That's fun, right? I had everything perfectly set up except for one thing. That's all it takes sometimes. Hello and welcome to the show. It's me. I'm John Park. This is John Park's workshop. You are you, and you are part of our Adafruit community, so we are really excited and happy to have you joining us here today. Hi to everyone over in the YouTube chat. I see you. Anthony Becerra says that they have put together their macro pad. Hey, that's cool. We're going to be talking about the macro pad today, in fact. And I think the YouTube stream is catching up now because I'm seeing people saying, no sound, but now sound. So sound is back. In fact, I even set up a little something that I'll show later with the macro pad to maybe help me with my muting and my unmuting. It'll work something like this. Oh, you know what? I don't have it plugged in right now. I'm not going to attempt to fade. We'll do that later. Later. Later. Later. Let's see. What else is going on? We've got some fun stuff planned. I'm going to talk about some job board stuff, some product pick of the week stuff. I've got a circuit Python parsec for you. What else? And macro pad things. And then I also, taking a cue from the Ask an Engineer show, if you've got any questions, we can do some Q&A either during the show throughout or at the end. If you've got any questions, go ahead and post them over in our Discord chat or in YouTube. Those are the two I'm watching. So if you're on, if you're watching on Twitch or Periscope or LinkedIn or one of those other great places, awesome, Facebook too. But I'm not watching the chat on those because I only have so much attention I can spare on different chats. So best place to go is to the Discord. It's at the adafrew.it slash discord. If you head to that URL, you'll get an invite. You can join in the Discord. And look, this is what it looks like. If you head to the live broadcast chat channel. In fact, let me show you. Let me show you this real quick. I'm going to do a little adjustment here on the screen share and shoot that over there. There you can see that is what our channels look like there. So we have live broadcast chat. That's what, that's where you usually find people during a live broadcast. But then there's a whole slew of other channels that you can check out, especially these help channels are terrific. If you have help questions for any of these types of topics like CircuitPython, Arduino, 3D printing, audio, Raspberry Pi and so on and so on. Those are great channels to go and check out. And it's, I don't know, we have somewhere over 25,000 members, I believe, of our Discord. And there are people on there 24-7 answering questions helping each other out, making each other laugh. So I encourage you to go check it out. And that's the Discord. So that's that's what I'm talking to over there. Hello Dexter Starboard. Hey, Rich, Sad. Hi, Doctor. How are you? BlitzCityDIY. Nice to see you. Andy Calloway. Hello. I think I saw C Grover. Hey, C Grover. And question over, first question is in YouTube. Someone asks, any relation to the park brothers of DC fame? I don't think so. I don't know who those park brothers are. So I'm going to say no. Not. All right. So next thing I'll mention is we've got our job board over at jobs.adafruit.com. So if you're looking for work, there are worse places you could go than heading over to jobs.adafruit.com. This is it right here. If you head to jobs.adafruit.com, it's a free job board. You can look for jobs there. You can post your resume if you're looking for work. Here are a few new positions up at the top here that might be interesting to people. I saw this one jumped out at me. Circuit Python Coder needed for Adafruit Matrix Portal. If we click that, that went up just yesterday. Someone is looking for help with doing a 64 by 32 LED matrix using the Matrix Portal and Circuit Python. And they want to be able to show some finhub.io, stockinfo, and nomics.com crypto data. And they have some project examples they show. It's based on something that actually a good friend of mine, Mario Cruz, who is one of the people behind the Miami Maker Faire. It looks like he had a stock ticker project that's being referenced here. So really cool position. If someone's looking for some freelance work, that's a good place to check it out. And this person's looking for bids. So you can bid on how much you want to make to do that job. You probably want to get more details first. But that is just one position that is up right now on jobs.adafruit.com. So go check it out, won't you? And since I said I'm going to keep an eye out for question and answer on the Discord, I actually better do that occasionally. So I'm going to just check in on the Discord. Let's see. No question so far. Good. We're safe. OK. But I don't mean good. I mean, ask some questions. Maybe some easy ones at first. I don't know. All right. Next up, look, it's sort of a show within a show. This is a recap that I like to do about my Tuesday show. So just two short days ago, right at this time, I was running my JP's product pick of the week show. Every week, I do a product pick on Tuesdays at 1 o'clock Pacific time, 4 o'clock Eastern time, about 15 minutes to half hour. And I'll go over a new product pick, show you a little demo, how to use it. And there's usually a deep, deep discount on the product of the week during the live stream only. So that disappears after the live stream. There may be discounts at another time or coupon codes, but this one, this was 50% off on this week's product pick of the week. That is the product that I picked this week. It's the RP2040 QT Trinky, which is just a plug-in Trinky. And you can use it both as a circuit Python device as well as with Blinka to use Python on your computer. And here is a little one minute recap. The Trinky QT 2040 is a USB key and a QT RP2040 all in one. I have a magnetometer plugged into it over the STEMI QTI squared C. And then I'm going to go ahead and plug it into a hub that's plugged into my computer. I'm going to run Python code on the computer that is then using the USB connectivity of the Trinky to access the sensor here. So if I take a magnet and go ahead and move it towards and away from that little magnet sensor, you can see I have the values changing in the little terminal there as well as the NeoPixel that's built onto the Trinky updating and increasing its brightness or decreasing its brightness. So that is one really cool way that you can use the Trinky which is as a sort of go-between for your Python on your computer to talk to circuit Python-based devices. It is the Trinky QT 2040. All right, yeah, so that was our product pick of the week and you can still get them, I think. They were running low on stock the last I checked, but you can head on over to the product page and look and see if that's still available. Otherwise hit the notify me link and you'll get an email as soon as they come back in stock. Let's see. The question I got over in YouTube is, JP, do you know if Adafruit are going to make the wireless NeoPixels? That is, I think you may be referring to the inductive charged or inductive powered, induction powered LEDs that Lady Aida showed recently. I do not know if we're going to carry those. Those are, I believe, single color. I'm not sure if those have a chip in them to do any multi-color stuff. They could, but those actually have a little inductive coil, just like an RFID tag, passive RFID tag does, and then there's a large coil, inductive coil that charges it and lights up the LED when it's in a certain range. It's a really cool. In fact, I think I've seen vests that you hide under your clothes that have a coil like that for use in certain types of illusions and magic tricks. It's kind of a cool thing to see the raw parts of that. I hope we carry them. Yeah, that would be really cool. The doctor says over in Discord that those are single color, no chips. I don't know if there's a reason you couldn't. I don't know if the power consumption of the chip makes that a little harder to do. Maybe you could have a capacitor in there to store up some of that power before it lights it up. Anyway, those sometimes, so one thing that Lady Aida does a lot is source cool stuff. In fact, she is a really, really like ninja level at sourcing things from Chinese parts suppliers, and she gets in a lot of stuff to check out, and then some of that ends up in our store. Some of it ends up for one reason or another not going to the store. In short, I don't know, but I hope so. Those look really cool. A lot of fun. Let's see. I think that was the only question I saw. Yeah. Okay, so let's see. Next up, we've got our circuit Python Parsec. So get ready for this. All right, so let me get set up here. I think I've got it all set up. Yeah, okay. Looks good. For the circuit Python Parsec today, I wanted to show how you can read a rotary encoder inside of circuit Python. This is really straightforward thanks to our rotary IO library. So if you look at what I have here, I'm using one of our trinkets that's made for running a rotary encoder, but you could plug a rotary encoder into most any micro controller. It just takes ground and two pins to read which direction it's being turned. There's little internal switches that open and close. In this case, this one's purpose built for it. What we do in circuit Python is we're importing the board. So we have some pin definitions and we're importing rotary IO library. Then with that rotary IO library imported, we can do this encoder, which is the name I'm giving this, just easy to reference the encoder. This is the encoder object equals rotary IO dot incremental encoder. And then we point to the two board pins. In this case, the board pins are named wrote A and wrote B, which is super convenient. Sometimes that'll just be a general purpose IO pin or a digital pin. And that will set it up. It's going to work at this point. Everything else is just how do I want to use it? So I want to print out when it turns its position. And I only want to do that when I turn it so it's not constantly flooding. And that's why I have this variable here called last position, which is going to store the state of things. So it'll only update when it changes. Then this is the main loop of the program, while true, if encoder dot position is not the last position. So encoder dot position, that's all you have to ask for to find the value of what the encoder is doing, which way it's turning. And we can then compare that to that last position it was at. And then we know we're going to do the next thing if they've changed, which is print that encoder position. And then we update that state of the last position. So you can see here, as I turn this little knob here, that's turning that rotary encoder shaft. And that is being read by the little trinky there, microcontroller is noticing those changes on its two pins, the rotary A and rotary B pin.  