 Welcome to the show. It's me, John Park, and you are here with me in my workshop. And that means it is time for John Park's workshop happening right now during the normal Ask an Engineer time slot. So we've made a little adjustment here, and I'm doing my show on Wednesdays for the foreseeable future. But Phil and Lamora are off doing their thing while I'm doing this here on Wednesday nights. So I just got distracted because I realized I was playing some Gallagher earlier and the attract loop is running over there. But I guess I'll leave that. Sure, why not? So all kinds of stuff going on here tonight, jam-packed show. Let's see, what are we going to do? We're going to talk about products. We're going to talk about shipping. We're going to talk about perks and free stuff if you order things. I've got a coupon code for you. What else? We'll go over the product pick of the week that I did this week. What else? We've got some highlights from the Python on Hardware News letter. I don't have a Circuit Python parsec for you today, so we'll be skipping that one. But I'll be back with that next week. What else? Jobs, learn, our Discord. By the way, let me mention our Discord. If you're wondering where the chat is at, you may be wondering. You may be over on Twitch or Facebook, and you figure, well, some people are probably talking somewhere. Where is it? Where are they doing all that talking? The place to be is in our Discord chat. And you can get there by going to adafrew.it slash discord, that'll jump you over to our server, and then look for the live broadcast chat channel. We have a bunch of other channels, too, and this is the one where most of the action is right now during a live stream. Let's see. What else do we have going on? Let me start off with show and tell recap. So we had a show and tell earlier, and we had a few people come on. We had Jay from DigiKey came on, and he was showing a pretty cool gift he's making for someone for the holidays that is a music box terrarium with rotating motorized gears and some lighting inside, all controlled with a circuit playground, or circuit playground express. I forget which one if he said. You can always catch the recap, by the way. Just head to the YouTube channel. And maybe after this show, if you missed the show and tell and you want to go see it, it's there. It's archived. Jeff Epler, our own Jeff Epler, came on to show a couple of things. One is some changes in the way some settings files are going to be saved on circuit Python boards, which is rather than using the dot ENV or N format, we have now the option to use Tommel, which is a markup language of some kind. And there are some changes in that. It gives you some ability to do some comments. There's just some updates to how you're going to put quotes around strings, kind of requires quotes around strings, and a few other things. So go and check that out to see some of what Jeff was talking about there. I think Scott was working on this as well. Jeff also showed a next mouse. So last week, he was working on the next keyboard, next brand, N-E-X-T. And now he's got the mouse. And the mouse is also funky, and you can't just plug it into a modern computer. Actually, I didn't see if he showed what the connector is on that. I don't know what connector it has. It can plug into a next computer currently. It can plug into a next keyboard and then route that through to the computer. And so he's going to make it run on circuit Python-based hardware, so one, just reading the mouse on hardware and writing out USB to your computer. And he also wants to work on just having one circuit Python device necessary for the mouse is plugged into the keyboard. And then both of those data streams will be going through a circuit Python piece of hardware, which is pretty cool. Liz came on to show a project that she's been working on, which is taking the control voltage, which is used to change pitches in a Eurorack synthesizer, and quantize them, which means force them, no matter what weird semi-in-between notes might be coming over your control voltage. She's going to snap them into specific semitones, maybe even specific scales, like a major scale and a certain key, just a bunch of possibilities there to clean up your act, clean up your control voltage, which can be flying all over the place and doing weird stuff. And she's hoping to even get to where she's using four of these little quantizers on a Raspberry Pi Pico, so she can do some polyphonic stuff, play multiple notes at once. What else Joey came on from the community? Our good friend Joey Castillo came on to show his NeoPixel Christmas tree. Now, this is a cute little Christmas tree. He's decorated with NeoPixels. Pretty good, pretty attractive so far. But it's Joey, so he takes it a few steps further. First of all, he wanted it to be battery powered. Now, that can consume a lot of power. You can run through that pretty quickly if you leave him running all day. So he had to make himself a little control panel. He wanted to make a little control panel that used a LCD feather wing, which he created, his oddly specific labs, I think is the company. Sorry, I can't remember right now. He has a little feather wing. I can show it actually on our site here in a second. We sell it that he's using for the UI. It's an LCD, kind of like this watch and wear here. And a feather, and I forget what the other board was on it. But he's got some buttons on there and he can program a schedule. When do the lights come on and some other settings? Let's say he's going to have it running for just four hours a day. He said he can get a week of battery out of it because the scheduler will turn it off and just run it for a few hours. And he's using the deep sleep. So deep sleep mode in circuit. Python allows it to draw. I think he said just a milliamp when it's asleep and is just periodically checking to be woken up to check the alarm to see if it's time to turn on the lights. So that was really cool. And I'll show this later in a little more detail. But Joey took advantage of the fairly new feature inside of Adafruit's user pages. So you can, as a logged in user, you can create your own user page. And Joey had a user page learn guide. So you can go to the user page for Joey and you'll see a learn guide on how to build this tree, which is pretty cool. So that was our show and tell. Let me take that off of there. And let me give you some updates on shipping things. So let me pull up a web page here. How about maybe this one will do. So in fact, if you go to Adafruit.com, if you haven't been in a while, it's likely that you'll see this banner up top. Sometimes you can close that and then I don't know how often it resets or if you can refresh to get that. But there's a little banner up top that says, hey, approaching holiday shipping deadline. Place all of your UPS three-day orders by 11 AM Eastern time on Friday. So you've got a couple days, December 16th. If you click that, I think that takes you to Adafruit.com slash holiday. So you can always get here even if you don't see the banner just by clicking on that or by knowing that the URL is Adafruit.com slash holiday. And here's our general info about what holidays are non-shipping holidays, non-shipping days. And then there's the specifics of holiday shipping deadlines for 2022. And you can see here we have blown past. Just yesterday was the last day for ground shipping by UPS. And then on Friday is the last day to do three-day orders by UPS Monday. That following Monday is the limit for two-day orders. This is all in order to get them before Christmas. And then next day would be on December 20th is the last time we can guarantee that. So don't forget, if you're thinking of making some orders, that that is, those are your deadlines there. Now, I also want to say we have a new freebie. So if you go to atafruit.com slash free, you'll see the freebies that we have. And this is a change. So if you place an order for $99 US or more, you will get a free nude. And that is our little flexible, rubbery, nudely LED. And this is going to be a warm white, which is one of my favorites. You can use it for Edison bulb-like things. It looks like a very natural, color-nice, warm white color. So yeah, this is a 130-millimeter-long one. We have, I think, a couple lengths of these. This is the 130-millimeter-long one. There's a positive and negative side to it. One of the little metal ends has a mark in it that tells you it's the plus side. And you just connect three volts to it. Use a microcontroller to do that so you can control it on and off. Or you can just use a lithium watch battery. There's another way to do it. So yeah, that's the $99 perk right there. You get a free nude. If you go to the $150 or $149 or more, you get, I believe, these stacks. So you'll