 Welcome to the show. It's me, John Park. It's time for another episode of John Park's workshop. That's where we are. We're here in my workshop today. I left my locker door open. I just noticed that. I was getting some Goo Gone out of there. You ever use that stuff, that orange Goo Gone? I needed some earlier and I'll show you why in a little bit. Let's see. What else is new here? We've got the usual opening remarks. I've got an Adafruit Jobs plug. Jobsadafruit.com plug. Product pick of the week. I'll show you a little recap of that. We'll do Circuit Python Parsec. Then I have a really fun, simple LCD display hack and some general talk about LCD stuff, why I'm talking about it, why I think it's cool, why I think you might also. More to come. First of all, I'll say, if you're wondering where the chat is coming from, who am I talking to? Well, it's you. It's you over in the Discord. That's our main chat. If you want to jump into that Discord chat, you can head over to adafruit.it. Then you'll get an instant invite into our chat server. Then you can jump into the live broadcast chat channel. You can see it listed there on the left there. I see Grover. Hey, BlitzCityDIY. I see a mysterious animated ellipsis because Todd Bot is typing welcome. I'm also keeping an eye out on our YouTube chat over there, Anthony and Becara. Hello, Dave, Odessa. Nice to see you. Welcome and thanks for coming and joining us for the show. For some reason, my setup for broadcasting to Facebook didn't work today. I don't know why. It never showed up with the, hey, let's broadcast this thing. Sorry if you usually watch on our Facebook page, but maybe you can join us over on YouTube or Twitch or one of the other places where we are broadcasting. Let's see. I don't want to laugh at Todd's dumb joke. It's dumb, but it's funny. LCD. Let's see. First of all, I mentioned we have our jobs board, so if you head on over to jobs.adafruits.com, it'll look an awful lot like this thing right here. On the jobs board, it doesn't cost anything. You can just send in a job submission, follow the guidelines there. You just need a login and password for Adafruit's sort of general login system. It doesn't cost anything, but the jobs are vetted. You'll know that we're not just letting spam flow on through. The jobs will get an eyeball or two from Phil and Lamore. If you want to go and look for work, it's probably good stuff. If you want to post your own job listing, you can do that for free if you're looking to hire someone. Also, if you're looking to get hired, you can post up your info over in the available for hire section. I can jump over there. Let's see. There it is. Am I logged in? If I am, then I can go there. Yeah, I am. Look at all these available for hire. Here's someone in Chile who's got 3D CAD production supervisor R&D innovation projects. If you're looking for someone, click on that. Follow that one or any of these other links that you see. That's at jobs.adafruit.com. Next up, we've got that right there. That is my show on Tuesdays. It's at this time right here. It's about 1pm Pacific time, 4pm Eastern time in the US. On that show, I like to pick a product that is new or interesting. It doesn't always have to be new. This is a fairly new one this week. We take a look at it. We go into the datasheet. We play around with it. We hook it up, or I show you a canned demo, more likely. It takes a little too long to hook it up right there. Maybe it's software that we discuss how it works. And there's a big, huge 50% off. Almost always. Sometimes that percentage will vary. But it's always a big discount. This week goes 50% off on these three packs of the clicky buttons. Clicky clicky. And you don't need a coupon code or anything. Just buy it during the show and you get it for that excellent price. And here's a little recap of this week's episode. Step switches with LEDs. Clicky clicky clicky. Blinky blinky blinky. I was inspired to look for these because of my great love of the Roland TR-808. I decided to call them step switches. There are the different colors that we have. So we've got a white, a gray, a black, blue, yellow, red, and green. This works well, same with these really nice Proto boards that Adafruit has. With this code right now is that when it starts up, it does a couple little blinks. And then it waits for me to pick a mode. So if I pick the first mode, this is now in MIDI toggle mode. So I have four different MIDI CCs that I can toggle on and off. That's all done in software. So there's no connection between the LED and the switch in the mechanism itself. You can decide in software how to respond to clicks or not using either a on-off of the LED or PWM if you want to fade them. That's my product pick of the week. It is the step switch with LED pack of three. Yes, indeed. And by the way, I had mentioned in there that I had to come up with a name for them because there was no good thing to search for even when I was trying to find if these exist currently. As I'd mentioned, the originals in the Roland products were an Alps tax switch plus an LED plus a custom injection molded plastic frame and rocking mechanism. There wasn't a sort of all-in-one switch. I ended up calling