So you can use this for things like volume controllers, you can use this for things like MIDI CC, for mouse control for moving a mouse on one axis. It's a lot of ways to use it. But it is dead simple to use. And that is all it takes to read a rotary encoder inside of Circuit Python, using the rotary IO library. And that is your Circuit Python Parsec. Tremendous. I love how easy that that has become to use things like rotary encoders. There are, by the way, a lot of these rotary encoders, I didn't show this, but a lot of these rotary encoders have a second little secret up their sleeve, which is they have a push button. So let me move this one to camera. So this one, you can actually click the knob down and it has a button that's read just like any, any digital button, digital input button. So it's actually separate from rotary IO, that library doesn't actually care about that. That's a separate set of pins that are being used over there. Let's see, what else? See Grover says it's possible to preset the encoder position value. Oh, yeah, so if you're using it for something like a volume and you want to start at when you boot this up some preset because these encoders are called sometimes endless encoders because they will spin forever in either direction. They don't have stops like a potentiometer does. So sometimes you don't want to start them at zero. So you can actually tell it, hey, you're, you're sort of relative starting position is going to be in this case, let's say 12. And then when I turn to the right one, one little notch will go up to 13. If we go left, we'll go to 11. So also sometimes those are those directions are not what you would expect. So depending on the board setup, the encoder may decrease as you turn clockwise and increase as you turn counterclockwise. It's easy to change that encode this in this case, this one set up to work the way the way that I expect it. Although I'll show you, let's let's jump back here for a second. This is a little experiment. I think with this one, if I just change the pin order, so if I say, let me increase the scale of that a little, you can see that better. So if I tell it to actually read pin B wrote B first and pin A wrote a second. And then I'm going to hit save this is going to resave my code to the board. And now when I turn this to the right, you can see it's going in the negative. So it's subtracting from the original position. And the positive is counterclockwise. The let's see, actually, I want to try what see Grover said you can do encoder dot position equals okay, so we can give it a starting position. Let's do that. encoder dot position equals 12. Gonna hit save. And now you'll see when I start turning it, it's moving from 12 as it's starting point. I'll flip these back to the clockwise is positive setting. And now if you're using this particularly if you're in something that has let's say some graphical levels and some software and you're sending it either incremental arrow keys to bump a value up that often works or something like MIDI CC values, we can start at at something, in this case, we're starting at 12. And now we're going back down to zero and we'll go below. You can also do things like set the range to clamp at certain points. So it never goes lower than a certain number, never goes higher than a certain number. That would all be in software, the encoder doesn't care, just keep turning. And you can you can remap those into different ranges. There's a lot of neat stuff you can do with your code once you have this basic thing working of reading your encoders.  And this one actually is a grab a Alan hex driver here. This knob here is go to a bigger view for you. This knob is on here with a little set screw that clamps it to the D shaft. Do I have the right size? I don't think I have the right size Alan wrench. Oh, there we go. No, one putting on glasses. Are you going to fit? No, that's too big. Hold on. This is a knob that Adafruit sells, by the way. I've disconnected it now. I definitely this is definitely not the right size either. Hold on, how did I get this on in the first place? I swear it was one of these. How about you? How about you? Haha. There we go. Sorry about that. Yeah, so that was a two, a two millimeter socket. So these have a little usually have a little D shaft on them. And you can use either a D shaped knob. These usually ship with a little soft touch rubber knob, go into my bin of knobs. I don't have one of those in here. But you can see something like these little jog wheel knobs will work on those. And those have a little D shaft shape.  And same thing, it has a little D shaft there. So those will all slip onto there. So you can get some cool knobs onto there other than just that default. Usually, by the way, you don't want an indicator on these. Since they are endless, that indicator doesn't isn't very meaningful, usually. So you'll usually see on encoders, a on an endless encoder, you'll see no no marking indicator, versus something like a potentiometer that has stops on it. And then, you know, that means something that means something here. Those those indicators usually aren't useful. All right. So let's see, let's get back to questions. I thought I saw another one. Stuart Riggs says rotary encoders on Arduino was a process for me. Yeah, I it's been a while since I've done them. And I believe that there was a bit of a process for it. But usually there's a library that makes life easier with these things. What else? Oh, let me pop up the discord here so you can follow along. Let me move that piece out of my face there. There we go. Good. All right. Oh, yeah. So Todd bought said that since this is a metal knob, this is a this is a metal knob here. You can do is cap sense hack, which I, we need to look at that. I need to try that out. I'll show it on the show sometime. Todd bought came up with a way to use the metal knob on the metal shaft as a cap sense input so that you can tell if you're touching the knob or not. And that's different from clicking it in the case of a push encoder and it's different from turning it. And I don't know did Todd tell us did you do that with I don't know what board you used. I know that this trinky has cap sense here so you could maybe run a wire from that to a part of the rotary encoder itself. I'm not sure if that's how you did that. How'd you do that? Clever Todd. Excellent. All right, so let's get to the project of the week. Get this thing out of the way. So this is I'd love to introduce our new macro pad. You may have seen us talking about it a bit. Oh, look, and there's one of those those knobs I was talking about. So that's our kind of default soft touch knob that we put on there. So I'm going to show you it in action first and talk about the software then I'll take it apart and put it back together since I wanted to start with this actually working since I know it is right now. So let's start off with what is this thing. So this is an RP 2040 chip on there same as the Pico from Raspberry Pi. It's the Raspberry Pi chip. And this has a set of 12 mechanical key switches. So it has 12 pins on the RP 2040 that are being used directly as digital inputs, which means we're not doing a scan matrix and we're not doing a shift register. It's just individual inputs. And they all have neopixels underneath them so they can be individually addressed to do different color things. And that can be anything from just light them up a color light each key a different color change colors when you press them have the colors change when you adjust the rotary encoder or something else in your software needs to update you. But we also have this really great OLED screen on here and that means that we can do I think it's 128 by 64 so we can do some pretty nice sharp display especially of things like little text labels which I'll show you I'm working on that. And then it has the push encoder on there a little rotary encoder with the clicky button. And that is that is about the shape of things. And so what I'm going to do is plug in first of all I've got a USB C cable here and I happen to have a little right angle connector on it which I like for sending that cable off to the side. This is a cable that I just coiled earlier today I didn't coil it super tight but I coiled it over brass tube heated it up and then chilled it with some upside down air air air duster can canister my old hack for that so it's got it's a long cable and I just wanted to be shorter and coilier so now it is and you can see now this thing's lit up so let me let me give you a top down view of that so you can see a little better. What's going on and let me put me off to the side there there we go. So you can see here when this starts up it gives me a little readout on the screen that says its name macro pad PID by the way my camera setup is giving it a little bit of a flicker to the screen that you don't see in real life so just so you know it's it's not doing this on you all the time it's actually sharp and still. So actually since we just talked about rotary encoder you can see here I've got a little readout on the screen there of my rotary encoder position starts at zero when you start it up and now we can adjust that. I have code in there which I'm not using right now that will adjust the volume and I didn't want to be messing with this computer while I'm while I'm trying to do the show because that that can be a bad thing so actually commented out that as well as the mute so when I press this button it does the mute it also you can see flashes my flashes the brights there so that all the LEDs all those neopixels have a brightness value of point one out of a possible one and when I press this it goes all the way up cranks up to full full one brightness. And then here on the side all I've got is just a little label set of labels basically that's telling me what do these keys do I have them set up as a number pad right now. So if I want to use let's say a different camera I can hit four five and six and those are just sending the HID keyboard command of<PHONE_NUMBER> and then I have star and asterisk just like or star and hashtag or pound just like a phone keypad basically and those are just sending those as if I typed them on my keyboard they do the exact same thing so if I if I put if I just hit one on my let's say four five six on my regular keyboard it's the same as four five six here and the HID commands they'll they can be anything you want if you're just using USB HID keyboard stuff they can be a keystroke they can also be keystroke combinations so you can do control alt delete if you want it to you can you can do copy paste buttons that are actually a group of macros which is why these are called macro pads a lot of the time so sort of a little different than just a number pad which usually has one or maybe two functions it's usually either a 10 key number input with calculator buttons for plus minus divide multiply that's pretty typical a lot of number pads on either built onto your keyboard as a separate device will have a num lock button in the upper left corner that switches the function of some keys to be arrow keys and a few other things like page up page down I think so that's that's usually the number pad the macro pad is more of a it can be anything you want type of thing you could for example potentially code it so that it works in this sort of sideways orientation and you might use something that requires three rows of four keys for however you want to use it maybe it's for gaming if you have chains of commands that you want to send will be doing some projects with with that sort of idea in mind I think I'm going to do a minecraft cheat pad kind of thing for creative mode that that does different types of macros and turbo things and you can also create layers of functionality with this I think Phil B might be working on a macro pad for graphics software shortcuts where you could just turn your knob and go between okay here's my shortcuts in Photoshop when I'm painting in Photoshop here's the shortcuts when I'm doing photo editing here's set of illustrator shortcuts so you can do a lot with that that I think it would be useful to update this little screen here to tell you what those are being used for doctor says they want to use this as a cyberdeck type of thing in a movie absolutely it's definitely well well suited for that let's see the code for this let me let me jump over to Adam and switch switch out actually let's go to where'd that view go I have a convenient view setup for this that one will work really well yeah okay so in here in my text editor this is the code I'm running right now on this and a lot of this is in flux so right now there are a few libraries I'm using to accomplish this which will I think we're we're planning to make some convenience a convenience library for macro