get the nude. And you'll get a KB2040 keyboard, which is a great little microcontroller. Perfect for your keyboard types of projects, macropad projects, projects that require a lot of GPIO. You can use CircuitPython and Arduino on it. They're great little boards. I love them. In fact, I'm using one in the project that we'll be looking at a little later today. If you go over $200 or more, you'll get free UPS ground shipping. You probably don't want to use that right now, though, if you're trying to get it before Christmas, because I think you'll need to do the three day to get it in time. And on orders of $299 or more, you will get a free Circuit Playground Blue Fruit BLE. And this says right here, how many freebies can I get? All of them. So you'll stack up those freebies if you order stuff. And one thing I like to do when I encourage you to check out cool stuff that you can get in the store is make it a little bit cheaper for you. So this week's, or today's, rather coupon code. It's not good for the whole week. It's just good for this show today. You could use it before the end of the show or a little bit into the later evening. But blingy, B-L-I-N-G-Y. Blingy will get you 10% off in the Adafruit store. And that is for anything you can buy other than subscriptions, software, and gift certificates. So get real stuff, real physical things, and you will get 10% off. There's a little, when you're checking out, there's a little coupon code slot to go fill that in and get your discount. Let's see. While I'm on that hype train right there, let's, I will show you, here's what that nude, just type in nudes, N-O-O-D-S is how we decided to spell that. You'll see, here's the little warm white, flexible, 130 millimeter lit up, it's beautiful. So you can do some nice effects with those. And that's your $99 freebie right there. All right, let me get myself a sip of water. And then I'll mention, we've got our jobs board. So if you're looking for a worker, if you're looking to hire someone, you wanna head on over to jobs.adafruit.com. And that is entirely free to use, both if you're looking for a worker, if you're looking to hire someone. There haven't been many new positions posted in here. I'm wondering if that's because we vet them all and the people who usually vet them are busy right now. So we might see more new postings later or it might be just that time of year, right? Most people don't wanna hire people or change jobs this time of year. But here you can see, going back a bunch of the positions that were here, you can always get in touch with someone, click on their link and find out more. And this represents all kinds of work, remote work, onsite work, freelance work, contract work, part-time, full-time. It's all possible and all available there at jobs.adafruit.com, so go check that out. All right. I mentioned, let's see. Yeah, you know what, we'll get to Joey's, when we go and look at the Python on hardware newsletter, I think, I'll segue from that into Joey's user page guide, because that's really cool. All right, so next up, I'll mention I've got that show right there that happened yesterday. That's my Tuesday show, J.P.'s product pick of the week. And on the show, I like to pick a new product of ours, sometimes an oldie but goodie. This was a Brantz Bank and new product this week. Give you a huge 50% off discount on it. We stash a bunch of them in the back before the show so that we can make sure we have some in stock. We had about 100 of them in stock yesterday. Sold through like hotcakes. It's a cool item and it's a half price so you can't lose. And I'll do some demos of it, show some software so it shows some hardware. And then I like to reduce it down to a little bite-sized version, which I'm gonna show you right now. This is my product pick of the week this week. It is the 5x5 NeoPixel BFF Best Friend Forever for cutie pies and jouboards. Is a set of 25 little teeny teeny NeoPixels, RGB LEDs that are individually addressable. When you connect this to the cutie pie, what you're doing is you're connecting up power ground and a data line, which is on pin A3 by default. You can send it commands using the NeoPixel library inside of Arduino or in Circuit Python. And I'm using some headers here, header pins and sockets to plug it into my little cutie pie and unplug that. I'll take off that diffusion shield. So there you can see we've got little sockets I put on there, little pins I put on there. It is the 5x5 NeoPixel BFF for cutie pie and jouboards. Hey, that was just ready to loop, wasn't it? So I was just checking out the Discord while that was running there and had some questions and comments. Osterly said, I want this track, is it on SoundCloud? I don't think it is, but I'll put it up, I think on my Bandcamp, the track that played at the beginning of the show. Other question I saw, and by the way, you can post questions here during the show. I'll try to check them out. I'm easily distractable, but I'll try to check them out. And I'll also check them at the end of the show if you can throw some questions in then, I'll take a look. There was a good joke on here too. I don't know what spurred it on, but where'd it go? This is worth, Gordy G says, a photon checks into a hotel and the concierge asks if he has any luggage. He says, no, I'm traveling light. Good one. Good, yes, so ask your questions later on and I'll be sure to get to them. If I know the answer, if not, I'll do my best to direct you towards a good answer. Let's see, what else? So, hey, this right here, CircuitPython, is quite famously also known as Code Plus Community. And one of the ways that we like to celebrate that is through our Python on Hardware newsletter. So if you head on over to Adafruit Daily, you can subscribe to the Python on Hardware newsletter. And this gives you a glimpse into sort of the weekly happenings in the wide world of Python running on hardware. Generally we mean hardware that isn't a general purpose computer, but more single board computers and microcontrollers. But sometimes it's just general Python stuff. And these are things, some of them are Adafruit people, some of them are out in the community, so it's a mix. And I like to give you a few highlights from this, but first I'll say go and subscribe if you're into this. If you like this kind of stuff, head to AdafruitDaily.com and you can subscribe. All you need is to put in your email address. We vow to never ever spam you or sell it to bad people or do anything terrible with it. You can cancel at any time if you get tired of getting something in your mailbox. There's a little subscribe here link right there. So the first one I'll mention is this right here, the CircuitPython 8.0.0 beta five has been released. And a few notable things in this is the Wi-Fi on PicoW has been added to this release. Also the Wi-Fi workflow in general, so being able to get to the contents of your CircuitPython board that has Wi-Fi built in remotely from a browser as well as putting files on it, editing files, saving and all that. All that workflow has been getting a lot of attention and is in this release. Also another one that I saw that looks really interesting I'd like to check out is Bulk Analog IO Input which sounds like, and maybe someone can tell me this is Analog Buff IO available on RP2040 chips which sounds like something that would speed up reading multiple analog inputs, multiple ADC pins which could be great for a lot of the types of projects I like to do. They have lots of knobs on them, so I'm curious about that one. And let's see, scrolling on, so you can see there's a bunch of notes here about what came in that beta of 8.0.0 beta five. Another piece of news in here was there are updates to the Raspberry Pi supply chain which has been difficult to get, as a lot of you know, and they have announced that they're gonna be getting a lot out to retailers soon. The availability and retail channels should be improving a lot in the beginning of the new year and by the second half of 2023 they think they're gonna be bringing back significant stock, so if you can hold out a little longer, don't pay scalper prices for your Raspberry Pi, wait and you should be rewarded. Another interesting link on here, so a lot of these are long reads that you can go and click on and check out and I've seen info about this. There are a few different synthesizers in Korg's recent lineup, I think the Opsix and the WaveState and maybe one other. They're all similar hardware architecture and internally they're running on essentially a Raspberry Pi compute module, so there's an article on this that you can go check out to learn more about how they are using Raspberry Pi inside of those Korg synths. Hey, I mentioned this, right? Joey's tutorial page for the Christmas lights on his user page, here's