step switches because they look like little steps and they're used for steps and step sequencers. But Todd had posted that cool little Pico sequencer of his and on Twitter people were discussing, is there a name for these? The best we could come up with was, let me see, do I have a Chrome capture window? These guys, C&K switches, oh, they're now part of littlefuse. C&K may have made the original of this that everything else is a copy. I think after the Roland 808 era, but to make a sort of all-in-one switch with the LED sort of integrated in there. I think it was C&K. Let's see. They probably call this a tactile switch. Let's look and see. And if anyone in the chat can remember Todd, if you're around, it had a terrible name that I couldn't stand. And it was after the fact. I'm already dubbing these step switches, but they have digit scrub or something like that. What was the name of their? Let's look for them here. Oh, no. Oh, and now the thumbnails disappear. Let's see. MP01 might have been their line. MP01. No, all right. Let's do a Google search on that. C&K, MP01. MP, all right. I'm getting there. I see it. Be there any moment. Is this going to be it? Oh, no, that's on eBay. So even they avoid the weird gross name. Digit task. That was it. Todd, let's look that up. Why digit task? Are you kidding? Digit task. Is it because it's fantastic? Digit task. That's probably what these are a clone of. The brand that we're selling. What's that one say? I can't even read that one. Can I see that in my down shooter? No. Some of my photos are close up enough and well lit enough to see it. I'm not going to be hung by or something like that. Anyway, I'm not calling it that. Forget I ever said anything. It's not that. Can't be that. So step switches. That's what I said. All right. Enough ranting about that. Why don't we do a circuit Python parsic? Okay. Here we go. For the circuit Python parsic today, I want to show you how you can create a mode select inside of your circuit Python code. So what this means is when the program starts up on your device, in this case, a circuit playground express, it will wait for some kind of user input before doing whatever the other thing is that we're trying to do. So in this case, I have a simplified version of a button presser that will either do a MIDI mode or it will do a item select mode for a game similar to one I had done here. So on this, when it starts up, it is blinking yellow. And if you look at my little readout in the serial display, it says select the mode by pressing a button. So I'm going to press one of the buttons. If I press the first button, it says, okay, we're in MIDI mode now. And now you can see my LEDs turn blue. And now I'm just, I'm rocking them in this mode here where what I do is the thing I wanted the program to do. However, if I restart this kind of getting myself back to that initial state, it's going to say, okay, we're in select mode. It's going to go to yellow here in a second. And then it's going to say select the mode by pressing a button. Okay, this time I'll press the second button. Now I'm in this green mode, and that's actually going to pick between a couple of different audio inputs for me in this case. It just accidentally restarted itself. So now I'm in selector mode. Now the way you do this in code, you can see here, I have a section of code called while not. And that's the key. Essentially, we have a loop that we're going to stick inside of until that condition is proved false. So while we're not button picked, which I have a little variable here called mode picked rather, mode picked is false. So when this starts up, we can't get out of the loop. So it's sitting there essentially just waiting for a button press. Once a button press happens, oh, okay, that's been satisfied. I've changed the state of mode picked to be true. Now it can move on with life, introduce some new libraries, define some things, and then get to our main loop, which is while true, same sort of principle, except this one runs forever. And so that is how you can create a mode select inside of CircuitPython. And that's your CircuitPython Parsec. All right. You know, I've done some versions of this before. I've even done multi-layered ones. So I have some of my little keyboard projects using mechanical key switches where I don't have a lot of interface. I don't have a screen. I don't have knobs and things. But what I can do is wait on startup for some user buttons to get pressed and then maybe have a second mode where the lights blink and say, okay, now we're ready for another selection. So you're going and picking things like, oh, I'm sending MIDI CCs and I'm sending these numbers or I'm picking this minor key and this is the root or so on different modes and so forth. So it can be really helpful with a minimum interface, a minimal interface to set up these mode selections or get yourself a screen and an encoder. That makes life a lot easier. Okay. Let's see. Next up. So I wanted to talk about some of these LCD hacks and one of my inspirations for doing them in the first place. So let's actually take a look here. Where is my, I guess I can do it from this screen here. If I jump back over to Adafruit for