pad Catney's working on it right now that will do some of the setup and things for you it won't it won't mean you can't do the same stuff it'll just make some things a little easier to do so mine you can see I'm importing a ton of libraries right now the key one here pardon the pun is keypad so in fact let me jump let me jump to my browser here for a second and I'll show you a few things first of all here's this product there's a couple of versions of it's out of stock right now but you can you can sign up to be notified when it's back in stock there's another version that is the bare bones kit which is just the PCB pre-soldered but you'll have to bring your own switches bring your own key caps and bring your own mounting solutions or you can buy a little extras kit we have that includes the plate that kind of keeps the keys locked in next to each other so they don't wobble which can happen if you don't you don't put that in as well as this beautiful silk screen that Phil bill Phil B did that goes on the back and we'll take a closer look at that in a second when I take this apart if you head to the main guide which just came out yesterday from catney this will go over the basics and how to use it in both circuit python and in Arduino and one of the keys to this is this keypad and matrix scanning in circuit python library that dan halbert wrote this is able to read individual GPIO pins like we're doing here but it can also read a key matrix a scan matrix that's like a diode matrix with columns and rows as well as a shift register set up that uses a shift register to check the different pins and the different keys and so that's what I'm using and I'll show you show you how that works for the basics of it and and the specifics of how I'm using this project so I won't go through this in excruciating detail all of these things here but the main thing here that I want to talk about is the setup for using the keys so I've imported that keypad library I've imported the board library since I've imported those two things I can do this I can set up this list of the different keys that I'm using and I'm picking those in this order of I think one is the upper left corner and 12 is the bottom right corner and you'll you'll notice those pins are not zero indexed these names of these objects these board objects have one indexed which keeps it a little more in tune with the way a number pad or macro pad works or the way people think about it and then I'm creating this keypad object so it's we're calling it keys this could be anything could be called macro pad but the key pad dot keys as then being fed this list of the key pins so these are the pins I'm using so if you wanted to use this on something else let's say you wanted to use it on a QT pie for example or a feather board you would just feed it the list of the the GPIO pins that you're using with buttons or keys attached to them and then we're setting it to say are we going higher low or true or false when we press and is it a pull pull up which we're saying true it's pull up resistor so that again might vary depending on the type of board you're using it with then we do some stuff where I'm setting up some variables for colors I'm setting up my HID both keyboard and consumer control which is stuff like mute and volume up my volume down and then I've got this code that I keep recycling or slightly changing that I did first with I think the launch deck project I built using the trellis M4 and then again with my Pico keyboard that I built and now again what I'm doing here is I have this dictionary that includes 12 items in it and then each of those have their own little set of data that I want which is the color that I want the key to be whether it's going to be a key press or a media control thing in this case they're all key so they all say key there and then what they do when they get pressed so here you can see I've got seven eight nine four five six one two three and then the shift eight which is the star the zero and then shift three which is the hashtag so we have some great guides about how to use HID keyboard commands and lists of what those are and one thing you have to be aware of is that things aren't always named what you expect they're going to be named so there is not a star or an asterisk or pound or a hashtag instead those are named for the shift function of of some of the number keys in this case if you wanted a capital A you would do key code shift comma key code a so that's that's how you're able to string things together which means you can do big huge key commands control all shift delete right arrow all that's possible then I'm setting up the encoder just just the same way I showed before as well as doing the switch on it setting up the neopixels on here and then setting up the display and we'll do more stuff with the display as I as we're going to incorporate some display stuff into the library for the macro pad so I won't go into it now this is just using sort of our our traditional display IO for graphics and then I'm setting up the title here and the text for the read out of the knob and then I'm setting up this little set of variables for where I want to place these little labels this little cheat sheet and then I have this set of labeled data that again is is kind of a dictionary of my what's being displayed where it is on x where it is on y by the way thanks to our good friend Todd bot for helping me come up with a somewhat succinct way of doing that so this this runs through and sets up all of those rather than one at a time setting all those labels which is makes things more efficient thank you Todd and then getting back to the meat of how keypad works this is the sort of key thing event it is event based and event equals the keys event get so this is part of Dan Halbert's keypad library it goes in it just sweeps through and checks either the matrix the shift register or in this case just all of those pins all 12 of those pins and says has anything changed if nothing has changed that means nothing's being pressed then I'm going to go ahead and do all this stuff with the encoder from changing its value on there to changing the brightness so all of that encoder code is happening when no keys are pressed including I'm using the debouncer for checking the switch when that switch falls you can see here right now I'm just printing the word mute let me go ahead and show you my serial output here so you can see it's changing that value as well as printing volume up or volume down I'm just doing those right now instead of having those actually change my volume or my mute but these are the codes these are the commands that I commented out so we're not doing those right now volume increment volume decrement and mute and then the actual reading of the keys is kind of the main event right here again pardon the pun num equals event dot key number so event returns which key number has had something happen and then if that event is it being pressed we do one thing and if that event is it being released we do a different thing so what I'm doing here is keyboard dot press and then going up and checking my little dictionary there to see which thing for the currently pressed key happens so I'll place my cursor here and I'm going to press the bottom right key which as we can see from the legend is the hashtag there so that's a comment that's kind of a safe thing now I can go through and start typing stuff and you'll also notice this has key repeat because we're using the HID key command of press rather than the HID key command of send so send I actually am using that with my mute CC send that sends a one time thing when it gets pressed and doesn't really care if it's been released or not but that means you can't kind of hang on that and spam that button with the press and release it will which is great for things where you do want to have a key repeat happening and delete that out of there I need those then I'm also printing the name of whatever I've done down here in my serial ports you can see not only is the event returning its thing which is this print event so that's kind of what the library the keypad library knows is okay event key number nine was pressed or released which is nice for debugging I won't need those in the end probably don't need these print statements here either but I may end up using that for some stuff on the screen so maybe nice to highlight a character when it is being pressed or just show you a little print out of what you've you've typed in there almost like a ledger and a calculator type of thing and you can also see when I press a key I am changing the pixel to red so here you can see that goes red when it's get pressed and then it goes back to its default color when it's released and that default is taken again from this dictionary key map whichever item in that dictionary it is and then the zero item within that little sublist which is the the color and then I show the pixels that's the the new pixel since they're not set to auto show and then I have a little debounce here that I probably don't even need because I'm printing and and lighting up the pixels which means that there's probably not a not a huge chance of needing it the I believe these are automatically debounced internally in fact let's let's shut this off and see if I'm if I'm right we should be it behaves as as expected let's see this is stuff yep yeah so I don't need that in fact we probably don't need time in here at all unless you decide to start doing doing some other things like counting elapsed milliseconds to do some light show stuff that kind of thing so that was a lot let's see are there questions encoder can be used to set different profiles for different programs and uses as doctor absolutely that's I think a really cool idea it gives you a lot of versatility in fact if you look at the project that I was working on last week using my keypad as a modal MIDI keyboard I don't have a order encoder or screen on there and even have new pixels so everything I do is kind of key combos on start up or or when it's running to send MIDI panic this instead allows you to do you know I in fact I'm gonna I think I'm gonna rewrite that a version of that for this so that I can pick scales and keys from the screen using the encoder the question is does the key repeat is the same delay frequency of the OS settings yes I am 99% sure that that is the case because there's nothing in this code and I don't think there's anything in the the library for HID it is just simply sending the press HID command or message and then the operating system is doing with that what it wants and so your operating system key repeat should be what what we're seeing there so yes same as pressing regular keyboard interestingly in some cases with with regular keyboards particularly older keyboards that might have an LED underneath the caps lock and and maybe the scroll lock and maybe escape those LEDs are actually not driven by the microcontroller inside the keyboard it's actually a message coming back from the computer so if you're ever fooling around with an old keyboard and you're trying to send like a ps2 keyboard and you're trying to get the lights on it to light up they won't until you have either microcontroller your computer on the other end sending a command back telling it to to do the thing which is which is kind of interesting let's see any other questions no okay so let's let's jump over here to the bench and I will pull this apart for you so you can see how it goes together and also take a look at the beautiful parts on here let's see we have yeah we have about 15 minutes so I think we're good on time let's do a bit of a zoom in here set that there where you can see it and some stuff out of the way so first of all the keycaps you're going to pry these off this is one of these little whisk looking egg beater type of