 Hello, and welcome to Adafruit Show and Tell. I'm Liz. I'm going to be your host tonight. If you would like to join the stream, you can find a link to the live broadcast, in the live broadcast chat rather, on our Discord server at adafruit.it-slash-discord. First, we're going to kick things off though with some Adafruit folks and we're going to start with Scott. Hello. Hi, Liz. Thanks for hosting. Of course, yeah. Let me rearrange it. A little bit. What I've been doing is the IMX-RT is nearly there for us to release as a Metro. I've got it on my desk here and I've been experimenting with determining the performance of it. It's a lot more complicated of a chip and I want to get it configured so that we can get a good balance of RAM and speed. I've been playing around with that and ARM has a thing called SWO, which is a way of outputting performance data straight from the CPU out to the outside world. Let me share my screen. What we've got here is just as a test, I was doing two things here. One, I'm printing what you would normally see in the terminal but via this other path. Here you can see, for example, like trace back, you're trying to set the frequency and you can't. One neat thing about it is that it comes with this timestamp, which is actually dependent on the CPU frequency, so it should have per cycle accuracy for this timestamp. Then what I was trying to do here is output the instruction pointer for Python. For every individual bytecode thing that we run, how long does it take with my goal? Really, I wanted to see if I could output them all fast enough, because that's the challenge is this is a 500 megahertz CPU. How do you spit out all this data that you're generating? You can actually see here where it says overflow. The neat thing about it is if the things that are generating the stuff in the CPU work too fast, they detect that they're going too fast. They'll throw a thing that says, oh, by the way, we dropped something here because we couldn't manage to do it. I think what I'm going to end up doing is just slowing everything down, slowing all of the CPU down, and leaving the debug stuff faster to try to figure out how I can get the data that I want because ideally I would be able to do a trace where it says, this function was called from here to here, and this function was called from here to here, and we'd be able to see everything that's involved in actually running some code should be neat. That's very cool. I think what I have to do is I have to basically slow the world down on the chip. Like a quarter speed or a tenth of speed or even slower, where something that would run normally for a minute would take maybe 10 minutes, but I'd also capture all this data about it. Because there is all these complexities, like I can't really fake it between all the caching and stuff. I really just, I think you'll just slow the whole world down and capture it as much as I can to see how it's actually working. So that's pretty cool. And this SWO is actually on the SWD connector already, which is pretty neat. So I'm using just the stock Metro M7 for that right now. And then because I'm doing all this data ingestion and I was doing the logic analyzer stuff, I also picked up these two dev kits from DigiKey that I haven't actually played with yet. Okay. On the upside down, this is a super speed explorer kit. So it's a Cyprus FX3. Okay. Cyprus has these easy USB chips that are really geared towards like being an interface between a fast on board bus and the USB world. And super speed is five gigabits per second, which is pretty amazing. Very fast. So for logic analyzer stuff, for trace capture, that could be like really, really cool. So yeah, playing around a lot. Or you think of doing something with your Pi Cygrock project with one of those then? I am, yeah. So the FX2, which is the, this is a high speed device. So 480 megabits is like a very, very common chip in the Cygrock world already. So I'd like to support that from the Python side of things too. Very cool. So yeah, that's why I picked those up is because I think supporting those two boards would be really, really cool in Pi Cygrock. And I actually, for this SWO stuff, I'm using a decoder from Cygrock to do the analysis of the bytes coming in. So it's working out. That's awesome. Great. Well, thanks so much, Scott. Yep. Thanks, Liz. Thanks. Have a good night. Next, we're going to go to Internet Sensation and Barella. Hardly, Liz. Do you, I'm sending you some warmth and sunshine down from Florida. Thank you. Yes. Last time I was on, I was showing this kind of floppy hard case and knowing Pedro have had it on their show. The case is wonderful. It has an 80 fruit pie portal, which is fantastic. But there's no, there's no flop, what you call it, file icons like, like my other project. That the circuit Python community, Mark Thomas and Dan and Jeff have all been kind of working on getting animated GIF, GIF, however you'd like to say it, files playing on displays in circuit Python. So I could have done that maybe in Arduino, but that's not so much fun. I can confirm it's not as much fun. So there's been experimental in the nightly builds of 8.1. And so I just