Welcome back to another 3D Hangouts. My name is Noah Irwenz. I'm a designer here at Adafruit and join me every week is my brother Pedro. Good morning everybody. I'm Pedro's creative tech here at Adafruit and every week we're here to share three different projects featuring electronics from Adafruit. That's right. This is where we combine 3D printing and DIY electronics to make inspirational projects like these. Hello everybody. We're hanging out in the Discord chat room. If folks are watching live during the show, you can ask us questions and what else can we do? Post links. Say hello. Do some banter. All that good stuff can happen in the Discord chat room. You can get an invite link to that by hitting over to discord.gg slash Adafruit. I want to take a moment to welcome everybody watching us live on the show. Good morning. Good morning. Good evening. Good afternoon. Good night to everybody hanging out all around the world. We got Blitz City DIY. Blitz. Good morning. Andy Calloway, Ross and Jim Henderson. Good morning Jim. Vince. All hanging out in the Discord. Morning everybody in the YouTube chats on Twitch, LinkedIn, on Periscope. All the places. I think Facebook just went down. Good morning everybody hanging out. Make sure to post your questions. We'll be posting all of the links to everything we'll be talking about. Good morning George. Good morning. Let's go ahead and run through all of the housekeeping stuff. We got a jam-packed show again. We do. So we're going to try to run through this quickly. Adafruit.com slash free is where you can find all the deals that are going on in Adafruit. Right now we still have 100 days of masking up. So any order that's over a dollar, you get a free black surgical mask. For orders that are $99 or more, you get the black surgical mask and a free permup proto half size red board. For orders that are $149 or more, you get the permup proto, the black surgical mask and a randomly chosen Stemic QT breakout board. And if you are registered with Adafruit as with an account, we make sure that you don't get the same one twice. For orders that are $200 or more, you get the randomly chosen Stemic QT board, permup proto, black surgical mask and free UPS ground shipping for continental U.S. only.  You can go to Adafruit.com slash free to find out all the details that I have just told you. If you go to jobs.adafruit.com, you can find out all the different jobs that are available. If you're an employer looking to hire some makers with maker skills, you can post up your opportunities for free. And folks that are makers and want to make their profile, y'all can do it for free as well. So check that out at jobs.adafruit.com. Every Monday we have a circuit Python meeting and normally happens on Mondays at 2 p.m. Eastern time. This is a great opportunity for folks to come in from the community and listen in on the the happenings and circuit Python, the core devs and the community all come together and chat it out. There may or may not be blink a cake. Very soon. Very, very soon. Very soon we'll all eat blink a cake. Come on over to Adafruit.adafruitdaily.com. Check out your daily dose of Adafruit. We have a bunch of different newsletters there. You can subscribe to everything from through your printing, wearables, maker business, IOT, IOT monthly. Yeah, lots of great ones. So check that out. If you want to subscribe to that, you got to do it manually because Adafruit does not automatically subscribe you. And then for once a week newsletter, this is called the new, new, new newsletter. It goes with Lamar's jingle that she does weekly on the new product videos. This is focused on products. So you can check this one out by heading over to Adafruit.com slash newsletter. Jingles sold separately. All right, I think that's the housekeeping stuff. Right. What do I jump into next? Let's go ahead and jump into this week's project. All right, this week we are welcoming home Terakau. We're not prototyping this. It's complete. Oh, it is this week's project. That was the wrong thing. This one. I rearranged the stuff. We need to update this. Look at those old nickerbots back there. Let's go ahead and jump into this week's project. It is the super cute Terakau from Zelda. Not Breath of the Wild. Age of Calamity. This is Terakau, which I didn't know. That's what his name was until I was building him. I'm telling that. So it's super cute. Autonomous little robot. There's maggots on the inside. So it is a shoulder companion bot. And this is all coated by Philip Berguess. It has a really nice randomization code.  There's all these really cool code that we'll take a look at that generates all of the colors and what he's actually doing. All three are printed. The legs are able to support his body upright. And there's also these magnets on the bottom used for the little metal backing that you can attach to your shoulder.  It's part of our pin backing little product. We have for a bunch of the boards like the Circuit Playground Express. You can make like a badge from that super strong and hold they haven't hold that is good enough for this nice little light weight robot. I love to see if he sticks to the fridge. That would be really cool to see him on the fridge. We have not tested that. So all painted, you could do a extruded. You have access to all of the history and the timeline for the Fusion 360 files for this. These nice legs that you can position and I think we should we'll go into the inside of it when we go over the learn guide. And this is one of those projects where Lamar wanted to sort of do an upgraded suggestion on some of the robots that have been posted in the community. A lot of the shoulder companion robot people like on Jay or Alex Glow from the Hackster IO love making these and Lamar wanted to make something that was themed to things that people like like Zelda. And last week during one of our meetings, Phil, a PT was talking to Phil up for a guess on one of the upcoming projects and how it like combines your passion, things that you're really interested and love and combined it with Adderfruit, you know, making it into an actual project so we can, you know, have some boards in there.  At first, when we started the project, you know, the companion bot thing was like, OK, that's pretty cool. But then as you start seeing it around, especially like around Disney World, there's so many products that are companion shoulder plushes that everybody carries around. Yeah, that's sort of where this came from. This is a piece that came apart of one of the Banshee puppets that you can get from one of the Disney parks. Yes. So this is from Animal Kingdom. It is a should have brought him out.  