 And welcome to the show, it's me, John Park, and it's time for John Park's workshop. Thanks so much for having me back. I was out of town for a few days, and in that time it seems like YouTube and the Internet got a little funny on me, but it might be back, it might be running, and hopefully it's smooth. I'm going to check out my dashboard over here to see, before I get too confident, that, oh, stream health is excellent, it said. See, I had to trick it. I had to stop the stream and restart the stream, but it looks like we're good to go. I also just got that blog post out at the last second there, so thanks for your patience. I was traveling, and I kept having to get up, my son and I were traveling, doing some college tour stuff, and I kept having to get up at like 3 a.m. in whatever time zone we were to get on super early flights, which I can mess with you. But I'm back, and I have some fun stuff to show and talk about today, so thank you for stopping by for this. Let's just pause one thing over here. Okay, good, we're good to go. So we get a report that things are working in YouTube, that's good. Who am I talking to, you may ask? Well, I can keep an eye over on our YouTube chat. Hi, Dave Odessa, welcome, and thanks for stopping by. And this right here, that's our Discord chat. So if you're on Twitch or one of the other platforms, you're wondering, where is everyone? Who is he talking to? Lars himself, yes, and yes. But also, these people right here in the Adafruit Discord, our Discord channel has over 34,000 members now, I heard that the other day, wow. And you can get there by going to adafruit.it slash Discord, you'll get an instant invite, join in, and then head over to the live broadcast chat channel. You can see it over there on the side, it's a little cut off, but we have a whole bunch of different channels. I'll scroll through them a little bit, and you'll see there we have welcome announcements, live broadcast, announce, live broadcast, chat, that's this one right here, pet photos, off topic, and then we have a whole bunch of help with channels, and the Circuit Python Dev channel, and on and on, show and tell. So this is a really good place to stop by and see what's happening, chat with people. There's pretty much someone there all the time, and you can usually get some quick conversations going, maybe even some help on a project, or help someone else on a project by heading over to our Discord. So, Liz, BlitzCityDIY, thank you so much, this is an excellent shirt. I think this was a Christmas gift from one of my kids about a year or two ago. A whole bunch of not quite exactly synths, but you can probably tell which ones they meant, sort of, all wired together. Thanks, Charles Burnford too, I appreciate that. So, let's see, what else are we going to do? I was out, and one of the days I was out was this Tuesday, Tuesday of this week, so there was not a JP's product pick of the week this week, but there will be next week. So come back on Tuesday for JP's product pick of the week, and I'll be showing off a new product, and there will be a discount during the live stream, and the way that works is that we don't have a coupon code or anything you have to do other than buy something if you like it during the actual broadcast, during the live stream, which is four o'clock Eastern time, one o'clock Pacific time here in California, and the price will be generally 50% off if it's a native fruit product, and usually it is, so we chop that price right in half, and you can get that right into your cart with no hassle. I'm a little distracted because Todd is torturing me with lars, don't do that. Come on, it's bad enough that he lives here. So, since I'm not doing the product pick of the week, what we'll do is jump right into a Circuit Python Parsec, so let's get set up for that. Okay, for the Circuit Python Parsec today, I wanted to show you how you can use a bitmap graphic with transparency inside of Circuit Python, so this uses image load, and I'm using display IO to do a whole bunch of other stuff as well as vector IO, so you've seen this little example before, I have my little sort of circus themed breakout type of demo going on, but what I've added here is a new little function called add clown, so what I'll do is just comment or remove the comment from this and a resave this code to my board, and what you'll see is when it restarts, we will have added precisely one clown. Hey, there's a clown, and oh, he's a sad clown, but the cool thing about this clown you can see is that since I have the ball bouncing around behind him, it's pretty easy to tell that there is transparency going on, sort of like an alpha channel if you're used to traditional modern graphics, but what's going on here is that there is one special color in this image, which is considered to be the transparency color, so there's the original image, I've scaled it up a bit so it looks a little softened, but what's happening in the code is that anywhere that the index zero color, so the first color in the palette, which happens to be magenta, is going to be knocked out, it's going to be rendered transparent, so if I, let me hide that, if I take a look at the code here, I'm doing that in my function, what I'm doing is loading in a bitmap graphic, that's that