a moment and just type in LCD. See, we have this LCD feather wing that Joe Castillo of Oddly Specific Objects came out with recently. And I was playing around with this. It's really, really cool. So this is liquid crystal display. Means that it has a predefined set of numbers, letters and symbols that it can display, essentially baked in graphics that can be turned on and off. And so it's not a general purpose raster display where you can throw anything on there you want. You work within the constraints of what it's been designed for. And Joey's was designed particularly with clock-like projects in mind it seems. So it's got AM and PM. I'll show you some of the things it has actually in a second. Battery icon, a Wi-Fi icon, an alarm or a bell. And the way these work is really fascinating. It's a whole subject unto itself. And what I would recommend if you're interested in them is head on over to YouTube and look for a YouTuber named Posey, POSY. And he has three videos on how LCDs work, some of the history of LCDs and some discussion of the design of the segments for segmented displays that are in common use or in some cases not so common use, as well as some hacks and things that you can do. And that inspired me to dive into just one particular type of hack which is a polarization film hack. So Joey's featherwing is out of stock right now but I recommend signing up to be notified if you're interested in it. Hopefully you'll have another batch of them coming out. They're gorgeous. And that's one of the benefits of an LCD display. While it's not capable of displaying anything you feel like it looks great with the things that it was designed for. They can have very specific typefaces, the sharpness and the clarity, the contrast. Really, really beautiful. So what I'm going to do is I'll show you, first of all, just the project I've been working on once I put mine together to start playing around with it. So let me grab my down shooter here. Not that. That. And plug this in. So it's a featherwing which means I can use it on a feather doubler or quadrupler like I have here. And you can see I don't actually have a nice shadow on there. Let me get that shadow out of the way and I'll prove the exposure because this looks really great in bright light because it is the really crisp black liquid crystal display over a sort of silvery gray background which is super high contrast. One of the other benefits of these are the power consumption is incredibly low. Just orders of magnitude I think lower than something like a seven segment LED display or forget it with a TFT or an OLED. So it's not uncommon to find an old wristwatch at the thrift store that's been running on one battery over 10 years that just incredibly low power consumption displays. You don't really need to turn them off ever if you don't want to. And so with Joey's display here what I've got going right now is just a little test I wanted to do of creating a clock that I can set the tempo of music that's or sequencers or synthesizers that are listening for a MIDI clock signal. So it's a fairly standardized way to send your tempo around to different machines. And I won't hook it up to audio stuff right here and now just show visually the display. Right now it is working just over USB. I don't have the classic TRS output. You are output doing anything. And you can see here what I'm doing is I have a couple of our little mechanical key switches that I'm using to change the tempo and increments of 10 and I can either subtract 10 or add 10 to it. And then on the LCD side of things you can see I've got let me see if I can zoom in even closer and still focus. There we go. You can see I have a bit of a hack to be able to write BPM. This is I think a five digit display. It has five full seven segment equal size digits. So again, great for clock as a colon that can appear between the first two and the second two digits. And it has a couple of pre-built symbols. And I mentioned it was designed for particularly useful for clock stuff. So it has a PM signal. So I symbol. So I hijacked the PM to write BPM beats per minute. So I have a B and then I have the little PM symbol. You also see there's a data transfer symbol that Joey designed there. So that's got this sort of out and in arrow pairing that can be triggered. And one of the things about how LCDs work is that you have these different symbols and they light up sometimes in groups. So you can't always say anything I see on there. I can just light it. So I can't just light up that M of the PM symbol. That's on essentially one connection of a common and a signal pin. So when that one is high, I presume that's the right terminology for it, then the PM comes on. So those aren't separate objects. Same with this arrow. So it's in and out always. And in fact, you can see a little bit, if I get right up close, you can see some of the ghosted symbols on there that are not currently lit. So we have AMPM. We have the battery symbol below there. We have some decimal points. We have the five segment, seven segment digits there. There's the colon. And then over on the left here, you can see there's a bell, a Wi-Fi signal, a negative sign, a moon, and the data