wanted to play with it and it became so much fun. I started putting them on to Twitter and masted on. And so you have the old schoolness of the floppy case. Excellent. And then you can put all kinds of videos on it. I love Max Headroom. He's very vintage along with the floppy. You can see my Twitter down here, whatever. You can go into my Twitter account and check out all the different videos that I've made so far. And also I believe on Ask an Engineer there's going to be a little loop about which videos I've made. I've made some of the startups for Mac and Amiga, a few memes, a couple Easter eggs. So it's really fun doing this and trying to think of things that mesh well between the vintage part and the video part because of all the memes. And I've gotten a lot of feedback from people who like the nostalgia. Some people are telling me what I'm doing wrong. But you know, a lot of people like the floppy nostalgia and the just position. It's great fun. So we don't have a guide yet. But one will probably be coming soon because we're finding the playback code in Circuit Python. But it will be there. So pick up some stuff and have a case printed. Then you'll be in the lane for when it pops up. Yes. That's awesome. Thanks for sharing that, Ann. And looking forward to more retro from you. Thank you. A good one. Next, for some more floppy stuff, we're going to go to Jeff. Hello, Jeff. You are muted. Oh, Jeff, you're muted. All right. I was just thanking Ann for putting Nyan Cat on the floppy. That was the one I asked for. Because, you know, it's got that retro style to it even if it's not from the true floppy era. Yes. But my guide, if you want to go to the overhead camera, for the feather wing came out today. So this here is the feather wing itself. And you pair it with an RP2040 microcontroller and plug it all into a vintage floppy disk. This is a Panasonic three and a half inch floppy. Oh, okay. And you can arc your old floppies with it using flex engine and grease weasel. You can use it as a mass storage device to actually mount it live on your computer in real time. And you can do other stuff with it. And we are looking. We're hoping that somebody will make floppy music with it. We don't have code for it yet. But, you know, you can move the floppy motor back and forth and make sounds with it. So maybe some kind of MIDI to floppy thing in the future. I don't know. It's not my thing. But anyway, yeah, so that's this. And you have to power it with five and 12 volts depending on the drive. And some other gotchas that I ran into. I've got two other floppy drives here. So this connector, let me unplug it. Maybe this connector has a key, which is this little nubbin here you can see that stops you from plugging it in the wrong way. That's handy. Well, this drive here, its connector is correct. So you can plug it in. This drive, it's hard to see. It's hard to focus. It's got the notch in the wrong position. So if you plug it in like this, which is how it fits, it's wrong. It doesn't work. And you can't flip it around because the key stops you from plugging it in the wrong way. All right. So and then my third drive. This might be why people don't use technology. It actually has both sides cut out. So you can for sure plug it in, but one of the ways is wrong. So yeah, just watch out when you're plugging in your floppy drive. The guide does mention how to do a quick continuity test with your meter just to make sure it's incorrect. And then if you've got one of these old guys, the honkin five and a quarter Oh, you'll need to find a different ribbon style connector. So if you don't have this stuff, you are going to be spending some time on eBay. But anyway, if you are into it, check out the guide. We've got Arduino code. We've got circuit Python code. We've got just a UF two that you put on and then you use it with the grease weasel and flex engine on your host computer. And that is for doing things like archiving your old floppy disks, which you were kind of asking me about before we went on. Yes, I have a quick floppy question because I kind of missed all the floppy things. And I was given this floppy in like the fifth or sixth grade so that I could put like homework assignments on it and then bring it to the computer lab to print from it. I think it was some sort of task to try and make us responsible adults. And I don't know what's on it. Like I don't know if it's actually I have in my elementary school hand ranked science report. So I don't know. Oh, that could be really cool. Like I don't know what's on here. So I was curious if this kind of floppy would work with the feather wing. Yeah. So you were saying it's a Windows floppy. Yes. And so yeah, with there's a mass storage demo. So if it's a 1.44 meg floppy, there were two different capacities. Then that'll just actually mount on your modern computer when you use that firmware. Okay. Otherwise you can use those two pieces of software I was talking about, either flex engine or grease weasel. Okay. And that will get you an image file. And then apparently with the seven zip program, you can open up that image file similar to how you open up a zip file and see what's