 And welcome to the show. It is me, JP. It's time for JP's product pick of the week. So thank you so much for stopping by. And thanks to everyone for stopping by in the chat over in our YouTube, as well as our Discord chats. If you're somewhere else and wondering, hey, where's the chat going on? Check out our Discord, adefrew.it. No, adefrew.it, yes, slash discord. Jump over there and you can find the live broadcast chat channel, that's where it's happening. So, let's see, let's kick this thing off. Whoa, let's see, where's my stuff? Hey, here's a thing. If you're wondering where the product pick of the week is this week, then head to that QR code or go to this URL down here. 4654 is the product ID number. That'll take you there. That'll take you to this video going on inside of the product page. And we have a big humongous discount going on this week. It is 50% off for this product pick and you don't need a coupon code or anything. You just throw it in your cart and the price will be reflected. You just wanna make sure you check out before the end of the show or a few minute grace period thereafter. So, before I go any further, let's have Lady Aida tell us about the product's pick of the week. Take it away, Lady Aida. Yes. Okay, it's a mini-boost. This is a small boost converter that is surprisingly powerful for the size and price. It's a... Do you wanna get a wish on? The one you just... You wanna get a wish on? Nope. Do you wanna get a wish on? That one, yeah. So, VIN can be two to five volts. Although, to get the one amp out, I think you need to have at least three and a half volts in. The output is set to be five volts. Although, we give you, it's kind of like 5.2 volts. We give you a little bit higher than five because there's often a voltage drop on wires when you're powering things. But you can get one amp max out of this. At two volts, I think you can get like 300 or 400 milliamps out. Three volts, you can get like maybe 600, 700. But once you get to like a lipo range, you can get an amp out. If it's a fresh lipo, you can get like even amp 1.4 amps. So, it's quite a powerful little chip. It's really fully integrated. You basically just have an inductor, a bunch of 22 microfarad caps, and then the feedback resistor, there's an enable pin. When you bring the enable pin low, it'll actually completely disconnect the output. So, that's great for a power switch you don't have to like worry about feed through. But it's a great little booster. So, you know, if you've got a couple of alkalines or nickel metal hydrides or a lipo battery, is the perfect way to boost it up to get five volts. You can drive, you know, Raspberry Pi zero and maybe a couple accessories. The demo I have, to see if it still works, is having it power these ginormous neopixels. So, let me see if we can get it to show the text. So, you can see, so you can see here, you know, running the plain demo, I've got the booster here, and it's plugged into, you know, a lipo battery and it's powering the three ginormously neopixels. Giving it a nice, you know, 5.1 volts. This is an inexpensive way to just like toss in, you know, a five volt, if you wanna connect it five volt sensors or neopixels that you can drive them at 3.5 volts, but you won't get the best color. And one of the things to note is you can see when all the LEDs are on, it goes up to 1.3 amps, but it has no problem. It can absolutely supply 1.3 amps, even off of a not so large lipo. There's only a 1.2 amp hour battery, and it has no problems supplying it. Yeah, it doesn't get too hot. It's a really nice, fully integrated boost converter. And for people who, you know, they want it to make a power boost, but they want it much smaller, chips have improved, pick this up. It's really small. You can integrate it into any product or project you'd like. Yeah, that's good advice. Pick one up if you need a small mini boost. Here it is right here. Let me show you, it doesn't look so mini right there until you put a human finger next to it or similarly sized reference object. This right here is my product pick of the week this week. It is the mini boost, five volt at one amp. This is the, what's the model on this thing? The TPS61023, that's the chip on there. And this is something I've found really useful lately because I've been doing things like this right here. When I was working on taking the CNC and a lot of other toys you'll find on the shelf, they will have a couple alkalines, maybe three alkalines. So how do you run all this stuff that wants more? How do you run all this stuff that wants maybe higher current or things that really do want five volts and not three? A lot of the things we deal with these days are okay with three, but I find a lot of the audio amps want five volts. If you're running some older NeoPixels, they might really prefer five volts and not three and you can run them at five volt logic. So I found it really useful to have a