 Welcome to the show. It's me, JP, and it's time for another episode of JP's Product Pick of the Week. Thank you, everyone, so much for stopping by, both in our Discord. If you're looking for that, it's adafru.it slash discord. Head to the live broadcast chat channel. That's it right there. And I'm also able to check out our YouTube chat, but if you're on Twitch or Facebook or one of those other places, I'm not looking at the chat there, so head on over to our Discord and participate. So, before I go any further, if you want to head to the product page for this week's Product Pick, then check out that QR code or that URL right there. That'll take you to the product page. And this show is broadcast from right within that page. That's where I am. I actually, physically am there in that page, a little me. And you can watch that embed. You can buy the Product Pick for a deep discount, as it says right there. And you don't need a coupon code or anything like that. The price is half off. We have just put a bunch of them in stock. So, I saw there were some questions in our Discord before the show. It said there were only eight in stock. We took, I think a hundred of them and stashed them off to the side for the show. So, those hundred are in stock now. So, throw those in your cart. Maximum four per customer. We want to make sure that people get a chance to get these, but they're half off. So, what am I even talking about? I keep talking about this product well. How about I let Lady Aida tell us about this week's Product Pick. Take it away, Lady Aida. It's the Metro Mini V2 with Stem IQT. So, much like the Feather ESP32 V2, the original board, the Metro Mini came with an SCP-2104, which was one thing. And then that kind of got impossible to get. So, we got a bunch of CP-2102s, which required a slight change to the circuit board layout. You have to have two resistors. And one of those things is like once you change a PCB at all, like adding anything or changing any package, you basically might as well redesign the whole thing because you have to get a new stencil. You have to re-program the pick-and-place. So, you might as well just kind of like make any change. Also, things have changed. There's USB-C. There's a stem. So, that's why I was like, you know what? If I'm here, you're like, once you're like, oh, I'm going to throw out one thing from the fridge, suddenly you're cleaning out the freezer. So, the whole thing got redone. So, we added a Stem IQT port so you can plug and play with all of our Stem IQT sensors. We upgraded it from a micro USB to a USB Type-C. So, you have a reversible cable. And also, I like these nice big plugs and all that good stuff. It's the same physical size, same pin-out, same connections, same mounting holes. But really, the big change is changing to USB-C. The LEDs got smaller to make room and then adding that Stem IQT port at the end. But I think, you know, these are big enough changes and I think there's some people who may, you know, they're like, I designed a case for the micro USB port so they wanted to stick with the old version. But I thought, on the overhead, I would show both really fast. So, I've got, this is the new one and then this is the original. So, you see it's the same size. You can see it's like some parts moved around just a little bit to make some space. You know, I basically shoved everything over to the left a teeny bit to make room for this Stem IQT port. But also, whenever I write drivers, I'm always testing it with the metromony. So, this is, I kind of designed this for myself. And then, on the bottom, just like the V1, in fact, this V1 is changed. There's a little jumper that lets you change it from 5V IO to 3V IO. And this is actually important to note, because there's a little warning here. The, the, at Mega328 here is running at 5V normally. And so, this port is 5V power and 5V logic, which will work great with all of our Stem IQT boards because they all have regulators on them. There's a 3V regulator and level shifters. And this one, this one doesn't because this is a 3 or 5V device. But all of our Stem IQT boards are 5V or 3V friendly because we expect that you'll plug them into 3V devices like a QT Pi or, you know, Raspberry Pi or you might plug them into an Arduino Uno or at Mega328 running at 5V. If you want to use this with other boards that have a JSDSH connector, but are like quick compatible, that's a 3V power and logic, you'll want to change this from 5V, cut the jumper and solder it to make it 3V compatible. That way you get 3V power and 3V logic. But by default, it's going to be 5V. So just, that's the only thing you have to watch out for, but it's not a big deal if you want to connect to 3V logic stuff. Just cut and solder the jumper like I did here. It takes you one second and then now you're running at 3V power and logic. Everything is basically the same except just a lower voltage. Technically, it's overclocking a little bit, but really, don't tell anybody, it works fine. Okay, and that's two products. Yes, there it is right there. I'm going to grab mine. You can see I have one waiting brand new in the