 Hello and welcome to the show I had the mute button on but now I don't it's me John Park And I am excited to be here and excited to see so many of you over in our chat both on YouTube and on Discord if you want to find out where this chat is happening go to a to fruit dot IT slash discord And you can join in on our discord server. This is in the live broadcast chat channel and Let's see Why don't we get going because this is a cool one. This is a really exciting one It's also a terrific price, so I want to let you know where to go To see what we think may be one of the only or the only electronics Shows or live streams from inside of an electronics product page and that's this one So if you head to that URL on the QR code or the URL there you will Find the product page. It'll be a sneak peek as to what the product is and you're gonna see that it's 50% off which is Bonkers so What I'll do next is I'll have Lady Aida tell us a little bit about this So we'll jump back in time to the product release So take it away lady Aida The macro pad it's fully assembled and there's no sort of required It's got it's a macro pad So it's got 12 mechanical keys that you can plug into those slots There are kale sockets or compatibles each one has a neopixel that goes underneath you can blow through the key on the back You've got the RP 2040 from Raspberry Pi. It's a great little chip which we can run Arduino or circuit Python on 8 megabytes of flash that go with it Each key is connected to an individual GPIO, so you don't have to do any matrix driving. It's just like one key per We also have a 128 by 64 monochrome OLED, which I think is just it's super fun If you want to display what you're typing or have some feedback or the fun overlay details There's also a rotary encoder that we solder in it's a D-10 T Rotary encoder, so it's like 20 detents per revolution and there's a push button push button in there's also on the back a little speaker so the speaker is Eight millimeters. It's not like a high resolution speaker But it's good for like little beeps or sound effects or tones or audio feedback So you want to know when you type something it'll maybe say what you typed or give you a sound effect So you've got the basics right and so you got that you could also get the 12 pack of keys that we talked about you can get the 12 pack of translucent key caps, but maybe you want like a little enclosure type thing So this is two PCBs and a little bit of hardware that you can add on to your macro pad to kind of make it more fully ready to go So there's a this is the what we call the enclosure or the mechanical part So there's two PCBs one of them is a mechanical key plate That's the part that has all the holes cut out so that it doesn't have any mounting holes But what it does is when you snap in the keys They kind of all hold each other in place and it keeps them really nice and solid it works very well It's a it's a stableizer plate for just 12 keys And then you've also got this really beautiful bottom plate that designed by Phil B with like a cool like NASA space theme like very Rubin quote Got some sort of like Voyager probe type thing going on there space planet. We're going with space theme for the macro pad You can reverse it either way whether you're like the black and white monochrome or you want like the golden probe Display type whichever you bolt onto the back. It also comes with four bumpers. So protect your Desk the four screws to attach the bottom plate and then rotary encoder knob, okay But let's say you're like I I choose complicated. I don't want to get separate keys and key switches and key caps and whatever I want the whole thing we get the starter kit So you get the whole thing? You can make your very own three by four OLED and rotary encoder macro pad. We looked at a lot of macro pads. They're all really awesome They're great. We just wanted something that was kind of like a little bit of everything You've got you know a smidgen of wood encoder. You've got a smattering of keys You've got you know an OLED display USB-C RP2040 chip controlled. So it's got kind of a little bit of everything But it's really easy to reprogram in Arduino or circuit Python Which is what we're supporting with this and I think it'll be neat. You can use this Circuit Python has great MIDI support. It's got keyboard support. It's got mouse support You can you know use our our new faster key scanning core in circuit Python 7 To make your own macro pad it and of course the OLED display you can use that as feedback to Display what the keys are I let you know what they do or if you have an overlay or Functionality or you just want to have bongo cat going Go to town. So this is the 128 by 64 monochrome OLED and you can see here I've got the rotary encoder you can detect when it's pressed as well And then over here each key has a north-facing Neopixel there's a lot of debate should we do north or south-facing Well north-facing one home on and then you know each key here can be detected individually You can press as many or as little as you want It's very fast the OLED is SPI. So it updates very quickly each keys Individually connected to a GPIO so you know you don't do any scanning you can just quickly check if it's held down And then a rotary encoder add-on and then all together. It's a very beautiful Silk screen on the back. Thanks to Phil B This is just decorative the back the bottom plate is a mechanical But we didn't