There's so many actuators that help like move his his mouth and his eyes. There's sound effects. Put them on your shoulder and we'll put them on here. So you put them on your shoulder. Of course, this does work with the metal the metal backing that is included with the magnets, these pins. You get that it does work with that, thankfully. Yeah. Because otherwise it's like, oh, no, you have to build that thing too. But right, it holds on like that. Yeah, it's a good little solution. I don't know if you can purchase that separately, but maybe there's something you can either fashion it yourself or pick one up from. So super cool. He's just the life, you know, comes to life with Phil's code. For sure, he does. And the kiddo was like walking around showing Terakow around his house. So happy. It's yeah, seven year old being just so stoked that they have that nice little companion bot. And Andy Callaway posted a image of what Terakow looks like when he's fully upgraded. Again, I didn't even know that he was a playable character. He is what's to beat the story mode spoilers. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, Terakow is quite the soldier. I like how he has his own little guardian sword, too. A little mini guardian sword, which we definitely got a print. We'll go over it. Community make somebody made a little tiny one that looks so adorable, has all the lights in it. So cool. But what else can we say about it? Very cute. A very cute little project, especially if you have a little one. Order for yourself. I mean, I was super stoked when it came to life. One of the goals was to keep it simple so that folks can actually build it. There were plans to making his little top move up and down and having sound effects. And that just adds more time, more complexity to it. So one of the goals was to, hey, let's keep it as simple as possible. What is the kind of minimal features that we need to make this thing look like Terakow? And this really does it. I really like that you painted the sides here. You can do it straight, but painting it gives you that extra level of like its hand painted and you get that nice kind of zen moment when you're painting him. Yeah, so it has like this bronze look that is in the game and you're able to just blotch the acrylic paint on there and sort of replicate the way that it looks like it's like banged into place. And it's sort of that rustic look that the whole Zelda theme has. It's like ancient, but like high tech, bronze-y. What is it, the retro future type feel to it? One of the byproducts of making it simple is that I like that folks from the community who really like it can now add their features to it. Let's say they want to add magnets to the feet. You can punch a hole through here in Kinkercad and articulate this or have strings run through it. And they can just add all the things that they want. Do you want sound effects? Well, there's your thing that you can contribute to it. So keeping it simple not only helps us actually document it and release it within a couple, maybe a month or two, but it gives the folks that really want to build it and add to it that opportunity like, hey, I want to add to it. There is a little bit of room left in his body to be able to add more things. Vince is suggesting in the Discord chat that maybe adding a microphone to make him react to sound. Excellent idea. There's definitely room in there for that. And let's go ahead and jump into the learn guide for this. We launched this this morning. It is quite a build. Nice little amount of steps that are required, but definitely worth it in the end. Sure. First, we'll start off with some of the overview on what this little guy is. Let's look at the parts. The stability, let's check out the parts. Most of it's all in stock. This is awesome. We do have those magnetic pieces that you can get. And most of the cables and everything, it's in stock. So awesome. You can make a wish list and add all these things if you want. And if anything is out of stock, you can always sign up to be notified when they are back in stock. I think just the magnet right here is the only thing that's out of stock. And you don't need that magnet. That's if you want to create your own sort of, I don't know what it's, the shoulder piece. Like if you want to arrange it. If you want to create a magnet piece, yeah. But like we were saying before, the backing that it comes with works really well. This little pin here. That's this thing here. The metal part. Yeah, this is like for like a circuit playground express, this little thing here. You can see that there's the two magnet pieces and there you go. Okay, cool. All right, so those are the parts. The hero here and the brains. Yeah, the itsy bitsy. It's a bitsy N-R-F 52 840. We wanted to have some remote control in it, but you know, time constraints and all that. Philby's working on some really cool ones for Eight-O-Box and going forward. So I don't want to take too much of his time since the main part of this was just look, just to have everything fit inside there. So that can definitely be added. So keep that in mind. There are Bluetooth controls that you can add on there. There is also demo code that you can use like the color pickers and is a really kind of well-known demo code that you can use if you want to change the color and stuff and try to implement it into this right here. So cool. So there's that extra added Bluetooth. One more part about the itsy bitsy N-R-F. I will be updating that once the itsy bitsy PR2040, R-P. R-P, R-P, R-P, R-P, Raspberry Pi. Not GitHub. Yeah, yeah, R-P, R-P, R-P, R-P, R-P 2040, itsy bitsy. The QT Pi, R-P 2040 was just released. Yeah. So, they won't work with that. Yeah, but this is great little board. The N-R-52 has got a lot of RAM and it's got like how many megabytes of spy flash? It's like two megabytes or so. Oh, yeah, so it's a really good board. It's super, it's the smallest we can get, right?  There it is. There it is. Backpack, this little guy is designed to work with, originally the trinkets in the itsy bitsy, kind of the original itsy bitsy, but this also works with the newer style, the itsy bitsy's with the M0s, the M4s in the N-R-F. So this little guy is gonna make the USB port, allow it to recharge the LiPo battery. So for a little project like this, you definitely want to be able to recharge the battery over USB in the little LiPo backpack. You see that extra circuit to do that. The other extra thing that it does is allow you to add a slide switch. Yeah, it's got built-in pins for slide switch, so let's... Look at the technique that I use for cutting the trace a little bit later on, but yeah, you can see the slide switch is right there, and the USB port is on the whole other side, where you go. There you go. Access to all of that, so you can charge and edit the circuit by-thon code. It just loads like a USB drive.  I know how it's so cool how you can interpret, humans interpret the random movement for this with actual sentient action. Another example, like Gavin, your seven-year-old, he was so dead on sure that, hey, this thing is listening to me when he talks, like he would turn to him. We definitely gotta add that microphone on there to have him react to sounds, and just be the icing on the cake. Yeah, the super extreme version is like machine, do some Raspberry Pi machine learning, where you hold up the finger too, and he goes boop-boop, like too. That.  