clown2.bmp, then I'm setting up with image load the image as well as the palette, so the colors, I think I have eight colors in there, what I'm doing is with pal.make transparent zero, I'm picking the first one, index zero color, which is the magenta, and making that the transparent color, then I set up this little sprite as a tile grid, clown.tg is tile grid, clown image and the pixel shader, and then I append that to my main group, and then I'm setting it in a particular place, depending on the call that I send to this function, so if I send it now another one, add clown at 70, 70, we'll get two clowns on there, which are going to be at the positions that I've indicated, and we can go ahead and whoops, add one more clown, why not, so it'll be falling off the screen a little bit, but the, let me get that on there, so there you can see it's a really easy way to create transparency, and so that's how you can use transparency with a BMP graphic inside of CircuitPython, and that is your sad clown CircuitPython parsec. All right, so let's see, I'll probably do some other stuff with transparency and palette stuff, I've shown a couple other palette things before, but it's really a great workflow, and if you've seen me use the A-Sprite, A-E-A-E-S-P-R-I-T-E, is that hey, I never remember, A-Sprite, A-S-E-P-R-I-T-E, A-Sprite is a really great program, usually it's inexpensive, maybe ten dollars, or sometimes it's free with a humble bundle, but it's a really good way to do pixel art, and it allows you to do things like shuttle around your palette and decide what color to make something like a background that you're going to knock out. It doesn't have to be the magenta, this isn't like a chroma key or anything, it just is something that we can identify easily while we're working, so that's why that's why my clown there had magenta. So who knows where this is going, but I'm liking the Fun Circus theme. Hey, let's make that real big. Oh, let me focus that a little better too. You deserve sharply focused, there we go, oh that softens up a little bit. Stay, oh yeah, look at that. Did you know, by the way, I learned this on, today I learned on Reddit a little while ago, that that song that we associate with clowns and fail videos and circuses was written as a military march. I forget the composer, but it was meant to be like a really inspiring military march and now we associate it with clowns. So yes, weird energy, right? That's what's going on here today and that's mostly because of my air travel. I have a little bit of an incremental project update that I want to make on the L cars and then I also want to dive into a little sort of a product demo of something, it's not a product pick of the week type of thing, but I just wanted to dig into the RFID wiz kit that we have. I think it's sold out right now in the store, but it's pretty neat, easy to use, sort of beginner friendly kit for someone who wants to build something for things like escape rooms. So we'll do a little, I've basically got it working earlier just to see does it work and yes and I don't know a lot about it, but I think we'll see, it'll be fun to see together how easy it is to get it up and running. So to start with the project update, for the L cars, which I don't have here right now, do I? The L cars is my little Star Trek panel. I've been using a matrix portal, which is, I think I was using a 64 by 32 panel and it's not quite precise enough. So I mentioned this, I think a week ago that I wanted to try upping the resolution. So this is actually a pair of panels here. And this is a cool thing that we can do with our matrix portal, as well as I think our RGB matrix shield for feather and for raspberry pi. You can see here I've got two panels and these are a 2.5 millimeter pitch, 64 by 64. So this gives us 128 by 64 pixels, which is a ton of pixels. And you can see there I've got the matrix portal plugged in to tell it what to do, but couple three things that are that are different than the typical just plug it into a single panel. So first of all, you can see here I have an IDC cable that is used to take data and flow it from one panel to the next. And this is how we can use them as a single panel instead of just sort of a duplicate of one panel. So the data flow goes between the panels while the power instead of running it through the matrix portal, which we use an USB-C connector here. I don't have any USB-C plugs or power adapters that are over three amps, I think that's the raspberry pi one. This is going to require more than three amps. So what I want to use is a big 10 amp five volt power source. And so what I've done here is taken our power cables, run those to the board as usual, but then I'm only grounding them to the matrix portal and I'm running the power from a big brick. So you can see here, let me set this down for a second, I have a big five volt 10 amp power supply and that has a two, yeah a little barrel connector where it's 2.1 and 2.5 millimeter barrel connector, center positive. So what I can do with these is for now I'm just going to hold these, I haven't built something to connect them together, but I think I have, we'll see what's running on here right now. I'm not sure what state I left it in. So I'll power, right now I'm powering the board only separately