info about it, so if you didn't watch show and tell today but you did subscribe to the Python on hardware newsletter, you would have known about it and if you did both, you know twice as much and now I'm talking about it and it's really just gonna fold in on itself like a fractal eating a fractal. I got excited there, but yeah, there's a link to his mastodon post about that here and there's a link to his user page which I'll go to right after this. Some other interesting stuff that I saw in here, a project that we posted which is this weather station project of the week and thanks again to Ann by the way who heads up the production of this newsletter, it's a massive task every week and it's really great to have all of this news coming from so many sources brought together in one place and she found this one here also on mastodon, this is a rainbow weather project that was ported from a ESP8266 over to a Raspberry Pi Pico and it's using Circuit Python and it has this really nice acrylic LED light pipe type of display on it to give you information about what the weather is. Here was another really cool project that let me see, I'm gonna grab a link to this one that I put over here somewhere. This is Kevin McLear who created a guitar hero game using the Pimeroni Galactic Unicorn which is a big PCB with a bazillion LEDs, I'm not sure how many but lots and lots LEDs on it, RGB LEDs on it and this is running MicroPython on a Pico W and this is a type of rhythm game that you can play using a set of buttons down at the bottom if you go follow the links that are in the newsletter, you'll arrive here eventually and then you'll accept some cookies probably like I do and he's got a really nice write up about the build, there's a YouTube video that shows it in action and information about how it's put together. So yeah, it's a 583 RGB LEDs, it's a 53 by 11 grid and those are bonkers numbers, why 53 and why 11? I'm sure this is a good reason but those make me itch and you can take a look here, there's also a really cool silkscreen that they did on the back there with this epic artwork as they say, totally right. So that's a rhythm game, guitar hero style rhythm game where you have lanes of notes coming and you have to play them in time, very cool. Also found out about that thanks to the newsletter and let's see, Mark Gambler wrote up, Mark is a frequent visitor to our shows and tells, he wrote up the Christmas display that he has made from Neopixel strips here so you can find a link there to go over to Haxter IO to find out more about it. And one other that I blew past that I gotta go back up to because this thing looks amazing, this is a Unicode input device. So if you're tired of having real normal keys and typing at moderately fast speeds and you wanna slow things way the heck down, this is a series of toggle switches that you use to select a Unicode for a character or an emoji. And then you press the one button on there to send the whole thing, it's wild, really something else. And that build is available on Hackaday so you can go check that out. And then the last thing on here, this is kind of fascinating. I saw info about a project, this is kind of a, mostly a Python project, more than a hardware project, but it does involve hardware, just not the typical microcontrollers that we're using. This right here, first of all, NTSC test pattern caught my attention. This is a project called VHS Decode and this is a software defined videotape player. So what this is is software that you can hook up a VCR and they support beta and VHS and super VHS and one other, I think, through an RF, I think it's RF decoding box and it can, through the software defined part of it means, it does not decode the video, it actually captures it raw and then you can use the software to decode it the way you want. One example of why this matters, they're very typically in broadcast captures when people record off of broadcast TV, especially old archives, there's a vertical blanking area above where the picture tube makes your picture visible that can contain data and often that's where data for things like subtitles was contained. Also timecode, if it's type of tape that had timecode on it. So you'd never get that if you used a regular old capture card. This VHS Decode project will allow you to do fancy things like that as well as just the bizarre types of data arrangements that come off of the diagonal spinning drums of the tape players. This project aims, is open source and aims to handle a lot of these archiving projects for VHS and other types of videotapes. So super cool. And that's what I have to say about the Python on hardware news there. Really, really great issue. Thanks so much for everyone who's involved in putting that together. All right, let's see. How about, I promised I would segue over to Joey's user page. So what I'm gonna do is actually, I'm gonna scroll back up here to the link. Did I pass it? No. And I'm just gonna click on that. So here you can see this is Joey's user page. And so everyone who has an account, a free account on Adafruit, not to pay anything, but just having a login with your email and password set up. Login, you have a user page. And in fact, there's a learn guide on how to set up your user page, some ways you may wanna use it. And one of the features, one of the newer features is the ability to create learn guides right on your user page. So this is the one that Joey was talking about during the show and tell. And here you can see is Neopixel Christmas tree with deep sleep and LCD feather wings. So this was all created right in the user page. So you get a version essentially of the same methods that we use for creating learn guides and the ability to share them out to the world right here in your user page. So you can see it looks an awful lot like a regular old learn guide. You've got the products that were used and parts. A little gift there on assembling the feather wings. There's the feather tripler that's used. And oh, it's the prop feather wing. Yeah, okay. So the prop feather wing was the, someone had a question in the discord earlier about what was the third wing. So this one's using, looks like a, let me scroll up here and get around. Yeah, ESP32S2 feather. Then the prop maker feather wing, which is a really good one for controlling the Neopixels. And then the oddly specific objects, not labs, objects, sorry Joe. Oddly specific objects, LCD feather wing there, code, Adafruit IO setup. So you can use it on the web and then a really nice flow graph of the user interface for setting your schedule for your lights to go on and off. And some tips on decorating the tree. There's the beautiful little LCD in action there. And you also have some info on measuring the current consumption. I think that goes into the second page or second guide. So that's a really cool one. And it's not your regular average learn guide. I didn't include it in that section because it's right in the user page. It's just super cool. Oh, I gotta grab a window that just decided to fly across the screen. There we go. But that's a, I think that's a decent segue for talking about learn guides. So I'm gonna jump into, let's see, I got a different page up for that. There it is. Jump into learn guides and talk about new learn guides this week. So if I click on the little view all link next to new guides, you can see we have four that we're gonna talk about here today. One is this iBook iPad case from the Ruiz Brothers. Really cool project. They have a nice video there to show it in action. This uses a gutted iBook G3, which was sometimes referred to as the toilet seat. Can't imagine why. So they bought one of these on eBay for about 150 bucks. Probably non-working. You don't need it to be working because you're actually gutting it. It's non-destructive. So if you're careful, save all the screws, take all the parts out. All this does is reassembles the shell and with I think four or six Torx screws and uses a couple of 3D printed inserts to be able to perfectly snap in a wireless keyboard and an iPad Pro. So now this becomes a really nice iPad case that has amazing storage or carry handle on there. Look at that thing. Really, really cool. I feel like at some point someone made a purse out of one of these or a couple of them with something in the middle there. Looks like a purse, right? So check out that guide. It'll tell you how to go find a donor iPad on eBay or elsewhere, what you're looking for or rather the iBook and all the files you need to 3D print, put that together and use the little wireless keyboard with your iPad. Very nice. Next, there's a guide by Liz on the iSpy breakout. I love this thing. I made this one of my product picks of the week a few weeks ago and this guide will take you through all of the pinouts, how to