super tiny way to add that capability and get up to the full five volts that I want for the projects. Let's take a look at the product page right here. So, and then I'll give you some demos. Let me find my product page. There it is. Yes, you can see right now it is 50% off during the show here. So that's going to only cost $1.98. You can get a maximum of 10 of them if you have a lot of projects in mind and they're so, so tiny small. If you take a look at this, it'll tell you some of the stats, some of the specs. If you're feeding it two volts, then you'll get five volts out and it'll just be kind of low current, like maybe 300 milliamps. Might be enough for your project depending. What we typically run into is things with two AA or AAA alkalines in there. And those are going to give you somewhere around three volts, maybe a little less as they start to die. Those will start off life at around 1.6, 1.5 volts. Three volts, you're going to get 800 milliamps out. And so that's what I'm getting probably roughly when I'm doing the two AA battery projects. Some of them will have three, so you can get up a little higher. You can also use lipos with this. It's not just for alkalines, also nickel metal hydride. If you want to use some rechargeables, some sort of older school rechargeables with them. And let me show you a couple of examples of this in action. It's a really cool little chip. So I'm going to go to the overhead here and I'm going to zoom out. So here's one that I just built right before the show, like minutes ago. I decided I wanted a project that would show this off in a case where you really need those five volts. So this is, you can see here, I've got a two AA battery pack, like you find in a lot of reused projects, a lot of toys in particular, other consumer electronics. And right here I have a Metro Mini. So any of your AVR boards, if you're trying to run Arduino Uno or this little Metro Mini or maybe a Pro Micro, those really want five to nine to 12 volts in to power the board and the projects. So what I've got here is I've got my mini boost and it is receiving this roughly three volts from the battery. So that's on its in and then on its five volt out, I'm driving the Metro Mini there. So that's going to get power from the board. And then I have a Neopixel ring here. Turns out it's a semi broken one. So we're only going to see a few of the pixels light up unfortunately, not a great demo. It's the one I grabbed. This is plugged into five volts on the Metro Mini as well and it's getting data over a IO pin. So you can see here, let me, oh geez, where did my diffuser go? All right, we're just going to use a plastic bag diffuser because, oh my gosh, that's so bright. All right, that's a little better there. So no holding back though. We're getting the full power on these things. Let me turn it upside down. That'll maybe be a little easier to see there. So this is great. You've also got the enable pin on there. So if you want to use a power switch, an on off switch, a little toggle, it can be a really tiny little toggle switch. It's not actually controlling the current. It's actually syncing this enable pin to ground or syncing it low, which does a proper power off of the circuit. So you're not drawing any power to use that. So that's again, something I've done in some of these toy projects. So we jump back here and look at this Lern guy. This is a Lern guy, by the way, for, I'm gonna scroll up here for this right here, the CNCI. So when I open this up, sure enough, to double a battery pack, you can see the wiring coming off of there. Let me get rid of the extra face that I have on top of my face. There we go. And what I wanted to do was use the batteries to power my own circuit, which included an audio amplifier that wants to run at five volts. And you can see in the schematic there, I've got this toggle switch, which if I drag down here, you'll see the circuit connector. There it is, it's got a little toggle switch there. And that, I drilled a small hole in the back of the case. So now, if you look at the back of it there down at the bottom, I have that. So that power switch actually is running right to the little mini boost and to its enable pin and grounding that or not. So let's see. The other demo I wanted to show actually is kind of a little more in line with that. I'll plug this and bring this over carefully. So it does not necessarily have to be a microcontroller that you're using in your project. It can be other five volts stuff. So here you'll see, zoom out a little bit more. So this is the other C and say that I had taken apart and decided not to use. So you can see there, I've got the little two double A battery box that's built into the case on this. You can see I've grafted that three volts coming off of the two double A's or roughly three volts. Over here to go into ground on zoom in a little closer. And I'll refocus, here we go. So power from battery