 much for joining it's me John Park and it's time for John Park's workshop sorry we had a slight technical delay there for a moment so you got to hear the weird chaff song one more time most the way through and I want to say hello to the people over in our YouTube chat thanks for joining us hi Dave Odessa hey Quinman 16 and modern magician Howdy thanks for stopping by and for people who are wondering where the other chats are if you're over on Facebook or on Twitch or some other place Periscope does that exist LinkedIn learning I don't know but if you're there and there's not a lot of chat evident then head on over to this place this is our discord chat and you can head over to adafrew.it slash discord look for the live broadcast chat channel that's this one right here and I love Thursday what a concept thanks for throwing that in there that made my day Andy I love that I got to rewatch that so what's happening here hi BlitzCityDIY thanks for stopping by hope you're feeling well Andy Callaway yes Jim Hendrickson thin man thanks everyone for hopping on over and yes Lars is what's Lars doing over there on the on the Meowzik we're gonna we're gonna get get inside that Meowzik I'm excited about this one too it's very cool so let's see first of all I'll give you a little delicious coupon code to use over in the store so if you head over to Adafruit and you buy some cool stuff you can build some great projects and we get to keep the lights on here which is awesome it's how we get paid but we want you to get a little discount so if you use happy day happy dash day today this very day you will get 10% off in the store on your entire order of physical stuff it won't work on gift certificates or software or gifts subscriptions gift certificates subscription software those are the three or 90 things I can never say those words together I gotta come up with like a practice like the right order that works for me the one I tend towards doesn't work for me but that's not the point the point is you can get 10% off over in the store and if you head over there if you just jump on over to let's see where this place go this is the Adafruit store right here make that little skinnier so that it fits fit thing almost and if you jump over to this little hamburger element up at the top I call that the hamburger I think a lot of people do if you click on that hamburger that's a little quick navigation thing that's for when your screen is narrow ish that'll pop up and you can go to new products right there you can see some of the cool new products that came out since the last time I'm excited about these is the Pimeroni Pico VGA and DVI demo bases I just started working with I'm building a little VGA video synthesizer video generator test signal generator kind of thing and so I've got a whole VGA workflow that I'm working on so it's kind of cool to think about doing some VGA with the Pico what else we've got this little camera breakout a few of these came out they I think we just had a small number of them but there'll be lots more and Lady Aida is getting into cameras so this was the OV 5640 camera breakout with a 120 degree lens on it in this sort of standardish 9 by 2 breakout format for the pins also this Adafruit floppy feather wing I got to get one of these I want to play around with all of the floppy action I got a box of discs where I put them them around here somewhere really good that I can't find but I got a nice box of floppy discs and I got to get a matching drive so I can try to play around with those this one's coming soon to this Metro M7 with airlift that's a Metro with a very advanced chip on it that'll be coming and more and more and more but if you want to get any of those things or anything else really that your heart desires in the Adafruit store and you want to get a little discount on that then type that in happy day happy dash day I'll get you your 10% off today in the store let's see on Tuesdays I've got my other show which is the product pick show and on that I get to play around with some new thing and give you a huge discount on it we had this one for a 50% off discount this week which was great it's like $7 and something or other for a feather board that happens to have an RP2040 chip on it and it's got all of those pins for driving NeoPixels in fact I've got mine hooked up you can just see a bit of it right there that demo that I showed it's actually also glowing some light over there I want to find a cool way to display that but here's a little recap from that episode just two days feather RP2040 Scorpio it's a eight channel NeoPixel drive-in feather we can use the NeoPixel 8 library inside of Arduino and in circuit Python to animate NeoPixel LEDs up to eight strips or rings of them it's all using a PIO state machine it really leaves the other processing free for you to do other stuff on the board such as read inputs or write to displays feather Scorpio there and that has the right angle headers and then I'm using one of these IDC ribbon cables to breakouts for IDC and this one is keyed so you can't put it in wrong so all the white wires there are the data lines going into all of the eight NeoPixel strips and then all the black wires there are connected to grounds power side of the NeoPixel strips broken out to snap connectors here and then I have this running to