All right, anyway, we're daydreamers. There's so many things that you can add to this. Yeah, but when you wanna add recharging to your portable project, the LIBO backpack is the way to do it, so, all right. Let's head over to that. I'll add that on there. One of the other things too, cables, we wanted, I needed to make sure that this was easily, you could easily assemble this or disassemble. I didn't want to thread wires through, solder it, and then I'm completely stuck where I would have to unsolder the neopixel or the servo, when you're iterating on these projects and going through so many different printed body parts. Historically, we've had bigger connectors and there's always a little, the connectors themselves are always kind of like the limiting, like how much space do I have? It's supposed to be for the servo. A little project. It's relatively flat, but it's the long, and then it's wide, and that messes with how small you can make things. Shout out to Leida. She's been on a tear, like getting these smaller connectors that are perfect for these type of components and projects where they need to be as small as possible in every millimeter counts. So, these new Molex cables, definitely check those out. They come in different wire arrangements. So, we have three pin, four pin, I think five, right? Something like that. So, you can check this out here. Yeah, I think it goes up to four. Yeah, it goes up a couple, because they are really nice connectors, so small. Another great project that this works in is the lightsabers.  Yeah, this is a great one. And they're Molex picoblade, cute name as well. Trying to put all of the links in here as I'm talking. It's always harder when it's my turn. Cause I'm like, I gotta run Wirecast and like tap switch, it's like we can't do that extra that add on. So, if you hear me pausing, it's cause I'm posting links and all that to Twitters and everywhere. Right, so cool, highlighting some products here that we really like. I think we already talked about the GST. The battery, there's not much. So, to tell about the battery, I'm looking for a smaller battery. So, a 420 I think is the biggest battery just because of the body size. I designed everything around the servo. And of course, trying to make it lightweight so the magnets will hold on. Did you try a 500, does that fit? I did, the horn gets in the way. Okay, so don't get a 500. So, don't get a 420. Again, don't get the 500, it's gonna intersect with the horn. We will show you that in a second here, but that's the battery. It's the smallest, most capable battery right now. This is a really good one for like all the high batches. Suggested by Lamar for servos. Good price. All right. That's about it for the product. The only other thing is one screw for the lipo backpack. Yeah, you just need one screw. Excellent. 2.5 by 5 millimeter long screw. Right, for the backpack. Okay, yeah. Make sure it's metal, not plastic because. Yes, I did try that with the nylon ones that we have in stock. Plastic, plastic. The sizing, the sizing doesn't work out. Okay, all right. Let's go to circuit diagram. This was just gonna show you the wired connections. Three wires from the servo. They're going into what, VHI and A2. You can switch that out if you'd like. And then the neopixel rings. This is this 12 or 16. I think it's the 16. 16. Yeah, and this one plugs into D5 and VHI and ground. And yeah, check that out. You can reference this as you're wiring it all together. And then for accessibility purposes, we always try to write out all the wired connections for accessibility purposes. So you can check them out and they're all. Where's the ADR? ADR. Or ADA? Yeah. Yeah, one note about wiring diagrams. We use the open software called Fritzing. And so if you wanna create your own wiring diagrams, you can download Fritzing for like 10 bucks or something. And you can get the Adafruit library of all the parts. So the itsy-bitsies and just about everything gets made for Fritzing so that folks can make wiring diagrams. And so internally as well so we can make these wiring diagrams. Cool. So you're writing down all of this here. Okay. And one of the things I did not note here I should have explained it more is the multiple pins that are gonna have to be shared between the ground connection because there's only one ground connection on there. And maybe we need to do a video of how to actually make, call like a squid. It's like one connection that's running out and it like splits into like four different cables. Maybe it'll be a topic on Collins notes. That's a good idea, we can suggest. But that's the only difficult part about that is sharing the grounds and the power behind. Everything else is pretty self-explanatory except the measuring of all of the wires to make sure it's all nice and tidy. So it's not like you can't even close the lid because of all the wires. It's one of those things when you're bedding. You definitely have to cut things down. Cool, okay. All right, let's move on to the 3D printing part. 3D printing, here are all of the individual parts listed. I should have put the legs, you need six of them per section and then obviously three feet. I'm sure somebody's gonna like make really long ones. You could attach to like a tree or something. Slice the parts, here are some of the settings that I use. The most notable here are for the supports. You are gonna have to print this with supports or like breakaway material. There is no way to avoid it just because of the way the mounting walls and the snap-together fit parts are all on the bottom of the body. And here's just some of them. In the previous three hangouts, we went in-depth in all of the support materials and actually did some live support material removal. Are these auto-generated or did you place them in? So these are all auto-generated by Cura. And this is just some of the settings that I'm using. The important for ensuring that any support material comes off nice and easy is the extrusion with lower that to 0.2 and with standard nozzle sizes, you're usually printing walls and perimeters at a 0.38, 0.4. So this will make it like half the size. You don't want it to be the same thickness as the actual walls. That'll just make it so much easier to remove. The support density, I don't know why the defaults are always like 20%. You do not need that much density. It depends on the scaling of your part, though. So if you have a giant part, 20 is not a lot, right? I think that's what's going on there. I think so. Yeah, so it depends on your scale. This is a scale down, so that's all. Well, I've printed huge things with just 4% density. Maybe the parameter got updated when we