inside. And the guide covers those things. So that's actually check out that guide right after you get off this broadcast. Excellent. I will I will use that to read the floppy. And then I'll transfer right over to the floppy music. That'll be a good workflow. All right. Awesome. Thanks so much, Jeff. Yep. Talk to you later. Have a good one. Next, we're going to go to John Park. Hey John. Hey John. How's it going? It's going well. First of all, I have a tell that I can't show, but I'm so excited because it snowed briefly here in LA today, which is so weird, but I can't show. I just melted like within two seconds to hit in the ground. Yeah. This was a little warm. But wherever that stuff comes from in the sky was very cold. So it made its way down as a sort of gross ice, chunklet things. That's what ours has turned to now. It's just gross and yeah. We've had some the hills out here about 3000 foot elevation and somewhere around 2,200 feet is there's been a snow line for a couple of days. So that's that's fun and weird. It's also terrible, terrible weather for I'm trying to do some spray painting. I'm actually on my midi version of the meowsic cat. And so I'm doing a black spray paint mostly. Wow. A guy. So today it has been variously gray and rainy, snowing and then sunny and very windy. So just perfectly terrible weather for trying to do any kind of spray painting. I was setting up walkers outside and painting and then bringing it in the shop to try to let it. I've tried to spray paint in similar weather here and it's just no good. Usually Southern California is like a great place for spray paint. Their weather is so dry and hot, but not today. So on to the thing I can show, which is if you pop the screen up there, what I've got is I've been working on doing some boards using these chalk key switches. So these are low profile key switches from Kale, the brand Kale. And here is an example of a sort of typical more common Cherry MX size switch next to the Kale. Right. It's got a nice low profile and we sell them, but we don't have any breakout boards for them and they have weird pin spacing and stabilizers and things. So you're not really shoved into any breadboard or perma-prote or anything like that. You kind of need a breakout. Yeah. So I took on a challenge that Lamore gave me, which was could you make a footprint for this in fritzing. So fritzing, I've done some PCB work in there and I've made some parts. This was definitely the biggest challenge for part making because I decided to go for the Reverse Mount Neopixel integrated into the same part as the footprint of the Kale switch. Okay. Yeah. This sort of worked and sort of didn't. Fritzing did not like that I was trying to make a SMD part and a through-hole part that was all one part. So yeah, why gets really weird? Like I kind of get so angry. I was able to get boards made. They work except for due to an error, just a straight-up error on my part. The holes got plated. So you can see there, it's plating there, which normally wouldn't matter except that can and did in one case, some of these solder joints. So I ended up with a problem. So I've revised that, but this is one of the ones that I had made that still has that problem, has the plating in there. And so the idea here is to make a little hex switch keypad, sort of like a hex shape, seven of these key switches. And let me adjust my exposure there so you can see a little better. I've got the reveal here. So here's one with really beautiful hexagonal keys. So those fit on top of this kind of weird stem that the Kale chocks have this little tooth thing. And so I've got my reverse Mount Neopixels under there glowing through. These are some commercially made keycaps that I got. They're a little hard to find at the moment, but Noe has started to work on a 3D printed variant of it so that we can do a project and people can get their hands on those. You could use this for anything. What I've got happening right now, if I turn up the exposure again and just flip this over, is I have a cutie pie mounted underneath. And right now it's up on some big risers there, so it's goofy, but eventually that'll be mounted pretty flush to there. So I'm just using kind of one pin per switch and using our keypad library. And then I have some code that I adapted from another project I've done, which was the modal MIDI keyboard. The idea there was a keyboard that plays notes that all sound good together, so you don't really have to know what you're doing. It's just more about selecting the intervals that you like. So I adjusted that to have a nice interval for these seven keys and each of them plays their own chords. So I have choices of like Lydian and Mixolydian and Minor and Major. So you can pick the mode you want, but then they each have their own sort of interesting intervals and even an octave thrown in there. So let me know if you can hear this well enough or I can turn it up. I can hear it, yep. Sounds good. Okay, so here's how I have them laid out. And there are a lot of keyboard projects out there that are using this idea of isomorphic layouts where it's not a keyboard sort of linear layout, but instead there are