keycap pullers those are really nice because they they slip in in a pretty thin space and then you just twist them to grab the corners of the key switch sometimes you can just get your finger up under there it depends on the case that you have so so with these you can get the two outer ones from the sides and then get that middle one so you don't really need that but with a more traditional keyboard that has a top enclosure sometimes you need this sort of thing to get in there now these are i'm using these are cherry mx compatible switches from kale these are called box reds and they are linear key switches these are the ones that come with our starter kit version of this that comes with all the parts so that's what you'll get but you can pop different keycaps in there in order to do that what we'll do is we're actually going to pry up all of these keys because of the way the plate works they've all been pressed into that plate and then into the socket so you just want to be a little careful that you don't bend them so that's all it took there and now you can see we've got our our key switches there these then pop out of here so again you don't want to bend the little legs on them but that's what that will look like when you start uh i don't think i have any other key switches are laying around here uh right now they're all in my studio but the um the plate there isn't isn't strictly necessary if you place that on and press it in there it works it's fairly stable you get it at an angle you can you can start to bump it up uh which is what this plate is about the plate is there to to keep these sort of connected to each other mechanically so they don't move as much but that right there will work just the same as um as not having that in fact let me plug this into some power um so you can see say that but let's uh actually find a cable long enough uh in fact let me go grab a longer woven cable from over here so these are these new whoops i just tried to sabotage my microphone hopefully that's still working uh yeah still working uh so this is the the new uh cable that we one of the new cables that we sell that's a usb-a on one side and usb-c on the other uh and it's nice and long so i'm just going to plug this into power sometimes usb based stuff doesn't really run right when you just plug it into power and not a computer but this should light up at least um yeah actually it's failing just it's getting to a part where usb won't initialize uh because because this is not on a an actual computer but you can see there that light is is blinking there there's like a little um let's see i'm going to reset this with this side button see that that's blinking to tell me there's a problem and the code only gets this far and then it says hey usb hid is busy i can't connect anything um so but yeah all of this will run and in fact all these key switches are doing is shorting those two pins so there's a data pin and a ground pin that are getting shorted to each other so you could you grab a wire and do like this and that's the same as uh as pressing any of those keys so you got your keycaps you got your uh plate here to hold the key switches next to each other we have these socketed kale sockets for the key switches and then we have these underlit neopixels so they're mounted on the reverse side but pointing up through those holes and then we got our little display in our encoder so then this back plate this is just a sort of a case to keep things flat so you can put it on a desk and we got a set of bumpers on there bumpons and these are some uh surface mount threaded bosses that you can screw into with a m3 screw uh so that comes soldered on there these are actually pick and placeable solderable things um and then this is this beautiful uh decorative plate that you will never see unless you mount it backwards like that which you have the option to mount it either way you like uh that phil b did defies your own paths and there you can see there's there's the board so here is the uh rp2040 right there with the little raspberry pi logo on it you might be able to see here's the connector for the display and a little ribbon cable usb c here uh there's a little speaker there uh so we're working on uh catney's working on code in fact to to be able to use that speaker uh with the library with the new uh macro pad library that's coming out and then here's this reset button there's also a stem a qt uh port right there that you'll be able to use to plug in any of our sensors or external things so uh that is the main way you'll connect other stuff to this because it doesn't have uh gpio pins available with a header or anything like that so that is the the one way that you'll connect to sort of the outside world of sensors and devices um oh i think that was hidden sorry that was hidden under a camera view i wasn't paying attention to sorry about that um yeah so that's that's Phil's back plate there which is beautiful uh and then lastly i i don't know if i mentioned this before but the boot button is one in the same with that rotary encoder switch so when you want to put new firmware on this you hold boot you press reset you release reset you release boot and then it'll go into the uh the boot loader drive where you can load on firmware after that uh process once it's booted up once the code is running then this can be used as a general purpose i o switch and uh i think that's it so let's put it back together um and sorry i can't see questions from here very well so if there were questions about this while it's open um i'll let me run over there real quick before i fully assemble this just to see uh doctor says macro pet lets you do everything daft punk style yeah a sound board would be terrific work it harder uh let's see hello from the school of cosplay in vegas says gamer versus taylor we're going to be interest integrating adafruit into our lessons later this year thank you so much for this oh that's great very cool thanks for letting us know i love the sound of that school of cosplay that's fantastic uh uh be beata graff of dal hagan says yeah the pins on those key switches are kind of weak they're very thin they're very weak they're just an extension of the the thin little metal inside the switch so yeah they're super easy to bend you do want to be careful putting those back in in fact let me go um put these back in over here and show you this process so um i think there may be a couple of ways to do this but the way that uh the two ways that i've tried and succeeded with um somewhat equally is just place them all in the switch plate first like this uh and then check very carefully that none of them are bent and straighten them if they are uh this especially if you if you're grabbing a you know handfulish of switches out of a drawer or something like that and make sure those are not bent and then you're just going to very carefully place the whole thing like that and double and triple check from the side that that everyone looks like they're lined up properly uh and then just start squeezing that down and as you do that you just want to keep an eye the other way to do it is to just place one switch in through the plate and then another from the corner and work your way around uh but then they're you're both clicking them through the plate and into um their little uh sockets so i think this is looking pretty good and then really you don't know if there's a bent pin there until you um plug this into your computer and try it that's really hard to see a bent pin in there luckily if you're careful you can unbend them you can pull it out and unbend it in fact this one i did that there's one there's one leg on here that got bent that i had to take it out and straighten it with some needle nose pliers uh so it's definitely possible so let's jump back uh over here for a second and see if we succeeded and uh there's a few ways we'll know one is just uh if the leds change color if they change to red that means that it knows i've pressed them just because that's what my code does so yay that'll work and then i'll double check over here in my serial output and uh and just by typing in usb uh that it's registering seven eight nine four five six one two three star zero and pounds so all that's working uh correct so that's about it that's how it works um let me know if you have any other questions we're just about out of time thanks for uh thanks for stopping in for today for a fun look at this new macro pad and uh now i'm going to get to work on some some projects with it so i've already got kind of a cool camera switcher out of the uh out of the bargain here uh but i'm gonna i'm going to work on porting my uh code over for the uh the midi modal music stuff and and change that a little bit uh i just saw a question come through oh wow i've i've got to scroll down there's a bunch of questions um am i going to go blind from direct exposure in neopixels it's possible these are bright uh the keycaps help a little to diffuse it and where do you order the board for your pico keyboard i did not see it on oshpark oh i might not have shared it on oshpark i thought i had but i will thanks stewart i will check uh oh in fact let me let me bring up discord as i go through these questions um the let's go to the um chrome for a second here stewart's referring to this guide uh let's go pico mechanical keyboard with fritzing so you could upload uh in this i tell you uh i give you the gerber file that you would need or the zip file of gerbers you would need to send it uh to oshpark or uh jlc pcb is the place where i had i had it made it made it both of them um but under ordering pcb's there's the gerber yeah okay i guess i didn't okay i didn't share it on oshpark i thought i had i'll share it on oshpark and put a link there um but you could upload it if you want to and uh let's see can we send you letters and or packages um i don't have a p o box but i've been thinking about getting one doctor so if i do i will um i will post because i'm happy to do viewer mail show off stickers uh what have you so um local beers i don't know but yeah i will i'll be setting something up because i've gotten that question before and that would be loads of fun uh and free stuff right so why not uh oh doctor has a has a nice let me throw the discord back on here doctor has a nice um diy version of the keypad going using three of the one by fours that's excellent all right good well i think that's about it um oh question over on youtube from hendrik putt geiter says hi from south africa have you got anything with lidar and do you ship to south africa i do not know if we ship to south africa i believe we have one lidar um yeah we have this there's a few things calling themselves lidar i think of the slam tech if you're if you're talking about like the uh i think that's the rotating rangefinder type that you put on an autonomous vehicle uh so we do have uh a few lidar things so if you go to ate a fruit and and look for lidar uh you should see it there as far as where we ship boy that's an excellent question i'm trying to think where we have that info um let me check on shipping and returns overseas military shipping options international orders uh we do dhl express worldwide to canada europe yeah we do it says all other international locations so the only question mark i think with that is sometimes if an item is considered to be restricted for certain countries so i don't know um but you could certainly ask in the um either support at ate a fruit dot com email address or go to the forums and ask uh and we should be able to help you out if anyone knows in the chat if anyone's ordered uh items to south africa please let me know um and that's about it i think that's going to do it so thank you everyone uh so much for stopping by to play around with this with me super fun and uh i can't wait to see the kinds of projects people are going to do once they get their own so uh sign up now i think we had about a hundred uh that we shipped uh and we'll be making more so uh stay tuned so you can get your own all right thanks everyone and i will see you next tuesday with a product pick of the week and next thursday with a new john park's workshop bye bye


