So it's 6 31 and I do want to start promptly. So I'm going to call this meeting to order and the focus of this meeting is to do a policy training workshop using some of the scenarios that we have from the Carver Institute that gives us sort of a possible, something possible scenario that might happen and then how we would use our policies to interpret and adjust our actions due to the policy that were present due to the scenario and the policies that we already have written. I chose this one, which I emailed to you a couple of days ago, because it's something that has happened before and has happened recently as well, is when board members want more information from the board about something that has happened in the most recent instance, which is only a week or two ago. I was approached by a community member who wanted me to answer some questions for them, which I then put to Lane, a few other board members did as well they were approached by various community members about athletic policies, etc. So Lane was about the water, the lead in the water at Brookfield School. So we approached Lane and he emailed us that he thought that this was taking a lot of time and not necessarily, you know, board work. So this scenario just seems perfect for us to address like how should we interpret our policies in this instance. So we're going to go through this, this scenario, using your policies either you've got them in a paper copy, or there's one available on our website, you go to OSSD board under governance governance and function, and then drop those down you'll see our copy of our policies there. So what I just not assume people have already read through this. So, using I'll give 10 minutes, so we'll get back at 643, and we'll discuss where do we find the evidence in our ends or executive limitations or board management delegation, etc. And then we'll talk about how we should best address this situation. All right. All right, so 10 minutes. Are we ready to start discussing this. Okay. All right, so everyone's read the scenario. I'll read it for a board member keeps asking the CEO for detailed reports regarding operations. The information required does not pertain to any ends or executive limitations policies the CEO has refused to supply the reports saying that it would take too many staff hours to produce them. What should the board member do. All right, so what have we already said in our relevant policies. Obviously, this does not address our ends it's nothing about our ends so someone pipe out what does it say in our executive limitations. Well, you know, if it didn't have that part that the info asked for had nothing to do with Andrew executive limitations then in 2.8.1 data required by the board shall be supplied by the superintendent. However, because that phrase is in there 3.1, then comes into play the unity of control instruction from individual board members. I'm not reading it I scribbled notes from individuals is not binding and if the superintendent deems it to labor intensive time time intensive. For the staff. Did I jump. Am I not doing this right. No, that's right. It says anyone else have anything else with executive limitations and in the two's time that you know, all the 2.0 policies to 2.8. 3.3. 3.33. Also talks about the board won't interfere with what has been delegated to the CEO. Okay. What else 3.1.1 is unity of control, right that it is our ourselves as a unified body. Anything else. Those are the two I had 3.1 3.3 under board and then under governance I have 4.53 a with the interaction to the with the superintendent is limited. I also had 4.1 point to the sentence about the board's major policies intended on and not administrative or programmatic needs to attain those. Anything else in the floors. Oh, I want to be sure I'm not going to name a number right now but this scenario but also thinking Laura about the scenarios that you specifically said in our world that just came up. In terms of board interaction with the community and how that happens that you know they can come and we have a public session and we can't necessarily do anything about it but that's how they can bring stuff to us. And that we're not necessarily the go between from that they can come to they can go directly to the superintendent they can come to a meeting. So I have no number but those are things that are coming up for me. And 4.13. We need to be disciplining ourselves about making sure that we're following our policies. That's why we're doing this. Exactly. Anything else in the governance process, you know in the force. I tried it down. I think for me where this becomes a little cloudy or is our relationship to the public that we do. We are the representatives of the public to the CEO or the superintendent and I find there's a little bit of a rub there is that we are called by our constituents and you know that's to me is sort of the point of conflict sometimes. Because we are called to represent the constituents that we serve and their interests in front of the superintendent. Yeah, I think, and I think it's a really good point. I can tell you that it's kind of similar to the superintendent's role. You know if I get a complaint or a concern that comes in over a teacher. You know my job is to refer it to the teacher or the principal first. And so it's kind of the same thing in the most difficult time to do that is usually your first six months in a new district because typically they have it hasn't been done by the previous administration.  But what I usually find is that probably after about about four to six months of sending people in the right direction it gets it gets a lot easier. People get the message that that's the expectation so they do tend to start to go there first, but it is not easy by any means. So I agree with you 100%. The other piece that I would say about this one is that as a board, as a board so not as necessarily as an individual, you always have the right. If as a board you decide that there is more information that you want or you need out of me, I will usually provide it if I've got the time just because if people have the question you know I try to answer.  And then you guys vote on it and the second you vote on it and there's a majority. It's a done deal. And the other time that that should happen in terms of the board, if there are questions about me being honest with what I'm portraying or with what the superintendent is portraying. In those cases, you always want to gather more information. But again, that's a board function, a board role. If an individual has a concern in the board meeting, you bring it up and say, hey, you know, I'd like to make a motion to examine this information because we're not sure if the right information is out there. And that's a part of your oversight, which I would argue, you know, you should always do if there's questions. So just my thoughts as we're bouncing around here. Well, along with that, in the conflict of interest complaints of conflict of interest so 4.5 and way down there. Just the interactions with the public recognize the same limitation and inability of any board member to speak for the board. Of course, I can't find what I was just looking at, but that individuals can't make decisions or speak for the whole board. In terms of our contact with the public, which is hard in a small town, but yep. I would also say, Lane, though, that you have to be careful about saying, well, if we want information again, we need to make sure if it has to do with monitoring one of our policies sure. But if it's just somebody in the public is is demanding that we turn over information it has nothing to do with ends, or with the policies that we monitor. Unless we want to change a policy, we follow our policies so no, even I mean, we can we can I guess vote as a board to decide to request that information. But I will not be voting along with the rest of the group because we'll be breaking our own policies. And but monitoring performance, pardon, also monitoring lanes performance, not just not just monitoring that we're following our own policies, we also have a responsibility to to monitor and review lanes performance performance that performance is in meeting the outcomes that are that are out in our hands. And in how he is following the executive limitations policies. That's the only information that we are allowed to use to actually evaluate him. Now we can go out and get some information we can monitor a policy on our own. But we can't. That's it, unless we want to change a policy and that's why I keep on saying, you can't just willy nilly decide Oh, well, we don't like what he did what he did over here because we're hearing a bunch of fuss from community members. And if it's, if it's legit, then we need to go into our policies and say, we've monitored this policy. Maybe we need to change that policy because he's, he's somehow doing something that is causing a problem in the system. And until we change that policy, if we accept the monitoring reports, which we have been accepting all of the executive limitation monitoring reports, and the ends reports, that's how we evaluate. That's what we look at, unless we want to change a policy. And I want to throw this governance structure out and and pick a different governance structure. And right now, all of those policies. And I'm in agreement with with what he says in the fact that, you know, those exceptional circumstances where you're checking, you know, should be the exception, not the rule. Right. Because if something exceptional comes up, you know, you need that flexibility as a board to be able to check on things. But if it's happening all the time, then you probably got bigger problems to worry about then. Yeah, either with your superintendent or with with the interpretation of the governance itself. Yeah, I think if it's an ongoing issue, you know, you look back at say some of the policies that might fit to cover some of the questions, you know, if it's treatment of staff and students or it's, you know, that those communication and support to the board or the questions come sort of under the realm of those policies. Then you can revisit those policies and say, well, you know, maybe we need to broaden that that interpretation so that we can better understand or ask questions about Lane's performance. And have him give those reports to us under that executive limitation. Let's move on. So according to the board's policies, the next question, does the scenario refer to anything that's been delegated to the CEO? Who is our superintendent? I said no on that one. Everyone in agreement with Brian.  