 Hello, and welcome to the Adafruit Show and Tell. I'm Liz. I'm going to be your host this evening. If you would like to join, the StreamYard link can be found in the Adafruit Discord. That's adafruit.it slash discord in the live broadcast chat channel. Click the link and you'll be able to come into the queue to show up your project. But first, we're going to kick things off with some Adafruit folks. First, Melissa, maker Melissa. Hello. Melissa, how are you? Good. I've been working on a CircaPython installer for the CircaPython.org website. So rather than just downloading the firmware and the bootloader, it would actually go through and do all the installation for you on the website. So I wanted to show what I had on my computer at this moment. Yeah. I'll share your screen. Yeah. There is the tab there. So right now I have an open installer button and it comes up with a little menu when you do that. And I'm going to go ahead and click that. And I have this board connected to my computer at the moment. So I'm going to connect. You probably can't see this. I'm choosing it from a menu and so it connects. Yeah. Here we go. Next. And then it goes and erases the flash there. And this is kind of similar to the, is it kind of the same guts of ESP tool? Yeah. It's just like that in the back end. Yeah. Very cool. And then now it's going, it unzips the file and then starts putting the bootloader on. Right now I'm only showing the bootloader, but it's flashing that you can bind up in. And then I need to add it so it'll copy the UF 200 still. But I just wanted to kind of give you a little demonstration of what it looks like. Yeah. It's very cool. I like that folks will be able to just like find the board and just click and it'll do the thing because sometimes ESP tool could be a little intimidating for beginners. So I think this will be really awesome for folks. Yeah. Yeah. And then hopefully we can eventually add this into like the learn guide and stuff. So yeah, that's pretty much it at this point here, but it's just like a little lizard and it's configurable and maybe we can even use it like the Whippersnapper and stuff like that. Yeah, that'd be awesome. It's been really cool seeing your work on that and can't wait for our folks to get to use it. Yeah. Cool. All right. Thank you so much, Melissa. Have a good night. Thank you. You too. Next, we are going to go to Scott. Hey, Scott, how's it going? Hey, thanks for having me and thanks for hosting. So I've kind of gotten sick of doing bug fixes. So I'm circling back to some stuff. First is the watch. My watch doesn't have anything. It's just me now. So I have CircuitPython running on my watch here. And I've had it running since August, basically, when I was on leave. And now I want to dust it off and get it actually checked in so that we're able to have other people use it. I have a second one here that I kind of haven't messed with. And I'm trying to get it working there, installing kind of wirelessly rather than using the. The secret ester pins on the back. So I've got to figure that out. So if anybody's done Nordic, if you hit me up on Discord and help me out. But then the other thing is the display on here is kind of like a sharp memory display, except it's three, three bits of color, one for red, one for green and one for blue. And so I was in there in display, I doing some like very low color work, you know, with three bits and four bits sort of stuff. And that got me thinking about yinck. Yeah, there's these seven color yincks, which are kind of weird. They're weird because it's it's not like with the watch, it's one bit R, one bit G, one bit blue. And that's kind of like gets you eight colors. But in this case, for these displays, it's like red, orange, yellow, green, blue and then black and white are your seven colors. I think if I counted right. So it means that you like this is a graphic actually designed for this display. So it looks pretty good. Yeah. And I'm turning it just because you'll get too much reflection if I don't turn it. You can use colors pop that way. Yeah. So this is kind of in the very similar places of display as. As the watch code. So that's why I was in there. And I've been thinking a lot about yinck and and all that. So finally dusted this off and this is a five point six five inch display. And Pimerone has a version of this as well. This is a wave share module. Yeah. And then it also comes in a four inch. So I got the Pimerone four inch on the way. And then it also comes in a seven inch, which is kind of so I'm kind of excited to see a larger ink as well and all colors. So to get an eye on the PRs for a ticker Python to get the sport for this in there. Excellent. I'm excited to play with that. I'm sure a lot of folks are. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's been a long time coming. Like the more was playing around with this like, I don't know, you're years ago and she like actually bought some of these. So expect to see those in the shop at some point as well. Excellent. Great. Thanks so much, Scott. Thanks, Liz. A good one. Next, we're going to go to Jeff. Hello, Jeff, how's it going? I'm good. So I wanted to talk to you because I put a new guide in the aid of fruit learning system this week. This is the mouse of the original next computer. And now you can convert this to your to run on your modern computer with circuit Python. So if you want to bring up my little overhead camera, this is the little box that I made to hold the converter. And so there's just about eight wires here. You solder them in, plug everybody in and you're good to go. But what I wanted to talk about a little bit is this is the kind of mouse that kind of broadly is called a bus mouse. And there's no not much smarts inside it. So like all of the raw information about the button, whether the button is pressed or not, or the like the motion information is coming in here and this is decoding it and sending it on to your computer. So anyway, I already took the screws out and I peaked a little bit, but let's see what's in inside here. Yeah. So we've got a couple of buttons. We've got the connector and then this is the motion assembly. It had three more screws. And I was a little surprised when I got down here. It looked a little different than what I expected. Come on. So actually that all that assembly all pulls out as one