updated Cura. But at any rate, the most supports that you need on three parts don't need to be so dense. That's what makes it so hard. You'll cut yourself, you'll break your part. What's great is you have here a nice GIF, or GIF, I say GIF, RG. It gives you a good reference visually to see you're stepping through the layers and you can see the density, so you can kind of gauge if you're using Cura's Prusa Slicer, for example. You can gauge what the infill percentage is going to be. Yeah, the second most important thing about this that allows the low density infill to work is we have a brim completely around all the supports. So it is held onto that bed plate, very nice. And then second or third, I guess, would be the support Z height. So that is how the distance between your actual layers and support material, it's usually like the same as whatever your layer height is and it should not be. It should have a tiny little bit of a gap. Here we're using 0.21, and this is for the cruelty printers. I tried that on the Ultimakers and the gap was just too much. So the defaults that are like on Ultimakers. So you definitely have to test it with your printer and slicer, but 0.21 seems to work pretty well for the cruelties or realities. Interface supports, I left that on along with a support roof. Turn that on as well. That's what's gonna create that separation between where the supports and your actual part is. The patterns for this zigzag, I found to be the most reliable in terms of removing without damaging anything. So zigzag for the support pattern and the roof pattern. And as I said earlier, the build, plate adhesion, make sure brims are on and it's turned and you have on the inside and the outside brims turned out that's what will allow the supports to have its own brim. Otherwise it's so thin it won't stick or will have a difficult time sticking to your bed. To remove the supports, you can use some flush diagonal. I should probably those. Sure. That's the flat Haku pliers that we have in the store. I can pull that up if you wanna do a link. Take a break to link real quick or something. Let's see. We're doing slicing jacks. So we just have pliers and it's the precision flat pliers from Haku. Which are great. It's a work well with your Haku flush diagonal snips as well. I would recommend both. One to help pry them off and then the flush cutters for all of the brims to get all of them off the edges. It's posting links here. Lost in tabs. Where am I? Sorry. All right. Moving on to assembly or no code? I'm lost man, sorry. I'm gonna go back.  This is a mirrored page. You should see this on any of the pages or projects that require installation of itsy-bitsy. It'll just walk you through to updating the UF2. Make sure you're on the most current updated firmware and then how your library structure should look. Get in the USB to boot or to load. Yeah, yeah. So this thoroughly covers installing circuit Python. So cool. All the learn guides have mirrored pages like this so that folks know, hey, here's how you install the latest version of circuit Python. All right, for the code page, you can download the code off of GitHub and this is gonna walk you through it's making sure that you have upgraded circuit Python the first part of it and just like a visual way to check that you are indeed in the latest version of circuit Python. You can check the bootout.txt file to make sure that it says it's the board and all that stuff. So these are the libraries that you'll need for this project. It's got the new pixel library, serveral kits and the PCA9685 which is like a driver. Serveral driver. Yeah, server driver. So you can check this out. Here are all of the libraries that you can add there. It's just a screenshot of what your drive looks like. So once circuit Python is installed, plug it into a good USB cable or USB cable that has data and it shows up like a flash drive. So that's where all the code and library files go. Yeah, cool. And that's kind of it really. Actual code, right here you can kind of. Here you go, so. I can't read this, so. But it's nicely commented. Yeah, I'll try to read it for you. Yeah, so a couple of libraries that is using the LED animation library that makes a lot of the animations easy to work with. You can make sparkles and comments and stuff. This one's using sparkle poles and comment and it's also using the animation sequence which allows you to animate multiple animations together. The pins are set up here. So for the pixel, the NeoPixels is on D5, A2 and you can switch these out if you want. If you have more pixels or less pixels you can update this 12 as well. Yeah, well, that's really it. The brightness here is set up. That's like 0.6. You can make it more if you want. You can go all the way up to one, which is 100%, all right. So here it's initializing the servo and here we're setting up some of the things. The animations, you can change these out if you'd like. And then if you want like more position I guess you could change this 90 to like 180 if you want and see if that works. But play around with it. All the random stuff set up here. Yeah, and it's all commented. So shout out to Phil P for commenting it out. Excellent, excellent life code. Life code. Yeah, there's some, is there some floats going on? No, some ABS.  You got a fraction, elapsed in duration. Yes, yes. So check it out. If you have something similar that you wanna do this is great little piece of code to kind of reference or reuse as you like. So check it out. Cool, well done, well done Phil. One of the things I forgot to mention for the 3D printing part, on Thingiverse it's not listing the project so you can get to it directly right there and I'll post the link. Or if you just want the Fusion 360 file you can grab that as well. But this will be where the STLs for, the ready to go STLs. There you go, there you go. Just gotta generate your supports. Cool, okay. And then the Fusion share link is somewhere. Yep, in the exact same page. Like the button above that. If you want to do the little explosion to take a look at that. Oh cool, yeah, so this link gives you like a, it gives you like an exploded view of what all the parts are. An online 3D viewer so you can see the model. And there it is. Here is that little guy. There's that little guy. I didn't make everything in a component so it'll probably go all crazy. Oh, there you go. That's a bit. Main three pieces are there. All the sketches and parametric timelines are there. There's that servo. This is a great like model to reference. Like if you ever need to make a custom servo attachment it's always really good to make your 3D printed attachment go over the existing servo horn because the servo horn has like, it's an ejection molded thing. Maybe if you have a resin printer you could try to print out the splines. Those are the little- The little teeth. The little teeth that actually press fits the stock servo horns that are like, I think they're nylon or maybe they're ABS. But any manner, that's the method that we like to recommend and do whenever we do a servo project that needs a 3D printed thing. Always make your attachment fit over an existing servo horn. There is quite a bit of little geometry that makes it go over. So I would definitely use that again. There's like some peruv's that go underneath to like, isolate. Yeah, isolate. Let's see how that is. Quite a bit of prototype and I get that to work and fit. Yeah. I can't remember what servo thing I did, but the very similar. I'm pretty sure I used your sketches from that and then had to build on top of that. So we're always doing that ourselves. We're grab things that we've done in the past, update it to the specific project that we're working on. Yep. Sometimes the rotations will change the tautness as well. Yes. Big time. Cool. Now to continue on over to assembly. This is a nice long page on all of the things you need to do to set everything up. First off is the LiPo charger backpack.  