Science and technology is important because it brings warfighting concepts to reality. My name is Victoria Blair and I'm a materials engineer for the U.S. Army. As a materials engineer, I develop new sensor windows, which are protection for sensitive electronics and cameras on U.S. platforms. I love a technical challenge and this is one of the most difficult scientific problems in ceramic science. If I'm successful then we'll be able to have more options for guidance to guide warfighters in a challenging scenario. I'm proud to serve the U.S. Army with my science. I am the Forge.


Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotch tank peoples. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's conversation with Francesca Morgan about her new book, A Nation of Descendants, which looks at how genealogy has been used by specific groups and how its use has changed over time. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two programs that you can view later this month on our YouTube channel. On Friday, October 22nd at noon, NASA astronaut Nicole Stott will discuss her work on the International Space Station and share insights from scientists, activists, and change makers who are working to solve our greatest environmental challenges. Her new book is Back to Earth. And on Wednesday, October 27th at 1 p.m., Nathaniel Philbrick will discuss Travels with George, his new book that recounts his own modern-day journey based on George Washington's presidential excursions. In the late 1970s, National Archives research rooms saw a surge in new researchers inspired by Alex Ailey's book and television show Roots. They searched for their own family links, not necessarily defined an illustrious ancestor, but to discover where they came from and to understand their place in history. Those who come to the National Archives to search for family connections usually start with census records which show us individuals, families, and neighborhoods, pinpointing a specific line on the form identifies a person and looking at the whole page and its surrounding pages gives a snapshot of the community in which they lived. In less than six months, on April 1st, 2022, we'll open the 1950 census and get a look at another historical slice of America. Censuses may be the entry point, but the National Archives researchers also sift through records documenting immigration and naturalization, military and civilian service, bankruptcies, taxation, schools, and much more. Many of these records are available online at the National Archives website and through our digital partners. And as any researcher can tell you, being able to make a personal connection to one of the millions of stories contained in these records is a feeling like no other. Francesca Morgan is Associate Professor of History at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago and author of Women in Patriotism in Jim Crow America. Her research interests include the history of genealogy in the United States since 1800. Joining Francesca Morgan in conversation is Karen Wolf, who is Historian of 18th Century British America. Her research focuses on gender, family, and political culture. Her latest book, Lineage, Genealogy and the Power of Connection in British America, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Now let's hear from Francesca Morgan and Karen Wolf. Thank you for joining us today. Hello. Thank you all so much for being with us and thank you to the National Archives and to the Archivist for that very warm welcome. Francesca, it is wonderful to be in conversation with you. We have talked about your research over years and it's delightful to see this marvelous book, actually, and to hold it and to read it. So congratulations to you, first of all. Thank you. I thought we would just start with talking a little bit about genealogy itself. That is, what is genealogy and why is it so popular? And tell us a little bit about genealogy's popularity and then we'll dig into some of the themes of the book. All right. Well, to make a long story short, you would answer this question differently depending on where we are in history and what culture we're in, but I can say with confidence that in modern times, genealogy in many ways is an interstate highway leading to history. It's for people who just love explorations of the past, but it also speaks volumes about our present, our identities as individuals. And of course, in my book, I get very involved with genealogy's meanings for all sorts of group boundaries and group sorting and all these different things. I'm going to keep my answer short because I want to allow time for as many questions as I can. Karen, I can spend the rest of the hour on your question, but I think I'm going to look it there. I hear you. I hear you. Well, it is phenomenal, really, the popularity of genealogy, even if we just think about the space that it has taken up in libraries, if we think about the volume of publications devoted to genealogy, if we think about the space on the Internet or in the world of entertainment now that genealogy is occupying. It's really an extraordinary phenomenon. And I think, you know, your book talks, though, about not just genealogy's popularity or how it is for Americans today, but about the history of genealogy. So tell us a little bit about how genealogy actually has a history. That is, it's not just a practice that is kind of obvious and that people just set out and do, but that it actually has its own history. Tell us a little bit about that. You're so right. The modernity popularity of genealogy, including online, is very characteristic of our historical moment and what can I say? It's a very, very, very old habit. And as you noticed, a worldwide habit, if you will, in nations and civilizations of all that you can think of, it takes a lot, it takes a big effort not to see all the ways genealogy operated in the past or to have an impression of it. You know, you can point to medieval Europe. You can point to Confucianism in China. All sorts of things. And I can say more about the past and the present in the United States. If you want me to, but in the meantime, I'm going to go on to your next question, you know, as go back and go further in depth on any of these points. So one of the things that you say in your book is that not only does genealogy have a history that we can explore through the history of genealogical institutions or genealogical kind of cultural phenomena, but you also say that there is a political dimension to genealogy. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by the politics of genealogy? I mean, it's right there in your title. Politics. Right there. Nation of descendants. Politics in the practice of genealogy in U.S. history. Can you talk a little bit about that? Right. Well, I define the word politics very broadly. Not just the working of governmental institutions. I have a lot about laws and so forth, depending on genealogy, record keeping and chapter one, but politics also means very broadly the workings of power. I talk about social hierarchies of all kinds, as well as challenges to all sorts of social hierarchies. I'm thinking very broadly race, class, gender, particular religious minorities, particular ethnic groups, and I could go just on and on. But yes, I'm especially interested in genealogy, as I said, as sort of all the ways that it keeps and weakens group boundaries and all the ways that it seals hierarchies of all sorts socially. Okay. So if genealogy has a history and there is a kind of political dimension to that history in the United States, which is the focus of your book, let's talk a little bit about how American genealogy is. That is that what is this specifically American-ness in your book? If genealogy is a practice that across time and space, there aren't a lot of things that historians like to think about as trans-historical, but genealogical practice seems to be one of them. But what is it that's so American about what you've captured here about this modern history of genealogy? Absolutely. The things that are characteristically American about genealogy practice in the U.S. going way back is that all the ways that it reconstituted are social hierarchies in the wake of the American Revolution where we supposedly did away with hereditary forms of government. Think about aristocrats. Think about monarchs inheriting their position. Supposedly we did away with all of that, but there's a whole number of ways that authority is replaced, especially in everyday social life. I noticed another one of your questions was about genealogy cultures in republics that don't have aristocrats right there with their family crests. That really flows into the question of genealogy in the United States. Another thing I want to say about distinctively American forms of genealogy is that this country has been a world leader in what I'm going to call genealogy for profit, genealogy businesses, genealogy as a vocation, as a career, as a hobby, and especially in the last 30 years. There's relatively new and recent form of mass genealogy commerce, and genealogy as entertainment on screen and also everything that tourists do when they're on route trips, not to mention all the ways this appears on your reality show. All of that is, it's so American. And I can go on from there on another thing that I think I can say is characteristically American is as genealogy businesses and commercialized forms of genealogy go from small to big from corner over here to mass. We have an anti-commercial backlash of sorts that takes the form of scholarly genealogy and that's still around today. Another word for that genre within genealogy practice is professional. I tend to use the word professional for them. It isn't just career genealogists, but there really is a sense of a professional than something that must be taught and adherence to primary documents. You might think, what's anti-commercial about that? Well, as we say among historians, are we doing the past for its own sake? Are we trying to foster empathy with the very different ways of thinking in the past? Or are we looking at the past in a way that will serve the present? Are we finding congenial values in the past of the sort that we want to reinforce in the present day, all the ways that interpretations of the past can serve the present? So anyhow, with professionals, we find history for its own sake. Among business people, because their clients is the descendant, certainly we find many instances of studies of the past deployed to serve the needs of the present, and I would dare say the market. Again, I'm seeing meanings of America all over that. Both things. Yeah, that's so interesting. Let me go back and ask you to pick up one of those threads. You say in the book that there is this kind of notion of the American character forged in the revolution, anti-monarchical. The American Revolution is the triumph of individualism over hereditary government. So it is the American Patriots against King George and the monarchy. And the notion is that Americans have a kind of spirit and ethic of individualism, that it matters who you are individually and not where you come from, not what your family background is. And you say in the book that it's striking that not just in the United States, but elsewhere, the genealogy seems to be most robust, not in countries or societies where heredity still really matters governmentally, but in republics and democracies. So can you talk about that a little bit? That seems really contradictory. Why would