And to provide the board with the information that we ask of him as a body. So, you know, Brian, you're right in that if it's just one person, it's the answer would be no. And I would, I would also say he's, he's got to have an idea of how this, how we govern as a board also himself. So he, he's aware that, geez, I'm getting asked to provide this and this and this and I'm trying to do my actual job of creating these outcomes for the system. And I can't do it because I keep on having to produce a report to justify what I'm doing over here that that doesn't allow him that flexibility to go out there and and produce the results that we want him to produce for the entire system. So the next question would be, does this scenario reflect behavior consistent with the board's governance process and board management delegation policies? What did you guys think about that? Yes, the CEO said I'm not going to produce this report is going to be too cumbersome on me. I've got other things. And he refused to provide the information. What action if any should the board or board member now take actions that you believe would be consistent with the governance process and policies. If the board members want some action, they need to have the chair put it on the agenda and discuss it and for a possible motion for action by the superintendent. Any other thoughts on that one. I would also say we need to look at is this an issue that has been is has been delegated to the superintendent but in a way that's so open or so flexible that we need to dive down one one step further and give him a little bit more guidance in terms of what is allowable or not allowable and and and Amanda policy if we if we needed to. Which would take place in in the discussion phase and then if, however, we would decide then we would go to a motion on what action whether it would be a new policy or to designate the superintendent to produce the report. Any other thoughts on this. I thought was was a little more basic but just educate the board member on proper procedures as well and refer them back to the policies. I actually think, I mean, this is a scenario that's bothered me for a number of years, I think. This is our policy and she probably remembers me about eight years ago challenging our former superintendent about this, because I think we're where there's a gap here is that when the superintendents, you know, have always said that the that right in the community with certain concerns needs to go directly to them to voice concerns and complaints. And what happened back then is that the superintendent brought up this exact same scenario when we try to advocate for positions of our constituents. And I think the cool or the gap is that we as a board have no idea then if it's just one person or two persons complaints or issues or concerns, or if the superintendent has received 10 different concerns from people going directly to him or her. And that is where we are not able to monitor the situation, because our constituents are going directly to the superintendent, and the superintendent may not be communicating that to the board. Therefore, have no way to know the concerns that people in Brookfield, Braintree and Randolph are sharing with our CEO. So it's happened before. And, you know, major things were not uncovered because of that. For instance, some of the issues with our former facility director. And I think those are major issues. And as a board, I think we need to figure out how we can address that sort of in our interpretation of these policies. I don't know, Lane, what do you think? Am I totally off the deep end here? No, and I think we talked probably a few maybe a year or so ago about this because it was a concern that I actually brought up in one of the EL reports. And I think kind of where the discussion was at that point in time was this idea that, you know, if it's come to me, and obviously I haven't addressed it to people's satisfaction, whether I should have or not, it's a whole other question, they should be coming to you. When it comes to your level, if you're hearing it repeatedly, that it hasn't been resolved or that, you know, you're getting it from multiple people. I would argue that's a time when you as a board would say, hey, you know, there's something bigger going on here. You know, Lane or the superintendent has said it's been resolved, but we're still hearing these complaints and things don't match. That's when as a board that I would say you would stop and say, hey, let's pass a motion to look a little bit deeper into this. These are the things that we think we need to look at. Or if you think it's something that's rising to an even higher level, I mean, it could be criminal or whatnot. I would even, you know, connect with, you know, like Pietro have an independent investigation done. So, you know, you have two pathways depending upon the level of seriousness of what you're hearing. Because if I as a superintendent had had a long time to address it, and I doesn't feel like I have addressed it, and I haven't been keeping you in the loop on how I did it, or if what I'm telling you doesn't match what people are telling you, that's something you should look at. And perfectly within your right, and I would expect you to. By the way, you know, in some of the comments, you're right. If the superintendent doesn't present the information to you, you may not know. And that's a problem if that's happening, right? You know, usually with the executive sessions and the superintendent's reports and other conversations we have, I try to keep you in the loop as much as I can on stuff that might be critical or might hit you in terms of somebody asking you questions or having concerns about things. And so hopefully I've been doing a good job about that. But yeah, that would be a concern. But I would argue if you're getting stuff that, you know, just isn't adding up, you check. Yeah. Any other further steps or questions about this scenario or how we would handle it as a board. If you know something like this comes up. I do have a question. So I do appreciate this overview. It is helpful for me. I do get approached a lot as a school board member with questions about different aspects of the school. And I was one of the people that had reached out to Lane about the athletics. And I guess, you know, according to what I was told by the people who came to me is that they had reached out to the athletic director they had reached out to the principal, and they had reached out to Lane. I did share with them that, you know, Lane has a lot on his plate. So if there was a delay in getting that information that, you know, please be understanding, but that there's with COVID a lot going on. You know, they weren't happy with what the athletic director said or the principal. I guess I in my, I just don't know in my opinion, what I sure in your opinion, what I should have done differently. Do I, they were saying they weren't hearing from him again being respectful of Lane's time. I understand Lane I think you did get to them. It was probably a rapid email following the one that you they had sent already. I was defending the school and their, their situation. But should I not bring that forward. That's kind of the way that I feel right now is that I just shouldn't say anything because I hear, I understand clearly what and says about our governance, but I also feel like since the first time I joined this board. We wanted that wanting to be have better communication with our communities. We wanted to be approachable.  