I mean, you're supposed to cut the trace, but yeah, damage something else. Then I figured, oh yeah, you can just take one of the flush snip cutters and then hold on one side of the mounting hole and then with your other side, push down on it and then just clamp it shut and that'll completely rip the trace off of that. So you can attach your slide switch. Yeah, I'll say it a different way. You can use the mounting hole as a way to anchor one of the teeth of the snips while the one of the teeth is like anchored in through the hole. Then you can use the other tooth to cut the trace. That gives it that extra support when you're using the mounting hole. So really good, really good method. And this could be used on any number of boards that require a trace to be cut to enable something like SCI or something. The mounting hole right next to it, that's the magic here is the mounting hole is right next to where it needs to be. I'm sure you could figure out some way where you can put up something that covers that one end and just use it as a pivot so it'll still cut it. Well, it's like a stop, right? It's like stopping your blade. Anyway, very cool method. That's how you cut the trace to get a switch, right? Yeah. And moving on from that, once you have everything measured out and your slide switch on there, which you are gonna do a lot of dry fitting to figure out what the sizes that you'll need for that. For the length of the switch. The length of the switch wires, the itsy-bitsy wires to the lipo charger. And for that, we're using the silicone coated wires because of its bendability and moldability so you can keep it nice and tidy inside of this tiny little body. Yeah, it's more, you can stress it a lot and it won't snap, which is great. Oh, and you can solder right by and it's not gonna melt. Yeah, that's the main thing. It's super heat resistant. Silicone. All right. Moving on to the mullet's connections for the new pixel ring and the servo. You can kinda see here how I did one wire for the ground and then split it off. And then the exact same thing with the V-high. I have one connection on there and it splits off to share between the two. Cool. You can kinda see it there and using the heat shrink that we have in the store too to seal all those up. So one is for the new pixel ring and the other one's for the servo. Both of them use three connections. All right. Okay. Wonderful. Right. And then this one shows connecting. Oh, the lipo backpack being connected with the light slide switch. Okay. Cool. All right, once you have your little circuit assembly there it simply press fits into the bottom of the battery and there are three walls. One of the walls has like a little chamfer that will clip onto the wall. So you wanna insert it into that wall first, insert it at an angle and then snap it in and make sure that the Bluetooth module is facing out like so. Yeah, USB port, there's a little cutout here you can't see but there's a USB cutout there and that's where you orient it. It's kind of difficult to mount a board with a mounting hole. So this is one of the ways we like to do it where we have like an end stop here and these two little things there and then there's some underneath it. There's some, I think some standoff bits that elevate the board. So that's a good thing to reference for you or you wanna do something similar. Sorry about the lawn maintenance. Sorry guys. Oh, you can hear it. It's audible. Yeah, they usually come on after the show or Thursdays. Yeah, we're lucky today. Cool. Okay, so after that. Yeah, once you install the PCB, we got another one to do it. So this one does have a mounting hole and hey, you can screw it into the side wall there. Cool, that's where that one screw is. Yep. Nice. Any orientation ways? There's only one. There's only one. So you have a little wall. Again, that does the elevation for you because it is a tapered wall for his body there. Cool. So that gets inserted there. Not too difficult to get the screwdriver in there. And then after that, the slide switch press fits between those three walls. You can insert it at an angle as well so that the actuator pokes through the opening first and then you can just slap it down. You might have some wigability with the tolerances here. So the two metal tabs on the side of the slide switch are able to be pulled, gently be pulled apart a little bit so you can increase that. So it can hold on when you're turning your circuit on and off. Yep. So I'm just using like one of the wedging tools, not wedging tools, it was the, what's it called? Spudger? Spudger. Spudger tools to sort of move those two tabs out. Right, right, right. Flare them out. Cool. Here we go. On to the servo cables. You just want to shorten that up because the included cable is kind of long. Like we were saying earlier, you do have this long, it almost feels like jumper cables, the length of it. Cool. Just telling PT. Yes, we are hosting tonight. Yeah. Yes. Yes, we will mention that later too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For show and tell, we'll be hosting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, moving on to mounting the servo. The wires go through that little hole that is on the bottom of the wall there, pass that through and then it press fits between all the walls there. You can kind of see where the cutout for the wire is on the vertical walls. And then the included screws, I think it comes with like three or four screws. It's going to be the pointy one with that extended like head. Yeah, it's a built-in washer. Washer, yeah, built-in washer on it. And that's what's holding it on to that top portion of the wall there. Sweet. Kind of difficult to see, but there is a wall that the, one of the tabs lines up with the hole there. Yeah, cool. All right, batteries. The LiPo battery is the JST extension that's going to be needed to reach to the LiPo