there be so much investment in hereditary background in places where, you know, the democratic ethos suggests that it matters. The individual is what matters, not the family background. One would think that my two second, my shorter answer to your very rich question is to say once again, in republics and democracies that have experienced that kind of revolution, and we can apply this all over North America anyway, I think it's safe to say that in the absence of hereditary government, group hierarchies of all sorts get reinscracked. And I don't need to tell you or my audience all the ways that some of these hierarchies, and this is kind of different, are thought of in a hereditary way. Race is something said to be inherited, for example. So you look around in these republics and you find all of these other institutions in both government and outside government that reinscribe heredity. Another thing from the U.S. history, enslavement, slavery, that's hereditary through the mother in a country where supposedly, Thomas Jefferson said the dead have no rights. The Tocqueville remarked on all the ways Democrats sever themselves from the past, always contradictory on this point. Yeah, I could go on, but that's a really good question and I can answer it for later times. Okay, so let me press you on another, and we will absolutely are going to come back to the question about slavery and race and how that plays a role in the history and politics of genealogy. But let me press you on another very American dimension, which is Latter-day Saints and the importance of Latter-day Saints and the Mormon Church in fostering not just genealogical consciousness and practice, but also genealogical institutions. Can you talk about that a little bit too, because that's a very American phenomenon that then has a very global impact. Made in the USA, but since 1996, there have been more Latter-day Saints outside the United States than inside American export, if you will, in so many ways. Yes, to answer your question, within this realm that I just described of the American Republic where social differences get reinscribed, within the history of Mormonism, very, very early, literally starting with Joseph Smith, the founder of the religion and the church. There's this spiritual, I would say virtual form of outreach to the dead to garner more souls. As a worshipper, you have to show that you've done this outreach for the dead. The church doesn't claim knowledge about whether the dead person responds and accepts baptism or not. But anyhow, there's this basic obligation in the course of worship, this basic temporal ceremony where you fill this obligation to evangelize the dead. And this importance of reaching out to the dead to your fate in the afterlife has been a tremendous motivating character, a tremendous motivation and grows your numbers and grows your commitment to institutions within the church, institutional commitments towards record keeping, and I'm talking about the massive index card file that became that massive cave full of microfilm negatives and nowadays massive digital holdings on familysearch.org. We pass through the generations, we see a change in scale, but it really builds on a very old tendency that when we take even a casual look at the business history of genealogy, every time we see, not every time, but every time since 1945 where we've seen a bigger business than before, we can point to founders of a business and a lot of the people of patronize the business as having Latter-day Saints, roots or some kind of affiliation. Ancestry Inc., which later became Ancestry.com was started in the early 80s, 1980s to a couple of young, recent graduates of Brigham Young University, which is the church's university. So, yeah, both in and outside the church, including in private life where there are businesses, we see that. So important, let me just ask you to expand even a little bit more on that because the influence of the Latter-day Saints I think is so significant and for anybody who is doing genealogical research online, which is how most people are encountering that research now, whether it's FamilySearch or Ancestry.com, they're influenced by those, you know, that century plus of genealogical record keeping and research and aggregation. So can you talk a little bit about, you talked about Joseph Smith and his first vision and how that influenced ideas about baptism of the dead and baptizing ancestors into the church, but also Wilford Woodruff is so important in the later 19th century and really comes into the story in a powerful way that you tell about the influence of Mormonism and American genealogy. Okay, just to modify something very quickly what you said, if there are experts or people deeply knowledgeable of Latter-day Saints out there, this was not in the first vision in particular, this was in, I'm safe to say, the second or third or very early vision with the, sorry, angelic visit and the talk of the dead brother. Okay, sorry to cut to the chase here on the rest of the question. Wilford Woodruff, I remind you, as president of the church in the 1890s after decades and decades of being a missionary and so many other things to say, being church president and within the Church of the Life, Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is like being a pope. It's a quite hierarchical priesthood setup within the church and this bears in what I'm gonna say next. It's with his presidency that the church begins its commitment to genealogy institutions focusing on amassing information about earthly relations. We see a new explicit talk of getting your relations to your living and dead relatives who are family to you sealed. That becomes explicit. Why does it become explicit in the 1890s? It's when the church ceases its practice of spiritual adoption. I'm happy to say there's some new work coming out. Megan Stanton, if you're out there and give me a shout on the church's practices of spiritual adoptions which I can talk about more but as the adoptions cease to grow, the church stops its practice it turns to this much more explicit talk of sealing yourself to the biological we might say the blood relatives that you have. And there's some wonderful quotations from Woodruff. So Woodruff, his presidency marks the turning point where we start to see the very first array of genealogy institutions and instruction and genealogy columns in the Latter-day Saints newspaper, the Deseret News, and it goes on from there. Lots to say about these different stages in the 20th century. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. So let's talk a little bit more about something you raised earlier just briefly which is about the significance of race and the institution of slavery in particular and how that's played a role in American genealogical thinking. And I know these are actually separate, one can hold these concepts separately that is slavery and what the institution of slavery did to later practice for or against later practices of genealogical research and also American ideas about race which seem to pervade genealogy as you argue in the book and as you show whether we're talking about African-Americans or other groups, ideas about race just seem to pervade American genealogical practice. So can you talk about both of those, both slavery and race? Be as brief as I can but it's safe to say I can easily take the rest of the hour on the first question. So important. These are deep and profound questions. Right. Absolutely to preview what I say in the book about and the descendants of enslaved people doing genealogy there are particular ways that enslavement what am I trying to say suppressed record keeping and all these other things that genealogists depend on to trace individual and family identities. There are these just these particular gross violations of Victorian 19th century norms of kinship to talk about.  What word am I looking for? Responsibility and kinship from the biological father and that feature alone incentivized or literally it created a situation where it paid the owner every time and the slave woman got pregnant and there's a lot to say there. So I'm just going to leave what I say about enslavement there's a lot more to say that modern day people who research African-American ancestry often portray the 1870 US census as the brick wall they use that expression the brick wall because before that sorry the 1870 federal census is the first one taken after slavery was outlawed in 1865 and before 1870 the federal census listed enslaved people I think but it was dear me it's been a while since I looked at this material but it's basically maybe we get as specific as their ages their numbers, their gender but never names and you depend on names when you do genealogy research okay about race ideas about race to make a long story short you look for there are these characteristics where race is inherited race depends on documentation and so indeed there are all these ways that starting in the late 19th century and I would say extending very well into nowadays genealogy gets deployed to reinforce and enforce racial boundaries we see that with Jim Crow in the south and all the cruelties that happen to African-Americans once enslavement is outlawed once slavery is outlawed we see this especially in Indian country with all the forms that colonization takes and again this is just a little preview of the book but there's genealogy practice in itself is not racial on its face and there's a very strong kinship all through the 20th century all through the different phases of the civil rights movement where we see civil rights activists including really pivotal figures like W. E. B. Du Bois taking up genealogy along with history and it really is a profound form of resistance against white supremacy for in the end for an African-American to trace their black ancestry and their white ancestry to some of them back right so there's a lot more to say that I see in my book about race and race features in all the chapters it's really complicated because it seems like you're often talking about what individuals are doing to explore their own family background but you're also talking about broad patterns and also institutions and organizations that have particular commitments you use the phrase white supremacy to talk about in the late 19th and early 20th century so can you just address that a little bit what are some of the organizations that you would say are actually in that period using genealogy to advance white supremacy that's right well I can point to particular laws but in the interest of time the groups that I most have in mind for the late 19th century that really signify these broader developments are the emergence of those daughters and dames and sons and hereditary groups in general in the late 19th century in the genealogy community they often refer to these groups as patriotic groups or hereditary groups and of course there's a whole lot to say about the relationship between genealogy activity and patriotism but why do these groups what do these groups have to do with white supremacy these things are very different with them they're making these various commitments to expanding the immemoration in particular of black and brown people and diversifying within themselves or they're starting that process so it's a lot to say but when they first emerge they truly exist as a way to certify whiteness in part because the features of genealogy at that time that are documented on documentation and the whole act of documenting your ancestors and finding them in the archive depends on all sorts of class and race privileges both for your ancestor and yourself and 100 years ago much more than now the kinds of documents that archives and historical societies collected were much more about let's say white people and the elite when I say white by the way that's a