 me JP and it's time for another JP's product pick of the week. Thanks everyone for stopping by. I've got the Discord happening over to adefrew.it slash discord. Check out the live broadcast chat channel. It'll look something like that right there. And also I'm able to check out the YouTube chat. So hello BeataGraph and Evil Dave. Nice to see you. If you are somewhere else such as Twitch or Facebook or LinkedIn learning and you're wondering where the chat is, come on over to our Discord adefrew.it slash discord. So first thing I want to do is let you know that you can head right there and a number of associated other URLs that will be very clear very shortly for this week's product pick. And you're going to see that this week's product pick is a whopping 50% off. So head on over there. As you probably know, you don't need a coupon code or anything like that for the product pick of the week. Just put it in your cart during the show and the discount price is taken care of for you. So head right there and check it out. But before I go any further, let's have Lady Aida jump back just a brief moment in time to explain this week's product pick. Take it away, Lady Aida. We have updated the quad or sorry 14th segment quad alphanumeric displays to have stem and QT connectors on the back. So it's the same size and shape and pin out as before. But now you can plug and play it much easier. For now, you still have to solder the X4 putting up with that. So I'm thinking that happened during the Lady Aida movie. So I'm going to start that again. I don't know if this will work. I will try to start it partway through, but I don't think my software loves that. So give me one moment. I'll try to skip that ahead a bit. I'll see what happens. We have updated the quad or sorry 14th segment quad alphanumeric because we really like to show these things just to show you really as easy. We can run a company run a show and somehow manage to also do live demo in more displays if you like. For this one, I just soldered in Swiss pins so we could like quickly change out the cut like this, you know, this stem and QT board and I just have a connector going to it. So it's easy to plug and play and then you can of course chain more displays if you like. For this one, I just soldered in Swiss pins so we could like quickly change out the colors because I want to do this demo. So we've got bright green and then you can also get, let's see, I'll just swap out one. One. You can get red and get the right way around live demo. There you go. You lit it up though. Oh, you did. What? It did. I saw it. I know, but you know, I didn't insert these flat. I was all like, we do live demos. I know, I know, but the problem with live demos is sometimes I... I'll edit it in post. Look how perfect it is. Everything's fine. Everything's fine. Everything's okay. That thing's going on. Everything's safe. There you go. Okay, I fit it in. Hi, everything's fine. Nothing happened. So what's nice about the 14 segments, of course, you can see if you're doing letters, you can have like lower case and upper case letters. And so our libraries have, for CircuitPython Arduino, have a font that you can use that will display it nicely. Otherwise, it's plug and play. The one update that I did do is there is now, instead of two power pins, there's a VIO and a V high pin. So the VIO pin is the same as the systemic UT pin, which means like in this case, it's running off of three volts, which is, which is plenty, plenty bright. But I'm going to do a dangerous live demo because I didn't try this ahead of time. Yeah, okay. If you're... I like it. You learn nothing. I learn nothing. But it, so it's running at three volt power and three volt logic, but then I can connect this to USB power. Whoa. And then it gets even brighter. So now I'm powering just the LEDs. Whoa. I can power just the LEDs, oh my god. Blowing up the camera. It's so bright. Okay. Yeah. So at five volts power and then three volt, five volt, three volt, five, we can see it's a little bit different. Yeah. It's a little bit brighter. So handy. And then I touched on things. But it's handy if you are, if you, because one of the issues people had is, oh, they wanted to use three volt logic for the driver chip, but they wanted the LEDs to be driven from five volts to get like a brighter look, especially for the green and blue and white, which have a forward voltage of about 3.4 volts. So updated. It's one of our Stem Acutification projects. We're trying to go through every product and QTFI. And so you can see we're going back in time. This is one of our older products, but now it's plug and play. Yep. Yes, indeed it is. So thanks for putting up with that. Sorry about both the stream health, which plummeted but seems to be decent at the moment. Knockwood. And also the Echo. Got rid of that. So let's dive into it. I'm actually going to just pop up this little window here so you can see it from the overhead that right there is my product pick of the week. It is the Quad Alpha Numeric 14 Segment LED Backpack. This is a update of an existing backpack that we had. It runs over I squared C. So you know what we did? We did what we always do. We added a Stem Acutee slash quick port. There's actually two of them back there so that you can daisy chain this along with other devices that run on the I squared C bus. So long as they have a unique I squared C address and you can chain together a bunch of these. So let's do some little demos, shall we? I've got, I'm going to jump back to this view of the world here and I will. Hey, that's