsec. Hey, it's me, I'm back. So let's see, I just got one suggestion. Thank you from a Discord member called Is This Discord? I'd love a circuit Python parsec episode on Laura and NeoPixels and how to best listen for packets, animate some NeoPixel. I love that, that's a great one. I'll put one together on that. I haven't done that a long time. Last time I did it, I used the Radiohead library inside of Arduino. So this will be a fun learning experience for me. Thanks for that bit of input and I'm gonna go ahead and make a little note right now so I don't forget. We'll put that right there, I have a note. Thank you. Okay, so next up what I wanted to do. Let's do a little bit of a gear report and this is a teaser so I'm going slightly out of order. Current project is right over there, we'll get to that in a second. But an upcoming project that Lady Aida suggested the other day to me and Liz and Jepler was to get together, put our minds together and create a small sequencer synthesizer using Synthio and Circuit Python and a small display and some buttons that is similar to a really wonderful, venerable music making piece of software for the Game Boy originally that's called Nanoloop. So if you're familiar with Nanoloop we're gonna try to do a real nice neat simplified version similar to the Nanoloop 1.0. But what is this thing? Well, it's actually originally a cartridge. So let me go to a overhead view here real quick and I'll show you the cartridge and then I'll do a little quick demo of it. So here we go, I'm gonna go ahead and focus this. So there you can see, thanks by the way to my friend, Tim, who lent me a Nanoloop cartridge because they're really hard to get now. This came around 1999, 2000 originally and it ran on the original Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Pocket. I'm gonna zoom out a bit so you can see some of the interaction as well as the screen here. And, but before I turn that on and talk about it, so this is originally a piece of software that was created as a Game Boy cartridge which could access the onboard sound making capabilities of the Game Boy. Later there were versions that included synth circuitry right on board. I actually have one of those right here in my little Game Boy Color. This one was called, I think the Nanoloop Mono. This one is amazing, not in the least because where the heck is the circuitry? It's actually sandwiched in there. It's a sort of a sandwiched PCB construction which is really wild. You can see a bunch of vias and probably test points but all of the actual circuits are in the inside there and it fits right into the Game Boy slot connector there. But I'm gonna focus on this one because yeah, this one is in its original incarnation, a three channel or three voice sequencer so it can access the noise. There was a noise making channel on the Game Boy. The wavetable synth and I can't remember what the third one is it's also a pitched synth and I honestly can't remember. Oh, it's a square wave. Later versions expanded this. You can play very modern versions either on the analog pocket which is an FPGA Game Boy light handheld or you can get it for, I think it's a few dollars, maybe $8, maybe less on iOS and Android devices. Those are much more sophisticated than this one but the basic premise is the same. So what I'll do is I'll give you a little demo. I'm not an expert in this. I will run out of batteries right then and there maybe. Let's see. Yep, good. I anticipated this and brought some extras. Hopefully that wasn't just the death of my Game Boy. Let's, oh, where did I put these batteries? Uh-oh. I swear I brought a whole thing of batteries in here and now I have lied to you. Let's see if these rechargeables work. Let's cross our fingers. If not, we might have to do this another day. Oh wow, it's absolutely utterly... Hello. All right, I can do a demo on this. I'll pull the cartridge and put it in this Game Boy color which I think still has some power and I have this plugged into a little amplified speaker set. The reason I wanted to use that other one is you may have seen briefly there, I put a backlit screen in it which makes it easier to see than these original reflective screens. But yeah, you can see that fairly well. I'm gonna boost the brightness here or the exposure. Okay, so there we go. So there's Nanaloupe. I'll hit start, Oliver Wichau or Wichow, Wichow created it. So to start with, there's one note. You can kind of hear it there. Let me know how these levels are between me and the sound you're hearing. I'll go ahead and take out that note. Okay, so here there's nothing playing. You can see, I'm gonna zoom in just a bit more. That's probably as good as I'll get it, okay. So if you look in the bottom left there, the three channels I have are that R, N, and S. So S I think is the square wave, R I think is the wavetable and N is noise. So if we just wanna lay in, you can see there's this 16 box pattern that it's running through. And if I wanna lay in a sound for let's say a drum, I'll go ahead and start laying in notes or in the case of the