So I sometimes feel like there's a real rub with that we're told this is what we want, but well you really can't do it this way. So I know I often feel like a lot of this frustration is because of me and and what I'm doing. In my other world. My job is to communicate communicate communicate communicate and which is what I do all the time so this is just very different for me. When I don't feel like that people come to me they've neglected me in a position and I just have to sit back and say you know please come to the school board, share your concerns, but we're not going to take any action on it then. Sorry. I'm not and I'm certainly not saying that anybody is right or wrong here I'm just sharing how I feel about it. The conflict piece is this is that I responded pretty quickly to the people that asked me questions. And I think that's one of the reasons why that conflict protocol is so important. It's really easy for somebody to go to a board member and say I talked to Lane when they may may have not. And it's a lot easier to have it come back to me and then you check in with me hey did so and so actually check in with you and have a conversation. You know, then it's it's so I can say yeah I did you know they I tried to explain it they weren't happy. They seem to have concerns so you know it's appropriate, you know for the board to take over at this time. But that's part of the the problem and one of the concerns that I have is not only did I respond to everyone, but most of the responses were quite lengthy required me to go in. You know, well I don't believe you Mr. Millington I need you to go and get the guidance and show me the guidance. And so it took time to go and get the guidance and cut and paste and explain what the guidance meant and then have people argue with me that I was interpreting it wrong. And then me right off to the agency of education and have them do an interpretation which took a week to get their interpretation out of it to find out that my interpretation was correct. So that's that's part of the I think part of the conflict piece is it just is making sure that folks have the right information. You know, I did a long lengthy report on students that were allowed to go to other schools, based on an assessment from a person to who to this day is unknowns to me with accusations that I was allowing teachers to move their kids around willy nilly wherever they wanted to go as a benefit to teachers, which was the farthest for the truth. And to that day I don't know if that misconception has been addressed because the person was not asked to talk to me. So there are, again, some of that can relay misconceptions about me or what I've done or or my record and that's concerning to me because I to live in the community. As an administrator, it's important to be seen as transparent and open and honest. And it's it's it's hard to do that when you can't connect with people. Try to connect mis misconceptions or have a legitimate conversation with them about what their concerns were because it just it's it's difficult. It's difficult. So go ahead. I was just going to say the other thing is, we still have, I mean, as a board member, this isn't is this is a little bit different way of running a board than a lot of other boards are run. And when people oftentimes think of school boards, they think, Oh, well, if I talk to the board member, then they can get in there and they can, you know, influence the operational decisions that are being made and and and be involved in that. And that really isn't what our school board has been or has done for the last for a long time now since we've switched our governance structure. So we're looking more at what what outcomes do we want to have. And if folks are, you know, community people are really concerned, then how is the sports, whether or not the sports policy for COVID, how is that impacting outcomes. And that's where again, our our communication to our community is not it's not let's be out there and and open up the floodgates to have everybody tell us what they don't like or what they want for the system in terms of operations, because every you're never going to be able to please everybody but we've got, well, unless you disagree with it but we have a set of policies that are that are aiming us hopefully toward creating a system that that produces well educated and well prepared young people to move on to the next stage of their life. That's what our focus is about. It's not about second guessing, whether or not, you know, Lane should be doing such and such in order to produce those outcomes. That's all his, his area and the professional educators area. And that doesn't mean that parents because generally it's parents who have operational issues. They, you know, there is a way for them to express their feeling we don't have a parent parent teacher organization right in. I don't think in any of our schools. So again, if you've got a group of parents who want to work with the principles and influence in that direction. That's a great way for them to feel more integrated in the schools but as a board we haven't unless we want to again unless you want to change the way the board is operating. We're looking more systemically K 12. And where are we going what do we what do we need these these young people to be able to do when they finish our system and move to the next stage. So it's a more it's, it's not a it's not we're not looking at the micro we're looking at the macro when when we're looking at the system as a whole. Yes, I think that's true. I think that some of the scenario that Lane just talked about though, you know, parents exhausting, you know, their, their avenues through the AD and the principle and then coming to him and he's still doing work. Right. It's, you know, circumventing us, but he's still doing a lot of work that, you know, answering those questions that doesn't involve us at all. Right. You know so I don't think I don't think that's saving him any work really because instead of having people come through the board, basically he's asking answering lots of individuals questions who are coming directly to him. And as the manager, he can then work with his administrators and say, hey, we need to communicate better with our, our, our community because people are, are concerned or hey AD, when we, we've really need to make sure that parents understand that when there's a case in the school, that's going to influence the sports and that's going to be a major rub with the community and we need to be out front on this and make sure that our, that our, that our customers know that. And, and, and be a, be ahead of that but that's his management of his administrators and, and his, you know, instructing his, his people to get the word out to, to his, to the community and to parents. Well, I do appreciate the conversation because it is really helpful for me and I think that when I'm caught in the moment, I trying to do the impossible, which is to please everybody. So, I appreciate the conversation. Thank you for the clarification. Are there any other comments. I just wanted to kind of chime in a little bit. And I understand what everyone's saying, but I can tell you from, you know, from the other side, when you come to the board and they give you the line of, you know, I can't answer that it's policy governance, you need to go down.  It really seems like the board is just blowing you off and you can't do then as a board member it feels the set you're that you're actually doing the same thing is these people have elected you and you just have to pass the buck down the lane and your hands are tied in it. I don't like that feeling one way you from either side. But, you know, that's our policy that's our policy but I don't like it so Well, and I have to chime in and say, I think I would like to have a conversation about the structure and the possibilities of changing it because I don't think that the community necessarily they don't get these trainings right so they don't necessarily know what they're electing us to and what they're electing us to could be something that we can't do under this current structure, and, and frankly, perhaps not what someone would run for school board to serve and something that's in that structure so I, I'd like to make a motion I'd like to suggest and I hope that we can look at our structure and just like we should look at our policies and think, is this serving our community. The best that it can. And this is, and I don't say that in order to please everyone, but I do say that, again, to serve the community as best we can, and perhaps a policy governance structure is not how we can best serve our community and our district. I will caution you. A couple of things. First off is that people will respond based upon the expectations that they have. And if board members are always inviting folks in to have those sorts of conversations that through your own policies are supposed to be pushed down to the superintendent. If you don't have that uncomfortable moment with them and push them where they should go, you will always get people coming to you without expectation. Right, you set the expectations for folks. Number two, if you plan on moving away from policy governance, you need to check state law, because state law in terms of the board's relationship with its superintendent is pretty close to policy governance. So just a couple of cautions there. And I in no way mean to imply I definitely think we should do that or that I understand everything that it would take to do that or what other options are I just this brings up for me.  