 This month on Maker Update, we're taking a look back at the five best projects from the Adafruit team in 2020 and the five best pieces of hardware. Hello and welcome back to the Adafruit edition of Maker Update for December 2020. I'm Tyler Weingarner and we're gonna do something a little bit different this month. It's the end of the year and what a year it was. So we're gonna look back at the five best projects throughout the year and the five best pieces of hardware that came out of the Adafruit factory. But first, some news. If you're like me, you still have a bunch of holiday shopping to get done. And if you're gifting for another maker in your life, Adafruit has just published a list of critical dates to make sure you get your gifts in time. For folks in North America, your absolute drop deadline is December 18th with next-day shipping to make sure you get your delivery by December 23rd. For international shipping, place those orders by December 9th and opt for UPS Worldwide Express or DHL Express Worldwide. If you still don't know what to buy for that geeky or hardware curious friend of yours, Adafruit has put together a collection of helpful gift guides. From Stem of Connectors to Circuit Python to Machine Learning, there's a little something for just about everyone here. So dive in and take a look. Over the course of this year, we saw a ton of wonderful projects and it's a great time to give them a little extra spotlight. So in no particular order, here are my favorite Adafruit projects from 2020. Back in July, Adafruit contributor R. Dagger 68 came up with this system to help prevent the restroom keys from wandering off in their shared office environment. A feather NRF 52840 Express tracks the distance from a trio of BLE beacons placed strategically around the office floor plan. If it gets too far away, the light on it changes color and a voice gently urges you to return the key. The electronics are housed in an oversized 3D printed key fob with a lipo battery, an amplifier module, a speaker and even a wireless charging module. What I love about this project is how it's a testament to what we can build with a bunch of off-the-shelf parts. Everything about this looks like a polished professional product, but it's totally custom. When you take the time to design something in a compact and clever way, you can get some really outstanding results. Back at the start of the year, the Ruiz brothers teamed up with Liz Clark to develop this Circuit Python-powered motorized camera slider for camera motion control and time lapses. The project makes heavy use of the feather platform, using the M4 Express for the brains, a feather motor wing to drive the stepper motor, while the color TFT display with joystick provides the perfect platform for a user interface to control the slider timing. Once again, the design really takes the center stage here. The slider is made of a combination of 3D printer hardware and 3D printed parts, but it all comes together in a compact, elegant design that looks like a delight to use. DIY MIDI instruments were a huge theme for Adafruit projects in 2020, and there's plenty of engineering and creativity to appreciate here. Like this MX MIDI guitar, which is a totally custom music instrument inspired by the classic guitar hero controller, but this one is designed by the Ruiz brothers and programmed by Liz Clark. This guitar offers a ton of potential for musical performance in a unique way. The 12 cherry MX switches along the neck of the guitar control note playback for individual notes, or you can hold several of them down and hit the strum bar to play chords. There's a whammy bar for pitch modulation and a few knobs and switches for mode selection and volume control, like you would find on a traditional guitar. What blows me away about this build is how they could have just harvested the controls from a guitar hero controller. There's plenty enough of them around, but instead they design their own 3D printable versions of them. Both the strum bar and the whammy bar are sporting their own custom designs, which is great. You don't need to go shopping on eBay for spares if you break it by rocking a little too hard. John Park made a totally unique and custom MIDI instrument by retrofitting the Nintendo Power Glove, their response to hand shapes to create notes and sounds. The tricky thing about building a project using hardware that's over 30 years old is figuring out which components are still viable to use and which ones need to be scrapped. In this case, John was able to use the original flex sensors in each of the fingers to use as MIDI inputs, but scrapped the PCB in the palm unit in favor of a mini perma-paroto board. The original wire loom helps pass the signals back to the feather sense tucked into the wrist unit. The wrist PCB and button pad is retained, but it is not used in this version of the instrument. When