noise, it's not even really a note, it's more of an envelope. And I can go ahead and change some of the character of that. Okay, so let's just say that's our simple initial set of sounds. I can go ahead and copy and paste those around. So I'll go ahead and paste. And I don't like the, actually I wanna copy this one. I don't like the way that first one sound. Which one do I like? This one. Okay, so let's say that's our drum pattern, really simple. Now I'll go into this synth sound, synth voice, and I'll put in some actual notes. And if I wanna mute one of those while I'm laying stuff in, we can do that. Actually I'll just put these on these sort of syncopated and I can drop the octave here, cut that one. All right, love that. And now I'll go into the third channel here. And I'm gonna raise these up to a little more lead. Okay, so you can see we've just got some real basic parameters laid in. Sound is really low. Okay, I'm gonna crank that. That's as loud as that's actually gonna go, I think, unless I can. Now I can just change some of the other parameters of how this sounds. So I'll go and pick some effects. And one of the cool things you can do here is save these patterns and then recall different patterns and you can string that together to be a song. So what I'll do is head up to this file menu up at the top and I'm gonna save these patterns. I'll come way over here to about D, okay? And so those are the three that are playing right now but I can load other ones. So let's load a different drum too. And now I'll go back to my E there and reload those. Oh wait, I was D. Tell me in the chat how that sound is. Hopefully you can hear that a little better. And you can see here, this is the song mode. So here basically those different patterns have been laid out. There are actually four banks, I think four banks of 16. You can pick from one bank and then string that together into song stuff. So I think I'll end that there. Just shut it off, I can't remember how to stop that. So that is a really popular, early form of Game Boy Sequencer that's a lot of fun to play with you. You can see there the interface really makes the most out of having a pretty limited bit of space to work with. And, oh thanks, Jason and Dave, let me know the sound was pretty good there. I should have run it through, sorry I should have run it into my actual mixing board here but I did not. So the things that are really interesting about that is that it's a pretty easy to learn interface that makes use of a few basic concepts that you repeat all over the place. The interactions are kind of the same. You really can use two buttons and a D-pad. I think the more modern version on the analog pocket also makes use of some shoulder buttons that are on that one, that are not on a traditional Game Boy. There was also a Game Boy Advance version of this. Unfortunately the cartridges, not many were made. They're all sold out at the moment. I think parts shortage, I don't know what chips are on them. But if you go to Nano Loop, just I think it might be nanoloop.com, just Google Nano Loop. There was also a, actually let me go to my browser here. Let me pull that up first, hold on. I'll show you what the heck I'm talking about because that's helpful, right? So this is nanoloop.com. If you look at under Game Boy, that's similar to, not the same as the one that I've got here, I think that I have nanoloop mono that Tim lent me, that's this one here. So these are these modern ones. There's a physical device you could get. It's hard to find right now also, but this is the same sort of engine, does FM synthesis on a handheld with no screen, which is kind of wild, kind of like the screen, but that's a neat restriction there. Here is the nanoloop sequencer for Game Boy Advance, which will also work in like a DS or a DSi or DS Lite, I think, any of the ones that have a GBA slot in the bottom. And then Android and iOS, go check these out. If you're interested in this stuff, there's just some samples on here. For some reason, the navigation on this site makes it difficult for me to find the manuals, so I kind of end up Googling manual and then you'll find some nice PDFs and there are YouTube videos out there. So that's what nanoloop is. And originally, Lamor said, hey, maybe we should do a nanoloop style thing with Synth.io. And I said, that sounds great. Let me also, Liz and I both wanted to check out, compare that to LS DJ, Little Sound DJ, which is another really popular synth sequencer for Game Boy and other devices that is more of a tracker style. So someone mentioned Mod Tracker and other trackers for the Commodore 64. I like trackers, but their interface is way more out there for people to get used to versus this one, which is really clear. I also think this one might be easier to code. Trackers tend to have a lot changing on screen and if we're gonna do this on a circuit Python screen, we kinda wanna minimize the amount of refreshing we're doing. So you can see not a lot is refreshing on that screen, just like one little dot a lot of the time. Bomb inventions, yeah, LS