signal. So if we take a look at code here for a second and pull me out of the way there, let's open this up. So I'm going to close that out. And do I have... Yeah, I still have multiple things plugged in there. Grab the right one. There it is. Oh, there's still multiple mini-me's there. There we go. So some of this is based on the sample code that Joey provides with the library. So here it is. Oddly-specific objects is Joey's company. OSO-LCD is the library. So I'm bringing in the LCD wing light import. LCD wing light and indicator. And indicator is the name of those little special symbols. So this is set up as a object named display on I squared C. And then the main thing we do is type in display commands. So when I started this up, I had that word midi and clock going back and forth. That's sort of a special exception. You can't do a nice letter M with a single seven segment digit. So Joey has a hack for doing that, which is this ampersand seven uses two of your digits next to each other to make a sort of two-digit M. You can do the same with a W. If I change... Actually, you know what I'll do is I'm just going to resave this. Then I'll just cause it to restart. So you can watch here. There's my little midi clock. Midi clock. And then I'm turning on this PM symbol once I start the program. So let's change that. So if you look at the way that works, right at the end of my little display prints that I'm doing, I then do set the indicator PM. Let's change that to AM. And you know what I'll do is I'll take out an instance of that startup. Okay, so now I'm saying bring on the AM. I think that another one is battery. It's a little battery symbol. I don't know if there's one that sets them all. There's one that clears them all. I'm going to just guess indicator all. Yes, okay. Thanks Joey for writing that the way that I would guess it works. It's a great sign when someone comes up with predictive usage like that. So there you can see we've got all those cool symbols on there that you can use. So otherwise, nothing I'm doing in here is all that, sophisticated or all that interesting right now. I have a little BPM clock thing that Todd Bot gave me. He had been working on some midi clock code. And I was like, hey, do you have any good examples of midi clock code? And he came up with this little BPM is your seconds divided by BPM divided by four. So we do quarter notes. And then the main loop of this is simply sending a midi clock message, which is based on this rate. So it sends the midi clock message, it sleeps. So I didn't really realize that the way we had implemented midi clock in Circa Python, and maybe this is the same in Arduino also, is just say I'm a clock message and then say it again and say it again and just keep spamming that at the proper rate. It seems to work. I was feeding it into a software synth and it was happily tracking at the proper BPM as I changed it. So the other thing I wanted to do before I get off of this one is take a look at Joey's page on the, let's see. Oh, that's a different page than I was expecting. All right, hold on, let me back up. Maybe documentation. Yeah, there we go. So oddlyspecificobjects.com. Okay, there's a .org and there's a .com. So on the .com you can see here you got Joey's bear with a robotic leg and a shark for an arm and a laser eye. Just don't screw that bear. And everything here, by the way, is in the Creative Commons license except for the bear he mentions there. Oh, there's a nice, yeah, I forgot. This is everything that you can do on the display. I'll lit up at once there. And I'll also mention there's an excellent talk from, I think it was last year's Hackaday Super Conference that's available online that is Joey talking about the LCD reverse engineering, hacking, designing a new one, having them made. It's a really fantastic talk if you're interested in this subject. And then there's some info about the Circuit Python usage, basic usage, the letters that are available, some of those little hacks to get a W and an M and so on. And I think, I'm actually not sure if anyone knows in the chat, I don't think Joey's around, but if anyone knows in the chat if this is available anywhere for sale other than Adafruit, because it's out of stock right now on Adafruit, so I don't know if he's got more on the way for Adafruit, if he's selling himself somewhere, if some other reseller has them, I'm not sure. Todd says, oops, now I see the midi clock calculation is wrong. Whoops. Oh yeah, and Steve, hey Steve, Steve says, yeah, midi clock spams all the time. I guess I should have realized that because you always see midi clock messages in your little midi message viewers just spamming all the time for some reason. I thought it was something you could just send once, but that makes no sense. Yeah, it's also on Tindy. Hey Liz says that it's also on Tindy. So, all right, this now gets me to this, what did this lead me to is this whole topic of LCD hacking. So there are, especially because of the digital wristwatch scene, if that's the right word for it, there are people who are interested in doing hacks to the polarizing film and the color tinting and backlighting of LCDs, particularly for watches, but pretty much