one of our old DC breakout feather RP2040 Scorpio yes it was so I hope if you wanted some of those you got some of those let's see what else is up actually I just threw this note out there if anyone can let me know if the frame rate seems healthier today I made one just one proper scientific method I made one change to my setup on the frame rate that I'm sending I was sending 60 frames a second up to restream I dropped it to 30 I'm curious if I was clogging up the bandwidth there with too many frames and it was wiggin things out so I'm waving my hands because that's that's usually a good test of a frame rate right and I don't want to try to monitor that so let me know what you think about the frame rate today what else oh blitz says frame rate is smooth that's good thank you okay what else is going on here hey this is a good good chance to do a circuit python parsec and for this one actually the smoother frame rate which I'm getting multiple reports in that it is smoother this will be helpful actually help with seeing what's what's what so check it out all right of course I spoke too soon because I just broke the demo didn't I let's see if I can restart there we go all right hopefully that'll stay running you can see that so for the circuit python parsec today I wanted to show you how to iterate forward through a loop and then back through a loop and in this case to do some cool ASCII graphics but you could apply this to anything particularly things like neopixel animations is a good one sound things anytime you want to create an increase and a decrease running back and forth back and forth this will help and it's it's quite simple so all I'm importing library wise is the time library so I can put little pauses I can adjust my intervals then I have an integer variable called len for length length of 10 so that's how many times I'm gonna loop forward and then how many times I'm gonna loop backward my interval is the time period so that's how quickly this happens and then here you can see in my main loop I have essentially the same type of for loop repeated twice first they say for I in the range of my length in this case 10 I'm gonna print a space multiplied by I so at first I is gonna be 0 then 1 then 2 then 3 then 4 all the way up through the end of the length of the thing so I'm just adding spaces and then I'm also printing this little ASCII art of a dot dot and a bracket I pause a little bit between each one so it doesn't zip by too fast so that gives us the increase and we get out to the edge of that sort of saw wave we see then we're working our way backwards we say for again I in the range of that length of 10 we're gonna print space times the length minus I so initially I is 0 so it's just that length then the next time through we're gonna be increasing I so we're gonna take length and subtract 1 from it to 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 all the way through until we reach the end and then loop back through and so this is one way you can really clearly and easily loop forward and backward through a range and that is your circuit Python parsec all right hopefully that stayed smooth the whole time I think the encoding is not making the ASCII art scroll very smoothly is what Todd just said so that's that's too bad but you'll see a different effect locally as far as how wiggly and fun this looks but the the notion of it incrementing slowly outward might might be a little easier to see so here you can see I'll adjust this just for fun I'm gonna say give me an interval of 0.1 so that's gonna be slower that'll probably be a little easier for the video encoder to deal with and this doesn't have to be just things like the ASCII artwork moving out by spaces we can also do something like let me see I should be able to actually show the value of I at the end of each of those so you'll see it go 0 1 2 3 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 5 6 7 8 9 so you can see the the value of I keeps increasing but it's that length minus I so if I put that here length minus I we should see our what 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 on the way back I thought I'm using this for something like tempo of a drum machine or a an LFO to adjust a volume or something like that it's a lot you can do with it but I thought this this might actually look look clearer than than trying to do it with audio and we will be doing some audio stuff so so that was our visual stuff today all right let's see so go back to regular view there unplug this metro I'm glad that behaved because for a moment there was it was looking like the metro didn't want to send over to my serial my repel which can be a bummer okay let's see I think we'll jump right to it so this is what we're gonna be talking about here today this is the meowsic toy piano or cat piano meowsic this has been around for a few years at Target it's hard to find it anywhere else or you'll see it marked up so there must it must be a target exclusive it's coming up be toys they have a bunch of cool stuff on the shelves at Target and then this is like $27 or something for this cat keyboard it's a kid's toy priced like one you can pay double that if you try to go to Amazon or eBay or other places from what I can tell unless you maybe get a used one or something but real cheap at Target less than less