DJ is awesome too, for sure. These are all really fun programs, great to just throw headphones on and if you're getting on a train or an airplane or just sitting on your couch, they're really a lot of fun. And with the exception of worrying about batteries, you can get a lot of mileage out of them. But yeah, check it on your phone if you're interested. That's a preview, no promises, but that's a preview. We have in Synth.io some incredible polyphony. We're not really limited to like three or four tracks, which is what you find in NanoSynth. But it might be nice. It might be nice to creatively limit yourself to design or pick some presets for some synth voices and then stick with those as you construct your song. You can always save patterns and put different sounds into them, but it's kind of a nice limitation to not have 16 different sounds happening at once, kind of focuses it. So that's NanoLoop and hopefully a little bit of a preview of things to come. So let's see, oh, C Grover said maybe use that rotary encoder wheel as a piece of UI interface. That could be cool. Gives you a little extra modification there because those click, I think those click in the cardinal directions, center click as well as the wheel, if I'm remembering correctly. Maybe I'm wrong. All right, so moving along, let's talk about our good friend, the that thing right there, the computer perfection. So, I'm gonna, before I head over there to the workbench, I wanna open up a couple of links to show you how, speaking of Cedar Grover, Cedar Grove saved the day for me on this project because I asked last week, I think it was, hey, how am I gonna actually wire this thing? I had shown you, oops, hold on one second. Why is that not, why is that not opening? Oh, because there's a bullet point, there's an asterisk at the beginning of my URL, I won't work with them. I also disabled key repeat on this keyboard in software at some point and I can't remember why so it's very slow going to, okay. So, I had a big pile of wires coming out of the center of the computer perfection, I don't have a picture of that, I can easily show you right now, but this circuit board on the computer perfection was a mess of wires where I had pulled the microcontroller out, so I was thinking about, oops, maybe desoldering the dip connector that I had just shoved my interconnect cables into and then solder wires to the bottom and cedar grove, our good friend suggested one of these things, which is an IDC ribbon cable type of connector, including the little spiky, they're not called crimps, but it's kind of like you find on a telephone switch panel. Somewhere remind me what those are called, does it say on here, I don't think it does, but it gives you the footprint of an IC that goes into a dip socket, except the thing is, let me see what pictures they've got here, a connector, you can see it right there, that looks an awful lot like a ribbon connector, IDC cable end, and they refuse to show you inside of it, so I'll show you with the top off of one, let me switch cameras here again, so I got a couple of types of these right here, and you can see what you get, the idea is to, oops, is to pry this off somehow, these are not the ones I used, so I'm not familiar with where the clips are on this. Are they meant to come fully off? Oh look, I broke one, this was the cheap one, so that's okay. So maybe on this one it doesn't come off, but you are meant to just feed your ribbon cable into there and then squish it down, unceremoniously, and then you have a set of, in this case, 28 wires that you can have coming out of this, which are able to just plonk down inside of the socket, so I'll show you the one I ended up using was this fancier German one, these cost like $6 each or something like that, they're not cheap, but they saved the day for my wire, yeah, $6.69 for this one. So this comes as two parts, and top is just kind of a lid and some channels there for the wires to fit through, and there you can see that we have these little, give you a black background, we have these little crimp connectors I'm gonna call them, they're not that, but you just set your wire down, push them down, there are specific tools for doing this, I actually, again on Cedar Grove's suggestion, I think it was because of the limited space I had, I used a bunch of this, I think it's 30 gauge, silicon sheathed insulated wire, this is stranded wires, this is stuff we sell in the store, so with these, you can see I'll do one right now, you can zoom in a bit, you can simply push it down just like that with your fingers or I used a little pair of tweezers, and then cut the excess here off, but that is now touching the metal here, these I actually found, these are a little on the thin side, there is a danger that they might wiggle free, this top isn't really putting pressure on the wire because it's a little skinny, so maybe going to 28 or 26 gauge would be better, it probably indicates what gauge wire you're supposed to use in the data sheet, maybe it says here on the digit key, it doesn't, yeah, it's probably