set it up, how to use it, some code examples, running your display on CircuitPython, Python and Arduino. And this actually, if you check out the pinout page here, this is nice because there's a lot of pins on here which is one of the reasons is rules because you don't have to wire all that on a breadboard or a perm proto anymore. You can just use that one, lovely little cable, little flat ribbon cable right into here and then into your board or rather into your display. But it's a lot more than just display. So you see here, it says we've got the power pins, VN and ground, we have I squared C on here. So if you have something happening I squared C wise over on the board that has your display, this will allow you to connect to that. All the SPI pins that are usually used for the display as well as the SD card. If you have a SD card breakout or reader rather on the display and a lot of our displays have those. In fact, here's one that I showed last week so you can see, there's a nice big TFT and it's got the I spy ribbon plug right there and it has a SD card right over there. Sorry, my monitor's backwards. All that travels over that ribbon cable so you don't need to do a bunch of hand wiring. Now there's a couple of GPIO pins if there's buttons and things you wanna use on the other side. Chip select, backlight and a couple others busy and int which are not often used but in some cases you need those. So thanks Liz for putting that guide together. Those are great little breakout boards. There was an update to the working with multiple same address I squared C devices guide by Carter, Carter Nelson. I actually don't know what the updates are. Sorry, I wish there were a diff or something that told me. Actually I can kind of go into the history of it but I don't know what changed on this one. One thing is that we have a newer board I think since this was made for multiplexing this which I've shown, I have one right here. In fact, this is one of our multiplexing boards that lets you plug in a bunch of the same address I squared C devices and this will round robin through them and get data. So that's a guide to go check out that's got an update to it. And then the last one, another new guide is this MOSFET driver breakout board and Liz did a guide on this. So this is great. This is essentially a little teeny tiny breakout that you plug a three pin JST. Is it three or is it two? Three, yeah, three pin JST over to your microcontroller and that will connect those up to power ground and a data pin. And you essentially write, just like you blink an LED you write a digital output to this thing over that JST and it has a MOSFET transistor in there as well as a diode to prevent problems from spiking current that often happens when you turn on and off big noisy DC motors and solenoids, maybe even relays. So this is a really cool breakout when you wanna do that classic thing that people always had a question about, hey, I've got my microcontroller can I plug a little fan into it or a little DC motor into it? Usually not, usually you don't have the current to do that. You don't have the oomph. This little guy gives you that oomph also has really nice connectors, these push fit connectors for the wiring of the motor that you're driving and Liz did a really great little set of animated GIFs. I don't know how well they'll play here when I hover over them. Here, plugging into the terminal block. So you can see there's this series of GIFs showing you use a screwdriver or something to press down on the little clip that releases the pressure on the spring clamp and then it clamps the wire in place. Just do that on both sides, reverse the procedure to get them out. And these are great. We had these on the bonsai board, which was similar in some ways. It was a pump driver for the clue for watering your plants. And this is an even smaller, cheaper, cool little breakout. And as long as you can blink an LED, you can run this thing. Liz has examples in Circuit Python and in Arduino for using that. And those are your new guides. Right there. That was them. Just gonna check my discord to see if anyone has anything to say about that. No questions. Any thoughts about what changed in Carter's guide? I'd love to know. Sorry, Carter. I don't know. I don't know what changed. I bet it was that, including the new boards. I'll pretend it was that. Okay, let's see. What else is happening here today? I could talk about my project. Yeah, I'll talk about my project and then we'll do some new products. Don't let me forget new products. I will remind you though that I've got a coupon code for today's show. And that is that right there, blingy. And why that will come clear later, but blingy is your coupon code. That'll give you 10% off in the store. So if you're getting any of that cool stuff, make sure you remember to add that coupon code on the way out, you'll get your 10% discount. Hey, okay, so why don't I head on over to the work bench and I'll show you the, I had huge, huge progress rather on my 808 style drum trigger sequencer project. So that's it right there. You can see it. Similar to what I showed last week, except I've added a display. I've added a power or rather a play pause play button. You can see that little yellow smaller button in the upper right corner there. The display is the 14 segment I squared C breakout with STEMIC UT. And then you can see I've also got a rotary encoder on there. So this is nice. This gives me some input I can work with. I've got the rotary encoder for making some selections. I can click the encoder wheel to switch between a couple of input modes for settings. And I've got a start, stop button there. And I actually still have one GPIO pin left. So I of course could add more I squared C stuff. I want to kind of contain it, but I do have one GPIO left. And the way this is working, quick recap is that I've got the KB2040 into it. I've plugged over the STEMIC UT cable on I squared C the constant current LED driver. So all 16 of the LEDs there can be faded up and down from a minimum to a maximum value, brightness value using that breakout or I squared C which means I have freed up 16 pins to use for IO. So all of those little clicky buttons are acting as normally open switches just running directly into the KB2040 has about 18, 19 pins, something like that. So I'm using a bunch of those, using 16 of those. I still have the play button to plug in. And like I said, I've got a spare. And then the, yes, since I'm using I squared C I've chained together the constant current LED driver as well as the display, the 14 segment display. And then the rotary encoder, it's also over I squared C. So last week, this was just acting as essentially a MIDI keyboard. And I had assigned each button one of the MIDI notes that's used in a thing called General MIDI to play drum hits. So every other MIDI channel you can send over will just play notes into whatever you tell it to. It'll send chromatic notes. This is the special channel, channel 10. If you send it to a device or a software synth that's expecting it, it plays different sounds per key. So it's got a bass drum, analog bass drum, a kick drum, three flavors of floor toms, three flavors of stand toms and on and on. It goes, I think from note 31 to 80 or something like this. There's a bunch of these keys. And so even like a sound blaster, if you think of something like an old sound blaster card, if you wanted to, you could send it notes over channel 10, MIDI channel 10, and it would say, okay, I'm not playing piano stuff anymore. I'm not playing chromatic notes. I am playing different drum samples or synth synthesized drums depending on what you're using on those. Which means now instead of me pressing and playing this kind of like a little piano or a drum pad, I decided to set up 11 different drum voices. So right now that you can see it says bass on there, that is gonna send bass drum or kick drum sounds. And I have it running at a certain beats per minute. So it's gonna go through these four beats each. So it's four beats in a measure. This is one measure and each is subdivided into 16th notes. So it's one eanna, two eanna, three eanna, four eanna and loops on and on. I can press those down and decide where am I hitting the kick drum or the bass? Switch over to the snare. Where am I hitting the snare? So let me go over there and demonstrate this to you. So it makes more sense with some sound. Let me just find a camera over there and I'm gonna turn off the fan there. That'll take a second for that to stop. I'll leave that on, sure why not. So what I have running right now is actually a laptop running garage band. And garage band, you can pick a bazillion different nicely sampled, I don't know if they're synthesizing stuff, but nicely sampled, multi-sampled instruments that have