any LCD that is of this type. And by the way, if you check out that YouTube video by Posey that I mentioned on LCDs, there is a type of LCD that pretty much since 1972 or so we've been using. That's the type I'm referring to. There's an older type that I think is a little bit more transparent and tends to be over a mirror display. You'll find it in really old calculators. You'll have to go out of your way to find those. So really this is your garden variety LCD. They can be color, digits can be color, background can be color, using a bunch of really sneaky tricks. I'm talking about just these monochrome black and white kind of ones, or black and silverish kind of ones that I'll be using, but these are the most common. You'll find the color ones on some fancier watches, but with these you can do some things like tinting. So for example, if you look at this one, let me take this one off and put it under the down shooter, not that one, that one. In fact, next to Joey's, you'll see Joey's is I think untinted. My little Casio here has some dirt on it first of all. It has a sort of amber tint to the lens. So there's a lens over the top of it that is tinted amber, which I kind of like. It actually makes it a little more readable. This one is not tinted and that's, you can see that's pretty similar to the one on Joey's display. So what influences the color are two things, two sort of passive things. That's the background, what you put behind it, and if you put a color film over the top of it. So one thing you can do, let me do an impromptu hack here, is you should be able to get away with a colored tape or colored film. And if I have some Capton, this stuff is pretty cool for tinting stuff, especially if you like amber, which I do. So just a little roll of Capton tape. Thanks, NASA. If you open up this module, I'm not going to, but if we open up the watch so that we can put this tape over the display module but under the outer crystal, it'll look better and it won't get scratched up. You can see even just setting it right there, that's clearly got some similarities to what's going on with this one. So that's just putting a colored film. It could be a filter, it could be a very thin gel filter. And you can also do this behind it. So often these are set onto a sort of silver-ish, very, very light silver background, which makes them pop a lot. It gives you the highest contrast that you can get. But you can put colored, you can either remove or insert or paint. There's a few different methods depending on the type of module. A different color behind it and then it'll be black on top of that in this case. But one of the interesting things about how these work is the polarization of light is handled in such a way that we get this display to work in the first place. So there's a piece of polarizing film that goes over top of it and then the light is polarized differently through the main body of it versus the segments themselves. And so that film that's over top of it is usually arranged, it's a linear polarizer, not your sort of circular ones that you might find in some camera lens filters and things like that. But the way you know, and I know I've talked a little bit about polarizers before, but let's take a look at this. If I take, let's say, Joey's display here and grab some sunglasses. Oh my God, these are so dirty, sorry about that. You can see that you can often block them entirely, they'll become black through sunglasses. So often this happens, let me just try it here, if you tilt your watch sideways, yeah, if I go to about 45 degree angle on this watch, it goes black and it's a sign that there's a polarization filter there at work. Now the interesting thing is that the polarizer is actually the top layer. So there's an adhesive polarization layer on top of this that you can peel off. I'm not going to do it on this because I only have one of these, but I'll do it with a calculator over here on the work bench and then show you some cool tricks that you can do with that. So let me fix my bench cam that got super big, there we go. And I'm going to put my watch back on and I'm not going to destroy my watch. So leave that one alone. So what you're seeing right here, and I'm going to turn on a little work light here so we can see it better. What you're seeing here is a little calculator, a Texas Instruments calculator that I've had forever and ever. I went and bought a battery for it today. A battery was $5. You could probably buy this calculator new for $8, but oh well. So I got the $5.50 battery at the hardware store, yikes. And then even though this is on right now, you're not going to see anything because I removed the polarizing filter. So if I take that polarizer and put it back, you'll see the letters show up or the digits show up. So that's the thin little layer on there. What I did was I peeled it up with an X-Acto knife. It's a little brittle because it's old, so I tore a bit of it, which is too bad. I did use some rubbing alcohol and then also some Gugon adhesive remover to get rid of the adhesive. There's a bunch of adhesive on there that I wanted to get rid of just so it would be a little clearer. So first of all, cool reveal effect right