backpack. Not by much though, it's just a little wire. There needs to be a little wire because it comes as 100 millimeter long, so. Yeah, for advanced makers, I suppose you can solder to the pads. We're not supposed to tell you that. No. So we don't do that. How are you going to take that out? That's the whole reason why we have all these. Oh, I see what you're saying. Because it's going through the body. Yeah, you can't, you have to unsoderate to disassemble it. I see what you're saying. Okay, so don't do what I said. I told you not to do it, so there you go. All right, well done. After that is connected, I used a tweezer here you can see to align the JST ports and just plug that guy in. Now you just plug in the battery on the other side. Setting up the Neopixel ring, we're using another set of the female Molex three pin connectors and just measure it. So it's, the length is just long enough to reach to the, it's a busy board. Okay. The 16 Neopixel ring snaps right on top of the servo as you see here, the size. Yeah, the inner diameter is big enough to snap in at an angle around the servo, right beneath the horn. So it's out of the way, nothing is rotating with it. So there's no wires that are like getting twisted or rotated, it's just the head. Yeah, the only thing that's moving is the head. And that's the main reason why I didn't want to attach a matrix or something like that onto his eye because I didn't want to have the head rotate and then it spin and kill itself, you know? Yeah. So the head is just completely separate from any components. That's really well done with my version, it definitely has a problem with the servo. Yeah, it works in spinner arms. Yep, yep, well done. All right, everything is then plugged in, tidied up, moved around along the inside of the walls so you can have a nice space when you're closing up the lid. Yeah, at this point you can decide whether you want to trim those wires or not, but having some, some, You will definitely want to. What do you want to call it? Having some, some slack is good too. Because you work with it to figure it out. Yeah, keep that in mind, the spline. That is good. I moved on to the servo horn, like you were saying before, it snaps onto the included horn and then with the included screw that just attaches on top of that like so. Yep, it's threaded, so it works well. Then moved on to the leg assembly. These pieces snap fit together and depending on your tolerance, they're either going to be loose or they're going to be a very nice, like tightness like this. I really wish they all came out like this because you can really mold them. They feel like the hobby creek, helping hands from the hobby creek. I feel like that. Yeah, this is printed on the Ultimaker and it did a really good job with the tolerances. On the cruelty, it's very loose. Mm, yep.  That'll lock it. Right, because the ball socket joint is kind of flaring out a bit with these reliefs here, these little hole reliefs. Give it that grip. Yeah, it's so cool when these lock in and then you snap them back in like that. Pretty cool. Ah, nice. Move again. Snap. Mm-hmm. But I really wish they were like these with the tight tolerances. Wow. Yeah.  Don't touch me. And moving on to get all those is, what is it here? Snap them on and then the base here, the base bottom cover has sockets there. Yep, you can snap in those limbs. Yeah, so like before six segments will make one leg section. And you just need three of those. Okay. The bottom lid after the whole light is assembled, it just snaps to the body. No wrong way to do it. Yeah, wrong way, yeah. Symmetrical. Another thing, you can't adjust like when you position the head, which way is like looking out. That's the only thing, but again, that's just rotating the head on the servo horn. Yeah. Moving on to the diffuser eye, we're just using translucent filament. So you can see the LED shining through. No glue, just press. Yeah, just press fits right in. You actually probably want to do this after you have aligned the head onto the little spokes on the horn because it'll make it more difficult to see where you are. Maybe paint it first, yeah. Order wise, I think folks will know. Like I need to paint it and then add the eye. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's just a little thing. And after that, like I was just saying you align these little pegs that are on the inside of the head to the spokes on that horn. Yeah, those are little end stops so that the, it appears like a spokes, yeah, are right onto those spokes so that it's lost onto it, really. So it doesn't just spin freely without it moving the head. Yeah, so then spokes here, like these little frames, the little plus sign, the guards or whatever you want to call them. That's what snaps into it. Cool, all right. And then you test it out. Here's the paint. We are using, what is that paint? Craft. It's like at Walmart. Crafts. Smart. Michaels, Joanne. I think it was like, it's called Espresso. Three bucks, two bucks. It's really inexpensive and it looks really good on this. Is it Esquire? It's Espresso, the color. Yeah, it's like a coffee bronze. And it has this nice little shine. Looks like the bronze you were saying. Shiny, metallic. And then the metal and that's your shoulder. Put it on your kid or yourself. One thing on the paint, and I did print two heads just so that I could test painting it, see how to get the clean edges. I didn't use any tape. I just practiced. It's really good. It's very, very good. Just practice getting the edges right. The kid has his Link costume from last year. Yeah, so the Link, there's like a new Link costume coming out in July. Cool. I was like, why is it gonna take, it must be the part shortage or something. Cool.  I did reference, just type in, you know, Guardian Turquo for the patterns on how to paint these. Nice, fun, relaxing, painting all of these sections. And then if you look at the actual game character, there are like these little details, like these swirls down here, like just ran out of time. You could definitely just paint those in. Had some like nice splotchiness on there to recreate that nice little rusted metallic look. I like everything, simplified, more cute. And there you go. A Turquo, that you can put right on your shoulder as a companion. Super, super cute. And Gavin is downstairs counting down to when he can finally take him home. Cool, let's check it out. We got the Learn Guide, it's published. Yep, I've been posting all the links for that. If you guys want to download the STLs, print one out, edit. If you want to make him bigger, fit more components inside him. There's a ton of expandability. Cool, all right, well done. Yay. So next, Robot is up. Yeah, we'll see. Probably be a Star Wars one. Yeah, I was thinking DB1, but we'll see. From a Fallen Order to another one. Yeah, that's a really cool one with the legs and everything. A lot of servos, like eight servos. Yeah, crazy. All