been carefully tuned and designed. And they've got slew of different drum kits in there. So what I've done is I've picked a drum kit and then the fact that I'm sending to a drum kit means it's gonna do this drum thing where there's different drums, not pitch drums. So I think I have it set up right now where it's only gonna play this kick drum. So I'll hit play. So I can go ahead, it's running and I had to crank my exposure so this little display wouldn't flicker on camera. It means these are kinda blown out, but hopefully you can see I've got three notes that are lit up and I have a little blinky that's traveling to show me where we are in the measure, where we are in time, right? So there I just added another note. Okay, so that's the bass drum. Now, with my little rotary encoder here, I can switch over to the snare track and what you'll notice is these lights are gonna change because I'm not playing the snare drum on the same beats or the same steps. So now you can see this bass was on step one, nine and 11, and now I've got snares on five and what, 12? No, 13, five and 13. You're not hearing them right now just because I've mixed them out of here. When I turn those on, it's actually also gonna play one of the other ones. I think I've got the clap drum that's playing in that. So this is the snare. Let me go find where that clap drum is. Turn that off. Now I can go back over to my snare. Someone else is playing right here. It's the clave. I had the clave going there too. This is just because this mixer inside of GarageBand gangs together some of the drums in the kit so I can't mix each one on its own. So let me bring back some of those. And now I'm gonna turn it all on just so you can hear the full kit. Let me see if I can get it to compress. Do I have a compressor? It does not. Let me turn some of these down. Now I can slow this way down. If I click my rotary encoder, you can see the beats per minute that we're running at and now I can just simply change that. Let's slow it way down. Totally different feel. And now we can go in and start changing some drums. So I'll leave them all playing. So every time I click this, I'm just going between my beats per minute tempo and the voice or drum track choice. So let's turn off a bunch of stuff and just build it from scratch. All right, so now I've just got that kick snare. Snare, kick, kick, kick, snare, kick, kick. And then I can throw in like these little toms. I like these little toms I can do like a high, medium. You don't need to fill it all out, but I always love to throw in a bunch of closed high hat and open that hat and there's the start, stop. So what I'll do is I'll actually reset this and I have one pattern stored in here and that's the sort of default pattern that's gonna play on startup. I don't have, I'm gonna put some descriptive text here at the beginning, but right now I know that it's restarted because it's back to 120 BPM and it's switched over to showing that. So here's the track as it's stored in software. And we go fast, real fast. That symbol is real annoying. Let me get that out of there. Faster. All right, if I go faster, it's just gonna start smoking. All right, we'll stop there. By the way, just because I was sorry, I was talking about this software, but not showing it, doesn't look like much. This is just GarageBand open with one, this is the Roland TR-808 drum pack that they have, comes free, that I was running it through and then these were the mixer controls that I was doing. I'll show you actually, let's see, I'll leave that open and let's bring this back to something a little more reasonable, speed-wise. And what have I done? If I've broken something, let me restart. The, one of the cool things, really cool things in here is you've got all these great drum sounds, drum packs in here. You can basically switch to them while you're playing. And it doesn't have to be electronic kits, you can go much more rock, rock types of kit. So somehow I've never really played much with GarageBand and now I'm totally enamored of the great sounds it's got in there, I'll show you something else. I had it running also on my iPad, but one note, I, let me switch cameras out here, one thing that I still want to look into is can I prevent this from lighting up all 16 LEDs at full brightness on startup? I'm running through a powered USB hub just because the current draw is right on the edge of what my USB wants to deliver. I didn't have too many problems with it, but then when I tried it on the iPad, I think it was, it was unhappy about that. So just to be overly cautious, I think I can run it on the laptop here without that, but on my iPad, I needed more juice, I think, than it wanted to supply. So that's one thing I want to mess around with. And another thing that I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to write up a guide on this, and I think I'm leaving it on the breadboard. You could switch this over to three perma-protos, but I'm going to leave this pretty much as is. I might, might meet and up, give this a home. One note, when you use these Stem-A-Q-T, I squared C breakouts, you don't have an easy way to hook them to your breadboard because you didn't solder any pins on. It's totally fine to solder them on just as a mechanical connection. So I may solder pins on there, find a little spare spot on here, press that down into the board so that it's got a permanent home. Same with this display. This display has some pins on it. Actually, I never cut the display pins, but it has headers there for soldering in pins so that you can just stick it to the board. This, by the way, just using a little photo filter, light filter to make that display much more legible. These don't look good on camera or even in real life, for that matter, in bright light because the unlit ones show up really brightly. So I like to use a little piece of photo filter on there to make that look nice. The old alarm clock trick, that's what I call that. So let's see, what I want to do is, and I'll mention one other thing, and then I'll show you a code on this. The other thing that I want to do is add or just guide people in the guide towards possibly adding some features that they'll really like. And one that I think people will really like is the ability to store patterns. Just to get the guide out before the end of the year, I think I'm gonna skip that. Maybe I'll add it later, but I think as it is, it's pretty usable. And it's really about experimenting with patterns and playing with them. You can see very clearly on it what each drum kit is doing on every step, which is good. The ability to save your own patterns that would be really cool. And this was inspired by Todd Bot's Pico step sequencer, which I think is inside now, I don't have one out here, which has the ability to save to flash patterns. So you can hold a key combo and save the current pattern, which would be kind of nice to add, but I don't think I wanna go and do all that. At least not right now. But you could add to this UI to where you can have A and B versions of a pattern. You can potentially change it from 16 to 32 steps if you wanted to. You could probably do mismatched track steps to do Euclidean rhythms. All of those kinds of things, I think, would work great. It's just an exercise in software. But this platform here, this little breadboard-y platform, I think is a good one for step sequencer stuff. So what I'll do is unplug that, bring it over to my workstation here and show you the code, show you what makes this thing tick now. So I'm gonna switch cameras up. Oh good, Todd put a link in the Discord to his Pico step sequencer. So he's got all the great features in there that he's written for doing things like storing sequences, having, you could have multiple default sequences to begin with and pick between the sequences, using the little rotary encoder and just toggling between choice modes is a really easy to use and easy to add to type of interface. So let me plug this in and switch to this view of the world and I'll open up my code here. Yeah, some people in the comments also said that using some LED diffusion plastic might work for making that LCD easier to look at. I find that fuzz is it out, it's just thick enough unless we found a source for much thinner. That fuzz is it out like crazy. So just a Lee filter or what's the other theater one Roscoe? If you buy a filter book, like swatch book from Amazon, it'll give you like 300 filters and you can just cut out little pieces of them. It's meant for you to figure out your lighting and then go buy full sheets of gels for theater lighting or stage lighting. But you can get a little swatch of them, swatch book of them and have plenty on hand for these types of projects. So here is what's going on. So I've got a bunch of libraries that