than $30 and it is the only toy piano I've ever seen where the keys have a shape to them the length of the keys is has been completely manufactured custom just for just for the purposes of this design which is fantastic I love it so it's a simple electronic synthesizer it plays back some samples that are pitched these meow sounds as well as some other this piano sound bells organ and it also has a little microphone input and it can play back it can record and play back some short passages adjust the tempo of that you can also just some some different rhythms that are built into it and some canned songs in it so I wanted to take a look at this one and I've seen I know that people have done some modifications on it before I think people have circuit bent it and I think maybe someone did a limited version of a MIDI or not MIDI but like a serial output so they could just read it like buttons on a Arduino I think it was and then I've seen one that was circuit bent and had audio line audio output so one idea I have with this is that a lot of those circuit bent ones are kind of focused on more adult type of players who want to do some cool noise art glitch art circuit bent stuff and not just noise it can be very musical but in the vein of the kid hackers and toys for for hacking on in the home for infants kind of like the sea and say that I worked on one thing I want to do is just see if by adding an audio output to it we can improve the quality of the sound that comes out of it and one reason I say that is that there are a lot of instruments that I've run across in electronic music and an electric guitar is actually kind of a great example of this where the instrument itself doesn't sound like much until you add some processing and some effects and that can be anything from just distortion of a cabinet and overdrive to any kinds of effects pedals that you want so my idea is this could be for an adult it's supposed to be for a kid it is a lot more pleasant to play this thing once you put a little bit of delay or reverb or both on it so what I want to do is show you what it's like just give you a tour of it on its own then I'll show you the guts of it that we care about if we're gonna try to get a switchable audio output properly and safely so that we can switch between the built-in speaker versus a quarter inch jack that we can plug into other audio gear like a guitar pedal you know if you think of a lot of new parents a lot of new parents have little kids they get this thing a lot of new parents still have their guitars and pedals and amps around so why not marry the two together I don't know Phil and Lamar have have amps and pedals but maybe they do so let's jump over here and I will take you on a little tour of this meowsic and hopefully you can hear the little speaker on it well enough to get an idea of what it does and then I will dive into the modified version so this one actually right now I have some a couple little leads soldered to it internally but at the moment none of that changes anything so I basically it's basically untouched I have the output from the audio card on here running to its its speaker so if I turn it on I'll turn the volume all the way up so you can hear it beeping there it's got a little digital volume and I'm just gonna lower my lav mic down here so you can hear this so here's piano sound has its own little bit of distortion there on some pitches just I think from harmonic feedback of the the resonant plastic there this plays two tones at once maximum so I'm trying to play all three but it only is playing the first two I hit so that's piano sound there's these bells I'm skipping meow because it is the best so we'll hit that last organ actually has some sustain so you can hear it kind of peaks up and then comes back down you know I'm just gonna pop open the discord chat so I can see if anyone has any issues with hearing hearing this hopefully you can hear it well enough so there's the organ and banjo which is nice and plucky there is not an octave switch on this so one mod I've seen people do is add a giant pitch knob that'll like drop it down an octave or two and raise it up and it's I don't know if the pitch tracks that well once you start doing that or if it's a more of a adding resistance circuit bend kind of thing kind of sounded like a circuit bend thing as a youtuber called Simon the magpie who's got the best example of a circuit bent one he did one with just the audio output like I'm gonna do and then there was someone called house cat who does toy modifications instrument mods and stuff who did a one with a LFO and some other mod I forget what it was as well as pitch bending so that's banjo it's got these built-in drums so that's apparently a rock there's blues Samba techno disco so you can increase it and decrease the tempo and then I'm gonna put the lab here for a second you can also hit stop this nose button for stop I don't know why they made it beep when you hit stop but I guess why not you can play back oh here let me give you the cat sound I forgot to do that so here's meow and they preview the sounds when you press these which is kind of neat which is great you can here's the full range lowest you can record so if I hit record hit record again to stop and I can play that back on screen it has a really terrible microphone with a