 This month on Maker Update, a pocket-sized procedural MIDI sequencer, Empire State Maker Fair, a menagerie of matrices, solar-powered projects, and this little cutie pie. Hello and welcome back to the Eight of Furter Edition of Maker Update for October 2020. I'm Tyler Weingartner and maybe it's just me, but I feel like there's sort of a sense of change in the air. I know we're heading into autumn, we're starting to decorate for Halloween, and that US election, it's right around the corner. Whatever it is, I've got an awesome show full of great projects that I can't wait to share with you, so let's check out the project of the month. We've seen a lot of MIDI projects using Adafruit hardware over the past few months. Maybe blame the pandemic, but it's great to see people using creative hardware to build tools to make music. However, this MIDI melody maker by Liz Clark and the Ruiz brothers is something else. It's not just a set of inputs that are translated into MIDI triggers, nor is it a set of output events triggered by MIDI software. This is a simple but powerful MIDI sequencer that can interface directly with electronic music hardware and bypassing the DAW. An Adafruit M4 Express is doing the hard work here, but we need to take a moment to mention the Adafruit MIDI feather wing. Instead of using MIDI over USB, this allows you to send MIDI signals over a five pin DIN cable, so you can connect it directly to music hardware like keyboards for their note libraries. This slider controls the tempo of the sequence, while potentiometers control the key, no progression, note length and modulation. There's also a small OLED screen to give you feedback on the current playback settings. We also need to talk about the enclosure design. It's really simple, but elegant. The control surface, backplane and base are made from acrylic sheets, and there's some holographic vinyl embellishments that were cut out on a desktop Cricut machine. The side panels are milled from 12mm wood panels, with slots for the acrylic pieces to press fit together. It's a really simple design, but it looks gorgeous, and is easily adaptable to any project you need an enclosure for. Adafruit provides 3D CAD files for all of their hardware, making it easy to make physical designs based on their boards. You can find the bill of materials, code and design files for this project by following the links down in the description. Now for the news, LeMore Freed will be providing the keynote speech for the Empire State Maker Faire on October 16th and 17th. Empire State Maker Faire is an online event wrapping up all of the regional maker fairs across New York State, including Fredonia, Buffalo, Rochester, Twin Tears, Syracuse, New York City and Long Island. All the details on how to attend can be found down in the show notes, and you can catch LeMore's keynote on Saturday the 17th at 1pm Eastern. If you haven't been keeping up with Adafruit's YouTube account, then you're missing out on a whole new series, John Park's Product Pick of the Week. As the name implies, the show airs every Tuesday, where John gives a live demo for a particular product. It's a fairly short show at around 30 minutes. If you miss it, there's a one minute recap version that will live on the product page, but you'll definitely want to catch the show live. If you do, you'll be treated to some pretty steep discounts on the featured product. It's a fun new series, go check it out. Back to more projects, if you've stopped by the Adafruit Learning Center page, you'll find that nearly every project there is based on the 64x32 HUB 75 LED matrices. The reason for that is there's a new piece of hardware called the Matrix Portal that makes driving these panels ridiculously easy. Phil Burgess has brought his classic monster eyes together onto a single panel, and now it has a face? John Park built this wonderful display of spooky images as it counts down the days until Halloween. The Ruiz brothers made some 3D printed handles to use with the grains of sand demo, so you don't need to grab the panel itself. There's plenty more, so get inspired, get your own Matrix Portal, and start designing. Aaron St. Blaine published this guide for making a light up LED necklace powered by the Itzy Bitsy 32U4 Devboard, a Neopixel Joule, and the LiPoly Battery Backpack for on the go charging. There's a great demo here for casting the necklace Joule in resin and using mica powders to give it color and translucency. Check this out before your next costume party. We've seen a handful of different projects that allow you to easily message your housemates that you need some focus time, whether you're podcasting, taking a meeting, or you just need some personal time. This design from the Ruiz brothers easily mounts to your home office door and features replaceable sign plates to reflect your particular availability. The black LED acrylic diffuses the light nicely, and the internal LiPo battery means it can work without wires. Halloween may be right around the corner, but just beyond that is the US election. Colin Cunningham has made this wearable electronic pin that shows I vote using the OLED feather wing display. Tap the middle button and the message changes to I voted. And the bottom button to ask, did you? A tap of the top button returns the original message. Myself and everyone at Adafruit cannot express how important it is to get your vote out. If you're looking for other voting projects, check out Colin's vote keyboard or this pie portal election calendar by Elvaro Figueroa. From the Adafruit community, Kevin Walter has built this rock, paper, scissors game for the clue. This probably won't be too much fun if you only have one clue board, since it's meant to be played with friends. You'll mostly just be able to learn the rules of the game. But if you have two clue boards who can play head to head with a friend, and if you have multiple clues, there's an arena mode that's been tested with up to six players and could potentially support even more. Kevin provides a pretty deep dive into his game theory design. And while a lot of this is going over my head, it's a fascinating look into how complex this problem can be. Now for some tips and tools, a lot of Adafruit hardware is now supporting the STEM a cable interface for solderless I squared C components. These are wonderful for plug and play prototyping, but you tend to end up with a long string of components and no easy way to package them. The Ruiz brothers came up with a handful of 3D printable designs that let you press fit the boards onto Lego plates. The boards snap fit onto risers that allow space for components on the underside. And you might even be able to use some of the space for cable management. I know the days are starting to get shorter, but it's never a bad time to add solar energy to a project. Brian Siepert has a guide for the BQ24074 DC Solar LiPoly Breakout Board. Whether you want to add solar charging to a project or you just want 1.5 amp fast charging over USB-C, this board is what you need. Check out the full guide for all the details. If you got inspired by all the LED matrix projects we talked about earlier in the show, but you don't want to dive into a whole new hardware spec, check out this guide for using the FrameBuff library for video pixel matrices. This will allow you to program display elements similar to the Adafruit graphics library, while still only using the single GPIO pin to drive the display. It's pretty cool. For this month's Adafruit product spotlight, we have to talk about this adorable little dev board, the QDPI. Somehow Adafruit has managed to pack a SAMD21 microcontroller, a Stemma connector, a USB-C port, four dedicated GPIO pins, an I2C interface, and an SPI interface, all in a footprint smaller than a quarter. Like the name suggests, it'll of course support Circuit Python. What's even crazier is that they're selling it for just $6. At that price, these are likely to go fast, so keep an eye out for when these come back in stock. And that is going to do it for this month's show. I hope you've gotten some great inspiration for Halloween projects however you plan on celebrating it. Let us know what your plans are down in the comments below. And if you like this show, give it a thumbs up. As always, huge thanks to everyone at Adafruit for making this show possible and to you for watching it. Take care and we'll see you in November.