 there's stuff everywhere. There we go. Hello and welcome to another episode of JP's product pick of the week. It's me JP and I am here with a very cool, very fun product pick. Thank you all so much for stopping by. Thanks everyone over in the YouTube chat as well as in our Discord. If you're wondering where the chat's happening, head to adafru.it-discord. You'll get an instant invite and then head on over to the live broadcast chat channel. That's a lot of words. Now let me send you somewhere that you may want to go to check out this show and that is that URL QR code and URL right there. That's where the product pick of the week is and the reason I'm sending you there is that we have 50% off on this week's product pick. So you may want to pick one up or a few and there's no coupon code or anything like that needed. You just need to buy it during the show. So we've got maybe 15-20 minutes here to check out the product pick during which time you may want to throw that in your cart and get ready to get that at a half off price. So before I tell you about the product pick, I'm going to have LeMore jump back just a little bit in time and show you her new, new, new segment. So take it away Lady Aida. This is the Lipo BFF mostly because I couldn't come up with a better name in time. So this is sort of like a shield or a wing or a hat for cutie pies. So you know we want to make a couple add-ons. One common add-on that people wanted was the ability to especially for the Wi-Fi boards to have a battery plug in and have the battery charge. We didn't have enough space on the cutie pie to add charging circuitry or a lipo connector but this little BFF solders onto the back and kind of gives you a lot of functionality. So there's the battery port of course. You can use any 200 milliamp hour battery or larger. There's an on-off switch so you know if you if you're portable you don't have to unplug the battery to turn it on or off. There is the voltage from the battery is then diverted back into the 5 volt pin because there isn't like a separate battery in on the cutie pie or the the shell that it's based off of. And there's a voltage divider on A2 which you can cut this little jumper if you want to cut the voltage divider. And the voltage divider lets you monitor the voltage on the 5 volt pin not the battery of the 5 volt pin which actually has a bit of a side effect that it lets you determine roughly whether the board is being charged or is running off of the battery because you can if the voltage on the 5 volt pin is above about 4.2 volts it's the 5 volt power coming in from USB. If it's below 4.2 volts it's most likely running off of the lipo battery. You can see turn it off turn it on it's running off the lipo plug it in it knows it's running off of USB unplug USB it knows it's running off of lipo again. That's right well let me grab one right here I've got my down shooter you saw this earlier all right so let's let's take a look at hey it's my best friend forever right there this is my product pick of the week it is the lipo charging BFF best friend forever add-on for the cutie pie now this will work pretty much with any microcontroller that has a 5 volt in that's what it's sending over the regulator off of the battery but it's designed specifically for the Zhou pin out and form factor which is the same as the cutie pie and maybe some others and here's how it works you take your BFF and you take a cutie pie and you just set them back to back like that now you can see this example here I've got some header pins on there you can do it with socket and pin you can do it just pin to pin straight through you can even if you're careful sandwich them right up to each other using the castellated pads if I go to the overhead you'll see this this is pretty cool this is about as minimal as I imagine you could get it so it just looks like a double-stuff Oreo big thick board there and they work just like that back to back so there is an M0 cutie pie which has nothing on the bottom side so it's perfect for this and there's the USB port on the cutie pie there is the battery port right there on our BFF now the cool things about the BFF one this gives you a JST plug for adding a lipo or lithium ion battery it has a little on-off switch there that you can use to turn on and off the battery power to the board so if you're not plugged into USB and charging but just running off a battery power this is really handy on-off switch for your microcontroller project we can also monitor over the pin A2 if we have either the battery or the USB running it just based on differences in voltage through a voltage divider or you can slice that little jumper you see right there that little trace between those two pads in order to remove that sensing from A2 and just give you the A2 pin back on your cutie pie which you may want because there's not a lot of not a lot of pins available on a cutie pie now let me show you this in action and I've got a really cool demo here as well as kind of a weird off-brand use that our friend Steve okay you're on in the chat asked about so I want to show both of these here so let's start with this one my little double stuff friend here I'm just gonna zoom out a bit and let me refocus here that's not focus this will be that's better and what I've got a battery and I've got a little Neo pixel strip and I have for that happened to have connected this up to a stem a Qt cable even though Neo pixels don't run over I squared C I in code have told the zero clock pin to act as just the Neo pixel pin so there's a fourth wire that's not connected but essentially is a neat way to not have to solder on anything extra in order to use some Neo pixels and then I'm gonna take this and I have it in the off position plug in my JST connector for this battery here now if I plug let's actually let's go ahead and turn this on so if I go and flip this on switch you'll see we're gonna get a nice little flame demo here this is some really cool flame code that my good friend Todd bought wrote and I've got a really nice diffuser for it here that I built just some foam and and LED acrylic there and so this makes me let me go ahead