very nice retractable cable mechanism on it so the only thing interesting about it I found was feedback you can get using it with your amplifier so maybe we'll explore that I may also add a switch to cut the mic it's always active so I might add a switch to cut that so that you don't have to hear that feedback once you get it going through your amplifier and then it's got some built-in songs which I won't play on off switch there so now let's take a look inside I've already removed the massive pile of screws by the way has a really really nice carrying handle nice and easy to carry I'm not sure why they did that but that's great carry that thing around I guess kids might want to carry that around and have small hands it might be a nice way to carry it so nice big rubber pads for the feet so it doesn't slide around six AA batteries in here only I can leave that closed and I will tighten that up and here's the giant pile of screws that came out of there to open this up I didn't count but it's like 21 screws or something like that and then it's slightly snap fit as well besides having all those screws the case you kind of have to get a finger guitar pick or something under there so yeah so I was looking at the comments DJ Devin I don't think it acts vocoder like I don't think playing pitches actually influences your sung vocal it's so hard to tell if that's what it's doing that I don't think it is but it's kind of funny I couldn't exactly tell so here we have on the bottom we've just got two things really the battery pack and you can see this is actually four batteries four double A's and there's a diode protection diode here probably shot key and those run to power runs to the on-off switch which is over here and then ground runs to the main board and then it's distributed elsewhere and then the other thing on this side is the microphone so you can see it's got this really great well-designed well-engineered retractable locking cable you can press that and then release it and of course imagine young kids I think this is listed as like ages five and older or something will want to pull that out and then just press this and suck it back in all day long so it's got to be pretty robust to deal with that microphone runs to this board right here and I'll zoom in just a little bit and then we'll get closer try to get that focus there we go so the the mic cable goes in here it has two wires coming from it I believe and then it's got some strain relief hot glue this you can see most of the wiring has hot glue strain relief which is a good idea and I have not I think we will before the end of the show take in everything apart to flip it upside down one thing I am interested in and you can I think you can see it here so this is just see if I can boost the brightness here one second there we go so this here looks like a little PCB for all of the key presses and you can see the little telltale rubber nubs there these little kind of white rubber nubs that have been pulled through those are an indicator that this is going to be like a video game controller type of rubber dome or elastomer dome with a little capacitive or a conductive pill in the bottom and then there'll be some copper traces like this that get closed when each key presses I also love that the sort of base support that all of the keyboard lives on is also kind of a smile kind of a Cheshire cat looking smile there which is great so we have a few button little ribbon cables running for buttons I think this one here is one of the the canned songs and I think that runs into this ribbon along with maybe some of the keys not sure some more keys there's probably a matrix that it's reading because this is what like eight one two three four five six seven eight I think there's eight pins in this ribbon and there's more keys than that so it's probably a matrix there may be some clues on this board will probably take some rubbing alcohol and pop off that hot glue so we can just read the silk screen on there another there's another case here where we have a number of buttons that are running up to this ribbon cable and maybe they're picking up this this button here the switch that's also being used for one of the canned songs to play and then we have the on board speaker here some of the buttons are just built on the main motherboard there or main board there so the tempo up down and volume up down those are those are directly on this what I think is the main button there's we just seeing a capacitor and what is that is that a accelerometer or a tilt switch I don't know if this thing does I don't think this does any tilt switchy stuff look at the manual is that a fuse someone someone tell me what they think that might be right there a little silver cylinder there what's that likely to be fuse tilt switch temperature other so then we've got the speaker and so this just a little bit here so this is where I've started my modifications and this is a ground that's at the center of the on-off switch so that seemed like a convenient place to grab ground the red wire here that I'm holding this is the audio output that goes to the speaker so through whatever processor and amplifiers built onto the board it's running through this red line and it was running straight to the speaker so I went ahead and clipped that and where you see yellow this