there. So it's as if by magic that that comes on. In fact, let me get closer up as close as I can get. Sorry for the shaky cam. So you can see there as that polarizer gets in the way there, we can see that revealed, which means you can do some cool tricks, sort of small magic prop types of things. Means you can also just look through it and see the digits which no one else can see. So you can do secret displays if you wanted to. If you had some sort of an LCD that you wanted to see, no one else can see. Maybe you're doing calculations on the airplane and you don't want your nosy neighbor to look at them. Put the polarizing filter on your glasses. In fact, you probably do it with your sunglasses. You might have to tilt funny. But I can see it and so can you right there. So just so long at, look how clear that is. So long as that light is polarized through the linear polarizer, you see the display. Now, really cool sort of modification hack to this is if you either turn this 90 degrees, you'll see it is now blocking the unlit part of the display and not blocking the lit part of the display. So if you've ever seen a wristwatch that's trying to be super cool, it may have this sort of backwards looking display and that's how this works is the polarizer is simply reversed. Now, one thing you'll find is that you don't just have to turn it 90 degrees. You can all just flip it over, which means you're still going to get the same ratio that you originally had. And now you have this cool inverted display. And you can see they work best reflecting that light. So the brighter the light or if you have a backlight type of scenario, which is often what you find with the inverted displays, you get it really nice and clear and now it looks really cool. So typically what you'll do is buy yourself a little sheet, which I forgot to do, sorry in advance of this, buy yourself a sheet of this film. You can get it online easily from optics places, admin scientific, Amazon. Just because it's going to be, you can get the type that doesn't have any adhesive on it and that's going to be easier to work with versus peeling off and then trying to clean up the piece that you swiped there. But technically it works great. You can also see the smudges and things better on the black. So you probably want to start with a clean piece of that. Now that's not only a trick that works by putting the lens in front of, rather the polarizer in front of the LCD or putting it in front of your eye or the camera. But you can also, I'm going to turn this light off for a second, you can also shine a polarized light at it. So I'm going to take a flashlight here and I'm just going to take, I have a bigger piece of polarizer film here. It's also adhesive. It's one I took off of a broken display. And since this has a little adhesive on it, I can kind of stick it to my flashlight and now I can point this light at the display, which is a really cool effect for something like an escape room because now you're giving someone an object that can sort of magically reveal information. You'll see here as I rotate this, I can go from the inverted to the regular display, which is kind of cool. So depending on how you arrange this, what type of prop you put this in, it could be on a swivel and you have to move it around a room and then reveal some information that's not there to the naked eye, which is really cool, again, because it's so clear. It's like super, super sharp. I'm blowing it out with a light a little bit. The camera isn't in any auto exposure mode here. But this is really cool because the polarization of the light can be sent there polarized, right? It's coming out all scrambled and then only the sort of vertically aligned particles or photons are coming out of the lens and hitting this. So the polarization kind of works both ways, which is really neat. I think I'll leave this one alone until I get some film. But I have this really cool calculator. I also picked up for, I think, $10. And it's a really nice Casio. You can see I have a fondness for Casios. Really beautiful looking. It's even got metal. How can they make it that cheap? It's got metal accents on it. Nice little desk calculator. And I think that would be kind of fun to give that an inverted display. I mean, it's beautiful the way it is, but that is a nice, big display to play with right there. Pop that out. And if you watch Joey's talk, you'll find out a little more about how these are connected and arranged. There are a number of common pins and then a number of the sort of segment pins here. So you're not going to swap this into something that isn't designed for it. You need an exact arrangement of them. But it is a sort of nice big one with a big ribbon cable. If you're interested in deeper hacking of this, it might be interesting to use the driver board that Joey has and hook this up. You might need to double check that voltages are roughly in the same ballpark. But they're so cheap because they're made in such huge quantities. They're not cheap to make in the first place. The first one's expensive, but obviously if they can sell this in a $9 calculator, that part is just sub $1 probably is my guess for that display. So you can