and switch to the the main view here this makes for really great wearable projects so if you want to use a Qt pie you want to have battery power you want to have that on-off switch you want to be able to charge your battery in between things if it's a cosplay thing or something like that this will work great for it now I can just stick this in my pocket and I have a very cool little fiery set that in there again now I have a cool little fiery accessory so great for wearable types of projects also great for wireless projects if you're using something like an ESP32 based Qt pie excellent for giving you a little on the go wireless project you'll also see here if I take this USB-C cable and plug that into the Qt pie that we have a little oh I just did that all right how about now yeah my audio is back I'm so sorry about that so I had batteries die my mic pack so let me know in the chat when you lost that lost it from just before the Pico okay so hopefully you saw the demo of the little flame cool little flaming demo here and that's the Pico plugged back to back this is the Pico M0 let me go down shooter this is the Pico or rather the Qt pie M0 plugged right into the BFF and I've soldered those with the castellated pads got this nice little neopixel demo running here battery power can turn that on and off with the power switch and we can also charge that right off of the USB so the other demo the one that that I think I was talking about after after my microphone died sorry about that again that is this question from Steve okay you're on in the chat can we drive power to and charge a battery with the BFF and a Pico RP2040 and the answer is yes so there's a V-SIS pin which is a 5 volt pin and a ground pin and those will work perfectly the next pin on here I think is my A2 is that right sorry this is a V-SIS this is ground these are blank these are actually not wired up on the board so I'm using them for mechanical support and these pins over here one of them is A2 the others are not used and that allows me to still read the whichever Pico pin that is that allows me to read that voltage if you wanted to do that but go ahead and plug this in there you go you can see this is one of these 420 milliamp hour batteries that Lady Aida had designed for our feather boards but it works pretty well here doesn't fit between those perfectly but it is it is pretty pretty good fit for this use and you'll see here if I flip on the power switch on my BFF I have some code running on the Pico that just lights up it's it's on board LED actually that that LED doesn't light up by default so this has got code running circuit Python running on there other questions we had about this will pretty much run any board that takes in a 5 volt it's just whether or not it'll physically match up the pins as well as this so you could certainly run an Arduino off of that which was a question we had over in the YouTube chat let's see what else I think that is it so head on over to that page right there we still have them in stock let me refresh yeah we still have been stuck half price $2.48 cents you don't need to use a coupon code or anything like that just simply go go over there to that site throw some in your cart and you will get them at this tremendous price and I'm not sure which which parts cut out but I want to thank again Steve for that question about powering other boards particularly Pico RP 2040 as well as Todd for the cool flaming LED code that I used here with this little LED stick so there you can see it's a it's a great way in fact I think the last time we had a board that had a really nice convenient on off switch was the Gemma and I don't think we could power the Gemma as easily off of a battery I might be forgetting but the the QDPI RP 2040 or QDPI ESP32 great for Wi-Fi really popular boards really nice to set them up as some sort of a wearable some sort of a sensor based project that's talking over Wi-Fi maybe and you want to plug it in sometimes unplug it not lose any info not have it restart this will work great for that because you've got that little battery on there that could act as your full-time power or could act as your battery backup and yes there's a second me up there in the corner there we go let me check and see if there are any other questions nothing over in YouTube and see Grover has a great idea over in a discord he says can you plug the BFF into your battery into your mic pack so you don't lose power I wish I could that's a good idea what's it running off of two double a's so not five volts but maybe with a regulator all right let's see 950 megahertz ass does it boost or bath provide the output of the lipo does boost it it's boosting it to five so lipo comes in at around what 3.7 volts sometimes 4.2 when it's fully charged the BFF is boosting that to five volts or just just under five volts I think let's see any other questions I think that's going to do it yes so head on over here to pick some up and you can use these in a lot of different microcontroller projects particularly these beauties right here actually that's a nice shot you can see on the top there of the sort of standard header pins that it comes with and you just snap those off and solder I think it's seven on each side and that makes the connections that you need to make and also since it has the cast-related pads you can do some sneaky things which still leave leave some holes open all right I think that is going to do it for the product pick use this one right here I'll keep my cool wearable there product pick of the week is my best friend and yours forever it is the lipo charging BFF add-on for cutie pie and I forgot to make a little hanger thing for it but I can plug into that battery as our hanger for the time being that right there thanks everyone for stopping by for Adafruit Industries I'm John Park this has been JP's product pick of the week and be sure to stop by tomorrow morning for 3d Hangouts and then show and tell and ask an engineer or ask an ear later in the day on Thursday I have John Park's workshop and then Friday we'll have a deep dive with Tim so lots and lots of live streaming coming up thanks everyone bye bye