of the matrix portal. You might be able to power them both from the same source later, but for now since I'm programming it, I'm going to power this from USB-C. So I'm going to steal my USB-C cable. So that's my computer's USB. It is not going to bother attempting to power this giant number of LEDs, but you can see here I now have a whole bunch of LEDs lit. I have it, I just made myself a little two-frame sprite sheet animation so that I could see some colors happening. I could see some pure white happening, pure white looking really good. In fact, let me let's set this down so you can look at it in the overhead. Give you that view one second, little focus, there we go. I'm going to turn this exposure down just because it is quite bright. You can see one of the telltale signs that you're underpowering these, whoops, shutter speed there, it wasn't happy with, you will see lines and artifacts. Any blinky refresh stuff you're seeing on video right now is just because of my capture of video and sending it in person. It's just rock solid, particularly this tea that isn't changing, so that one is just rock solid. So I think this could end up being the solution. This pair of panels is actually, it's two that I had on hand, they are a little bigger than I need them to be for the Elkars panel, so I may move to the two millimeter pitch, two of the two millimeter pitch panels, which means I'll have some really precise, be able to match the backlighting needs that I have and therefore get some crisp edges, even though I'm using a little light, sort of light tunnels and light blockers, I still want the pitch to be as tight as possible. And that should be the solution. I also mentioned last time that LaMoure had said, hey, why don't you try using color so that you can enhance, even though the backlight Elkars panel works with just white light behind it, it may be interesting to see how that saturation changes by using color behind it. So that's the update on that, and really important, I was having some problems with this, so I want to show you something in code and something in hardware that matter a lot if you're going to try to do this, and I had forgotten about this at first and was banging my head against having a weird sort of half display mirrored between the upper and lower sections. And let's see, let me bring up a web page here. So if you go to the Adafruit Matrix Portal M4, you will see a section here talking about its features. It has an address E line jumper for use with 64 by 64 matrices. So there are two possible pins that aren't normally used on your board that you can jumper. I believe I'm using pin 8. Let me see if I can see it on here. Yeah, I think it's the pin 8. Some boards, some panels will use pin 16, up the exposure here. You probably won't be able to see this too well, but I'm not going to touch this with the screwdriver. If you look, where'd it go? I just lost it. Right here, where I'm pointing here, there's a little blob of solder you can see there. That jumps the address E line to pin 8. So that means pin 8 of this M4 is being used to send out that sort of fifth line of data, which is how it does a 64 by 64 panel. So it's pretty specific. I forgot about this, and therefore was having problems because I was telling it the right things in code, but it couldn't care less. Here's what, wow, that's so many windows. There we go. Here's what, let me open this code. Here's what I got running on there right now. Same sprite sheet code as before. When I set up the matrix, I'm setting my bit depth to be 2. This just lowers the memory needs. If you go up to higher color bit depths, you can get more gradations of color, but you will pretty soon reach a memory limit. I found bit depth of 2 works well. Here you can see I'm setting my width to be 128 because it's the two panels of 64 and then the height of 64. I believe that's it with the matrix portal. You can see here I'm using matrix portal. This code takes care of a bunch of housekeeping if you were just using the straight RGB matrix library. Matrix portal makes it very straightforward to use these two panels together. Essentially, as long as you're plugging the data cable in here, you can just tell it what the width is and it works. Then my sprite image is 128 by 128 because I'm essentially shifting between the two, a color version and the white version. These were little things I used to just register things when I was having problems trying to figure out what was I stretching stuff or whatever. This is just a little test image that helps out. I think that is it. I don't think there's anything else I needed to do once I figured out the hardware problem there. Feed it lots of juicy 5 volt current and off we go. I'll be rebuilding this with the just plugging in essentially the 2 millimeter pitch tiles and then using a graphic that fits the backlight L cars. That's where that's going. Looking at the chat for questions, I'll check the discord in a second, but I just saw a question from Charles Burnaford in the YouTube chat. It says, what do you use to change the voice in the parsec title? I used a vocoder that is essentially a software vocoder built into the Arturia Micro Freak keyboard that I have. I'll pull that up. It's a neat looking keyboard. I should show that off