I don't I don't think that's the. I'm having I'm being distracted here so I'll stop there. I was going to say, I'll jump on the bandwagon here. And I think it was just really interesting on a side note watching that conversation just unwind and every single person on here was doing a lot of this. So I feel like there's a lot of consensus into into keeping this discussion open. And I think that you know again as a newbie you know it's it is that question of of as Hannah said as Brian said like how do we as a board serve the community in a way where the community feels that it's being served by the board members they elected so that's kind of where you know I feel that situation lies to so that's it. Yeah it's a really interesting conversation and you know possibly something to be pursued at a retreat or something like that either with a policy governance model. And just asking you know a specialist about that these are our hiccups with PG and you know where we go from here to make our constituents feel better heard, you know, just an idea. Can I ask a random question do we know or maybe Lane you have the answer to this how many school boards are run under this type of policy governance what's the kind of percentage. It's fairly high in Vermont. I've actually been called into one or two that are thinking of converting to it to talk with them about how it works. I can guarantee you that if you do not have at least a similar model where the superintendent has clear separation from the board you won't keep the superintendent. They won't you won't get a good one that'll come and want to work with you. So that's you know that's the other caution that I want to put out there because it's a very it's a very difficult role to do when you're not your own master if the board is taking over everything and what do you need a superintendent for. So I just just a couple other things to think about. And I'll say my wife works in the Berry School District and they're not policy governance and it puts a lot more work on the board members than than what we have. They just lost their superintendent. Well they they got a new new one it wasn't because of their policy though. I know the old superintendent was he wanted to go to Colorado. Again I interact with those guys. A lot of it was the lack of a clear definition between board and superintendent. I wonder if the opportunity we have though maybe in educating our public on our role with policy governance might actually go hand in hand as we share the new strategic plan. Is that an opportunity for us to actually educate and reeducate through a different media as you know is it you know up there could be a written one there could be something on the website blah blah blah all that stuff but that actually explains this is the role of your board. And this is how we you know work collaboratively with the superintendent who he is doing all of this and this is the strategic plan. So maybe as we work on that process this is our chance to reeducate our communities really on what our roles are and what we can do in this elected position. Thanks everyone for an interesting conversation. I think you know it's it's worthwhile going through these and just reminding ourselves of of sort of the ways upon which we are governed and under which models sort of that we're supposed to adhere to so I think that was great. Any any further thoughts before we adjourn. I'm just curious how many of the board members have. I know Ashley and Brian you were you were at that training with Miriam Carver herself right when you first got on the board. Was that that we did in the fishbowl. No I haven't been on any policy governance training then. Okay. And can anybody hear me. Can anybody hear me. Yes we can. So Miriam Carver hasn't come to do a training with us since I've been on the board. So it's been more than three years. I think the only two points that were there were in and Laura at the time that are currently on the board. Right. So no one has had any training and how how our board governs. So I went to a training put on by the by the BSBA in Montpelier. It was an evening shortly after I was initially elected that was policy governance based and so I feel like I've had some training in addition to the little scenarios that we've done. I had done an online one shortly after I was elected. It was put on by BSBA and it was an on you know a remote one just online. It wasn't anything in person. And we've done a couple of facilitated retreats with Val Gardner who of course is a policy governance expert. I don't know how many of the current board members were there. I think Rachel was I don't remember if anyone else was. Yes I was. So it's definitely something that we need to you know schedule in our last facility retreat with Susan wholesome before the strategic planning one was on governance although she's not a policy governance expert I would definitely hire someone more like Val to do the next training if that's you know the way we want to go. All right. Thank you everyone. We will adjourn the meeting at 726. Don't forget that there's a budget informational meeting on Wednesday this next week the 24th and a the town meeting before town meetings so Monday, March 1 it's called the annual school meeting. That's also what our UHS. All right. Have a good evening. Bye. Thank you. Thank you all.


John Park and it's time for John Park's workshop. Thank you for the people in the comment section there over on our Discord who noticed new theme music. I got bored of my previous theme music which was a song I wrote years ago so I picked this one which I wrote just like a year ago so I'm modernizing. So let's see what's happening here. My glasses are clean. Dave Odessa over in the YouTube chat asks am I on the right channel? I know it's shocking when things change. That is a new song. Andy Calloway over in our Discord says it's the voice of Lars. I'm not going to admit to that for sure. That's creepy. What else is happening here? I noticed something disturbing actually there's two disturbing things here. One I knew already but you may not have which is for all of my interest in mechanical keyboards. The one I use for this show is just this dirty membrane apple one. All of my keyboards are really clicky, really loud so I have not been using a mechanical keyboard here to drive this show but that may have to change because here's disturbing fact number two. I think I have battery swelling. Can you see it? It is here. Right there look at that. You see that right there? This is a wireless keyboard. I think the battery is swelling which is disturbing to say the least so if I burst into flames that's why. That's probably why. Yeah that's probably it. So I gotta do something about that. I'm gonna have to build a keyboard. I'm gonna have to build a keyboard with some silent switches. A nice mechanical and silent switches. That's my goal. That's what I should do. Maybe a small one. Maybe like a 60% or something like that. We'll see. All right what else is new? Hey we've got this. We've got this help wanted sign up right here and that's because there's a jobs board over on Adafruit at jobs.adafruit.com and look if you head over there right now here's what you're gonna see in the for hire section the available for hire section you gotta be logged in. You have to be logged in with your Adafruit login to get here as well as to post your resume and what kind of stuff you're looking for but there's always interesting things here so if you're looking for maybe someone local you can you can search by location you can cruise on through and just browse here. I noticed we've got an engineer here who's doing R&D work somewhere and also looking for work. I sat down at the bottom here art and design factotum ad nauseam. Go check that out if you're looking for an artist slash designer slash photographer to help you out with the project. So that's jobs.adafruit.com. Head over there to check it out. I'm laughing because I shouldn't laugh but hey we got keyboard suggestions and I saw that CripNip just picked up a num num fee a new fee new fee air 75 I have to look that up. I don't know that one new fee air 75 75% keyboard that's I like those and but the one I'm laughing about is Blitz City DIY said gherkin I built a gherkin there's no way I'm using that thing actually that that's my wordle entry thing because it's just letters it's pretty much all it is. Those are good suggestions though I'll check out the one you got there CripNip thank you. What else?  Yeah that was some sampled drum packs and such I can't remember what the audio the vocal audio was originally might have been something I sampled myself but fun sampled workstation the 1010 black box. What else? Hey I've got this show that I do on Tuesdays it's called JP's product pick of the week that's what it looks like right there and even more so that's what it looks like this week so this week I had this one two different products that were on a deep deep 50% off discount during the show usually I'll do software hardware demos not a lot to demo on this one I will be honest it's hookup wire but it's a good set and it was at a great price but I'll give you a little recap just the same so take it away me. The 10 and the 6 solid core hookup wire spool sets these are 22 AWG and they are perfect for breadboarding and prototyping we get white black gray brown dark purple blue green yellow orange and red look at the set of six you get the blue white green yellow red and black here's how you use them so I will just take a little bit off of the ends of my wire and end up running them like that the solid core this this gauge works great 22 AWG works great for pressing them in and getting a solid connection this isn't fallen out easily I first built this on a breadboard then I just moved it over to the perma proto and was able to make sense of my wiring and match my fritzing diagram that's my product pick of the week this week it is the 10 and 6 spool hookup wire set solid core yes indeed it is uh so next up uh what am I oh I'm getting messages with that