I'm bringing in here to start with. Some key ones is I'm using Supervisor, which allows me to use the ticks rather than time or rather than what's the name of the, I've already forgotten the other time monotonic. Yeah, from the time library, there's monotonic. These are the more accurate. So I'm using the ticks milliseconds. I think it is ticks milliseconds for counting. We'll see that later. I got my AW9523, that is the constant current driver for the 16 LEDs. Got Adafruit MIDI. I'm actually experimenting. I was running into something that now I'm questioning my, well it was loud. I'm questioning my sanity a little bit on this. Let me turn this guy's volume off. I was having some timing issues and then I switched away from Adafruit MIDI, which is a little more overhead just to straight USB MIDI. It just isn't as pretty to look at and the problem seemed to go away, but now I'm not having the problem at all. I set up a switch here though. I can try the two different MIDI library approaches. So stay tuned. I'll see how that shakes out. You've got a couple of options of how you can do your MIDI library. Bringing in debouncer and Adafruit C-Sauce that I can use the rotary encoder, all those switches without any problems. And then the HT16K33 is the 14-segment display there. And look how nice that looks. Now that I've got it close up under this camera. And it's great compared to a seven-segment display. You can't write snar for a snare. You can't write snar. I guess you kind of could, but can you type this? Can you type clove? I don't think so. There's not a good V without a diagonal and it's even got upper and lower case. Clap, hand claps. Cowbell? How are you gonna make a W on a seven-segment display? You're gonna use up two slots for that. It would just be cow, which is fine. Anyway, I really like this 14-segment display. Then I'm setting up my I-Squared C-Bus there. Excuse me. So here's where we get into some of the sequencer guts. I have a variable here called number of steps. And I could probably, I don't know, name that differently because it's not necessarily the steps in the sequence. We have a separate sequence length here that's set to 16, but it's pretty common on drum sequencers to be able to set like a 32 or a 64 step pattern. So you get like two or four measures, not just one, which is pretty repetitive. Still using just 16 physical buttons and LEDs, but you'll run through the first measure and then whoop, the second measure comes on, third, fourth, and then back to the first. So maybe I'll name this num switches. Number of drums. So this is how many voice channels I have. And this mimics an 808. I've got kick, snare, the three toms, the clave or maraca, the hand clap or whatever that also is, the cowbell, open hat, closed hat, symbol. You could make this anything you want. You may at some point reach limits of sending your MIDI accurately if you have too many things happening all at once, but it seemed to handle 11 without too many problems. I've got a default BPM. So this BPM variable is just why you see it say 120 when we start, and then I have some math here for deriving the timing of a step based on what my BPM is, since we can change that BPM, that gets calculated later too. Excuse me, I have a step counter variable that's just for knowing which step we're on. The sequence length I talked about, some variables for keeping track of the last step we were on and the current drum that we're on, so that switches around between zero to 10 for my 11 different drum sounds. And then whether or not we're playing, so that's what gets changed when I press that little yellow button. I create my little digital read for that yellow button in the corner there. Maybe that should be another color, but I liked the yellow. Then I set up all my switch pins, these are the KB2040 pins I'm using for all of those switches, and those are set up as using keypad. So actually debouncer is only used I think for this yellow one and for this rotary encoder switch, these are all using the keypad library, which I think just has the debouncing built in. Set up all my LEDs and those are using the constant current driver of the AWU 9523, went over that last week. Then set up the rotary encoder to read the encoder and the push encoder button. And then my MIDI setup, this varies if I'm using Adafruit MIDI or USB MIDI right now, just during testing, it'll pick one of those or the other. And then I've got this variable here, actually this list of drum names. And I've also got their correlated MIDI note. So this is based on that general MIDI thing I was talking about. You can just Google general MIDI drum note chart, and it'll tell you, if you're doing an acoustic bass drum, it's gonna be 35. If you're doing a sort of generic bass drum, which is the one that a lot of the electronic kits wanna fire on, note 36. And so you can pick your notes there for what you're gonna do. Another feature I have not implemented, which is pretty typical for trying to emulate something like the 808 drum, is some of these have multiple tones. So the three toms can be three different congas, three different pitches of congas. There's the clave, it can also be a rim shot, the hand clap can be maracas. So I didn't do that, but that's an option you could add potentially. I've got a little function here called play note, or play drum rather. And then I feed it a note, which note are we playing? That comes from that list that I made earlier. So we know based on the track that we're on, which one to send. And then the way I'm sending it, if it's the midi, if it's the Adafruit MIDI library, then it's midi.send note on, the name of the note number, and then a velocity, I'm using 120, or, and then after it plays it on, it immediately turns it off, using note off and a velocity of zero. And then this is just the different nomenclature or syntax, if you're doing the USB MIDI library, you construct your message first as a byte array. And this here is note on is X9, and then which channel it is, is the next value. So zero through C or D or whatever it would be to get to 16. There are 16 midi channels on earth. The note number and then the velocity. So it's very similar, you're just using this hex nomenclature. And then note off is the eight, followed by the channel that you're sending it on. Then we write those two messages. Then we have a little function here for lighting up the LEDs as well. And those are for steps that are held down versus the, when it's playing, you can see the little blink running across there. Set up my seven or rather 14 segment display here. I have a variable called edit modes. That's what I'm switching between for my BPM versus my track name or a drum voice name there. And then basically we start, and you can see I'm fooling around with doing some scrolling text. Marquee, I think just locks you out. It just never stops marquing, but maybe there's something I need to do a little more cleverly. So I was gonna marquee the name of the drum machine on, but that just went forever. So I gotta figure out maybe using scroll, let me just scroll it on and off and then get on with life. And then this is the main loop of the program. So in this loop, we check the start button, which is what I named this little yellow button here. If the button has been pressed, so using debouncer if it fell, then we change the state of the playing variable. And then we set the step counter at zero. So some drum machines will have a provision for sort of pausing. You essentially stop at the current beat and then restart there. I didn't wanna do that. When I start, I'm restarting it at the first step. We check for updates on the knob here. So rather the button of the knob. So knob button update also using debouncer. If it fell, we just switch that edit mode between the possible modes and print the right stuff. And then this is the main if we're playing. So if we're playing, we do a check of the current time using supervisor ticks underscore MS. So that becomes this variable name now. And then if now minus the last step is greater than or equal to steps millies, then, and that's the subdivision based on our BPM, then it means it's time to advance to the next step. So we update that little variable last step to be now. So this works over and over again. And then we send the light beat call the light beat function which moves our little LED the proper next step. And then we check all of the drums and see is there a note or not at the current step where we are in the sequence. If it is, then we send the play note to play that drum sound. I blew past this, I think, scrolling up. I sure did. This right here is how I'm storing my sequence. So since I just have the one sequence, I made it kind of big and pretty to look at. It shows you the four beats and the four sixteenth