is my additional wire going to the speaker and then I've just kind of bridged it right now so if I take that off now we won't be able to hear anything because there's there's no nothing bridging the speaker so what I'm adding is and I'll go we'll go look at the circuit in fact let's let's run over here for a second take a look at what the the schematic is a crystal Johnny Bergdahl says he thinks that's a crystal that would make sense thank you alright so pop open this view here okay so here is my fritzing diagram of the circuit I'm just gonna drag it over a little bit so you can see I've got ignore the fact that the speaker object I'm using has plus and minus in disagreement between breadboard view and schematic view so what so one of them is wrong right but the top of that speaker there that's going to we'll say it's going to ground so I don't care about that one this other one is the positive and that would be like a audio ground but that part doesn't matter but the the next one here this is the the board's amplifier out that goes to the speaker so what I'm doing is I'm running that to zoom in here I'm running that to a switch and originally that came from I just made a mystery object that you can see there and fritzing I'm calling it the meowsic audio and sorry blank in the screen there so the meowsic audio there is just a mystery component that I made and I'm saying that this pin to here that's where the audio comes out of the meowsics amplifier so that runs to a switch so that switch can either just be shorted over to the speaker and then it's going to act as normal or I can short that over to what is going to be my line out quarter-inch instrument guitar style line out output just we'll we'll briefly touch on this I haven't done this part yet but I'm pretending that there's a couple of lines here for the microphone and that I'll probably interrupt one of those lines with the switch and then this is the microphone object down here so I haven't done that yet but if I if I do end up wanting to throw a switch and that's kind of what it would look like I think so here is kind of the interesting part of the whole circuit and I'll show you I got this example off of a in instructables post and then I kind of verified it with some other sources checked in with Todd bought about it he said yep these values look good so I put it together on a breadboard worked out so what's going on when I switch my switch and I'm going to use a sort of low force guitar pedals or stomp switch type of switch because it's a nice big clicky switch is not too hard to press like you know you may think of a traditional guitar pedal switches you got to kind of step on it this one's actually easy to click and it's a nice form factor for something like this on a kid's toy I think so click that what it's going to do it's going to short the it's going to create the contact from the meowsic audio output that was going to the speaker that's going to run to a 100k resistor and this is to limit the current so that we don't cause any issues if we short something with with the rest of the meowsic if the when the guitar plug goes in for example so this will reduce the current then we run that output from the meowsics amplifier circuit into one side one leg of a potentiometer other side of it goes to ground and that means I can adjust the voltage of the output audio so we can basically use like a volume knob of the output a mixing knob of the output so I can drop it all the way down nothing will come through and then bring it up to something that works with whatever equipment you're sending it out to so the wiper that variable resistance value that's changing as we turn the knob that goes through a capacitor which is going to it's a 10 10 microfarad capacitor that will bring us to a zero point it remove the DC offset essentially and bring our zero point of audio to zero so the baseline of what that audio signals wrapped around this will offset it so that we're starting at zero which is a healthy place we will sound good when we output this to other equipment that then runs to a tip of an audio output jack which is usually the left side or if it's a mono jack the only side I happen to have a diagram schematic here for a for a stereo one so I'm just leaving the the right ring side unconnected and actually the one I grabbed happens to be stereo and it's same thing I'm just not worried about what's connected into that I don't have anything plugged into that right side and then sleeve goes to ground so what this looks like on the breadboard might might help so you can see this one with a question mark that's my meowsics amplifier circuit the white leg that wire coming from the middle leg is going to my switch which then can if I said send the switch left then we'll go to the speaker there actually I don't need this wire here that's kind of wrong all right I'll leave it there for now the other side when we flip it means we're going to go through our 100k resistor into the potentiometer you can see the other side of the potentiometers and ground actually have these kind of backwards I won't flip them now because the schematic will get mad at me so this would this would volume would be lowest to the right and highest to the left with the way I have this here but I didn't do it that way on the one we're going to take a