pack. I actually opened that up, but let me jump back to this camera for a second, get rid of the extra me. Let's get this out of the package and there is my product pick of the week this week. It is the Metro Mini 328 V2. This is the updated Metro Mini that still has all of the good Arduino Uno style compatibility that we love on an 8-bit 328P base microcontroller. But this adds small, small size, so it's breadboard friendly. USB-C, that's an addition, new for version two. And Stem-A-Q-T. These are the really big changes with this and it's really exciting. So let's talk about this. First of all, comparison. That's an Arduino Uno and that is the Metro Mini V2. So you can see it almost fits in the old DIN style version of the chip there. It's pretty tiny. Love the Arduino Uno. However, one of the things about it is it's not too breadboard friendly, especially because it has the sockets on the top and you have to kind of wire it to a breadboard. So if you take a look at this type of arrangement here, this is great for learning. This is great for trying out projects and prototyping things. So you can see right there, I have a Metro Mini V2 and I've soldered the pins that come in the package. So you get a couple of strips of these header pins. I've soldered those onto there. And now I'm wiring it up for sort of a simple Arduino blink style exercise. So if I plug that in with USB-C and no fiddling around with which side is which. You can see here I have a little blinky sketch that's blinking. The onboard LED, the little red one there, that's pin 13. And then on pins 12 and 11 with a resistor to ground, I have a couple of these nice spherical LEDs running here. And this is good old Arduino, right? So this is just an extension of the basic blink sketch that you get in Arduino. Just so you know, you're not going to be running Circuit Python on this. This is a pretty small 8-bit microcontroller. It is not Circuit Python time with this. This is an Arduino type of board for you here. Now one of the exciting updates with this version is the addition of the StemAQT cable for I squared C, which means you can plug in I squared C devices without having to do any soldering, without having to plug it into a breadboard or wire it in any way. So I'll show you an example here where I have a little bit of a fancier setup going on. You can see I have a Metro Mini and this is right out of the package, right? No pins are soldered onto it. And I've plugged in one little StemAQT cable that is running to a rotary encoder to see saw break out. And then the chain continues, I squared C moves along to this little display. And this works really well with these little OLED displays. We have a few different sizes of these, but these are these really neat StemAQT I squared C displays. And they respond pretty well. They work fairly well in Arduino on the 328P. So give this a second to boot up here. And I have a simple demo going on where I'm just reading this encoder, little rotary encoder over, reset the board here, over the I squared C. And then I'm reporting both the number on the screen there. And I'm also moving it. I'll go kind of slow just so the screen tear doesn't happen with the video. The video is not responding as quickly as it is in real life. But in real life, this is moving really nice and smooth. So simple demo here. But the nice thing is you can get right to coding without any soldering. So this is excellent for beginners, software people who are transitioning into hardware, students, and so on. If you're just impatient, you don't want to solder anything. You just want to grab it out of the bag, order one of these, plug it in. And then any of the sensors that we have, pretty much all of them are available with Arduino libraries. So you can go to town on coding and not worry so much about the hardware side of things. Now, if you are into the hardware side of things, great. This is an excellent board for driving NeoPixels because it's 5 volt. So it has 5 volt logic. And that means there's no level shifting or anything going on. It allows the NeoPixels to operate the way that they were meant to in the first place. But if you do have projects that require a 3 volt logic, you can cut a trace and then solder that little jumper there that's for 3 volt. And then you can use 3 volt logic instead of 5 volt. But all of the boards, like Lady Aida said, pretty much all the boards that we have, these sensor boards, STEMIQT boards there, they have a regulator, so they will work with the 5 volt out over STEMIQT. Let's see, what else is going on? Someone in the chat over on YouTube said, Len Popps says, I bet this code could run similar to what was on the Apollo moon lander. I think you're probably right. Some of the stats on this. It's an AVR 18 Mega 328P. And P, I believe, is the low power one. I've always wondered, I checked that out today. What is the P on the end? It's the same as the one without the P, but it's the lower power module. This has got the 20 GPIO pins, which is the same as the Uno. So if you look at these, you're going to see the same pins on here. You get six analog ins. Six of the