notes per beat there. So we get our 16 per track. So if we go scrolling back to the bass drum, you can see the first beat of the first measure and then the first beat of the third measure and then the third beat of the third measure. So that's what that pattern, how that ends up looking here. So those are the 11 possible drum tracks. So you'd have to change this if you decided to use different numbers of drum voices. And then the last things that are happening here are switches. So this is using keypad library. So if keypad library sees a switch change, it's been pressed and this events gets, then we note down which of these 16 has been pressed and then we set the, essentially we flip the one and the zero that's visualized here. So if I were to press that, it's essentially saying, okay, that was a one, now it's a zero. So now we no longer play when we get there and it writes to this sequence. It updates the sequence, sequence array or list. And so that's all that does. It just toggles the state, saving that sequence. So now the next time it runs through to play, it'll do the right thing. And then we change the lighting as well. And then the last thing that happens is all of this jazz with the rotary encoder. So we check the rotary encoder position, actually invert it just because it was running counterclockwise, this one is set up that way. So I wanted to go in the other direction. So I've inverted it. If it's different than the last position it was on, that means it's changed. We set the encoder delta, which is essentially gonna be either a one or a negative one. So we're either moving up or down. If we're in edit mode, zero, that's the BPM mode. And then if I make changes, I'm essentially updating the BPM value and I'm recalculating all of that stuff I need. And I could probably put that in its own function but I didn't. I'll probably have to before I get this thing up on our GitHub or it'll yell at me for global variables. Update the display to, I clear it. So display fills zero, just clears the display and then I'm writing. And the reason to do that is if you went from 100 down to 99, you'd leave the one behind if you don't clear it first. So it would go from 100 down to 199. If the edit mode is one, then that means we're changing the current drum to go between those different possible tracks and then we're updating all the lighting. So that's how we're able to show these different patterns here that are stored in the sequence. And that is it. So, shoo, thank you. Thank you so much for letting me talk through that. It'll help me, talking through it helps me clean it up a bit and also write up the explanation of the guide. So that'll be coming. And I think that does it for my project. So let me know if you have any thoughts or questions about that and anything else. I'll be looking in the Discord in a moment to take any questions. The last segment we've got is new products. So let's talk about what's going on in the store for new products. I'm gonna go ahead and quickly update my browser here to the right one so I can look at new products. There we are. And here we go. So we have, I actually kind of theoretically have a bunch of these to show because I don't have the real ones. I think I will order a bunch of these to show you next week just so I can show you them hands on. But what I have are stand-ins for a bunch of these that I can show you. These are wiring connectors. These are not the ones that we're showing here but these are wiring connectors and we have a few different types of these. So some of these I showed last week. Some are new since last week. And there are essentially a few varieties of these. So this type that I have here and this type that I have here, these are snap connectors. These will join essentially one wire and send its signal along to many. So it is a type of multiplier of just one wire. This will take one and send it out onto two others or join the circuit of three wires together. This one does that with five. So usually you'll have, you know, ground coming in and then you can send ground over to four things is a way to use those. Another type that we have are these pass-through ones with different conductors. So this would be useful for positive and ground for example. And so you can see here on our snap action, three to three wiring block connector right here, this one allows you to run three wires through and connect them essentially like a splice without having to do any soldering without using a wire nut or anything like that. This one is kind of more of a force multiplier but for two different signals. So you could put power and ground on this one coming in and then send out three power and ground each onto the other side. And so the types we have are one to one wiring blocks which look like this right here. And that's similar to something I have. This is a slightly different type but these are great for just connecting one wire, making it longer. You can see a nice little demo there of the one to ones. And next to it there is the five to five. So you can see that in action there running five to five. Love the colors on these two. I've never seen them done in colors like this. And then here's one where we're spraying out one and it becomes five. We also have the three to three and we have that two to six. And the biggest one of all, three to nine. So really useful if you're doing things with NeoPixels let's say and you wanna run power, ground and data from one pin and just send three identical NeoPixel strips out and they're gonna get their power ground and data signals off of those now nine wires that started life as three. So these are great looking. I can't wait to get my hands on them. These, some of them also have a mounting point on them. So this one can be screwed down. You get a couple screws and screw it down to something. So really useful if you're doing installations, if you're doing burning many things, house lighting, stage lighting and so on. These are really, really cool wired connectors. So yeah, you can see the two to six also has the mount points, not found on these other ones like the three to three. One to five does have it. So any of them that kind of why out can get that connector there. So that is, that's our full compliment of, I'm just gonna go back to the new products page there. We can see them all at once. Full compliment of wiring snap action blocks. This one here is a pretty similar style. If I can show it right there, you lift up. These are pretty strong. So you lift up that connection, poke a wire in there and then snap that back down. So if you do that three times, you've now multiplied your wire out to two others and connected them. So that is one, another new product. You'll have to stop me, I can't remember. I think this one we had last week but I'll mention it again is the MOSFET breakout. So this is a little MOSFET driver, has JST connector on one side to connect to your microcontroller, data pin, power and ground. And then it has the two spring action terminals for connecting your motor, your solenoid. It means you can now power off of a itty bitty weak little pin on your microcontroller and use the transistor on there to be able to drive a power hungry current hungry device. So you can check that out here. We also have the new learn guide from Liz that'll show you how to use it. There's a nice close up of it there. And here's the little back there again with our beautiful soap screen text now. It looks all nice, it's not all bumpy anymore. And this is a diode protected so you don't have to worry about that collapsing electromagnetic field fly back causing your microcontroller to scream. This is protected by the diodes there. So you can get about amp and a half out of that for constant current. Not sure what the other specs on it there. Yeah, so this is your, yeah, three to 30 volts you can provide and the signal can be three to 20 volts at logic level. And then you get the two terminal blocks to connect up your power hungry device. And then lastly, remember before when I said that our coupon code is blingy? Just like that. That'll get you 10% off in the store. And the reason is because I like the word blingy and there it is right there. It's the new Feather S2 Neo Blingy RGB ESP 32 S2 Feather Development Board from Unexpected Maker. So we just have a few of these in stock right now but if you want to get one what you're getting is a really advanced board. It's Feather form factor, pin compatible Feather form factor. It has the ESP 32 S2 chip on it. It's got four megs of flash. It has two megs of Q-Spy external PS RAM on it. It has this really cool little five by five Neo Pixel grid in the middle. Where have I seen that before? That reminds me of the product pick of the week this week was our little QDPy five by five. So get