sliding concept I'm talking about a time period 100 years ago where the term white meant a particular kind of European the people that nowadays might refer to as WASPs and white Anglo-Saxon Protestant and my book I make reference to them as white Anglo-Americans it takes a while and I thank you Nell Painter it takes a while for white people it takes a while for European descent to equal white that's a sliding concept but yes Karen those institutions I would really start off and pointing to are these hereditary groups that emerge in the Gilded Age they emerge in the 1890s and 1900s instead of 1918s as well and they don't go away and they're dynamic they keep changing and so yes to for for the original question the American Revolution why what is it about these adults that build being a daughter or a son or a dame into their social identity I thought we weren't supposed to care about the past and breaking forward as revolutionaries and of course lighting up for the territory of the American West I could go on and on but I will be glad to handle your next question I think what's helpful about what you set out there in terms of some of these hereditary societies like the Daughters of the American Revolution the Sons of the American Revolution, Colonial Dames so on that in their late 19th century iteration that kind of emphasis on whiteness and white heredity particularly genealogy as a kind of resistance activity a kind of a resistance both to the decimation of knowledge about African American families in the long period of slavery and also as a resistance to the kind of ideas about race and family and belonging that is being put forward by these organizations so I think that's a really helpful context there for us to see genealogy as a kind of resistance activity reclaiming family connections and that sort of leads me to my next question about something the archivist referred to which is the 1970s what we think of as the kind of roots phenomenon first of all can you talk a little bit about what is the roots phenomenon and then I have a very specific question for you to follow up about that so let's talk a little bit about Alex Haley's roots what it was and kind of what it meant to genealogy in America roots was Alex Haley's best selling book he called it a saga and a few months after the book was published it was a miniseries it was an eight night TV show and both the book and the TV show were about the previous seven generations of Alex Haley's ancestry he claimed to both name and know the full story of his enslaved ancestor who was originally kidnapped from West Africa out of the Mandinka tribe I'm pronouncing that correctly and so that was Haley's claim and the story goes all through Kuntekente's descendants particular enslaved people also emancipated people blacksmith Tom Murray that's a very high status and skilled job and so you have these among other things black businessmen like this and the story chicken George okay I can name names it's quite the 1970s version it's quite melodramatic and it's a fine show and I understand in the history channel there's a reboot from 2016 and one thing roots imparted to its audiences is a very explicit portrayal of the middle passage of the slave ship the dying and the gross atrocities taking place aboard slave ships and this is on network television at a time when like I say these portrayals of Africans as well as African-Americans as main characters driving the story are just very very rare so okay what did roots do for the history of genealogy the reason why roots found this unanticipated popularity and surprise network executives at a hard time believing that this audience this TV audience of its majority white people at a time would watch roots and such numbers and generate such ratings roots built on trends that were already there and exploded them afterwards wherein we have warts and all genealogy like you all pointed out in the intro we're at a point in time after 1945 well it's like a big slow trend where your ancestors are and you embrace them and you want to know more about them because they're part of you and you have a come as you are attitude towards your ancestors you don't sort of filter among them to find the successful ones are the ones that most appeal to you and the reason why I call it warts and all is that I encountered a woman in the 1970s who started this group about the gangster family and I had thought she wanted to reach out to other people with what she called criminals in their family tree to kind of foster research on them you know she wasn't ashamed of the ancestor she called a gangster she wanted to magnify the knowledge of course it's the time where the godfather movies are out Bonnie and Clyde and everything like this I could go on and on but that's the moment we're talking about and as everything to do with the beginnings of social history of the sort of histories being done of immigrants and working people and people of color and women of all sorts you are doing social history when you're looking at very elite and very well-advantaged women this period is very fertile one for that and that's definitely the value of the genealogy boom there's a real commitment to finding your female ancestor even your maternal lineage which can be a real job to this day even when we're talking about white families that leave a lot of records everything to do with immigrants looking up their roots and trying to throw off this expectation of conforming wasp culture that was so characteristic in the 1920s 30s 40s I could go on so the roots moment it begins and inspires roots I would say Haley's all the work that Alex Haley did in terms of writing roots was itself expressive of the roots phenomenon but afterwards we see an increase in scale and we see a qualitative increase institution building among more and more groups I have an extensive history in my book of all the building of institutions in the United States and now this is all over the world they're in Moscow and even in Germany we have Jewish genealogical societies and that's another American export I have lost to say about the first ever the first time African-American genealogists come together in the United States the first time African-American genealogists come together in organizations with chapters the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society and this journal there's a lot to say it comes about in the 1970s and 80s and it's still going of course there's lots of manuals and things and lots of energy surrounding this very difficult field of genealogy and the institutional expression comes after roots first ever Hispanic slash Latin X genealogy conferences happen in the late 70s early 80s no doubt inspired by roots to turn it into an institution I see it in Texas in particular Austin area we have some very active well they self-identify as Hispanic genealogists at that time I could on and on the Irish-American, Polish-American ethnic minorities of all sorts you name it and I say minority because at that time it's more debatable nowadays whether these groups truly we're actually a minority anymore but I think it's fair to use it for the 1970s yeah thank you so much that roots moment that you describe as both accumulation of some phenomena and also then producing an explosion of new phenomenon really really interesting to see roots as pivotal not just as kind of entirely fresh and new and one thing I wanted to ask you about which was really wonderful to read in your book is about the remarkable lawyer civil rights activist Polly Murray and her book proud shoes where she writes in a very different vein from Haley about her family background her African descended family and also native descended family so I wanted to ask you about Polly Murray's proud shoes and how we might think of that as a kind of forerunner to roots and the roots phenomenon I love to talk about that Polly Murray is known for many things and to make a long story short she published proud shoes 20 years before roots with a commercial press and the reason why I consider this particular work of hers among all the other things that she did the reason I consider this work so important in the history of the roots ethos is that she was you know mixed race growing up as African American and you know lots of civil rights activism to talk about for both her and the aunts the three aunts that raised her and so this is a family history of her mother's side going back generations into enslavement and a painful story that's all too common of the white biological father who is also the master the slave owner of her grandmother and this is all in North Carolina in the area around Chapel Hill why do I see this as anticipating roots it's because both Polly Murray and later on Alex Haley reached back to research multiracial family trees and of course we're to point in American history where mixed race person who has black ancestry tends to grow up as African American with the rest of the society identifying them as African American so I know it's a complicated question but anyhow with both of them we find family trees made up of people of different races African American and white and indigenous in many ways and you know her book also had very I would say explicit presentations of slavery's both slavery's atrocities and all the ways that people survived and built themselves up her Polly Murray's grandfather was a civil war veteran I believe having come from a free black background but she has a lot to say about the African American soldier who fought for the union in the American civil war okay I'm getting off on a tangent here I must say I think a Polly Murray tangent is always a good tangent but absolutely there's no documentary on her that I haven't had a chance to watch yet but what I want to just say about Polly Murray's importance in my own book is that I wanted to set down proud shoes in the history of genealogy it deserves a place she was ambivalent about whether to sort of call herself a genealogist and she kind of moved on to other things because she had all those different careers again commenting on her proud shoes and retrospect when Roots came out and so she's part of a broader picture of the research I do on African Americans doing genealogy before Roots this is a place to bring an intersectional theory if you're interested in that and that we don't have to look too closely to see that these are people in the black middle class typically highly educated but be that as it may when they step into the street they're black in America and there's a lot to say Sonya I wanted to set down Polly Murray in all the ways that the Roots set of ethos developed to inspire and fuel Roots so another thing that I think is interesting about your situating Polly Murray's proud shoes there that makes one think of so many things of different ways that people think about lineages and the way that she is thinking about the lineages of her mother's sisters and she's thinking about that in what Martha Jones historian Martha Jones would call the vanguard generations of black women activists and Polly Murray is kind of setting down that sense of inheritance from those women it addresses something else that you talk about in the book which is the question of chosen families and about how the new science of genetics and DNA which claims a kind of certainty about family connections whereas if in the 19th and the early 20th century the mid 20th century it was genealogical records that created a sense of certainty about descent now it's DNA that offers a kind of veil of certainty around relationships just at the moment where we understand better how just how complex families are how chosen families are whether adoptive families LBGTQ families chosen kin in other words is it and do you think this is asking you outside of the book but do you think there's a moment here where DNA