pins can be used as PWM. There's hardware SPI and I squared C. There's UART. We also have, by the way, built onto the board. And you can see it here probably when I restart some blinking and flashing going on. So there's the green LED, and that is the power LED. There's a red LED, which is the blink LED. It's just LED wired up with a resistor to pin 13, so you can blink it if you want. That's what the red one is there. And then there's a transmit and receive LED. So if I send code to it, I'll see the sort of traffic going back and forth with transmit and receive. And those are the pins 0 and 1 there along that strip. So like I said, you can follow nearly any Arduino tutorial, except for shields, right? The big shields that go on Arduino Uno are not going to work with this without some adapter. But they could work with an adapter, because it is pretty much pin for pin compatible. Let's see, what else? One thing I wanted to mention, actually, as I was looking around for, since there are just so many projects and tutorials out there that were created for this chip and for the Arduino Uno, you have a lot to pick from. And having this nice small form factor and the convenience of the USB-C and the Stem of QT is a really fun way to revisit some of those projects. One that I was looking into, actually, is one of my favorite little synthesizer modules that I have for EuroRack is this one for mutable instruments called grids. And it generates drum patterns, interesting, essentially, bass, kick, and snare triggers to trigger other stuff. Usually, it works with EuroRack, but you could use the code to send MIDI instead. And this module uses a 328. So there are actually, I know there's at least one project out there of someone who ported it. It was written in C originally, but there's someone who ported it to Arduino. So with some work, you could actually take a really sophisticated project like this and get it working on the delightful and humble little Metro Mini V2 there. Let's see what else. I'm going to just check our Discord there and our YouTube chat to see if there's any questions. Looks like we still have these in stock. So if you want, just throw them in your cart. Make sure you buy them before the end of the show, and you'll get the discount on them. There's no need for coupon or anything like that. The price will be the price, except that half price expires after the show, right after the show. So let me see. I'm going to check the Discord here and the YouTube, see if we have any other questions. 120-volt dual shock survivor. Nice username. I hope that's true. Not true. Why is it named Metro like the underground train things? Well, the original Metro, I don't have one here, is an Arduino Uno sized board. And this is the Metro Mini. Being in New York City, Adafruit, New York City decided to go with this subway train sort of styling. And you can see it here, if you look at the back there, you get the sort of Metro map there. And this was, I think, a collab between our own Phil B, Paint Your Dragon, and Bruce Yan. Let's see. What else? Other questions? By the way, one other thing I noticed. When you use Arduino with the Arduino IDE, it's always a bit of a question mark when you go to flash it, when you compile and upload, using that process in the Arduino IDE, how smooth it's going to go. Sometimes you have to get some timing of double-clicking reset. When I was working with this yesterday, it just worked beautifully. The IDE was able to find the board, reset it, and put it into bootloader mode, and flash it really quickly and easily. So that was nice. So I've not run into any issues with flashing on it. I, DJ Devon asks about, is it native USB? No, I think there's still a USB serial converter chip on here. I don't remember which one. I was using it on a Mac, and I did not need to install any drivers. I'm not sure about on a Windows machine or Linux, but if you check the Learn Guide for the original Metro Mini, I don't think we have one up for the V2, or I didn't find it. So someone let me know if I've just missed it. This will probably answer a lot of these things. The only big difference besides the two hardware ports is the USB serial that's built in just happens to be a different chip, but I believe it's still functionally the same. And let's see, let me go back to a camera view if it'll cooperate. There we go. Let's see, other questions. Dan J, thanks. He answers SILabs, CP 2102, and USB serial converters is the one that's on there. Let's see, I think that's about it. Yeah, it's an UNO and a tiny form factor. Great for all kinds of projects. Thank you everyone for coming by, and if you're interested in getting one or more of these at the half price, go ahead and do that before the show is over. I'm gonna add a little hanger to this one here. I pre-cut some wire, so I can put that on my board. And there it is, that's my project. No, there it is, that's my product pick of the week. It is the Metro Mini 328 B2 with USB-C and STEMQT. Thanks everyone for stopping by for A Different Industries, I'm John Park. This has been JP's product pick of the week. See you next time.