is going to ground and to V in on the mini boost. Then I have a switch here for enable that goes from enable to ground. And then I have the five volt out going to the rails of the breadboard. And then that I'm running one of these five volt LED lights. So this is a nice light. It's not smart. It's not neopixels or anything like that. It's just a bunch of these tiny little cob or LED lights in a ring with a kind of nice phosphorus coating there. So if I flip this on, you'll see, I've got my LED ring there with the full five volts that it wants boosted up from the three that it was initially going to give us off of that battery. So if you were maybe just adding lights to one of these toy projects, you could throw in the mini boost, maybe add a switch and throw in one of these nice bright five volt LED rings and you're off to the races. This would be great for cosplay stuff as well. And it's so small. It's really easy to integrate into your existing project or one of these toys that you're repurposing. Yeah, really good for, really good for wearables as a DJ Devon three says over in the chat. So if you head over to, let's see, I'm going to check out. I think we have a learn guide just on the board itself. I'm going to turn off this LED there for a second. If you, let's see, let me see if I can get to the learn guide on this power boost itself. So I'm going to click here and scroll down a bit. Do we not? I don't have a dedicated learn guide. I thought we did. And sorry, sorry if we do. And I'm just not finding it right now. I thought it would appear in there. We have some other similar ones. And generally speaking, it's going to follow the same formula. If you take a look at a different learn guide for one of these voltage in, it converts it, boosts it, and then the five volt out or whatever the voltage output is on it. Let's see. What else is there to say about it? Not too much. So this one is a straight up, just grabbing the five volt off of the boost. This one, this little project here is my more involved one where I've got a microcontroller involved. It does not, like I said, it does not have to involve a microcontroller. LaMorse said actually in the video there, I haven't tried this, but she said you might be able to power a Pi zero off of this, which is pretty interesting since Pi zero wants a little less current than let's say a big old Pi three, which kind of wants closer to two and a half amps. It's pretty hard to run those on lower current projects, but Pi zero, you might be able to get away with embedding that in a little project and giving yourself the five volts off of some existing alkalines that you need. And like I said, not just alkalines, you can also use this with lipo batteries and with nickel metal hydride. So you've got a few different chemistries there at your disposal. Let's see, anything else to say about it? Let me check in with the chat. It's so small. You're not kidding, Tackle of the World. The thing is tiny. One nice feature of it, it does have, shoot the, add the down shooter to this and I'll refocus there. It does have a mounting hole on it. So even though this thing is tiny, all right, I can find the focus closer. There we go. This up here in the corner is a nice big mounting hole so you can, generally speaking on these kinds of toys, you'll probably be able to find yourself a little screw where you could just add that in if it isn't gonna disrupt the mechanism, maybe on this little speaker screw here. So you can screw that down onto your project and then run your wiring to it over there. All right, it's a simple one, but really useful. You might wanna grab a few of these, especially if you're following along at home with some of these toy building projects. I know I'll be putting these to good use. And let's see. Let me know if anyone has any questions or thoughts about it in the chats before we go. I'm gonna scroll back a little, make sure I'm not missing anything. Yeah, these KSC, these really do look huge on their own. I think it's that inductor. That inductor there makes it look like a large, a possibly large thing until you go and pick it up. All right, that's gonna do it then. Let me throw this in a little bag right here. It comes with the header pins necessary. You can see I had used it in my breadboard example with some header pins on the little Metro mini example. I just used some short little jumper cables there, little wires. That is my product pick of the week this week. It is the mini boost five volt one amp that is gonna do it for today. Thanks everyone for stopping by. Don't forget, you can head right over here before the show is over or a little bit of a grace period and grab some of these at half price, $1.98. Cheap way to get your five volts. I can't think of a cheaper, easier way. So thanks everyone for stopping by. For Adafruit Industries, this has been JP's product pick of the week and that's me, JP. Bye everyone.