right. So let's go ahead and jump into this week's, what are we prototyping? Yay, what are we prototyping? Here's the correct slide. Yeah, so this week we have a square pixel display. So I showed you folks the 16 by 16 last week. Lamar wanted more pixels. She said, that's not enough. We need more pixels bigger. So we have a 32 by 32 matrix with a 3D printed frame and this is black LED acrylic. Now I haven't turned off because I forgot to plug it in, but also it's a good way to show you the magic of what is black LED acrylic. Now you look at black LED acrylic and maybe it's not apparent, but this stuff isn't opaque. You can't see through it. So how is it that when you turn light through it, it becomes opaque? That's a, what was I forgetting to move that one? That's from Doom. Sorry. That's Mario, Luigi, and, you know, right like the first thing you saw was like, continue with Luigi. Yeah, yeah, that's a nine in cat, nine in cat. But anyway, this is a 32 by 32 matrix. These are not neopixels, these are just RGB LEDs and that's Sonic, right? So yeah, the black LED acrylic is this really special material that like I said, it's not transparent until you have light through it. Like it is transparent, but not really that transparent. So here it is, right? And we have this video here that we did a little bit ago. Let me show you this, like folks think this is just regular acrylic, but it really is designed for light. Now, if you look at some other acrylic that's transparent, it has like a little bit of a grayness to it. Where is it? Here it is. It actually is not. So this is black LED acrylic, a sample of it, doing its thing. The magic comes out when you have light behind it and then regular kind of black acrylic just is see-through. It doesn't have any real kind of magic light properties. So when you look there, it is side by side. Yeah, it's quite different. So it's not just your run of the mill black acrylic. I hope I explained that well. You can kind of visually see what's going on. Yeah, so here's a giant piece of it, Adafruit loves it so much that we stock it. It's in stock right now. So if folks want to pick this stuff up, get it before the part shortage gets to that. So it's like 10 bucks for a 12 by 12 sheet. So this right here is only like half of that, so that's cool. So I got this frame here. That's the black LED acrylic. This is one of the frame pieces with these legs. And then the actual PCB. So this is a 3D printed grid that I designed, right? It's only about six millimeters tall. And then this is the Bayer PCB. So the 32 by 32 has a injection molded ABS frame. You can just remove the screws to show the Bayer PCB because that is how this works. You see the grid, it has to encompass, has to cover all of the LEDs so that they do not leak into themselves. That's what achieves this effect. That grid really has to go beyond the light source. And with the stock grid, if I were to just put this over, it would kind of look like that, which doesn't work. So I had to remove the stock frame and grid. So that's how this was working. So when it comes to what are you powering it with? I got this beefy five volt 10 amp power supply that we stock as well. And so this here fit this extra frame here has the neopixel grid press fit into it. And on the back here, we can see, well, what's powering it. So we got our power cable, right? This is cool. This is the Feather NRI 52840. We're gonna swap that out for a Feather RP2040 once I can get my hands on some more hardware. But this is what's adapting this Hub 75 connector to work. So this is the RGB Matrix Feather Wing. And both of these feathers are on a Feather Wing doubler. And then I have these standoffs that secure it to the main frame. But yeah, this is how you're able to set this up here. You have this extra cable and your power cable here. I have this extra switch here, which is really nice if you want to be able to quickly turn this off without disconnecting it. These chunky switches are great. They're just there for a 2.1 barrel jack. So you can just kind of add that to your existing power supply. Now you have this nice chunky switch that you can turn it on and off. So yeah, very excited about this one. It's running Matrix Animation Player that JP and Melissa worked on. So I'm just assembling here to show folks how it all precipitates together. There's just three of those pieces. And then the Gribblies. Come on, focus. Focus. What is going on? There you go. And then now where's PartyPirate? There's PartyPirate. So yeah, Black Illegally Acrylic, 32 by 32. RGB Matrix Featherwing. That's what this is gonna be. And this is all Circuit Python running Display.io. And I forget what other. The Matrix Portal Library. So all that together to make these animated sprites. We have a question on how to make the graphics on these Matrix's. I'm linking to Phil B's guide. Animated at Jips. JP's guide. Oh, I'll post both. So here's one from Phil B. And then JP has one. What is it? I'm trying to pull it out too. Too many tabs. Is it the LED Matrix to play for Bitmap, Pixel Art and Animation? No, wait. My PS. Yes, that's the one. That's totally the one. Another, and this is on Twitch. Ben Wood Live. Here are two learn guides. You can look through on it. JP's explains how to actually set up the sprite and the applications used and then how to use that to make the individual frames, the BMPs. We might have to restart the show, right? The computer's like locked up. Shout out. Whatever. Still going? Really struggling here. All right, cool. So here's the learn guide. So this works with the Matrix Portal library, but you can use the RGB Matrix feather wing and a feather with this code base. So that's how I have this working. You just have to change a little bit of the library so that it works with the pinouts, particular to whatever board you're using. I'll cover all that in the learn guide for this because it's not quite, it's not explicitly laid out for you. So here under the sprite sheet animation, this walks you through what is an animation, kind of the fundamentals of animating, and then it goes into like actually using, to creating a sprite sheet animation, which is this software called Asprite. I used it, JP used it as well. It just lets you take an image sequence.  