piece. OK. And so here on the back, I'll zoom down. So I would like to figure out what these two chips are. There's two and there's probably one for the X and Y. So this little guy here rolls. The ball moves against this guy here and is rotating in here. And that's got some kind of sensor that produces a pair of signals that you can decode with incremental encoder. And I'm guessing that goes to the chips U1 and U2 and then comes out. But these aren't like microcontrollers. They're just like amplifying the LED signal or something like that. Yeah. And then CircuitPython does all the rest. And I'd love for you to check out the guide. And if you adapted to run some other kind of old mouse from this era, like I think it would run an Atari ST mouse or maybe the Commodore mouse with a little adaptation. So I'd love to hear if you have an old mouse and get it to work with CircuitPython to bring it onto your modern computer. And that's what I got for you tonight. And you've done a few guides now bringing these vintage products. Yeah, I've got a number of keyboard guides. This is the first mouse guide that I did. Actually, I did a second one because you can also daisy chain it with the next keyboard. That was how they hooked together. This plugged into the keyboard and the keyboard plugged into the computer. But yeah, maybe I'll do more mice. So if you are interested in that, you can hit me up on Mastodon or on the Discord and tell me what I should do next. Just don't break the bank by telling me to get an ultra rare mouse because it should be something that other people could get a hold of as well. That's fair. Anyway, that's what I got for you tonight. Great. And when I was little, I would always see the balls in the ball and the mice and I'd really want to get it out. And so it's very sad. Oh, me too. Now it's what's going on inside. I would want to fidget with that totally. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks so much, Jeff. All right, see you later. And now we're gonna have JP play us out with I think some retro action. Hey, Liz. Yeah, first can I tell a story about mice? Okay, so I had a buddy that I worked with when I worked at Disney Animation and I had this buddy, Joe, who was an animator. We used to play pranks on each other. And one day I came back to my office, I think, from lunch and my mouse was acting super weird. So back in those days, in fact, we had like dual SGI CRT monitors. So two like 22 inch CRTs, like 1,000 pounds of monitor. And I went to do something and my cursor just started to like drift off the screen. I'm like, what is up with my mouse? And it took a minute or two for me to like look it all around here, this weird little whiny noise. And I look around on the ground like the workstation is sitting there on the floor basically behind my desk. And I'm hearing this little whining noise. Joe had hooked up a pager motor to a battery and had taken a second mouse and plugged it into my computer and opened the mouse up. And the pager motor had, he'd like grafted some kind of like a little rubber wheel, like from a tape player that was just spinning one axis, the X axis of my mouse. And it was like, it had barely any traction. So it was like a weird slow jerky motion that was endless. So I never, I never got back at him. So that, and that was like 18 years ago. So I've been waiting cause that one was so good that I didn't really, he ended it right there. It was a really good, really good hack. So thanks, Joe. And thanks for reminding me of that, Jeff, with your ball mouse cause those, yeah, those often had like either a physical wheel that's fun or usually two wheels that would spin like a little light blocking LED encoder thing would get spun. So that was my mouse story. Yeah, so, so I wanted to share a screen here that I didn't set up. So let me, let me add, I'm gonna try two different things. So let me try this one first. Okay, so the Nintendo entertainment system emulator running on Pico with HDMI, actually DVI and audio output through an HDMI shaped connector and SD cards. So this is a project that Frank Hode Makers put together and it was forked off of a couple other iterations of this, but his added the SD card support, I think, and he put together two versions. One runs on a Pimeroni, and he put together two versions. One runs on a Pimeroni base that has some of these things built in and the other one, he just put it on a breadboard and used the Adderfruit add-ons for DVI breakout and SD card breakout. So the ROMs that you're gonna play on this Nintendo emulator go on the SD card, which is really cool actually, cause it makes it easy for someone who's not technical, if you give a gift version of this to someone, they can just power it off, put a ROM on the card and play. Yeah. This, I've got it running back here, which you won't be able to see too well. And I picked Kirby, which probably doesn't have enough contrast to look like much of anything, but there it is playing. So it's playing, I think it's 64480 over HDMI port on this old TV, LCD TV. But the innovation, the thing that's really cool is that this is now running with a real NES controller instead of a modern controller plugged into USB. And this is thanks to Phil B. So our own paint your dragon, I asked him, hey, is there any chance you could look at, while you're fiddling around in there and checking out the code, what do you think it would take to use the shift register as three wires of like data latch and clock as well as ground and power. Those are what are in the end. I'm gonna probably break things by unplugging it while it's live, but that's the end of the controller. It's a seven pin connector. Two of the pins are reserved for other uses, like with some of the joysticks that have weird other support and probably some of that robot Bob stuff uses it or Rob uses it. But this, he was able to get it working. And so no longer need the OTG connector and the USB controllers were real pain to figure out how to get them working. So it's like very specific to like just the dual shock from PlayStation, dual shock four and the dual sense. That's it. You're gonna try to plug something else in, forget it. Generics don't really work in that USB game pad descriptor world. They're all super specific. So that was win number one. Two, those are both like $40, $50 controllers. You can buy used originals for 10 to 