a nice little five by five matrix there for doing blingy, blingy things. You can obviously write words on there which is useful, simple little text readout. And this being ESP 32 S2 you can do Wi-Fi with it. So you can use this as an IoT type of device connected up to Adafruit IO or other IoT types of uses. It runs a, let me see. It runs latest version. A latest version of Circuit Python that supports ESP 32 S2 also runs on the ESP IDF and the Arduino support as well if you want to code in C++. What else? There was another cool feature on this. It's got, oh, the RGB LED that's used for status can be shut down to reduce your deep sleep current and also has a pretty beefy 700 milliamp regulator for 3.3 volt. And the, by the way, the matrix, matrix, LED matrix there is running on its own LDO. So that current is not gonna affect you, not gonna brown out your logic current on the rest of the board there. So really smart design behind here. So go check that out. That, let's take a look at some of these nice pictures here. It's got USB-C on it. It has the battery charging circuit and JST connectors for LiPo that you know and love, has boot and reset buttons on it for getting into, for resetting it and for getting into flashing mode. And it has a Stemma QT quick connector on it for connecting up your I squared C devices. Comes with some header pins there depending on how you want to use it. You can solder those on. Happy, happy USB-C. And there's the back of the board there. Makes something unexpected. It's the Feather Neo S2 from UnexpectedMaker.com. You can go to UnexpectedMaker.com as a link here for documentation and support. And you can go to circuitpython.org to grab your UF2 to flash this with the latest version and check out what versions are available, check out the notes there. And, oh, that first pic has a nice animation. Why isn't it animating for me? Is that the one you were talking about, Austerly? Don't know why it's not animating. Spooky. All right, well that I think is gonna do it for new products. All right, so let's take a look at the Discord. What kind of thoughts, questions, comments do you have and then we'll wrap this up. I know this has gone kind of long. I feel like Phil and Lamore get this done quicker. I'm with it somehow. Click it. He says click it. Let's click it. Just decided not to let me click it. Maybe it's the browser I'm in. Don't know why. Yeah, it says loop. It looks like it's got the video controls of one of our animated gifs. I don't know what happened to mine. Oh, let me reload it. Hey, that worked. Just a simple reload. Let me go back to that page real quick. All right, watch. I'm gonna reload. We'll see if it plays. It's playing. It's stopped. Stop. I don't know what's going on. Got mad at me. All right, so, yeah, questions. Let me know your questions here. I'm gonna skim back a bit and I'll look for any. If you put my atJP name in, it will alert me and it'll be easier for me to see. So, going back a little ways. Loving this seven-segment or 14-segment display, trying to do lowercase. What library are you using to do those letters? That is the, I think it's just the HT33K, HT1633K library has that font built into it. So, all of that lowercase stuff came from it. It says, I'm thinking Neo-Key five by six. Oh, that's something else you're building. Okay, maybe not the drum project. Some love for GarageBand. Yeah, that Brooklyn drum kit is good, huh? Todd says it's remarkable on iPad. People wanna get their gels. Let me move this over here so I'm not looking off to the side. Oh, does that break it? Nope, I found it. It actually says, tap plastics as some of the color smoky and reflective plastic film by the foot. Oh, that's good to know. And by the way, I think someone might've been talking about, Pixel Smith says, iOS bought a third-party program that allows you to chain apps as sound sources, effects, recording, syncs with no latency. It's built into the OS now. Yeah, I think this is, oh, I can't even remember the names anymore. It's not audio kit, but audio units. I think it's audio units. But yeah, on an iPad, you can have multiple apps that are at a very fundamental low level in the operating system, communicating with each other so you get low, low, low latency and the ability to run something into an effect or have a drum kit that's its own thing. It's pretty impressive. I haven't dived much into that, but there's a lot you can do. See Grover has a link to something that's worked well for, I think, a filter sample book for LED projects. Go check that link in our Discord. Interested? Someone almost put their eye out while soldering. That's no good. Wear your goggles. Is there an iSpy cable splice extender? Oh, not that I'm aware of. I don't know if I've seen any. You could probably build that. It'd just be tiny. You'd probably have to drag, solder it, but I think you could get the little connectors we're using for those and just make a splicey board for that. Yeah, FPC. Thank you. Liz has looked for FPC extenders for that. Osterly shows husband DJing with, are those light up goggles? Everything about that is pretty spectacular. I'll have to check that out later. First pick out a nice animation. Okay, we're caught up almost. Okay, questions. So, oh, Liz always asking the fun ones. If you were to design a Eurorack module, what type of module would you design? Hmm, let me think about that and come back to it. I'm gonna, I'm thinking while I look at other ones. Are the switches for your MIDI controller momentary contact? I want to make a budget version. These are momentary switches. Yeah, so you could get any tactile switches, any momentary tactile switches and use them in this kind of way. You could even probably dig open an old keyboard, like a keyboard, bigger would be better with more space. This is still working, by the way. I know I said I was gonna replace it because of the battery, but it's still working. This is a fire, you know why. But you might be able to use an old keyboard and rewire it or tap into the matrix on it. But yeah, tactile switches on a momentary tactile switches on a breadboard will work for what I'm doing there. If you wanted LEDs, you'd wire those separately. Got a cool matrix GIF. Okay, so coming back to this, designing your Eurorack module. I like the notion of clock input and clock divide. I know I actually mentioned one of my favorite modules as a clock one the other week, but based on, I showed that one, the little trinket trigger that Todd had made. I like the idea of using something that's got maybe a circuit Python or Arduino microcontroller on it that's programmable to set up interesting clock divisions. So feed it or tap a tempo into it, but have it be able to send off, you know, different subdivisions of clock multiplications and divisions of clock based on that, so that it's streamlined, so there's no menu, no UI. I also really like the idea of a multiple LFO. So have something that's got multiple outputs and maybe knobs to say I've got one main low frequency output and then I can use knobs to have everything else be related ones to that so that we get one that's halves and one that's twice as long, but having a lot of modulation sources that are based on one, but tunable would be a lot of fun. So cool question. All right, I think that's gonna do it for today. Thanks everyone for hanging out. Thanks for your questions. Let me see, I wanna see if there was any questions over in YouTube too. Trader Monk asks, I'm not a programmer but I have ideas of stuff I want to do, so I'm thinking about trying to learn this. I'm kinda clueless of where to start. I always recommend check out make code and you can go to Adafruit's learn.adafruit.com and check out a couple of beginner guides on make code because it is about the logic of programming and not about the typing, the little syntax. And then you can use it to pivot over into I think JavaScript and Python on it or come on over to circuit Python, which once you've got some ideas of how the logic of programming these things work, you might wanna check out circuit Python because it's very friendly and we have a lot of great tutorials for absolute beginners. So those would be my recommendations to Trader Monk. Oh yeah, nice Austroly posted. There's a good party platter of tactile switches if you're thinking of having a bunch of tactile switches on hand, check out some of those links there. And that is gonna do it. I will be back next week with a product pick of the week on Tuesday and I will do this show on Wednesday and then I think a lot of people will be taking some time off for the holidays so I'll see you sometime after that. But in closing, I'll say thank you so much for stopping by for Adafruit Industries. I'm John Park. This has been John Park's workshop and now your moment of Zorba.