oh I take a look I just got a DM ooh uh all right get back to get back to JP's wired says Andy Callaway all right next up let's do a circuit python parsec all right sorry if that was echoey that might have been echoing for the circuit python parsec today what I wanted to do was extend the lesson we did last time what I want to do is show how you can use the color of a coordinate in a bitmap like a pixel in order to make your own DIY roll your own line drawing routines so if you take a look at the screen here I have a little feather with a tft feather wing and in my atom session I just have it doing nothing at the moment just like get a blank screen what I'm going to do is let's just uncomment this one line of code and save it so this is a little procedure I made called draw horizontal line and you can see there I'm feeding it an x position and a y position to start a length a hundred in this case a color for my color palette and you can see I also have it sort of drawn dramatically by putting a little pause there uh and I'll just add one more to that so let's also draw in a vertical line so these are the two procedures that I built draw each line and draw v line and you can see them right here here's how they work so first of all I'm using display IO and I'm using a bitmap that I have put inside of the display group and I have a little palette of colors here when I call one of these two functions we feed it x position y position length color and the pause which will default to zero and then we loop through the range of the length so in this case I was going a hundred times looping through this next section which says hey bitmap set this position on x and this position on y to whatever color from our palette we have selected and then pause if there's a pause called for there and all this does is change the palette value at that pixel which has the effect of drawing now you can see if we want to do some extra fancy stuff here we can make little line drawing procedures here you can see I've got sort of my own version of a of a very old school looking video game level drawing on so we got a little ladder we got some ledges here drawing on uh we don't need to have the pause in there we can pull those out and in fact what I'll do is actually delete this right here so these will no longer pause they'll just use the default which is zero so we don't even have to type that in that's a default for the function and now I'm gonna change the color of the palette once I've drawn it on so we've set down pixels and then you can see it blink white there on that one palette color and that's because that position doesn't really know what the color is we can swap it out that position really just knows what its palette index is and so that is how you can roll your own horizontal and vertical line drawing using bitmap inside of display i o in circuit python and that is your circuit python parsec and uh yes thank you top point of this how to realize as I was saying give it an x position and a y position it does seem like I'm either talking a lot to it or we've set up a county fair or something uh x position kind of a confusing word in english all right uh so let's move on from there what else have we got going on um let's talk about the uh the coupon code of the week so i'm i'm not in the habit of this i got out of the habit but but it's back uh here comes coupon codes hot and heavy sliders that is your coupon code this week or for today if you are placed in an order just head on over to ate a fruit and during checkout you'll see a little coupon section or a coupon code section type in sliders with a z i don't know why it just looked fancy uh type that in and you will get 10 off your entire order this excludes software gift certificates my gosh that's a hard one to say this excludes software gift certificates and subscriptions uh and so you can get products stuff any other stuff pretty much in the store i don't think there's any exclusions there uh if it's a physical good that you can have sent to your home do it and get 10 off so head on over that will be good until midnight east coast time tonight so that's good all day long i'm tripping on my mic cord here um sliders is your coupon code that'll get you 10 off so head on over to the store pick some cool stuff uh speaking of the store and cool stuff where's the where's my here's my store uh i can move this out of the way hold on whoop let me just drive that there and just three eight uh so what's new in the store if you're wondering you can head over to products and this new product section pops up here view all on that and that'll give you the latest things in the store so you can see we've been building out our assembled pre-assembled backpacks both for the seven digit and the 14 segment displays so really cool especially because these now have uh the stem of qt port on them you don't really need header pins on them you don't really need to do any soldering to use them so if you have something like a cutie pie or one of the more modern feathers uh kb2040 and you want to plug stuff into it just go over stem of qt and with these pre-assembled ones you don't need to worry about uh any soldering at all uh here's an upcoming product that i'm excited about actually it's this quick stem of qt five port hub uh so it's a passive hub it just connects up wires on that ice word c bus but it allows you to do a sort of hub and spoke arrangement instead of a chain where one stem of qt enabled thing to the next to the next to the next so depending on the topology of how you're setting up a project this could be really useful um also there are some items that don't have a pass through just because of board space i think there's some some of the displays you'll find uh i don't know is this one one of one of them no this one's not one of them but some of your displays i noticed uh just have a single stem of qt so this helps with situations like that um some new sensors coming out again i'm very excited about this stuff here these i spy breakouts which will be a little ribbon cable uh that allows you to connect up to spi displays without doing all that soldering which will be fantastic so those will be on microcontroller boards dev boards soon but right now you can use this little breakout board to at least uh get there also a bunch of these inductive wireless leds have been coming out in 10 packs of of the different colors of the large size one so just some stuff that you might want to check out in the store uh and use that coupon code right there uh to get a nice juicy juicy discount on it 10 off um questions from the chat let me bring up my discord view here uh dj debon three says what are some use cases for spoke versus daisy chain does it make a difference in how some things might work it should not as a passive connection so it is it is just presuming one i squared c bus things need unique addresses it is just a physical arrangement and so um i don't have any good examples right here but as you plug things together if all of your physical objects are in one space like the walkman project for example if you have a lot of stem of qt things plugged in uh running those cables from thing to thing to thing means you're using longer cables probably just to accommodate the space so that's what this sort of hub and spoke arrangement gives you is you'd go from your controller board to this and then out and so everything and have nice little short hub and spoke runs what else dj debon asks can you combine a jp jp coupon with an ask an engineer coupon i have no idea that's a great question try it we won't uh throw you in jail for trying probably not i think they're exclusive there may be some language in the in the coupon code page i think we have a page about coupons probably not also i think they tend to expire before the next one so i think the ask an engineer one should have expired last night but i think sometimes pt keeps that one on so follow up supposition from dj debon three is maybe the power draw farther away on a long chain of daisy devices yes i squared c doesn't really want to be on long long runs so if you can keep the runs shorter of cabling that's better and that's that's a case where hub and spoke may may also help you um all right let's see what else is happening so why don't we uh jump into project stuff so you can see here i very suggestively uh called today's episode darth faders and uh credit to jenny skew seven who i think posted a darth fader meme gift on our chat last week when i was looking at faders so these are the faders we're talking about i did a project a few weeks ago of just showing how to use that as a motorized fader that can go to a pre-saved position has servo control because of the analog and allow you to still control things in my case i was using it for some midi control last week i went into some of the details of controlling that brushless dc motor using more advanced techniques and this is based on c grover's excellent guide and so i showed how you can adjust the pwm frequency and the throttle to get the kind of speeds you want and still have enough oomph without too much stepping so that's that fine tuning you can do uh reason i was really interested in getting slower motion on this instead of using p id to whip places as quick as i can without overshoot is that i wanted to build a sculpture so you may have seen i showed this off last night on uh show and tell but we're going to get a little deeper into it