sometime. It's essentially a digital synth that has some pretty neat capacitive touch pads as its input. It looks like this and it runs a bunch of different synthesis engines including some of the open source synthesis engines from mutable instruments. I believe it has braids and maybe clouds and maybe rings on there for effects and then a whole bunch of wavetables and other synthesis methods. There was an update in the last year where it gained a vocoder and it always had a mic input in it kind of hidden as a TRRS mic. You can buy a little Gooseneck mic from them that's tuned pretty well for its needs for 30 bucks or something. I got that. Then it does the formant stuff of a vocoder without it being a giant piece of outboard equipment. That's what I used. I re-recorded it with some mellower settings because if you remember the old version had this really peaked out sound. It sounded like a disaster on your speakers. I took the feedback and re-recorded it with some gentler lower pitched vocoder stuff. The thing about a vocoder, if you're not aware of them, they are triggered by two things. One is you speak or sing into them but your pitch doesn't matter. You play the pitch that you want. I said the Circuit Python Parsec in a monotone that would work but then by the Circuit Python Parsec by playing the keys that you want it to shift these formant sounds through you can make it follow a precise pitch. Not the same as a auto tuner but not entirely different from one either. It's a different approach to a somewhat similar thing which is taking human voice and pitching it where you want. It's trying to synthesize voice not just kind of slap frequencies of a recording into the right place. So great question. Thanks for asking that. All right and then the Discord. What's going on over here? We have a matrix for the matrix portal there. Yanisku found a nice matrix gift. Thanks for that. Okay so now I want to jump over to the workbench in a second to remove this. I'll do a little build with the super cool RFID Wiz. Let me show what this is first. I'll jump back here and head to Adafruit. Let's do RFID Wiz kit there by Smooth Technology. So these are out of stock right now. I don't know what the stock status is if there are more on hand that we can get over from the Smooth Technology people or if they're waiting on them. But this is really cool because this reminds me of something from our good friends at Evil Mad Science Labs which is a relay timer kit. Let me actually show that because that's pretty cool. So EMSL Relay Artist. It's called the Art Controller. So this is really neat. The idea here is that a project or a product that artists often want who are building interactive sculptures is a triggerable relay that can take in things like a button press and allow something to maybe turn on like a motor or a light for a certain amount of time and then turn off and that is what this does. So it's something you could do with a microcontroller and a little bit of code but this allows you to do it entirely with dip switches. So setting these dip switches on here changes the timings and the state of I think if things toggle on and off or go on for a certain period of time and go back off. So this came out years ago. Here's this blog poster from 2012. I used one as a camera in a volometer one time. It's a really cool quick solution for certain types of on and off autonomous on and off projects. So the WizKit reminds me of that because it is I think also I think these both have a tiny chip running them. This doesn't say right here that has been pre-coded with some code that looks for button presses to learn RFID tags, certain button presses to erase the memory and I believe just this toggle switch for behavior. So do you want it to be an instant or a delayed thing and I haven't dug into it to see if you can do things like change what the timing is on it. If it's just one second on, one second off or one second on and then goes back off or if you can change things about it with button presses. You could probably also code the thing but I think it would use this programming header or something like that. Apologies to smooth technology if I'm lying in any of this. I really haven't used it much but the idea behind it is you give it power and that can be just a wall wart that'll provide anywhere from 6 to 12 volts and you can then trigger that 6 to 12 volts DC with the relay. You can also use an external power source with the little screw terminals there and then one of those generally the common, so you'll plug your device into power in, the V in here and then whether it gets grounded or not will be based on the ground running to common and then either the normally closed or the normally open part of the relay being triggered. So let's dive into a bit over here. Let me jump to the work bench and I'm gonna show you the basics of getting this set up. Oh gosh, I think my fan is blowing AC. Let me just turn it off for now. We'll see if we don't overheat. I was just pulling air in from outside. So here is what you get in this kit. So there's the main board here. Here was the bag it came in because it has this power supply in a box so it needs some size there and I'm also going to turn down a spotlight here that was on full blast. So you get the main board