so so many of me. There we go. That's a little better. What I'll do is plug this in to a KB2040. It happens to have a Stem Acutee port on it. So it's nice and easy. And you can see here I'm just going to plug my little Stem Acutee cable in on one side. You could go to either side of the board there. You'll notice the nice thing here is that the connectors are vertical mounted, not horizontal mounted. So that makes it a little easier to put a couple of these together side by side flush because the cable doesn't come out sideways. So I've got that plugged into the KB2040. I'll go ahead and give power to the board. And you'll see a nice little demo here of some red LEDs. I'm lighting up every segment on it there for a moment, as you can see. Then I'm spelling out some things. Here's quad alpha bunch of random characters there. You can light up individual segments if you want. Yee-haw, my friend, is what that said right there. So you can see we get uppercase and lowercase. And then it says JPOW, product pick of the week, except I had to fit it in four characters there. So this is a little bright at the moment. One thing you can do with these, I'll show you an example in a moment, is put a bit of a tinted film or glass or plastic over it, which cuts the con or kind of increases the contrast, gets rid of the the unlit characters. You won't see those. You'll only see the lit ones. In fact, let me grab just a piece of, I've got some film here I've used for that purpose before. Where did I put that? I think it's right here. It's a little dusty. I'll wipe some of that dust off of that. This is just a lighting gel, but you can see this works wonders for your legibility there. So let's take a look at what's going on in code to do this very simple demo. And the code is very simple. So the key thing here is that we're importing this HT16K33 library. That takes care of pretty much everything for you. So I'm setting this up on the I squared C bus with the default address. We can also, as you'll see here, have multiple of these chained together by using multiple I squared C addresses. But right now I've just got a single instance of this being created and I'm naming it display. I've set the brightness here to 0.3. And then when this starts up, the first thing it happens, I'll just resave this so you can see, is that we fill 0, that blanks the screen, then we fill 1 and that lights up every character. Then I'm doing things like printing. Your quad and alpha, that's just a print statement, couldn't be easier. You can also do individual characters. So if you have a reason to, you can set, whoa, we're getting beeps. Let's see, does that mean the stream has gone funny? No, I don't know where those beeps are coming from. One second, I'm going to turn off my alerts. There we go, that might help. So here you can see, yeah, it's possible to light up individual characters, print out things in upper and lower case. You can use punctuation as well. I'll demonstrate that. And here you can set those individual segments. So unlike the typical seven segment display, which is essentially the number eight broken up into seven segments, this one has all of those diagonals and the horizontal is broken into two pieces, which is how we're able to do so many legible characters like the W there. That's really just a pain in the neck to do a W on a regular seven segment display. Kind of have to take up two characters to do it, or do some weird compromised version of it. We also have some neat tricks here such as marquee. So marquee just looks for a phrase. And then you can set the speed that it's going to go and whether it's going to loop or not. So I've set loop to false here. You can also do things like move individual characters around. And I'll show you some slightly more sophisticated demo or at least a bigger demo in a second. But before I do that, let's go and check out some web pages. So first of all, we have, bring this up, the main, get me out of there, main page. So unlike most product picks of the week, this one doesn't just have one URL, even though I only showed one, it's all five of these. So this comes in red, blue, white, yellow and green. So you can get any of those with this same discounted deal. The prices do vary, I believe, depending on the color or maybe that's, maybe I'm wrong. Okay, it looks like they're the same price. No, they do vary. Okay, some of these are a little cheaper than others. I'm not sure why, but yeah, some LED colors are cheaper. Red is the cheapest you can get. So if you want to build a project with lots of these, you can get up to 10 of these with the discounted price right now. Throw them in your cart and off you go. And oh, let's see, the red go out of stock. I bet these are going out of stock quick at these prices or any left. Oh my goodness, it looks like these are selling right through. Well, I hope you grabbed them, but let me keep selling. I'll also mention there are variations of this available in the store. They won't have the discounted price, but you can get, I believe some of these now come as a pre-soldered one. And you can also get the ones that don't use the Stema QT cable but are still over I squared C, which is what those pins are up on the top. If you're wondering how to use this, head on over to Learn and just look up this LED Backpacks guide. This actually covers a whole array of LED Backpacks, including dot matrix style ones, 8x8, 16x8. But we have these alpha numerics here. And so this will tell you what to do, what to load, how to use it in both Arduino and in