today uh so i've built a sculpture using three of these and a motor feather when we head over here to the bench and we'll take a look at what i've built and uh where i'm going with actually i'm going to probably pull this apart so that we can uh swap out the bottom and you'll see you'll see why in a second here so let me head on over here and grab my iced tea on the way and yeah that's good right there i have to remember to turn that back on so here you can see is my three printed case for three of these faders now right now you could just plug this uh in over usb there's a feather in there and we could use these faders as just kind of fun oddly shaped control box this will sit vertically or on its back here it's pretty flat or you can also set it up on some some of its sides there depending on the cabling you have coming out of it and so these are controllable when the motors aren't moving them when i go ahead and give this power over usb to the feather you can see this is my latest addition i didn't have this hooked up last night but this morning i hooked up a rotary encoder using one of our little seesaw rotary encoder stem a qt breakouts and this is a rotary encoder with a push encoder so you can see here i can click click so that's a push button so i have that doing something right now i'll show you this also has a little neopixel for feedback on it and power and so on and i put one of our really nice new anodized aluminum knobs on there in keeping with the sort of Darth Vader theme by the way the purple's going away that was that was a sort of throwaway filament that you can see isn't isn't in such good shape this black filament i've got right now is working a lot better so we're going to replace that in a second and oh here's a nice suggestion from the chat Todd says can you make the faders move in a Darth Vader breathing way that's a nice idea so now what i'll do is plug in dc power to the feather motor feather wing driver so that's what's driving these and you can see it doesn't do anything it's still just free running free floating here but what i'll do is click the click encoder to enable movement so i have this functioning right now is essentially an on off button and so that starts a little cycle of animations running and then runs forever so this will run a little pattern i have it's i think six steps oh i noticed it's doing a little i wonder if it's a little different when it's vertical we'll tune we'll tune the values yeah i think in vertical it's not doing that overshoot but in horizontal it is so the tuning of of the throttle and the pwm the orientation of it actually matters um so i can press the the push encoder button and that stops the animation right where it is also gives me free free running so i'm not using the capacitive touch right now and i might not on this project because we're not we don't um have any of these for sale yet lady eight has been trying to source these um capacitive touch fader caps they're actually kind of hard to find um so i don't think i'm going to use that in my previous project i did show how you can essentially disable the motor when you're touching it and enable it when you release so on this one instead i'm just hitting my little push encoder button and that resumes the animation from where it was so you can see right now we're stopped at the middle we're going to be heading up if i pause it and continue we're still going through the cycle of animations that we have so that pauses it um rotary encoder right now isn't doing anything other than it is a print statement we'll take a look at that over on the uh on the workstation in a minute but i have a couple ideas for things to do i'm interested in people's feedback of what what does this sculpture need from a rotary encoder one idea is to have some different pre-saved animation patterns that you go to another is to just step through each individual little step of the animation for fun this could also be used as automation for let's say a stereo mixing board or for values for midi sliders or cc going through a converter for for synth stuff video mixing all those good things so maybe having granular control of heading to a preset instead of just going there would be nice one thing i'll show you that i've that i've tested using it for which is kind of fun is adjusting the speed or the pwm frequency which allows you maybe to use a calibration mode to just tune it until you like it right down the number and save it or get even fancier and have something like a double click put you into that mode and then store that value um so let's um let's look at code stuff then we'll come back and pull it apart and and put on the new version of the bottom here that i built with just a couple of refinements so i'm gonna take my i'll leave the dc power here by the way one thing i'm going to do right now because i keep saying i'm going to do it and it's a it's a little tip this is nine volt uh this is wanting nine volt there's a lot of these barrel connectors around that i'm really liable to plug something into and and possibly damage things so i'm going to wrap a little bit of either um heat shrink or electricians tape around that i don't think this is big enough um so that i remember that that is nine oh here's some heat shrink that might work oh actually this is from this nice uh pre-cut little shrink kit from for made of fruit uh and there is a pretty wide gauge red maybe wide enough let's see almost wide enough uh here's another life hack i'm going to cut this and then i'm going to stretch it with some pliers so it's probably not how this is meant to work but it works um usually so let's get a little piece there uh zoom in for a second while we're doing this so you can actually use your scissors for this too uh all you want to do is yeah it's a little big i'm going to grab some needle nose pliers uh longer handle is better and set about stretching that just a little beyond what it wants to there we go now we have a diameter of heat shrink that we did not have before um and i'll just give this a little quick hit with the shrink shrink ray gun here just to tighten that up again i'm sure there's reasons not to do that but it seems to work pretty well and actually if i'd use this heat shrink on this guy here too let's see will that fit um i can probably write with a sharpie on this which is easier than than this um piece of electrical tape but you know what i'll i'll do it anyway so let's do nine volts nine volts you could write dc on that too uh i i won't for expediency but at least that lessens the chance of me really ruining something uh with the wrong voltage okay so let's take this over here and i'll rearrange some stuff here so we can all see this out of the way you know i'll try to keep this in camera view vertical uh like i did on the show last night let's see put a little beautifying junk blocker behind it and i won't subject you to this camera movement until i have it sort of dialed in uh there is going to be a let's see i know that'll work i need to block a a light from pointing in it all right so let's go to that view there and so here's my little rotary encoder knob uh let's plug this into usb and i will grab my dc power source and look i don't have any question if it's the right one because this is the red band that says nine volts so that's good so plug that guy there uh okay so that's working again uh and yeah Todd by over in our chat said the worst thing is all these guitar pedal people who use the uh nine volt dc barrel connector but the reverse polarity center negative yeah that's a a shocker when that happens uh keep the guitar stuff separate from the everything else stuff okay so excuse me i'm gonna go ahead and open up the code that's on us boom and okay so here's the additions to this code uh that are related to this encoder so i have my little stem a qt setup here with the seesaw uh for the rotary encoder and for the button i'm using that with the debouncer library and it just changes this last encoder position as i move it and it switches the uh button state where is it move state uh from false to true my main code is this right here and now i've wrapped it inside of if move state so that means that when i click the encoder button uh the debouncer notices it and then just changes the state back and forth and it flips that variable uh so if the move state is false then none of this happens if it's true then all this happens which is my little function that goes from position to position um in the uh in the case of the rotary encoder so let's see i'm gonna reconnect the repl here so you can see when i press the button i'm printing out move state is true move state is false and when i rotate it right now i'm just printing out the position so this is kind of the absolute position um but what i kind of care about more is the delta so if i if you look at this encoder position code uh encoder position i've reversed its direction just because clockwise and counterclockwise were kind of backwards from what i wanted using this and then if my encoder position isn't the same as my last encoder position which means i've touched it moved it um then we do the following i have a variable called encoder delta which is the encoder position minus whatever the last encoder position was which is the state variable um the uh let me print that out the encoder delta should just be a one or a negative one so if i'm moving to the right this is kind of like how a mouse works a