 All right, there we are. Look, it's me, JP. I just dig that song. What can I say? That was written by our own Tom White. You may know him as Bartlebeats. Here we are. It's time for JP's product pick of the week. Thanks, everyone, for coming by to enjoy the show. And as I do every week, the first thing I want to do is I want to send you right there to that QR code or that URL, because if you head there, you're going to find this week's product pick at a deep, deep, never-before-seen discount. And I'm going to hazard a sneak over there real quick and see if we're doing well already on the sales. I'm going to refresh this page. Let's see. We've got 18 in stock. Oh my goodness. All right, so let me jump back to the show so that you can hear all about it. I've got windows flying all over the place. So yeah, if you head to this URL, you're going to find our product pick of the week. And we broadcast the show from right inside that page. So you can watch it right from that page. And with no further ado, let's have Lady Aida tell us about this week's product pick. Take it away, Lady Aida. This is the 2.7-inch Sharp Memory Display. If you have seen our smaller Sharp Memory Display, well, this is the same thing, but bigger. 400 by 240 pixels, monochromatic, kind of daylight readable. This is the same display used in the Play Date. So if you've seen this really cool cranking handheld game, same display. We have both Arduino and Circuit Python and Python code. We've carried a smaller version of this display, like 1.3-inch or 1.5-inch. But we saw the 2.7-inch has come down in costs somewhat to the point where it was like, oh, we can make a breakout. So this is a very high-resolution screen. It's 400 by 240 pixels. You can see here the individual pixels. All the other demos had to use kind of chunky larger graphics because it was hard to see it, because it's such a fine-pitched display. It runs off of both 3 and 5 volts. You actually need both voltages, I found out. So we put both a boost converter, a little switch cap converter, and a linear regulator. So you can use it with 3-volt or 5-volt logic. And then I pointed bad apple to it, so I could show that. Yeah, let's do it. The only thing about this is I had to use a binary file that's 128 by 64, so everything looks really chunky because I scaled it up by four times. But what's really nice about this demo is it shows you both the refresh and the contrast and how it looks in real life with this silvery background and these black pixels. It's a very unique display, extremely daylight readable. You do need to have light shining on it, though. It doesn't have a backlight. Yeah, I already. You can do that, and you can see it's actually a little shiny. Yeah, look how sharp it is. It's very sharp. You need a sharp display. It's called a sharp display, and it is a sharp display, even though it's the company. It's a little sharp. So a very high resolution display, one thing to watch out for. You really want to have a hardware SPI port to control it, because there's a lot of pixels. And you need to chip in a lot of RAM because you have to buffer the whole display. So this is not going to run on an UNO or a Leonardo. You'll need at least a Mega or a Raspberry Pi or an M4 or an M0 board in order to drive these beautiful displays. So very nice. Also very thin. OK. All right, I'm convinced. I'm going to run over to my drawer of goodness and go grab one so we can check it out. Sit tight. I'll be right back. That's the product pick of the week. It is the 2.7 inch sharp memory display breakout. This thing is really cool. It's an LCD display that is monochromatic. So it's black and sort of the silvery. So I call it black and white, but it's black and silvery. And it is a gorgeous high resolution display. It has 400 pixels wide by 240 high. That's 96,000 pixels, can you believe it? And this is a really great breakout for adding to projects. It's got some of the SPI pins that you need and voltage and ground at the top there. So you can wire directly to those little pins or you can solder in some header pins and put it on a breadboard or a Perma Proto or into a circuit. It's also got some mounting holes there. Cool looking display. What I want to do is actually take a look first at the product page because it looks real nice on there. Let me jump over to this view for a second. And so if you head there, let's see, do we have any left? We are, OK, we have 11 in stock max, two per customer. So roughly five and a half of you can go and jump on that if you want or other permutations of numbers. There it is. You can see it's playing back a video right there, that Apple demo. If you take a look at the specs here, you can learn a little bit about the board. But even better is head to the learn guide, which is a link included right there. And this will actually tell you about two different sizes of these breakouts that we have. The code is the same other than the resolution. So we have a 1.3 inch. And then we have this 2.7 inch, which is nice and high resolution. You can also take a look at some projects that have been built with it. So here's a recent one