Circuit Python as well as Python on the desktop. It gives you wiring examples and usage. So if you head on over to, for example, the Circuit Python usage shows you how to set it up, set the brightness, blink rate. That's another one I didn't show in the demo there, but you can just tell a character to blink a certain increment speed. I think there's four preset speeds you can use. And on and on, printing hexadecimal. Here's the bit mask for setting individual segments. So you can see here we have all of those, including the dot, the little period there. In our library, you can just type a period and it'll light that up next to the letter that you're currently using. But that is an individual bit that you can set if you have a reason to. And that's the learn guide there. So go and check that out. And now I wanted to show an example of these chains together. So if you go back to my overhead here and do a little bit of a camera setup, let's put, how about, just this big one for now. And I'm just gonna do a bit of focus on this. Where'd you go? There we go. So what I have here, I'll remove these. These are just some LED shutter glass that I have that I put in front of here to act as a little tinting window to help with the contrast. So I have five of these displays, each color. I have them all plugged into each other on the back using the Stemma QT. And then I have that plugged into a little QT Pi here. It's QT Pi RP 2040. And I'll go ahead and plug that in. Each of these, I have set the jumpers on to give them unique addresses. And I'm going to set these little blockers in place here, these little filters in place so that we get higher contrast there. And so you can see here, it's going to run through all of the, in fact, let me restart this. So here I've got some nice upper and lower case alpha stuff. It says alpha numeric display. And now we're running through the uppercase letters. Once you have this set up, you can just throw long lines of text added or strings of numbers. It knows what to do. So there's nothing you have to do to manage it. It just acts as a single display, which is terrific. The library is excellent. Here's a bunch of punctuation. So you get a bunch of different punctuation marks you can use just off of the regular keyboard. And then I'm just going to loop through some numbers and letters here. Any stuttering you're seeing is just a video artifact. It's actually running really smoothly in real life. So taking a look at the code here, bring up my coding window, close that, and I'll open up this example. So same sort of thing. I've got the HT16K33 library imported. I'm setting up my iSquared C object or iSquared C bus. I'm setting my display object. This time, all I do that's different is tell it a number of addresses. So address equals, and then I fed it 71, 2, 3, 4, and 5. So those are just based on soldering the jumpers on the back. And then I have my display brightness setting going through some of the same stuff here. You can see when I do something like display print alphanumeric display, you'll see that that's all I had to do is just tell it, hey, print that long piece of text and slide that out there. It will take care of it for you. Just thinks of it as a 20 character wide display in this case. And then I'm going and just creating a marquee. You'll notice I don't even have to loop. We could do other code, and it'll just keep looping as we do things. So it's really nice. It takes care of all of the housekeeping for you. So let's see. Any questions? Let me know. I'll bring up the Discord here. I see Janisku threw a nice gift up of our favorite DeLorean, the time traveling DeLorean, with the multiple seven segment display. So you could do more sophisticated stuff, more legible stuff really with a alphanumeric. They're great. They can do the same stuff. As you'll see, a lot of these numbers other than the five and the zero, I think, are pretty much standard as you would see on a seven segment. So you can do numbers clean, but then you can do these fancier things. These do not have a colon. So it doesn't have the blinking dots between the two. That's just one of the differences here. But these do have the little decimal point dots. All right. Let's see. I think that about covers it. Let me know if you have any other questions in any of the chats. And I'll wrap this up. So let me jump back over here. And just a reminder, if you want to get the product pick of the week, it often pays off to get here early. I know we sold out of these pretty quickly, even though we had a bunch of them in stock and five different colors. So this is really popular. But get here early. That's all I can say. We don't do any kind of brain checks or anything like that with them. If you do want to know when you can get some more at the regular price, just fill in your email address on the page and say, let me know. There's a notify me section on the webpage. So I will prep this one for hanging on the pegboard there. Plug in both sides. That's my product pick of the week this week. It is the Quad Alpha Numeric 14 Segment LED Backpack Display with StemaQT. Thanks everyone for stopping by for Adafruit Industries on John Park. And this has been JP's product pick of the week. I'll see you next time. Bye-bye. Bit of bonus content. I just wanted to mention the little backpack here was made by our own Todd Botte using Stable Diffusion. So that backpack doesn't exist in the real world, but he fed it something like Quad Alpha Numeric backpack or LED backpack and we got that. So thanks Todd. Thanks Stable Diffusion.