want to go with acrylic we wanted something a little more sturdy So we did FR4 and this this shows you how it's put together So there's the bottom plate the standoff that's built into the macro pad and then this is the mechanical Support plate that keeps all the keys and nice and sturdy. So there you go. We've got our very own Keep Hey, you know what? I think I've got one over in my mystery cabinet I'm gonna go right over there and poke around a bit and grab one. I'll be right back Hey, that's right. There it is This is the product pick of the week. It is the macro pad RP 2040 starter kit you can see I've added a little hanger onto mine for Hanging over here later. That doesn't normally come with it little piece of paracord, but this is as Lady Aida said a all-in-one macro pad. It's got 12 keys, which you can replace Using different types of MX compatible key switches that may be linear tactile clicky It's up to you and you can put your different key caps on top of those as well. It comes with these nice DSA profile sort of symmetrical low profile caps You can hot swap those because it's not soldered on and I'll pull this apart in a minute so we can take a look at it Besides the keys. This is running the RP 2040 micro controller We have one GPIO pin per so we're not even doing a scan matrix for this. So it's very fast To grab the keys and you can press them all at once. It'll it'll read all keys We have the OLED screen 128 by 64 OLED screen for displaying stuff And the little rotary encoder with click push on it now besides that obvious stuff on the front We have Stem a Qt port there so you can add other things someone had asked about Expanding this well. In fact, if you take something like This is one of our one by four add-on Neo keys you could plug that right in there and add four more and do as many of those as you want I think up to 32 of them. So you could make it bigger But by itself it works great for all kinds of macro pad projects. Why don't I demo with this a little bit? So I'm going to jump to This down shooter right here. You can see here. I've got some of the extras laying about so this is the little Top plate that keeps the keys nice and secure when they go into their little Sockets there this adds a little mechanical stability to it and I'll go ahead and plug this in with usb-c, which is really nice that it's a usb-c type of connector And here's a little demo program that I created. So this is showing off the display and It's a really fast to update display. Let me get that glare off of there. So here. I'm just Changing these numbers with the encoder. It's not actually doing anything But this is something that's very simple to set up for something like your volume control in your HID consumer code And when I'm clicking it right now, I'm just doing a brightening of all of the neopixels You can see it's really fast and responsive and then I have these set up for Numbers like a phone number pad actually so zero one two three four five six seven eight nine I made a little legend up here on the screen. I also have star and pound And if I use these right now, you'll see I've got some of these keys hooked up to My software's camera controls so or layer controls inside of the broadcast software So this will switch things around as I press it Which is a really nice use for this which is as a as a camera switcher But that's working just by entering in numbers with this this version of the code now. I'll go ahead and Pop this out for a second and actually let's head over to the product page to talk about this so Here you can see if I refresh this I'm scared to look are we hey, we have 70 still in stock I think we've had about a hundred when we started so people have been buying these at this really reduced price of $24.98 It's a it's a really terrific bargain And if you click on the link down here at the bottom of the product page. Hey, look, there's there's our broadcast you will Head over to the primary guide for the macro pad so click over here You'll see we've got assembly instructions so this shows you how those switches go into the switch plate And then you can carefully insert those legs into the sockets and press it down So no soldering required to change out your switches and you can mix and match to you can have some clicky some linear some tactile if you want and The back plate can go on one of two ways it can be That very Ruben design or it can be this control panel design here so flip it around it's symmetrical And then you'll put on your key caps and be ready to go now We have a bunch of code examples of how to use this There is a macro pad Library for circuit Python that makes it really easy sort of a high level library It makes it easy to just ask for key presses send the neopixel color changes Update the display read the encoder knob all that stuff kind of under one Nice easy library or you can do it a little lower level if you want with sort of the sub libraries that that make that up one other example I wanted to show here is I had built a get this out of the way I had built this case a little 3d printed case and I have a guide that shows how to put this together and Gives you the files you need for those this is some example code that's in that main library or rather that main guide on Sending MIDI Messages always like to send MIDI messages and this also demonstrates you can use any orientation that you want of well up down left right 90 degree orientations