get those harvest them. You might be able to find them in bulk online, Alibaba or something like that. But if you take a display like this that doesn't have the polarizer removed, then I think you can just block it entirely with the polarizer. That's kind of the sunglasses thing I was talking about with that focus. So it's polarizing the light, but it's all or nothing for what we're getting there. So we're either not blocking those ones or now we're blocking everything. So you have to peel that off of there to then do one of these interesting hacks to it. Same with the watches, right? You can see through it. You can make it black. If you peel that off, then you go in and add your own. So those, and by the way, the one that I took off of that smaller calculator, looks like it would be a good size for doing an inversion hack on a lot of these watches. Some of these watches, the ratio is such that you might not be able to turn it 90, but you might be able to flip it over if you get the adhesive off. But I recommend going get yourself some fresh film to work with and try some different densities and different thicknesses of the material. So that is it. That's what I wanted to show with LCD hacking there. Here we have the... I'll go back to this page here for a second. Wrong one. We have both the LCD featherwing in the store, but it's out of stock currently. Also, here's another one that was in the store at one point. It's this one, Turing Complete Labs. And this one's interesting because it is a 10-digit, really geared towards calculator type of stuff. You could also do clock. It doesn't have a colon. It doesn't have any of those symbols that Joe picked out that are clock-like, but you definitely get a lot of digits here. 10 of them all have decimal points. Some of them have these little sort of apostrophes or comma segments, depending on how you're using it. I imagine you could flip it upside down and use those as commas and then just change some things in code. So those are a couple that we've had. And they are different in certain ways than these types of LCD character displays, which are more of a matrix. So for these, this is like a number of individual dots that then software can light them up or not. So you're always going to have those little segments between things. You don't have any solid... Let me see if I can open that image up on its own. So if you look here, you have essentially a matrix display. It's in this case both inverted and backlit. So we're getting backlighting blue where we're not lighting the segments and where the segments are lit as the inverted, but they're all made of little dots. So, you know, this type of LCD technology, it's beautiful. One of the sort of crowning examples of it is something like a game and watch. And watch, if you're not familiar with these, old Nintendo devices that have baked-in little jugglers and other graphics that can only light up where it sees them. Also, teenage engineering with the pocket operators. Do I have one here? I don't think I do. Teenage engineering pocket operator. Sort of an homage in a lot of ways to that game and watch. They have some helpful graphics on there, but then also some of it is just for fun. So you get some BPM and key and some other things, but you also have just an arcade cabinet there, or with some of these you get these little robot arms that are moving because they're segments that have been designed for just for fun, just for animation. So that's the beauty of the LCD is it can be designed for a really bespoke purpose. And I think your Tamagotchi or your little, what was that thing inside the Dreamcast? I'm dating myself a little bit, but if you remember there was like a little Tamagotchi-like thing that you could use as your memory card in the Dreamcast and play like one terrible game on it maybe. Yeah, that's right, Tim. Thank you, DJ Devon3 mentioned that Tim C, Mr.FomyGuy has been doing the octopus game, the game and watch octopus game in Circuit Python. Yeah, DJ Devon, also this is like a magic show now. Thank you. Yeah, it is like magic. It's such a cool effect. I've known people who do escape room types of things to use this exact hack. I have mentioned it before. You can peel the entire polarizing film off of a display, a monitor, and then have something that looks white. It's just going to look like white light until someone puts on glasses that have the polarizers in them and then they can see a secret message. So there's a lot of neat, magic-y types of secret message stuff that you can do thanks to the polarizer. All right. Well, that's it. That is going to do it for today's episode of John Park's workshop, wherein I get excited about LCD displays. Thanks again everyone for stopping by. Thanks again to Joey for the excellent design and talk that you did on LCDs and the LCD feather. I'm very excited about it and looking forward to using that in other projects. And I think there's going to be a deep dive tomorrow with FOMI Guy. So look for that. I will be back on Tuesday with a new product pick of the week and I'll see you for that. So thanks everyone. Have a great one. Grated Fruit Industries on John Park. It's been John Park's workshop. Bye-bye.