on the data sheet, but if you match things up right, this gives you a really convenient way to do essentially breakout wiring for some IC that you have pulled from a socket, which is exactly the situation I found myself in, this thing is not a keyed or anything, you can put this in in any direction, so I actually put a little tape in here and marked where my dot was so that I wired things correctly and then the lid does, so the lid will show you this little arrow for your zero index or one index, whichever it is, I think zero index pin, so plonk that down and now you'll just put that into where the dot location is on your original socket. So let's go and have a look at the end result of that because I've got it put together and I took some photos and I'm gonna be starting to include this in a guide and one second to load up my Discord here so I can see what's going on. You will be noticing that monitor that I look at to see what the camera sees is starting to fail, the top third of it is dimming a bunch. Things eventually break here. Let's, let's see, let me jump in my broadcast chat. Oh, and thank you, someone, you can see it right there, DJ Devin 3 posted one of these punchdowns, that's the word, thank you, yeah, punchdown, very similar to that punchdown tool for telco stuff. Maybe, I don't know, this one looks telco sized, but yeah, there's probably ones for this use case. And I'm also just gonna tell my phone display to not turn off so I can see the Discord. Where's that in? Energy, display, auto lock, five minutes, yeah, never. Okay, great. Andy Callaway said, yeah, I realize I have one, so perfect. Okay, so here is the computer perfection and here is my schematic I made, which I had, sorry, that's hard to see, I had worked with as I figured out which buttons on the computer perfection were essentially linked to which leg of this IC and where I had put them on the Metro M7. So this helped me go through and do my wiring so that I could say, okay, this is note zero, note nine, eight, seven, six, the score button, put those into my little IDC ribbon guy and then run them to a proto wing shield that I'm plugging into my top of my Metro M7. So using that gets us to here and we'll come back, hopefully, this will still work after I open it up and I can come back and show you a little demo of things but I'll live dangerously and I'm gonna go ahead and you might remember if you've been with me since the beginning of this computer perfection saga, one of the beautiful things about this is how easy it is to get into the device two screws and then the whole thing pivots on this hinge and I'm gonna go ahead and unplug my USB cable which will allow me to pull this out a little bit better and you can see here I've got proto wing shield which I'm using in lieu of a proto board just as I didn't have one. I'm not actually using any of the screw terminal features of that and full disclosure, I get a small bit of money when we sell one of these because Todd and our friend Brian and I made these and we get a little royalty from Adafruit when they sell these so I just wanna let you know that since I'm showing it off. Okay, so here is my I2S amplifier. I've got that plugged into also the little proto area on the wing shield here I'm gonna go ahead and zoom in a bit. So that's running through a little hole that existed in the toy originally to run the battery cables to the two nine volts that were under here. I've got empty space there and this nice enclosed speaker right now and I'll probably come up with a nicer solution for the USB cable. So now what that does though is it allows me to unscrew the board from the plastic toy. It's just one piece. And then we can take a closer look at how this is put together. My original idea until Cedar Grove maker had his suggestion was I was gonna end up desoldering this socket and then running wires straight out the bottom of this which I hate. So I'm so glad you saved me from that fate. That would have been a mess and less reversible. This actually fairly reversible. Not that the original game is all that good to be honest. I think the design of the visual design of the thing is better, industrial design is better than the actual game. So I'm not likely to ever put this back. They're also not priceless. You can get these for $40 roughly on eBay a lot of the time. And that just pulls out of there like that. You can see there was originally a piezo speaker which I disconnected. And I'm not gonna use, there's these little stems which will fall out when I set this down. So I'm taking that. These are just extenders for the two center buttons there. And now you can get a better look at what we've done. So you'll see there's a pair of wires hanging off of here. Those originally were used to power on the device with a little hinge switch. I may see, I can't remember how those are connected to the circuit board. If I can read those like a pin or rewire it to read those like a pin, I may use that for turning this thing on and off which would be cool. But you can see we have our 10 switches that play