and then it has a little ribbon connector to plug in your RFID reader. So it's a little separate board here and then you've got your relay here either normal closed normally open switch that this is going to ground when this runs and then the V in and ground over here. The setup for it, take the power supply here and give that power. So this is taking wall AC and turning this into 12 volts DC and like I said you could run anything from 6 to 12 volts through this to run the thing as well as trigger whatever your device is. So this is good for for 12 volt motors, light strips that sort of thing. I'm going to use a light strip to demo it and then if we grab one of the tags you can see right now if I hold that up nothing's changing right we don't see this any any status LED changes there's a little LED on here I'm not sure if that one changes when it recognizes a tag or not. So what we need to do is hold train and now it has trained that tag. If I take any of these little sticker tags you can see it doesn't doesn't know what those are. I'll see if I can train just one so now this one does may have these may just be too close to each other I don't want to tear them off yet but so you get the idea. Now the we'll play around with untraining stuff later but two other things I want to point out you can rather than using whatever this voltage is this power supply as the power for your device you can also use this is a little sort of pigtail for sending out a 5 volt control signal and so a 5 volt control signal is really useful for things like smart outlets so if you want to run let's say 110 volt DC thing a power drill or something like that what you can do is use the board here the relay will just send a 5 volts there's a voltage regulator on here send a 5 volt signal that'll turn on and off and then there are things like the smart outlet or smart relay power strips that you can they have some big solid state relays in them that will allow the safely the 110 AC to run through and then this thing can just be the trigger for that so let me see do I have one of those over here I did and I think I put it somewhere else it's not here right now I can call that up though unless someone wants to bring that up on the on the discord but I'll call that up in a second the there's a couple of those out there that are pretty common so now let's try to have it do something so first of all let's just grab a multimeter this is a nice way to to figure out what it's doing what's the what's the what what should I be plugging stuff into so you can see here I'm going to take first just the v in and ground and so those are what the power supply is sending through so that's always available right there so that's this 12 volts so now what I'll do is take the the ground stop reading ground there and I'm going to read this normally closed now this isn't going to do anything right now because these are not connected so right now that doesn't change anything so one setup feature here and I don't know if there's any jumpers you can use for this it could be something you want to set up a little more permanently but what I'm going to do is just take a small piece of wire and I'm going to run the ground to the common leg of the relay there get a little closer still turn this light up a bit sorry it's a little better so let me grab a small flathead and I'm going to unplug this while I do this just for safety's sake I don't want to short anything so I'm just using a little piece of hookup wire that'll go from the ground and that's the same as this ground that's coming coming in and the common leg right here solid core hookup is fine it's not the best sometimes stranded is a little better for biting down on it with those but as long as you're not too violent with that it should be good so now what'll happen is if I take a look at the in and this common nope that in view right that common is the same as this ground over here so I get 12 volts if I check out the normally open that's going to be nothing if I check out the normally closed that's going to be 12 so that means I can turn off I can have something that's normally on and then turn it off when the tag is there back on off and the other one has the opposite behavior so the normally open here will be at zero and then back up to 12 and down to zero so that's the sort of most basic functionality of it now let's plug in something that's a little more fun I'm going to take five meters of led strip so this is sort of the verse pseudo neon that we have we sell this in one meter sections when LeMore got samples of these she asked me if I wanted some of these giant five meter sections and I said heck yeah so so I got some of these from her thanks for that so what I'll do is I'll leave it in the package just so it doesn't fly around I will go ahead and you know plug in the red lead of my led neon to the voltage in and then the open normally open it's an open circuit meaning it's not not going to be lit normally and so you can imagine this is really fun for things like puzzle escape room types of things because you can have someone have to solve some puzzle to gain access to an RFID sticker or something with the sticker on it so it's less obvious or the tag is buried inside of something and then you can have the reader hidden