mouse just sends a little relative negative one or positive one on each axis uh so this means i can now add onto something or subtract from something um so to do something like change the speed what i'll do is let's look at how the speed works right now top of the code this is all based on the stuff that we did last week so setting this motor frequency that's the the pulse width so as this goes lower it gets steppier but we get um more umph and then my max throttle value right now that's that's essentially what the speed uh kind of boils down to that's the easiest way to say that's how fast it's going um so that's point two of the voltage that the motor featherwing sends to that motor um excuse me so max throttle i can reuse that variable uh over here in my update position this is what moves the motor so it moves a fader or all the faders uh so it gets sent these arguments of which fader so we usually cycle through all three of them and the new position where it's headed so now let's add one more thing to this which is going to be uh max throttle and if we feed it that variable when it goes to actually turn on the motor because it's set to none when it's not moving it's going to grab max throttle that i can now change and it's going to get the new value of that so when i want to ask for this update fader position i now have to feed it a third argument so let's go down here update position saying which fader which presaved position from the presaved position list and uh the throttle value this doesn't have to be named max throttle um or does it uh no it doesn't necessarily but i will have out so i don't get super confused um i know i'm doing bad things as far as global variable names sorry and this should work the same nothing should change here let's just test this right so it's still moving and this is the throttle value of 0.2 that it has been in the past so now what i want to do is be able to increase or decrease that throttle value as i rotate my encoder um so if we look at this encoder if the position has changed i have these encoder delta of one or negative one right now i'm just printing that but how about we say max throttle equals max throttle plus 0.01 times encoder delta so since my values are pretty minimal i'm going 0.2 this means if i rotate 10 clicks on the encoder we'll have gone up to 0.3 and that's actually quite fast so this will be a pretty pretty rapid change let's let's see how it looks though add a little space there so again starts out just uses the the starting value of 0.2 uh so let's slow it down it probably won't go much slower without starting the stall so you can see they're really kind of creeping along there uh my code doesn't actually wait for them to arrive at a position before moving on it just as a time base there's a period right now um which is kind of nice so we're not sitting forever but you could change that uh so let's get even a notch slower okay so let's pause right there so what why is this useful well it could be part of how the sculpture works how darth vader works uh and by the way uh the reason i started calling it darth vader besides yaniscu's excellent darth vader memes in the chat is that it's so ominous looking this this design that i felt here just has this kind of ominous look like the soap dispenser in darth vader's bathroom or something like that so what i'll do is i'll start printing the max throttle so let's get rid of that and this means i can interactively pick a number that i really like the best uh so let's do print max throttle save it hit play okay so let's tune that upstairs with 2.1 let's see what's this what's the smallest where does it really stall out that looks like it's too small so 0.16 no good i arrived at these before just interactively right so save change save change save this is much nicer uh it's also interactive it's a lot faster interactive what about top speeds at this particular pwm frequency how fast can we get going before it's okay you can see already at 2.23 we're starting to hit a little oscillation a little judder and that's because i don't have my pid code in here anymore maybe i'll add that back in so i can get super fast right because you can really whip this thing around uh so long as you can avoid backlash or overshoot so let's let's just go crazy fast it won't hurt it so you can see they get there and for the most part they flip out some of them are behaving better than others let's go real fast so top speed will be 0.1 i'll leave it at that uh so that's all overshoot they're just never getting there you can see they're kind of changing favoring the bottom and the top uh pause that right that's nice maybe i'll just put a microphone on this thing and this is the instrument um so what we can do uh just for fun right now is change what the high medium and low values are just keep it in a little narrower range so let's say high is 160 medium is 120 and low is about 80 now this overshoot may just still be tremendous but here i'll i'll run it first at sort of a moderate speed so you can see the they just don't go very far and this will just prevent it from clacking around at the expense probably uh drop this back down so you could um really for dialing this stuff in what you could do is have a find out a relationship sort of a proportional relationship between the pwm frequency and the throttle um and again you may have to have two knobs for that so that you can dial them in or maybe click the knob to change it but this could be really a nice way to do calibration uh before you stick to some numbers and this would all change if we put different weights on this right so i've got these little fader caps are pretty light if you put a lego piece or a piece of rubber band or a balloon or who knows what you're going to vary what you want your speed and your pwm frequency to be uh so having a couple of knobs for that could be cool and it could be like i said a calibration procedure so maybe for holding that button during startup it would allow you to get to something you like and then lock it in and store that value um oh star man in uh in the chat just said if you had some nudes hooked up which is our little rubbery led filaments between the sliders it would make the nudes go like a wave motion i was uh we're thinking alike i was trying that i didn't light one up but i i just kind of fixed it to them to see it moving around to see if it made good wave patterns um but i was going slow with it and i think you're right i think if we're going real fast that could be cool we could get maybe if they're fixed at one end this could be kind of like jump rope or something like that making them move who knows it's uh it's more of a an experiment and a and a piece of sculpture so all right so that's what um i've got let me put my default values back into here and uh just see that it's kind of working looks good um so now what it will do is take a look at how it's put together and i'll swap in the new base before i do that let me know if you got any other questions over in the chat uh over in discord i see i'll pop up the discord right now uh mouse said question for john and liz how the heck do i plug in the last year iraq module there's not enough room to reach in to plug in the power cable you're putting together iraq and you can't get that last power cable plug in i start with all the power coming off of the bus board and dangling out of a case so the last thing you should be doing is plugging into the module um let's see other questions uh yeah star man that would be cool with the fast move we might get like sine waves and stuff like that which would be really cool um and actually pt said he wanted to see some if we could get leds involved with this it would be cool for doing maybe some um long exposure photography which would be pretty fun too all right so let's let's jump back to the workbench and i'll pull this little darth fader apart and put it back together with the new base so i've been designing the case for this uh using rhino and uh most of it is based on some curves that i drew and then i derive everything off of these sort of base curves and i forgot in one case to add an offset to allow for the expansion of the 3d print because it's not perfect and i'm and i'm thinking more of a laser cutter world where the cuts are basically perfect so uh when i did the first base and the first walls which is what i'm calling the main part of the case you can see here i cracked this because this was just too small you can see it's so a little bit bent here uh focus so you can see this a little bit bent because this uh these two thought they were occupying essentially the same exact spot in space but 3d prints are a little fatter than than a perfection and ideal so that one snapped on me so i i haven't reprinted this one yet but i will put in the new case maybe i'll glue that later um so i'll show you how this is this is assembled um first of all i can pull off the rotary encoder i don't have a spot for that yet i'm thinking of just putting it on the side uh either just drill out a hole on this case and glue that and be lazy or put a real hole in it in the 3d model which is probably what i'll do so i can upload that for the guide and uh and have a nice spot for that to hook to the case so let's uh might as well take it all apart so i've got this cap only thing holding this together are the three m3 screws at the top and the three m3 screws at the bottom that go into the faders so the faders