actually that Jepler made, which is this really nice looking custom calculator. And it uses that gorgeous sharp display. So one thing you'll find is the look of it is similar to an e-ink display in a lot of ways. And while not as low power as an e-ink display, which can stay lit up with zero power going to it, it can stay the display, it can stay the same, it is pretty low power. And it is daylight readable. It's reflective. You bounce light off of it. One difference, however, is the refresh rate. While you might wait a few seconds to refresh a screen on an e-ink display, and there's a limited number of times you can do that before you may cause damage, this is a really high resolution, high refresh rate screen. So that's one way it differs from e-ink. In fact, one thing that you heard Lady A to say in our little video there was that this is the same screen used in this Playdate upcoming game machine. In fact, the pre-orders are coming really soon in a couple of days. So the Playdate, it was designed by teenage engineering in concert with Panic and a gorgeous looking piece of hardware. It's a game machine. It will support refresh rates necessary to play games on it, which is pretty cool. And this is also a really nice gallery of some graphics on it. Here you can see one of the games scrolling by there. I'm not sure actually if my browser is going to be full refresh rate in my broadcast. So you might go check that out yourself. So that's, I think, a nice idea of some of the graphics you can do on it. And then what I wanted to do is now jump into my own demo. So let's see. I'll put a copy of me up there. Unfortunately, it is difficult to actually light this thing up for use on camera. I'm going to try to focus a little tighter there. And that's fairly sharp. Also, you can see some dust on the screen there that's showing up really well on camera, not so well in real life. So here you can see I've just got a repel up right there. I was programming this as well as getting fingerprints on it. Programming this in circuit Python. So let me try to hold this at an angle with minimal reflection. That's not too bad. And I've got a little light here I can try to reposition. OK, so what I'm going to do is actually go ahead and rerun the program on here that I have, some simple circuit Python code. We'll look at this in a second. So here you'll see when this restarts, I'm showing sort of a black on white image. And then I'm going to invert that. You can see these nice graphics actually from teenage engineering that I pulled onto there just as BMPs. And I'm moving those around a little bit with display I.O. And now here you can see I'm using display I.O. to draw some lines, some boxes, text using both terminal I.O. and a font. And you can see I am bouncing around these squares. This is thanks to some particle code that Todd Bot wrote. And you can find that just by looking for Todd Bot on all the usual places. And this is, I think, a really nice example of how fast that refresh is. You don't really get much strobing or ghosting or anything like that. It's just a really fast refreshing screen. So let's take a look at the code now for a second that's running that. I'm going to jump over to a code view. And I can throw the screen back there. Let me see if I can mess with that. Lighting a little bit. Let's see. Is it better if I turn this light off or down? Sort of. That's a little more like what you see it look like. It's a little dark down there at the bottom. So you can see here in the code, I am doing a lot of our typical display I.O. stuff. So I'm importing the board. I'm importing time. I'm importing display I.O. to do the graphics, terminal I.O. for the built-in font, frame buffer I.O. So this is a frame-buffered display. So we're going to buffer the whole screen on the microcontroller and then send that full image up to the sharp display. And that happens really quickly because it's over SPI. And then I'm importing some of the display text shapes for rectangle and line. And then I'm using a bitmap font as well. You can see here I have sort of a Helvetica noi up there on that upper left corner. And then I'm importing the sharp display library. So that display library exists in a couple forms. There's the sharp display, which is built into the core on some of the builds of Circuit Python. It just depends on the board if it has enough space. This is, in fact, running on a Feather M4 right now. I built this little carrier board. And so you can see here on the back I have a Feather M4 with a nice bright neopixel. And then I wired that to some headers using some wire. And there's plugged into my display. And then I'm using a lot of our typical display I.O. tricks, releasing the display, setting it up on SPI, setting it up as an object called frame buffer using this sharp display. And here you can see I'm saying it's on the I squared C bus. I specify one other pin. I'm using D4. I think that's the clock reset. And then I have the dimensions of the board here. So it's a 400 by 240. Nice high resolution. And then we set up the display, display I.O., show the screen, set up some bitmaps. So