relationships among keys that sound good next to their neighbors and so forth. I didn't research any of that and I just kind of invented something sort of I think like it from scratch just because that was fun, but here's what it is with them played in order. So I've got an octave there, it's just not 12 semitones, but you can hear each of them have their own little chord. So the idea here is you can kind of come up with these patterns, these 2D patterns in your mind that work well visually for you and spatially for you and play things that I think kind of sound neat together. Yeah, it sounds really cool. So there's a little taste of the weird hex keypad and where I'm at with it. That's awesome. I can't wait to see how this all comes together. Yes, thanks so much. Modes and the hexes, great. Yeah, come on by tomorrow to the workshop. I'll dig into that a bit and sort of what the code is behind that and my thinking behind it. And maybe I'll even research the way this is properly done. So I'll have some, I'll be armed with some knowledge by tomorrow. Music theory and electronics, I love it. That's it. Yeah. All right. Have a good night. Thank you. Last but not least, we are going to hear from community member DJ Devon. DJ Devon, can you play us out? Sure. I'm glad. Okay. There's only one, only one. I know. It's a quiet night. It's a quiet night, but that's okay. Well, not with my mail boom box. Oh, wow. That's not quiet at all. Actually, this is only a 10% volume. Fair. And I barely have it on. So I really like the little mini mailbox from, I think Brent rebelled at this on printables. Yeah. And I did a make of that, but I wanted a big one. And this took 150 hours to print. Wow. All three pieces. Yeah. And I can't get the flag to stay on. Oh, no. Yeah. Well, I have to figure that out. I cannibalized the servo motor from the little guy and made the walls. I mean, you can see how thick these walls are. I didn't quite figure that into the dimensions when I did the servo. So the servo doesn't stick out far enough, but that's a problem for another day. Yeah. So in here, it's just, oh, God, where do I start? I have a pink Feather RP2040 with a Laura RFM95 Featherwing. So this mailbox is going to be a notification system for the real mailbox outside. I see. So it's going to do a lot of stuff as well as run octoprint, which I have plans in the future for using your guide for the octoprint stuff and then having a little LCD like right there as well as the notification for the print status and just like a whole notification bonanza kind of thing. It's the most functional mailbox I think I've ever seen. Well, it's not all working yet, so it's not that functional. Well, you know, eventually it will be the most functional. There are plans, yes. Oh, today I also got it working with Bluetooth. So it's a Bluetooth mailbox doctor print thingy. There's a small I2S amplifier in here. I don't know the name of it, the Max 9387 something or other. It's a mono amp, and you're not supposed to use this as a preamp to drive the 20 watt out of fruit amp. Now, the 20 watt is not I2S. It's just regular analog. It has I2C digital controls that you can kind of turn off and use a potentiometer and make it analog. So you have a digital I2C or an analog kind of thing and I have it set as I2C and that is not playing nicely with the little amplifier, which is why you're not supposed to use the little guy as a preamp because they both use I2C and they conflict with each other and tons of noise, tons of hum. If I turn this all the way up, it does not sound good. But I am working on that and I will figure that out and I think that's about all I have to show for now. This is definitely a work in progress. This is going to take a while. Yeah. Well, we like seeing works in progress because then, you know, it's all that more satisfying to see it working at the end. And are you documenting the build or the code you're doing anywhere? In my mind. In your mind. Fair. I guess not. No. No. Ultimately, this is going to be for a family member who lives out in the country. So like I can go to my mailbox and back, no problem, but they live really far away, which is why I want the Laura stuff. Plus, I can also use this to prototype the lid opening and closing. I'm going to use a an ultrasonic sent distance sensor. Okay. And another idea for the the distance is, yes, it will notify you of activity when it's open. But with the ultrasonic, I'm hoping that it can get distance just right so that if there's actually mail inside, it will tell you if there's actual mail inside. Ooh, that would be very cool. Yeah. So projects within projects within projects. Excellent. All right. Well, I like what you've done so far and looking forward to seeing how it goes along as you keep working on it. Thank you very much. And all you other community members out there, get in show and tell. I'm not the only one out here. All right. Have a great night. Have a good one. All right. That's good to do it for tonight's show and tell, but stick around in about five minutes right here is going to be Ask an Engineer with Lamor and PT. So until next time, hope everyone has a good night. Bye.