20 bucks on eBay, less if you find them at a yard sale or a thrift shop. And there are clones of these that cost like $2 that will also, I'm sure they'll also work as a well-known protocol and convention. And you're able to get these things, which are the connectors forum on AliExpress. I got like 10 of them for six bucks or something like that. I developed a little PCB to put the original three things I needed plus a switch on there. Now I'm developing another one that'll have a spot for the NES controller. And since Nintendo is awesome, they made it so that the SNES controller was essentially backwards compatible and Lamorra was just discussing this. I think it's 16 bits, but the first eight bits that this sent are the ones that the NES wants. So it just describes the rest and it actually worked. Yeah, so I plugged one of these in through just a bunch of wiring, but I got a hold of some of these too, like a couple of bucks. And I'm just measuring those carefully. There's no footprint I could find, but I'm measuring those carefully in building Minerino and then adding footprints to the board. So I think I'll be able to fit both of these on here. You can plug them both in at the same time if you want. You might do that for like accessibility stuff if a couple of people want to have like one person's on the D-pad and the other's on the A button so that you can get in a fight and hate each other or something. That's, I think, possible. I don't think there's anything bad about that. I was gonna do a selector switch, but it turns out you kinda don't really need to. You can just plug them both in. So that's what the state of that is. And then I just wanna share the other screen here. One second, I'll change what I'm sending. Let's see. Share screen, window. So I've been putting together these in fritzing. So for some reason, I've become enamored of making these PCBs in fritzing. UI on it is easy to kinda get into when you haven't done in a while, which is not the case for me with Eagle. I've used Eagle in the past and anytime I don't use it for a while, I absolutely immediately forget how to use it because it has very kinda old-fashioned UI things about it. Maybe that's changed with some of the newer versions of it. But anyway, I've been doing these in fritzing. So I started out on a breadboard. That's what this project looked like and I had to make up some sort of bogus stuff here to plug in my NES controller, put together a schematic for it, and then start laying it out. These are the sort of made-up things. I'm just using holes and putting them where I've measured they need to be, but that so far seems to work pretty well. I've printed these out and they seem to line up. I'm making a little breakout header there so that you can still plug weird stuff in without needing the exact controller port. And I still have to add the SNES controller. And then let me just flip it over to the bottom real quick. And the other thing I kinda didn't really realize is this is not that difficult to put pretty fancy silkscreens on in fritzing. Let me see how it looks. It looks nice on the front there. Yeah, oh, yeah, right. You there's, I put a logo there, right? Yeah, so that logo, I presume it'll look nice when I get them made. I haven't tried yet with a fancier logo on these. Let me just flip over to the bottom silkscreen and I gotta hide the top stuff. Let me see the top silkscreen. So this was, I should probably change it because this is just like a Google search for someone's ripped icons from sprites from a game. I'll probably find something else that isn't someone's. But what I did was I just took it into Photoshop and dithered it so that I could get some, it's really just black and white, but there's a lot of good dithering tools in Photoshop to make some shades in there. So that's what it looks like right now. I might end up changing that. There's the URL at the bottom there and I'll put it in the chat, which is the GitHub page for this SNES emulator for Pico. And once I get this PCB made, this new version I'll post it up to that same, to Frank's GitHub, so it'll all live there. It's very serendipitous that you'd left that space out of those intentional notes that Ben had said. Yeah, I totally was like, I don't need to make this as small as possible. I'm just gonna make it kind of rectangular and I bet I'll use this space for something. So I think those will both fit, hopefully not or I'll rearrange stuff a little bit, but yeah, that's the state of things. And it's a nice, you can press select and start at the same time. Oh no, it doesn't love me anymore. Oh wait, let's see, let's see. Does this recover from a unplug, re-plug the question? Hey, it did. Okay, yeah, so this has a little file loader. Oh, that's great. You can go in and start up a new game. And as Phil was explaining, it essentially reads, it launches that menu system thing, waits for you to pick something. It writes the name of the ROM you've picked to a text file and then it kind of reboots the machine and checks for that file name and that's the next thing it launches. And some stuff looks great on it, even on, I noticed even on a, this is a progressive display, but this emulator has added fake scan lines that on some games look really nice, look fairly convincing and a little less blurry than Nintendo's own Android emulator they put into a little mini SNES. So some of the games have a little blur to them, but some of them look nice and sharp. So I've been impressed. You can put that on your big LCD or plasma it actually looks kind of nice. That's awesome. Yeah. And you have your show tomorrow at 4pm Eastern? Show tomorrow, come on by, I'll be hacking more on the see and say. I've got the vintage style, the retro style but modern see and say, Fisher Price toy that I've been replacing its innards with some circuit Python stuffs and I've got some of my own city sounds instead of the usual farm and barking dogs. Actually, I still have barking dogs. That's very city, but we're garbage trucks now. So. Excellent. All right. Well, thanks. Yeah, thanks, come on by. Thank you. Have a good one. All right. That is going to do it for show and tell tonight. Thank you everyone for showing your projects up next in just nine minutes right here on the YouTube channel is going to be Ask Engineer with the more PT. And until next time, have a good night.