all was said and done, John was left with a MIDI instrument where each finger controls a different aspect of note playback, while the accelerometer in the feather sense allows further control by changing the rotation of the instrument on each axis. The glove connects wirelessly via Bluetooth to any MIDI software so it can be a fully functioning instrument in your electronic music. Finally, Liz Clark built this insanely complex BLE MIDI robot xylophone. A gang of 35 volt push-pull solenoids knock into individual bells of this 2.5 octave educational bell kit from Ludwig. Like the camera slider, there's nothing magical about the construction. It's all 20-20 extrusions and 3D printed brackets to mount the solenoids and the electronics. What is impressive is how the tiny, itsy-bitsy NRF 52840 express is able to control all the solenoids with just two data pins. It uses a pair of I2C multiplexers that let you control up to 16 additional data pins per module. This is a great one to know about when you want to control a lot of devices with just a handful of GPIO pins. While 20-20 was an awesome year for projects, Adafruit also produced a number of wonderful dev boards over the course of the year. Some of these are going to sound familiar, they've powered a number of the projects we've already talked about. If you need a dev board for your project with pretty much every sensor available, then check out the Adafruit Feather NRF 52840 Sense. An ARM Cortex M4 chip is packaged on a feather compatible form factor with a Bluetooth low-energy module, a non-DOF IMU, a proximity light and gesture sensor, microphone, humidity, temperature, and barometric pressure sensor modules. It's sort of a kitchen sink approach to board design, but if you're building a weather station or an interactive display or anything else, there's a ton of options here to supercharge your creativity. Plus, it's completely compatible with CircuitPython, so it's easy to code for. Speaking of CircuitPython, if you're ready to go a little bit more minimal with your next project, check out the QT Pi. The QT Pi packs an incredible punch on a board that's about the size of your fingertip. On board, there's 11 dedicated GPIO pins, a single true analog pin, 6 pins capable of capacitive touch, and a Stemma QT connector for adding additional sensors and components via I2C. There's solder connections on the back to add an SPI chip for some additional storage, and the Cortex M0 chip means it's compatible with both CircuitPython and Arduino. I guess I should just stop saying that each of these boards support CircuitPython and say this, they all support CircuitPython. Next up is the Matrix Portal. These large RTB LED matrices really grew in popularity over the year with one significant setback. They were a pain to program for. So Adafruit developed the Matrix Portal, a Cortex M4 powered Wi-Fi enabled death board with a solderless 2x10 connector to plug directly into the Hub75 interface of these matrices to control them. It's perfect for creating big, beautiful displays, whether you want them to interact with the onboard accelerometer or display information from the internet in real time. Similar in function is the Adafruit MagTag, a smaller, web-connected e-ink display that's easy to attach to metal surfaces by attaching four magnetic standoffs. There's a three-axis accelerometer on board, perfect for making a needlessly high-tech dirty clean sign for your dishwasher. But there's also four edge-lit nanopixels, so you can create a lighted display since e-ink displays aren't self-illuminating. Since e-ink draws so little power, it's possible for this device to run for several weeks on a single charge. This one is still fairly new. I'm really excited to see what kind of projects get built with this. And finally, we have the Itsy-Bitsy NRF 52840 Express. Originally billed as being smaller than a feather, but bigger than a shrink-it, the Itsy-Bitsy is a powerhouse of a controller. Adding the NRF 52840 BLA module makes this a delightful death board for making small, wirelessly controllable projects. The other secret weapon to this board is a single output pin for sending 5V GPIO, perfect for neopixel projects without needing to use a logic-level shifter. The only thing that's missing is battery charging, but you can easily add the LiPoly backpack if you need this. Alright, and that is going to do it for this month's show and also the Adafruit edition of this series. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been such a pleasure bringing you the best of Adafruit projects, tips, and tools to you every single month. If you'd like to keep up with this show, sign up for the Maker Update newsletter so you know where to find us in the future. As always, huge thanks to Lamor and Phil and everyone at Adafruit for giving this show a home. Be good to each other, take care, and I'll see you soon. Bye-bye.