the LED game originally but now are playing notes. And then we have the two switches here and here which are used for modifications to the synth. And then we have a set of three switches here. I'm only using two of them and that's cause this one here, it's kind of a matrix and I'm not using it that way. And so if I touch this one, it disconnects some grounds for some of the switches or something, it kind of goes haywire. So ignoring that one but I'm able to use these two switches. So there you can see my little punch down connected IC connector thing and all of these very thin wires that I have running and bundled off to the side so that my microcontroller can use all of those and those are running to the same place that I had them on the Metro originally. It's just going through this perma-proto now. And this here can be, I'm not gonna remove it cause I don't want the legs to, or the spring socket that they're going into to move that much at this point but that essentially lifts off of here and if I didn't have this tape holding the little wire bundle down it would be a little easier to demonstrate that. So let's see with it in this state actually we can demonstrate it all or should we? Yeah, let me demonstrate it in this state and then we'll put it fully back together. So what I'll do is take my speaker wire out of here there's only one way to get that out. It's a bit of a puzzle. Oh, that doesn't want to come out at all now. Maybe I fed it through the other way. I'll leave that connected actually. So this will be semi-awkward but not too bad I think. So there you should be able to see just the amplifier getting connected here. And then I'll plug this into the Metro M7 like so. Let me zoom out just a bit. And then I'll give power. I just got a little battery pack here. Okay, so with that powered up we should hear. Okay, so I have it working polyphonically. It can play multiple notes at once. I don't even think there's a limit. I think I can play all 10 of these at once. It just sounds like chaos. You can also hear I have a sustain going. So when I press a note, it'll just stay playing. Add a note to it. And then I have a momentary button. That's this green button here. When I press that it just releases them like the pedal on a piano releases the sustain. I can turn that feature off entirely with this switch here. All right, so they'll stop on their own. You'll also hear I have a really long release. Remember Jeff wrote this really excellent ADSR, Attack to K Sustain Release Envelope which is the on off but with style. So we ramp really gently for about almost three seconds whenever I play a note. Cause I want this to be sort of this ambient sci-fi machine. So we want real, it's not a reverb but it's got that feel of something that extends long enough to have some panache. And then I can also play an extra note that's an octave below the note I press by holding this second. It's this one here, the second one. So this is what this little red switch is plugged into. So when I press that, here I'll go without. So I'm gonna pick a higher note. Okay, so if you hear that and hopefully you can hear by the way, hopefully this little speaker and my mic picks it up well enough. If it's terrible, let me know and I'll set my mic over there. So here's the note on its own and now I'm gonna add the octave and without which is kind of nice. Really easy to reconfigure what things do. This is in circuit Python. I just have something that when this is pressed down any note that gets played comma that same note minus 12 which is since this is currently configured to take in MIDI note numbers and then convert them to the frequency to play. It's really nice easy math to work with because there's one MIDI note per semitone. So you can just do minus 12 and you've just dropped an octave. You could do little chords, triads all with really easy math in there. So that's it. Those are the features right now. Let me go ahead and reassemble this and then I'll do a little demo with it in the cool case. And then we can talk about some planned features that I have. So let's see, I think the easiest thing to do is I'm gonna go ahead and reconnect. Zoom back out. Our dog's going crazy outside. I'll go ahead and reconnect this. So by the way, in case you're curious, this blue ring, it's a single piece of plastic with enough flex in it to do these sort of living hinge style buttons. So that's all that happens for the 10 outside buttons and then the little stems poke through here for these two middle ones. And I do need to keep that wire out of the way there. I may add a little more tape because I don't want that getting pinched under here. Ooh, our peggiator with circular lights, please, says DJ Devon 3. Oh, I'm glad you said that, by the way, because that gets me to another point. These LEDs are really impossible to use in situ, in this circuit. The way it worked originally, it was super clever. The 4-bit microcontroller was essentially multiplexing input and output over the same pin. So all these pins that I'm using to read button inputs need to