comes along to say this is all certain at the same moment when there's a lot of uncertainty around the fixity of biology and its relationship to families that's a great insight and I wish I made it more explicit in my final chapters I think you're really hitting on a whole array of things that I talk about I think that okay there's a lot to say about how DNA testing that is genealogy focused gets marketed and I think or I know it got marketed successfully especially among people who are sort of taking refuge from how fluid the family seemed to become in the 1990s there's an earlier times too obviously there's a really fraught I would say political set of arguments that truly happens between the political parties and surrounding the religious right are families those families with two heterosexual parents and children or it can a pair of adults that might even be access to each other or not just declare themselves a family so at the point where the family becomes more fluid I think it's expressive of a broader cultural divide if you will and but this turns really complicated when you turn to real people you can people contain many multitudes and you can find the same person living as a member of a found family who is also researching their DNA for some other reason and another thing I want to say about another thing you pointed to and the emergence of the DNA testing clearly and here I'm standing in the shoulder of sociologists and others who have done research I'm about to say there's no doubt that the way DNA test results that are done for genealogy purposes get interpreted currently it reinscribes all these social differences that I spent my book talking about right it reinscribes racial and ethnic differences while if you I don't know if you look even give those basic look to what geneticists are saying and others in the wake of the first genome being fully understood on the other hand the genetic science itself makes nonsense of really of all the ways that humans are distinct from mice let alone all these differences among humans it's sort of an astonishing moment in terms of the persuasion exhibited by marketers and many many ironies here but there's a reason why I have to found families you know the people who the chosen families and that can get interpreted very broadly that's especially noticeable for LGBTQ parents and people who identify as queer gender queer it's a queer practice to go online and like someone I know and adopt someone online to declare yourself a family you know what a moment and how disruptive it is for the old time Victorian family norms that are still cherished by many other people not to mention inscribed into law and still in many parts states all the ways that state constitutions redefine marriage to be between a man and a woman before the Supreme Court decision and my daresay backlash against Obergefell 2015 and look it up I can elaborate more on that I know I opened a can of worms but go ahead well let me ask you to just back up just a minute and let's just talk a little bit about what DNA and what role DNA actually is playing in genealogy let's just back up a little bit to say just to find some of that a little bit so when is it that DNA science actually comes into the mainstream of research and really comes to play a role and what role is it playing in genealogy in genealogical research now that's a great question it's that when we talk about sort of the broader uses of genealogical testing the decade is the 2000s going up to the present the years since 1999 that's when we see really marketed choice genealogists and there are many meanings to talk about for communities of genealogists but the one that I'm especially interested in is that if you're talking if you have ancestors who are hard to document for whatever reason we had a question from someone with adoption for a sort of closed adoption in their family tree for example but you have some situation in your genealogy research where documentation is difficult DNA testing gives can give you another piece of information so it has this particular meaning in Jewish genealogy journals for example where researchers are dealing with this breakage that happened not just with the Holocaust but with all of those programs and things that happened before and all those shifting boundaries in Eastern Europe there's a lot of very active use and discussion in Jewish genealogy communities about uses of DNA obviously African-Americans too and those are the main groups I talk about in the book but it is a really complicated question Karen because there are all these other uses of DNA testing that have an older history like there's a great new book by Naroma Lonich called Paternity an American culture and toward the end she reminds us of all of the cultural importance attached to paternity DNA testing so there's this type of DNA testing that's much older than the stuff that's marketed on mastogeniologists that's done among close family members and that kind of testing also has really active uses and active meanings for modern-day genealogy communities when you read about sort of law enforcement the other year I believe it was the Golden State killer tracked down through specific postings that remote relatives had made on genealogy websites and that kind of DNA testing that happens among close relatives to say that someone has a biological identity or not so that kind of genealogy testing has also carried forward where it's among individuals I wanted to just ask you to talk a little bit about some of the ethics of genealogy online because you alluded to the way that online communities can create open family trees which other people can see and people can make assertions about family connections and there are all kinds of really potent collaborations that take place online that have been on any of the online genealogy lists or as you can see all these incredible research connections that are being made I think that some of those among descendants of enslaved people are particularly significant like the collaborative potential is particularly potent but then there are also these other ethical questions around people volunteering their DNA and family associations becoming known for example to law enforcement and the famous case you raised of the golden state killer being identified because DNA was contributed by one of his second cousins or first cousins I can't remember to one of the commercial sites and actually there are real concerns about privacy issues here with some of this am I right? Absolutely an ancestry itself even in the months, the final few months I was doing copy editing of the manuscript is vastly expanding its I would say attentiveness and policies on privacy and there's a great cultural studies scholar who writes all about ancestry.com and privacy I want to draw everyone's attention to the work of Julia Crete in Canada CREET on this very very matter and of course you and I have to set this on this broader history of privacy relative to social media of all kinds for a long time ancestry which began as a way to enable massive access and one stop shopping if you will for genealogists to access documents of all kinds now it has also tried to enable the kind of communicating and sharing that people don't other kinds of social media and I think this is a really open discussion we're in the middle of this history and it'll be really interesting to see where we are five or ten years in terms of awareness of privacy but in the meantime if you're yourself are concerned about privacy please be aware of what you're posting in terms of genealogy but oh dear I don't want to suppress this tendency I really admire in the history of genealogy and I want to stress is all the sharing that people do to save to prevent duplicating labor but to further along their own research yeah we just got a five minute warning and I believe there's a question in the chat yeah yes I was going to ask I'm going to save one of those for the very very end but I just wanted to ask you if there's anything you can say about what you see is the difference between kind of genealogical research that was happening in the 20th century and genealogical research that's happening now and the way that people are exploring family histories online right okay well the scale has changed the axis has changed you and I and everyone listening to us can do their genealogical research from home or from where we choose but a lot of those broader social developments that I talked about for the 20th century are still there now and I'm a well I kind of end on a down note because I worry with the DNA testing which itself is expressive of the importance that Americans attribute to biological relatedness and blood relationships another iron and we can send the whole promise of the American Revolution right it's this heredity heredity hereditarian thinking being reinscribed when we talk about the non-scientific understanding of DNA and everything everything that knowledge from DNA testing can do to seal relatedness I'm afraid we're looking at DNA is this sort of bodily characteristic and you can get it your DNA interpreted and read in all these ways and we will even reinterpret a DNA test that you've already had in many ways so once I you could say once your DNA is read that itself is a dynamic process however I worry that we're still reinscribing these social differences but a thing that makes me optimistic is all of these non-textual types of research are expanding the genealogical knowledge for groups in society who really fell on the wrong side of all the advantages that would let you get to documentation so documentation itself it's expressive of a set of privileges and I feel like the combination of documents and DNA are moving the fields like African-American genealogy and Jewish genealogy you name it Hispanic genealogy next genealogy all sorts of fields forward that used to be very difficult because of the shortage of documentation so I think I was going to say one of the problems with some of the DNA testing of course is that they're simply reading your individual test against whatever the collection is that they have right so if they only have a collection that is dominated by X or Y then they're going to only understand your test vis-a-vis that X and Y, they're not reading your test against the entire world so that's pretty important to understand why you're talking about this that's proprietary company knowledge just how many people are in sample that your DNA is being compared to and who they are so you're so right DNA evidence has to be used very sparingly with a big grain of salt so one question that came in over the transom is a question about your title and whether your title, a nation of descendants was influenced by John Kennedy's book A Nation of Immigrants he absolutely gave me the idea the title alone I don't claim to engage his thesis otherwise although obviously that roots moment that I talked about is a huge one for communities of recent immigrants and for ideas about ethnic diversity as a positive good in the United States so you could say that I used a nation of descendants and that was my title because I wanted to just start with this very basic characteristic of genealogy in the United States all the ways that it communicates the needs and priorities of descendants and the needs and the priorities of the present day and whatever time period you're doing your genealogy in wonderful well Francesca thank you so much for this wonderful conversation it was really rich and revealing and I'm hoping that lots of people are going to go out and look for the book and again I think we want to thank the National Archives and the archivist for hosting this conversation same here thank you for me and I have all sorts of histories of archives and libraries also in my book so you all are heroes so thanks for me