look at and then you can see the center leg of that runs out to my capacitor to remove the DC offset and then that goes to the tip of my audio jack and then ground goes to ground and then you can see here I was starting to think about the microphone there so let's take a look at what this looks like in practice I put this together so that it's sort of modular and we can kind of plug things in and see it come together makes it easier for me to iterate on it a bit I could change out some of the values on some of the stuff oops I got the wrong you over here there we go and then we'll also mount it into the case I think maybe we'll mount it into the case today if we have time so first thing is our switch so this zoom down in a bit this is the switch that is going to say either this heads to the speaker or it heads to the rest of the circuit to go to our video output or audio output so I've used some color coding and some heat shrink here so that I don't screw things up but I've got essentially a pair of wires that are the audio input is this red line here so that's in the middle these switches are essentially a single a three-pole double throw so there happens to be three poles one of them broke off but they're all double throw so there's something common in the middle that is either going to be sent to that side or that side depending on the position of clicking this goes between one another flipping back and forth so I'm going to plug in this yellow line here is what's going to the speaker and this red line is what's coming from the Meowzix audio board so that means right now with just this connected in one position we should hear audio come out of the Meowzix built-in speaker if it's turned on so I'm gonna turn it on okay and I'm not hearing anything so that should mean that if I click this you're in the on position okay that's good I've already broken it buries I'm gonna just assume the batteries okay so let me let me oh I plugged the wrong thing in even though I color-coded it I'm sure someone saw that in the chat sorry now we go here we go oh we got the drum going all right that button likes to get pressed so okay here's so here's the demo of just that okay so it's either going to the speaker or I click it and now it's going down that blue line so that's just taking the audio and diverting it either to the speaker or to the rest of the circuit so let's see now what I've got is this little board you could you could dead bug airwire all this stuff it's pretty typical to do it that way if you look at the the instructable that I'll show you in a second that's how they did it but for me just to make it really clear I put it on a little proto board here and so what I'll do is then run the switch output that goes to the rest of the circuit is that blue line right there what's happening on here is everything I described about going from the audio of the meowsic through the switch to the resistor then we go to one leg of a potentiometer I have there we have a ground for the potentiometer and we have the other side running out to the capacitor and then the capacitor output is this yellow line that'll go to my audio jack and then we have a ground there for the audio jack so that means if I take a potentiometer here and let me be a little more careful about my color coding there plug in those three cables so okay that'll now allow me to adjust the audio voltage level volume essentially and then here is my jack like I said I accidentally grabbed a stereo one it still works fine it just means that there's one lug there that's for the ring that I don't need to use so I have the tip and the sleeve there and I will plug those into the output and then the last thing that I need to plug in is my ground that's why I confused myself okay so there we go this I put some extensions in here so this is the audio and ground and then running to the switch I just I sort of left that extension out of there okay so this now zoom out a little bit sorry about the close up there so hopefully this now makes sense I've got audio from the meowsic goes to center of the switch and then those run either back to the speaker or out to the resistor which then goes to one side of my potentiometer I've got ground on the other side and then the output from that goes through this capacitor and out to this jack okay so first thing we'll do is just see does it still work with the speaker side of it it's playing a song oh I don't want to play those stop stop okay so that works um oh geez it's so easy to accidentally stop so now what I'll do is I'm just gonna hang this stuff out the edge here turn it around a bunch okay so this was just the jumper I was using when all this wasn't there so that the speaker would still run so I don't need that so there's there's what we have and that means I can now plug in a guitar amp so let's go straight to an amp first of all this will just give us some volume so I have a quarter inch jack and I'm running to this little sort of guitar amp thing here okay it's gonna hum and buzz when I touch it should should be pretty clean when I'm not so okay so there's built-in speaker I'll lower my volume a bit I'll stomp my switch hold on something seems a little loose now ultimately this is I'm gonna do straight wires I'm not gonna I'm gonna run wires that are soldered on both ends and not use