flip state to light up an LED and then flip the state back to be an input. So input, output, input, output. I don't want to deal with that at all. So the options are cut some traces and run these to a multiplexing like a PWM board, output over I squared C, or ignore them entirely and feed some neopixels into here, which may be what I try next. I've got some candidates here. There's this really, really thin neopixel strip, which maybe could just live right there and not disturb anything. There's so much space in this. This is what I like about older toys. There's just a lot of room to work with. So something like that fed in there could give me some cool effects. I've also got some edge-lit neopixels that are the sort of side-angle ones, or maybe put some jewel ones on the board, something like that could happen. Yeah, Boots City says definitely neopixels. All right, yeah, we're gonna ignore it. Sorry, red LEDs. I know you were a staple of 1970s toys and I love you and the red LED in the nose of the X-wing fighter was my first LED love, but we've got more modern solutions now. Okay, so I'm gonna go ahead and reconnect this PCB. If you didn't see some of the other episodes where I talked about this, Phil Turone last night on Ask an Engineer showed in the Retro Tech segment, he got one of these, he showed it off. He's the one who introduced me to this. I had never seen or heard of this thing. He showed it off, showed some examples of the kind of dome head commercial that was aired on TV as well as a cameo it played in an episode of Buck Rogers and there was also a movie, Ice Pirates, where the set designers grabbed one of these and just threw it on the set because it looked cool. And he was designed by Ralph Baer, who's considered by many to be the father of video games. He created a billion different electronic toys, including the Magnavox Odyssey and some other Pong-like home video games. So big ups to Ralph. So let's see, I've got board plugged back in. I've got my audio amplifier here, running to my little speaker that's on the bottom. For now, I just have this unceremoniously living in here. I don't have any mounting method. I may do something. There's enough space to maybe piggyback off of one of these screws or something like that, a couple of these screws, printed bracket, some foam, who knows, but one of those methods. And for now, I will have, I'm just gonna push this USB cable up here for power. Could probably do any of a number of different methods including run nine volt battery and plug it into this DC jack on the Metro M7. That would be kind of period appropriate to this regulator on the Metro can handle, I think up to 12 volts. And I'm gonna unplug that from power while I'm futzing around in here. And I'll go ahead and, oh, I almost forgot. Oh, it did forget. All right, we'll have to use these upside down. I forgot to feed those in, did anyone notice? Thin man, thank you, you left a few parts. All right, I'll correct that later. For now, we'll use it like that. I will put these two screws in because without them, any of the upper arc notes you press will rotate the whole lid, whole face of it back in. Thin man, thank you for catching that. I just wasn't paying attention. Okay, those should still work. So here we go. I've got power. Again, it'll be nice with some neopixels. As we can see what's happening. I may try to stay sane and keep them red. I don't think many colors are gonna show through anything other than red given this red translucent plastic. Okay, so here I'm gonna go into sustain mode. Okay, we can stop the sustain with that set button there. The, sorry about the focus there. The mode button here gives us a choice of voices. So I have two wave shapes. Okay, so that one is almost like a sine wave triangle. It's got not a ton of harmonics. Even while it's playing, I can go ahead and switch the waveform. And you can hear that one has a much greater set of harmonics, more like a sawtooth or even spike ear. So it gets a lot of upper frequency stuff that you hear in there. And if I turn off the sustain switch here, sort of sci-fi ambient music, right? It's a lot of fun to play with, very simple. Definitely creaky just cause the original toy had a lot of creaky plastic situation going on. But I like it, it's a lot of fun. And the sound is surprisingly loud for that little amplifier and this little speaker. I'll put it a little closer to me. Really fun to play around with. So let's talk about changes to it. Jepler has added a few things to the current build for Synth.io that are really cool. Actually, there's three things that I may be looking at adding. One is a LFO, low frequency oscillator. I talked about those I think last week. So low frequency oscillator is just a subaudible frequency, slow moving wave of some kind. It could be any wave shape you want. Very often you use something like a sine wave or a triangle wave. Why we want that, even though we can't hear it, is cause we can use it to modulate other things. So for example, if I just switch my frequency or rather my wave shape back and