somewhere maybe it's part of the side of a bookcase and they have to just put a book into the right slot and then light up something that maybe was in the dark in a box or something so that's one idea of how you can do this sort of thing so here it is it's armed it's ready to go uh this let's um let's see if we can simulate that kind of an idea and hide that under something I'll take this little box here so let's see if that it'll stay mostly flat there you go so now gosh that's bright so now you've got your uh and we've got multiple tags that it'll work with uh you can train I think it's I'm a little confused I read in one spot 20 uh is a is definitely easy for it to train uh they said maybe up to 40 but you could have issues and I don't know if that's because the uh the unique ID lengths on these might be different and therefore you're filling up memory not quite sure uh but there's also provision for uh taking all cards or a card out of training so if I want to if I want to untrain this erase the memory by pressing the train button five times quickly let's try that that work it did so it took a moment and then you saw that status light blinked and that's great because again if this is for some sort of a prop effect a Halloween thing an escape room type of thing you may want to untrain a bunch of tags and then restart restart your process that makes it easy so it's retrain all right so that one works again now we can have this one in toggle mode or rather in a momentary mode so it acts like a momentary switch but we can also train them as a toggle which means it will hold the relay closed until you bring the card a second time so you don't always want to have relays hanging out forever and ever and ever like this but for certain things that's fine especially if it's something you're resetting after an hour so let's do that let's take this tag um we'll press train three times quickly and that will put us into the toggle mode okay so now my card lights it up my card turns it off on off which is really cool i don't know if that puts the whole device into that mode it does okay so it's not a per card thing so all the i i'm guessing all the cards are just part of the same behavior so that's that's the device not the card um now let's take it uh we'll leave it in that mode but then let's try these other um the toggle switch here it's the release so we have instant release um yeah in fact let me let's uh let's retrain this okay so i clicked it three times i guess you probably don't even need the card there yeah that's just a switch the whole device that's cool uh so now we're in momentary mode uh but one nice thing is that a thing that is really common to use for stuff like escape rooms is a magnetic lock an electromagnetic lock so if you're using something like that you may not want super brief behavior because it's just not enough time for the thing to actuate and pop a door open um so this toggle here goes from instant to delayed mode now it stays on for a few seconds and then we'll shut itself off uh it seems like you get about five seconds so click be you got to go open the door while it's doing that me thing because it's pulling a deadbolt um so that's the difference between delayed mode and here's instant mode which is also useful you might find other uses for that uh that's kind of all there is too i think the other um other ideas that they have inside of if you saw me looking at something they have a nice really easy guide here i think most people could get this up and running maybe just with this guide or seeing a video either this or the ones on their site um the the with the basic functionality especially doing dc stuff if you're doing something like an ac power supply that has a lot more current uh their example here is they're using sort of a mage well power supply that is also 12 to 24 volts but it's separate from your little uh wall wart then you can run just the common uh ground to your device and have it plugged in separately so you're just breaking ground uh with it and then running uh powered directly to your to your lock and the ground is being controlled by this relay right here so uh that's just touching the surface of it i may poke around some more and see what else they've got um that lets you uh customize your behavior there uh i don't know if they have this this could be a programming header here i'm not sure uh these little points that could be that you're meant to just hardwire your rfid um into that the uh actually another thing i wanted to check i suspect these well that's interesting there's a there's a couple dip switches on there so there might be some behaviors you can use to maybe change the types of cards you can read um i think these are the what is it 13 megahertz cards i actually have a little box of my rfid stuff um and i'm curious if existing cards i have would work let's see so here's a a card that i had yeah okay so i think these are cards that we sell separately i think they're it's a pretty common one uh i'm also curious if i still have this box of rfid junk here let's see old project graveyard uh if i still have okay so here's these little tags that you can put on your fingernails and i did have the ring that i used in my chess project if you remember i had a wireless rfid uh so there was