all of these jumpers because they they're gonna introduce noise and problems so this is kind of more just in testing yeah I can I can tell something is sorry about that yeah something I've got flaky here I think it's just a jumper one of these jumper connections I'm gonna start one of the record one of the drum beats playing so that I can diagnose this that's better okay so I won't touch anything here now just because I'm sure I've got some loose connections that aren't aren't healthy to touch but so what this means though is we can now with a clean signal kind of this go into a guitar pedal which is kind of the point in making this sound good so it's cute but it doesn't sound great my hope is we can get it to sound great by running it into this delay so let's carefully try to not disturb too much and add this delay pedal into the mix okay so I forgot to get some longer patch cables I've just got some of these real short ones so I'm gonna go into this delay pedal that C Grover will recognize because it was his and out to and now we should get cool delay and we can adjust things like the the speed of the delay type of delay and the effect entirely we can also get oh you can hear that mic right that's why I'm getting all that feedback by the way right so that's why I think now that we have an external speaker there was no danger of that little speaker feeding back with this really you can hear it even when I'm speaking I'm getting this feedback not as bad when you're playing you won't hear it as much but that's uh this should go as far away as possible so the other one I have here is going to be bonkers but this is a distortion type of pedal all the cool pedals by the way my son took with him to college so I don't have any of the really other than this one actually it was the only very cool one that he didn't take for size reasons but he did leave this one little distortion pocket metal so let's see I'm gonna turn that down this is not as as pleasant as this giga delay I love the delay on there and you could get a get a lot with with delays and reverbs but here's the pocket metal which should just add a lot of distortion here it is clean just likes the feedback sorry yeah I really feel like we gotta gotta cut that mic out of that so um anyway that's some of the uh yeah can I turn off the mic so let's do it I think that's a fun activity so let's uh just see what's the clean way to cut the mic out of this uh later I can add a switch but if we look in here this is mic running to board I'm gonna get some rubbing alcohol a little pick and actually this works let me zoom in here uh this works fairly well I find uh and you just soak a little rubbing alcohol onto a little tool screwdriver or other just drip it and and pry on the bob of hot glue they kind of worked it all over the wiring there so I'll take a little more there we go so that helps uh and now I'm just gonna desolder one side of the mic here there's a kind of white grayish and a black so I'm just gonna desolder the black side of that um question is the right wire for my soldering iron this is the one that likes to shut off quickly so we'll see low voltage it says darn you all right I'm gonna just ask it nicely please heat up enough to just no darn it all right let me grab a different wire here's a new one let's see how this one does what about you yeah there we go we're getting temperature on that there we go uh so mic should be disabled now I'm just going to live dangerously and leave that off to the side and hope it doesn't magically re-short itself okay so now if we try this distortion pedal okay good power to the pedal I had to make a inversion of polarity for the power supply that I'm using here on the pedal because pedals are center negative and so I've got essentially center positive to center negative here this little set of adapters okay I hear okay so this pedal has like a tone knob let me turn the volume low so you can see it kind of cuts out some of the high end like a little filter so keep it pretty high end and then start adding in distortion something by the way is noisy in my I don't think it's just that pedal could be um I wish I were running this off of a battery but let's go back to the uh the giga delay there for a second the um feedback is gone though so I'm not getting that mic feedback which that's great uh so let's let's see I just want to see if this signal is still clean um because I think I've got some wiring to clean up there yeah it's real noisy all right so let me let me wiggle things and see if that yeah I think it's this potentiometer is suspicious that's a little less noisy all right well I'm not a keyboardist but I do like to have fun with pedals so um that is it that's gonna show us uh how to get line out from this and pretty much most toys you may need to do a little bit of figuring uh of the values on the resistor and the capacitor but otherwise most toys that have a speaker out this is a pretty solid way uh to both switch from the the toy on its own uh and then out to out to other equipment which gives you amplifiers and pedals and delays and uh uh loopers and things like that at your disposal which is pretty cool uh same with euro rack when I was testing this I had this running through um into into my euro rack uh the fact that we can adjust the um level with this volume knob here