forth, let me turn sustain back on, right? So that's the same note, but I'm changing that wave shape. If I want, instead of me doing that by hand, let's say once every second, if I want that to gently change or be real fast however I want, we can do that with an LFO. We can point the LFO at the volume of the note. So you can do things like a tremolo, right? Which is just the audio level going in and out. We could do it for something like a vibrato, which would be the pitch going up and down. So the LFO is a really cool feature and I think that's gonna help with some of that sci-fi vibe. Another thing I'll probably do is slightly detune my octave so that we get some beating of the frequencies as they go in and out of phase. And then another thing that Jepler's adding is math blocks. So these are gonna be little modular units in the code that can do things like add together two waveforms. It's sort of a utility that'll allow us to do interesting modular synth patching inside of code. And then the third thing is ring modulation. So ring modulation is a way of creating some really interesting sounds using a audible wave and a carrier wave and they interact. So it's essentially two waves working together to make some new sound. Really good for sci-fi stuff. It's not always musical. It'll kind of throw your scales way out of whack but for a sci-fi thing it could be cool to wave in and out of some ring modulation. It's very ringing. It's what the Dalek voice was done with and some other notable sci-fi things. Yeah, so that's where the computer perfection is right now, thing of beauty and now it's starting to sound pretty cool. So thanks for coming along on the ride with me on this and if you wanna go grab one head over to eBay cause you should still be able to find these every once in a while for not too much money. I think they made a ton of these. And yeah, big thank you to Jepler, to Mark Gambler, to Todd Bot. All people who've been helping me with aspects of the code and synth IO and making this whole thing work and a C Grover for the hardware help. So it takes a village and I appreciate it very much. All right, what do we think? Is that it? Let me look at some questions here over in our chats. First of all, I'm gonna look at my YouTube chat. Bomb Inventions said that they, oh, they found a tracker software going back to the audio sequencing, so a tracker software that worked on a Texas instrument calculator like the TA-82, that's awesome. Real serious chiptune making machine, I love it. I have to check that out, that's cool. See, Bomb Inventions also says you can use a vise and a piece of wood to crimp those kinds of things, any IDC things, that's great. Like without an arbor press, you can just give it even pressure, which is super helpful. Bomb Inventions, you were trying to help me to not forget the buttons too. Thank you for your attention to detail. I absolutely missed those. First time too, I kept putting them in properly as I went in and out of this thing. You said it, yes, you're allowed to say it, you said it. Yes, similar to frequency modulation, I don't know. I mean, I've used Ring Mod and I don't know how it differs, it probably is a former frequency modulation and it was often done with a diode ring. So I think it's a specific kind of frequency modulation, I think you're right. And what's going on over here in Discord, any other thoughts, questions? Oh, DJ Devin learned recently about using PWM synthesizers. That's another great place to use our LFO. So pulse width modulation, you can take a regular square wave, which is an even-duty cycle of 50% on, 50% off. As you start to change that proportion on or off, you get cool harmonics in your sound. The pitch is the same, but the harmonics change. Being able to turn a regular wiggly knob on that gives you really cool sounds and that's another use of the LFO that we'll be able to use low frequency oscillator. And let's see, I think that's it. Yeah, thank you to everyone working on synthio. And I need cool graphics like these for my synth stuff, says Johnny Bergdahl. Yeah, I do, maybe we'll get some stuff going with the DVI Feather RP2040 stuff that is reactive, that would be really nice. Okay, I think I'm gonna call it right there. Thanks everyone for coming to my workshop today. It's been a lot of fun. It's been fun having you and showing you stuff and a lot of fun getting to build these cool things. So I will encourage you to stop by for some of our other live streams. We should be having a deep dive with Tim, Foamy Guy, tomorrow. We'll be back on probably a desk of Lady Aida on Sunday. That seems to be when those are happening, but there are no promises. Those happen at random hacker mama times. I'll be back on Tuesday with a product pick of the week, Wednesday, 3D hangouts, show and tell, ask an engineer, how could I forget? And then back to this. So thanks everyone, thanks Gary T. Thanks Bomb Inventions over in the YouTube. I will catch you next week. Thanks everyone over in our Discord and for all of you watching out there who aren't on a chat. Bye bye.