a reader here and then it was wirelessly turning on a relay so for this i have like these chess pieces you can see yeah so my little i think those are those tags uh or or similar that i have under there i forget uh and there's also this ring so you can wear a little ring here let's see if it'll pick that up this might be an nfc thing that it doesn't love oh no it does it's just very directional right there uh so this is great you can have that kind of on the bottom of your hand and discreetly trigger something without anyone noticing especially helpful if you have that delay on uh because then you can pull your hand away and it doesn't look quite as cause and effecty um if you wanted a a delay at the beginning of it i'm not sure if that's possible without really just reflashing this so uh i think if you get to something that sophisticated you're probably more in the realm of uh build this sort of thing yourself with the microcontroller um but that is uh that is nice to see that all those different yeah so here's let's see these nails white nfc nails oh wait these do these work i can't remember if these will work do they glow let's see yeah these glow these have a little yeah these don't trigger it but these do glow which is interesting these are i can't remember if these if these are sending out any idea or if they're idea or if they're just using the induction to to light them up but that's kind of cute put those on your nails put some clear code over them all right so that uh that covers it it's really straightforward you've got like i said these stickers which are really cool if you want to do things like split playing cards open and stick them in there not saying that i told you to try that but you should try that um you've got the little key fob which is great and then these traditional kinds of cards uh i'll look two things up back at the workstation one is the ac power relay and the small tags i'm using in the chess pieces because those are kind of interesting so let's unplug that and head over here uh Todd says put a rfid sticker on the tip of a magic wand and you have your cast spell to solve escape room puzzle that's good uh so let's see rfid and nfc is a category um i think these are what i was using so yeah let's let's uh let's double check so this says it uses the 13.56 megahertz tags and these right here uh those are about the size of a quarter so depending on your needs those might work and then what tiny ones did i put those okay micro those are what i think i have in the uh in the chess pieces so you can see they got a small antenna so they got to be right on it you're not going to get them an inch away and still work probably uh but really good for for hiding inside of something um yeah it must be those these probably have a pretty small if you dug these open uh these nails but they're kind of cool too that's a i've never tried these but they've got kind of a hidden hidden tag in them here's a little bracelet yes any of these that say 13.56 should work and then i believe those nail ones just uh light up there's those rings are those discontinued we have them yeah no we have them okay the other thing i wanted to show is the power strip what's it called power ac relay ac relay outlet power switch tail okay that was one we used to have we're getting closer to it power switches this is it okay it's out of stock right now these are great so this has got four outlets on them two of them are just normal outlets that are controlled only by the switch they're always on and then two of them are uh either normally open or normally close i think based on this little five volt uh input here so you send it a five five volt signal okay so i was one normally on one normally uh one always on one and these are normally off okay so always on not affected by the by the relay normally on and then two that are normally off so that gets plugged into the wall uh using that power cord and then this gizmo uh or any microcontrollers five volt signal i think it might work on three even yeah three to sixty we'll trigger it uh from dc uh plugs into there and then you can turn that on off so i think that does it um hopefully those come back in stock soon but really neat neat gizmo or might inspire you to want to do some of your own power relay stuff uh related is the feather wing ac relay or just feather wing relay uh so this one here power relay feather wing that plus an rfid reader which we have this breakout board here uh i think you could do that directly or get the feather involved if you want to do something a little fancier um so rfid always cool a lot of great projects that you can do with that so start start thinking about i don't know escape rooms puzzles magic uh augmented reality alternate reality projects christmas halloween they're all easter you don't have much time left for that one but all right great so thanks everyone for stopping by for the weird energy episode uh or are they all like that i don't know you be the judge the next show will be foamy guy deep dive with tim on friday and he may do a saturday live stream not sure if he's doing those i'll be back on tuesday with a product pick of the week so i will see you thanks so much for stopping by for a different industries this has been john park's workshop bye everyone