I'm using those two versions of that one bitmap. We could also invert it with the palette probably, but I didn't. I just made two copies of the bitmap. In fact, let me re-launch the code there. And you'll see it go through its phases. There you go. That's the nice invert version. And then it's going to start moving that around and go back to the graphics. Setting up some tile grids to display on the screen and move those BMPs around, set up a font, set up this little particle script that Todd wrote. Super cool. And then I'm creating some boxes for these sort of UI elements. And then I'm also moving one little box around left and right to act sort of like a line there. As you can see that little guy there sliding back and forth. I could just get the glare off of that. That's kind of a nice angle. OK, I'll just hold it. I'll hold it at the best angle I can find. And then I'm setting a label up there. You can see I was thinking of actually updating that, which is why it's down here in the main body of the code. Or close to the main body of the code is the last thing I did. And then we go through and figure out our square velocity as they bounce around. And then I'm moving my vertical line sideways. I'm doing a slight delay there. So that is the basics of using it. It's straightforward. If you already have used any of our displays, TFT, OLED, it's really similar using Display.io. So there's not a lot to worry about there. Yeah, Randall Bunce says, where are the helping hands? That's true. I should have grabbed that new one I got. Where did that one go? I've lost it already. So let's see. Actually, let me pop over into the Discord and see if there's any questions. I'll throw a nice big version of that back there. And find my copy of the Discord. Yes, thank you. Dr. says, reflective LCDs are definitely hard to capture. This is true. And let's see. There's three left as of a few minutes ago. Maybe they're gone by now. Oh, Stuart Riggs asks, where is the example code stored for the circuit python parsec, pick of the day, and jump horse workshop? So I don't do a good job of that. Sorry about that. I should, in cases like this, be posting it somewhere. Probably the easiest thing is just I'll put a gist up and then put a link in the description of the YouTube video so that you can go and grab that. So I'll try to be better about that. Thank you for reminding me. Eric Anderson asks, will this work with a PyPico? Yeah, I'm sure it would. PyPico has hardware SPI, right? That's kind of the main requirement. So I believe that would. And since you can run circuit python on the Pico, you could use pretty much this code as is. And let's see. David S asks, how I always select the correct drawer every time. X-ray vision? Something like that. All right, I think that's going to do it. Yeah, so I think this is a really cool display for, particularly, I think UI things. So if you're setting up user interfaces for devices, little hacker stations, little readouts on the side, secondary screen, synthesizer stuff, of course, comes to mind. Clearly, play date thought this was a good, or panic thought this was a good screen for the play date. So there's definitely a lot of uses for that. Jim Hendrickson asks, will it retain the image when unpowered? It will not. In fact, let's power it down. You will see the image fades after a little bit. Let me clean the screen up a little bit here. So here we go. I will just unplug it from power. And you will see it will start to fade. Almost gone. Let's see it there. And I'm not sure, actually, if anyone knows what causes it when you've just dropped power, what causes the fade? Is it capacitance? Why does that take a little while to do that? I don't know. Chemistry? It's probably chemistry. Physics? It's probably physics and chemistry. All right, so I think that's going to do it. Let me know if you have other questions. Discharge maybe, says Stuart Riggs. I like that. That sounds very plausible. And we are out of stock of them now. So if you're looking for one of these in the future, you can sign up to be alerted. Just get an email sent to you when these are back in stock. But the deep, deep discount was just today just during the show. So for those of you who wanted one and got one, hooray. I'm excited for you. And can't wait to see what you use them for. So that's product pick of the day. It is the 2.7 inch sharp memory display. Set that on my board of goodies there. And I will call it for today's JP's product pick of the week. Thanks for stopping by. And I'll give you a little brief reminder that tomorrow night is going to be the unboxing of ADA Box 19. So I am excited to share this with you if you are a subscriber. Hopefully you have one in hand and we can play along. If not, we are working hard to get those shipped out. So hopefully it won't take too much longer. And that's going to be, instead of Ask an Engineer, that'll be at the 8 p.m. slot Eastern time, 8 p.m. tomorrow, the 28th, 28th of July. And I will see you there, all right? And thanks for stopping by, everyone, over in the Discord and the YouTube chat. And I'm going to see you next time. Bye-bye.