actually are kind of part of the structure just because they're metal and they have threaded holes and actually that's another case where i made my holes basically three millimeter and you've always got to accommodate for 3d prints being a little wide and i forgot so i had to kind of gouge those out a little bit with a with a hole reamer where is that hole removed this kind of thing here is the best to make uh make your mistakes go away if you're forgetting to add to the whole size you can also see i got a little impatient or i didn't put enough of my sort of glue stick magigu down on my glass bed that i print on and this part here stuck and warped a little as i was trying to peel this off so that's the lid uh just kind of sits on top and has these three holes that screw into the faders um faders you can see are they're locked in down at the bottom and there's some little walls and the screws but they do wobble a little until we put that collar on top uh so now unscrew the base here actually don't have to do that this just pulls out so right now this is just sandwiched between the layers so that pulls off like that there very Darth Vader-y and this is um where you can see i probably should put some support in the model so that these are a little stronger so just essentially run a kind of a fillet or a chamfer down that to make all these a little stronger so that's the uh the walls of the thing and you can see it actually stands alone much like coral Darth Vader with his mask off you get this gross innards wiry thing uh so this can be freestanding as is it wobbles a little but these aren't really going anywhere in fact let's let's plug it in just for the fun of seeing it running exposed let's plug that there uh i'm just going to bring up my discord to make sure you're not warning me about my sound going away or anything like that uh so let's get cabling okay so you'll see when i plug in the nine volt power you'll see the little light goes on right there the little green light on the motor driver so that just means that the external power that's being um uh regulated by the motor driver is there but i'm not powering the logic and this is a good idea with anything that's that's driving stuff with a decent load uh motors usually have a separate power supply from your logic so you don't get little brownouts and confuse things uh so now i've got my usb plugs into the feather right there we'll just be hub there uh so now this is my this now i can tell the lights are on uh the feather's got power because it's powering on the stemma and uh yeah you can see it maybe from the main cam if i turn it like that in front of me there or from the top down cam right so this is this is an alternate now you could also do a clear or or a diffuse translucent body for it and put some lights in there you can do all kinds of cool stuff i'm trying to keep it somewhat reasonable uh and go ahead and turn that off now let's pull it apart so easiest way to do this i've got a set of pegs that the terminal block feather wing are just resting on and i actually lengthened those on my revised one they were a little short um due to the length of all this uh stuff soldered in all of those um terminal blocks and now unscrew these three faders from there uh i don't have them numbered so you do kind of have to pay attention to which one's which i could probably put a little piece of tape or something like that you could always change that in code but you don't want to i say okay so that's the base there you can see i've made my wiring uh fairly short uh so that it just works in place you don't have a lot of leeway with these based on how i wired it and so the real changes to this there's three of them one is four of them actually so i've made this lip a little deeper in the back uh i've made the little pegs a little taller and those could be like heat set inserts and screws for the um terminal block feather wing if you wanted i decided to go the easy route and then i've made it just a little bigger so it'll accommodate hopefully size of this without bending uh and then i also removed a little chamfer that i didn't like this little corner here which i don't like and it was made with this terrible lavender delaminating not working on my printer very well anymore must have gotten moisture or something like that this stuff however is printing pretty well so ignore that broken bit there but this should now fit into here much nicer without all that bending in the back yeah so much better that's really not bent to live in there this one is a lost cause at this point uh so that should be a better fit and then put it back together we'll just kind of plop everyone in place all at the same time so this will drop onto those little pegs so go here uh oh forgot should do this first i need to remount those holes a little i didn't that's one thing i did not revise when i should have some size of those holes so these don't have to go in easy or you can make it hard and they'll thread in there which is nice but they won't even get started right now with the size i have so i'm just coming here if this reamer has even got a small enough maybe i was using the tip of a exacto before even a little bit of a chamfer there will give it the screw a little bit of a prayer starting there's one nice thing about 3d print is it is pretty forgiving to you going in and modifying it later within reason will it start i'll make that a little this will work better and he says darth lars knobs for faders could be legendary darth lars that is a sith i do not wish to encounter right lars you know what i wish i had is a little tapping bit for this screwdriver this type of removable that would be nice rather than getting the real tapping stuff out just one that would fit that profile oh if you're not checking out the chat you should because there's a cool project that c grover has been working on using a palette color swapping he's got a larsy example of knocking out a green screen so check that out by the way the the decision to go with three instead of four faders was all about the physical design but then as it turns out that's a really convenient number to do using the terminal screw shield because you have three different ground and three different 3.3 volt blocks on it which is what you need for reading the slide potentiometers so it worked out really well there's four motor driver outputs on the feather wing so you could drive them but without having to do any extra work i could just screw into stuff that's existing which is nice happy accident okay so this is pretty good looks like let me drop this on and the only fiddly bit here is just feeding some of this wiring up just to get it out of the way i could probably dress that better with cable tie or a zip tie or something oh i got one of these on the outside here these flex a lot because of the construction there we go that is a much nicer fit though and lastly i put the hat back on and i won't screw that in now just because you don't want to watch that i'll just rest that on there but here we go we are back in business and now with a nicer fit i can plug in my rotary encoder again feather power start it up you see this is a little sloppy up here because i didn't put those screws in yet so this will sit at wonky angles let's get it going crazy whoo calm down hey much better yeah that's what this is this is going to be a darts breathing apparatus when he goes to bed at night it's a sleep apnea mask basically that's that's what it'll be all right that's enough of that let's jump back over here and finish this thing off so thanks everyone for stopping by uh the stuff i was mentioning the discord there's a nice example of seagrover's green screen uh work he took a photo i i i or i gave him a photo i had of larz on a green screen from one of the eight a box videos and he's using that for his test case which i love uh kind of like the kodak model woman from the 70s i forget her name who got used in all graphics research uh larz is the new that oh yeah there's lots of lots of good uh lots of good anakin darth vader stuff there uh any other questions looks like mouse got the new module plugged in and you think it's working that's excellent uh darth plays harmonica and good we're all caught up dj devin loves stemma makes everything so much easier i agree boy that's that's so much less wiring uh maybe we'll put the motorized vaders on a stemma board that would be nice okay that is going to do it so uh did i miss anything i think not last thing i'll i'll mention again is we've got this coupon code right here let me try to move it that didn't work uh sliders that's going to get you 10 percent off in the store so head on over at adafruit.com go to store look at new products look at old products pick some stuff you want uh and get yourself 10 off on the way out just type in that coupon code it'll take care of it all for you that code is good until the end of today east coast midnight is when it turns into a pumpkin again so go use that sliders code and get yourself some adafruit stuff build some cool things uh these faders are out of stock right now so if you want uh you can sign up to be notified when they come back in uh if you want to build a project with these they're super snazzy all right well hey thanks again everyone for stopping by that's going to do it for this week for adafruit industries i'm john park and this has been john park's workshop i will see you next week bye bye new song time