you can hear I think this is broken I think something's going on with that knob which is where any time I touch it that's working getting a lot of the noise and it's not working to change the volume the way it was before yeah that should be totally uh dropping the volume to nothing so I've got a got some troubleshooting to do there now I shouldn't make any sound when it's far left like that um so let's unplug that stuff and take a look real quick at what else is in here this one turns off if you unplug the input which is nice and the other thing I'll do is um I think I won't do this right now because I want to I want to troubleshoot the circuit before I commit to placement but what I'm thinking with this is to put this switch maybe uh on the top of this ear so you can click that up and down there um put a volume knob maybe there get a nice little knob cap on there looks like his tiny little hat oh maybe I'll put it there I look like a tiny little fascinator how cute is that yeah that's what he needs uh and then the line out we'll go maybe over here over here but there's tons and tons of room to place stuff in here um so I'm not gonna take all of it apart but the thing I did want to do is just pull up this board to have a look at it and also Lamore said hey if you take that board up give me a picture of it so she can take a look at that from a by the way they put in this packing tape just to kind of keep the wiring I'm I'm assuming keep the wiring uh in place while they close it I think that's just a in the factory thing I don't think it these aren't going anywhere in use um so I suspect they just put this light packing tape in here to make closing it up easier without things getting pinched I suspect so if we take I'm just gonna flip this around so I can look at it driver there's a couple screws here uh let me turn this off what three screws yeah and pretty much everything runs to this so that's how we can guess uh this is where the brains are assumption is that we're gonna find mostly epoxy blobs and so far all of the exterior screws were the same length and looks like these three are the same length and size which is nice from a organizational standpoint okay so let's move that it's holding you back that and this ground a little tight okay so I'll I'll try to orient this to the camera okay so you can see we've got a main microcontroller there try to get a good focus under an epoxy blob so not much you can do with it uh you can see a lot of solder joints here where all the ribbon cables come in from all of the the buttons and the button matrix uh some passives some bigger capacitors for probably the audio amplification and and filtering there's four button uh I'll probably lift one of these up how do they have those on there is that yeah these are these are all just little nubs that pull through there so same sort of video game controller pad type of pair of contacts there that are shorted by the nub the rubber nub uh and that's about it so not a ton to look at and then I think all of the other boards here are going to be um just button boards this is my guess so I'll end up pulling those up but this is going to have you know one switch here that you can see there's two wires running to that just plays that one sound effect the start stop and so on uh so that's it that's the tour of the the meowsic interior not a lot to see um I think since there are a decent number of uh passives resistors in particular and since I've seen that people have circuit bent this that some some of this uh probably timing maybe that maybe that crystal uh is what someone is messing with when they're doing some of the the pitch shifting kind of stuff I'm not sure but that might be fun to probe around with and see how circuit bendable it is but I think that's going to do it sorry about some of the the noise feedback in particular but also some of the noise in my circuit there it was clean and then it wasn't so I think using the jumper cables makes it a little easier to test some stuff at first but I suspect that every one of those connections there is is suspicious versus running straight straight runs of soldered wire so that's what I'll do ultimately when I mount this up all right so I think that's it for the meowsic let me see if anyone has thoughts and questions uh looks like there's a in the comments over in discord uh ax wax hacked a kid's toy here uh added in a pro micro and a df player very cool to the button matrix so complete takeover I love that let's see thoughts questions see Grover says it could could put a strap on there to do a kitty guitar I need both guitar and keyboard lessons then uh yeah so I agree with everyone sorry I didn't cut the mic off earlier and that that does need a does need a switch for that I think a little external switch to cut the mic um unless you're a big fan of feedback and then just shove that mic right into the into the amplifier and you don't need anything else all right uh before I go I'll remind you you can get yourself a discount over in the store happy day happy dash day 10 off over in the Adafruit store head on over there uh find some stuff you like and get a discount on it uh that is going to do it for Adafruit Industries I'm John Park this has been John Park's workshop thanks so much for stopping by everyone and I will see you next time bye bye