of this and in one simple little bit of code you can tell it Oh, I'm flipped 180 degrees and then it'll change the ordering of the keys and the orientation of the screen which is really cool And this means I get a little knob here. I can control. Hey, you hear that sound? I can control some of the patch selection or bank selection inside of a piece of synthesizer software And then I can go and pick different Sets of sounds I can also press the little click button here to change what that knob is doing So instead of changing the patches now, it's gonna change the parameters of a filter And I also have a pitch bend that I added to that That's nice. So that's another example of some code that we have examples for and of course one of the most popular uses is as a macro pad which is having the keys assigned to things like launching applications opening up a fresh new email Selecting all copy paste those types of macros are straightforward to set up and we have example code that will show you how to Put that on to the board It'll allow you to then change config files for what you want your keys to do what you want them to say on the screen What colors you want things to be and we also have code for arduino So you can use this with arduino or circuit python, which is nice and straightforward Let's let's jump into some code. I'll pop this other example because it's really simple Which is the number pad I built here and How about Okay, our code view. So I'll jump over to my coding app where'd you go there you are and This one I actually created it's a simplified version of our macro type of program In that I have the code that's running on the board and I also have a little separate file Which is my key map file for this I have Created some preset colors that I can call and then I have a little map here of what each key does So I'm counting these as zero one two and so and so on and here I say what color the key is If it's a key or a key code or rather consumer Code for things like volume knob on your computer for HID USB and then what it actually does so these can be if you see here the example of Key number nine here it sends shift eight, which is the star so you can layer up your macros with this You can also have it type things out using the keyboard layout commands So this is referenced by my main code here, which imports a bunch of libraries Excuse me sets up the keypins and then reads those when I press Let me jump down to the main loop of the program this little key events. We do key event yet I'm not using the macro pad high-level library here. I'm using things like the What is this one called? Where are you? Keypad yeah keypad And then this is actually what's showing up in the label data That could also be something that you have over in your config file So we have a bunch of these types of examples up makes it really easy to To get started get up and running as well as just grab some of the other projects that we have So speaking of projects if I head back to Chrome browser here We'll just type in macro pad You'll see here. We've got the hotkeys Project the main macro pad guide here is an F2 a authentication Application even has little icons loaded onto the keycaps We have some little relegendable keycaps. You can print out icons Here is the macro pad remote over USB to control home assistant. It's a little game Phil B made drag-and-drop. There's an Ableton live macro pad launcher I built some Braille keycaps that the Reese Brothers did Isaac did a little Scheduler for watching the summer Olympics, which is really cool and one of the things that you'll see with a lot of those macro pad projects is the ability to use the encoder to switch between whole screens of Uses for the keys so the function of all your keys can change depending on which screen you're on or layer You're on in more of a keyboard terms keyboard speak Here's a Minecraft turbo pad I made that just does Essentially commands types commands for you inside of the console inside of Minecraft And then there's a lot of them that have also been put out there in the community So you can look around check out our forums check out our discord and see some other uses So that is the Product pick of the week. Let me know if you've got any questions over in the forums before we go The Let's see Let's see what our count looks like. I'm gonna refresh my page over here We have how many we have in stock here 57 in stock. All right. We sold quite a few maximum per per customer is 10 of them Makes a great gift. If you're giving holiday gifts, you want to have them sent to you Maybe customize them for a certain use for someone and then give them Zoom shortcuts and mute keys or that type of thing so they don't have to configure it and can get some use out of it Right away put a Simon says game on it. Those types of things are a lot of fun So makes makes for a great gift especially at this price. They're What do we say normally 50 bucks now it's 25 dollars 24 98 so get one get to get ten Why not? I think that's gonna do it. So thanks everyone for stopping by Let me Close this out here. So that is the product pick of the week It is the macro pads starter kit comes with the board enclosure keys key caps and knob as well as some extras like bumpers and screws to put it all together and put that on my Increasingly crowded board of cool stuff and that's gonna do it So thanks everyone for stopping by and I will see you next time. Bye. Bye