So you see how long that bitmap is. Well, the code is looking for bitmaps that are that long and it's saying, hey, cycle through these, and it's doing a tile grid of whatever X and Y you have set up. So for this one, it's a 32 by 64. So I just had to make my artwork 32 by 32. Crop it and export it out as a strip here like this. And it's all documented here. It's a good piece of software to do it. I don't know how to do this in Photoshop. I was doing this in Photoshop and it was way more complicated than it needed to be. It is because you're main, this is automated. Like you just give it the folder of a bunch of images, say that it's an image sequence, and then tell it, I want a strip. That gives you this. And we have some demos as well. So if you look at the code here, JP gives you some of them that he made. So if you just want to get it up and running, you can just copy this whole thing and throw it up there. Yeah. And I think you can watch JP, one of JP's streams where he does a deep dive on the code and creating the bitmaps too. So I'm just kind of piggybacking all of his artwork there. I'm in a frame, black island acrylic. We got a John story asking, is this going to be a kit soon? Yeah, maybe we can make a kit or something. It'll be a learn guide for sure. And the cool thing about this display, unlike the $100 16 by 16 Neopixel display, we stock it, we sell this for only 39. And a little birdie told me that we might be able to get this price down. So don't maybe buy it yet. I don't know. Buy it now. You want to support us so we can make this price lower? Yeah, and this was actually questioned by Mr. Certainly Bruce was asking for a 32 by 32. If we stock it, yes, it is right here. If you're going to get this, make sure that the pitch is six millimeters. We do have different 32 by 32s. I can't get this grid any smaller, like in terms of like the pixel spacing. I can't get it any smaller. Six millimeters is the cutoff point. That's like as small as I can get it. And if you get this from back there, you almost can't, that's the 16 by 16, by the way. In that one, you can just barely make out the pixels. So if I put this one over there, you don't even see the pixels, at least in the webcam. But if you like the 16 by 16 one, I did release it on Thingiverse. So if folks want to make that, they can. Where the heck is it? I don't remember. I have lost it. Yeah, I lost it in the, I'll bring it back up though. It's in the description of this YouTube video. You can pull that. You can search the 80 for blog as well. I made a blog post for it. But yeah, this is the 16 by 16 Neopixel version. Lamar thought the 32 by 32 one would be a better learn guide. So I just released this as a non-learn guide, but the files are there and there's some photos to show how kind of the assembly is. Very, very similar. It's just, these are Neopixels and they cost a lot. Now there was a matrix that I found on Amazon that was $20 and Lamar investigated. And it turns out those pixels might not be grade A. It's like grade C Neopixels. It's the longevity of them. Yeah, the longevity of them. Although these have been running non-stop for several weeks now. Not weeks, it's several days. But I don't know. I was gonna say several shows. So if you want to give it a try. Well, actually Bruce is saying that they are all gone from Amazon. Sorry, I must have sold, I must have did something. But yeah, you can, you can, you know, you can use it. And we have a request by Super Slow if we could turn down exposure a bit on the product camera so the RGB matrix animation are so blown out or is it just ridiculously bright? It's kind of bright. Yeah, I can try to fix that. And is the grade printable for a smaller pitch? So again, this is six millimeter pitch. You can't do four. I don't, I don't think, we could try, but I don't think so. Maybe with a .2 mil nozzle. Cause like the whole thing is like once you get even smaller like at some point, like it's just the fact breaks and it might not work because it's too small. But I can just barely get this to work. I know it looks like it's, you know, surely you can make it, but I don't know. And it is kind of giant. Like you kind of need at least a Prusa, like I3. So this is two, 109, 100, 200 millimeters. Sorry, I'm just out of space here. It's the angle. You have to put this in first. All right, I'll put some first. The way you cut this is you can do a PDF template like I did lay it on top of a paper template and then I'll score it and then snap the edges off. Okay. Okay, but this is going to be next week's Learn Guide. We'll talk more about it then. I'm super out of time now. Yeah, we're out. We had some shop talk stuff. We got some. Oh, reason we're in a Tessa shirt. I wanted to show off our solar panels. We'll cover that next week. We're going to be hosting a show in Tel later tonight. Yes, we are. Definitely tune in for that. Yeah, we can't wait to see you. You can join in by hanging out in the Discord server a little bit before the show. We will post the link to StreamYard. Anybody can come in and say hello. And yeah, that's a little bit of a show off. All the cool projects you guys are working on, your workspace, any artwork that your kids are working on. Retro tech, all game. We chill out for that. And then right after that, full hour of Lamar Foil on Ask an Engineer, all the top new products coming out, Editor Fruit, all the cool projects, and some behind the scenes top secret stuff Lamar's been working on. We didn't even get to talk about this guy. I know. Nor did we show the time lapse. Do you want to just really run through it or? We're done. We're done, okay. I'm sorry. It's 12. It is lunchtime. All right. Well, thank you guys so much for joining us. We'll get to follow us on all the socials. We've been posting a lot of the behind the scenes stuff there. Video every single day by Colin Cunningham for Colin's notes. And some special videos from Phil B. Let's check this out as well. Now it looks like one of our batteries have died on the camera. So with that, don't forget to make a coincidental day. See you next week or later tonight. Bye. Bye. Yay.


So right now I'm happy to welcome Felix Reinshagen co-founder and CEO of Navvis and his colleague Michael. So hello Felix, hello Michael, welcome and happy to have you here. Thanks for having us. Yeah, I'm in Euro from Navvis. You have a huge booth here directly also here in our hall in hall 23. And I heard you clapping, party, celebrating. And I saw many people visiting your booth. Please explain me who is Navvis, where you're from, what exactly is this. So let us talk a bit about you. Yes, so perhaps let me introduce myself very quickly. I'm Felix, I'm one of the co-founders and the CEO of Navvis. We are still calling ourselves a startup even though we have grown into a company of around 250 people by now. A success story then? Absolutely, yes. We were actually a spin-off from Technical University Munich 2013. And of course we started as a real research team. It was all PhD students and it took us of course a couple of years to turn the fundamental research which was all about photogrammetry, computer vision, 3D data processing, slam into the first set of products and of course these products still had some way to go. And yeah, I think we are now at a stage as a company where we are really kind of serving a very, very global market. So that's why we are, since many years I think 2015 was the first year, always very happy to come to interview. And I'm very happy to have Michael with me today. But Michael has something with him.  It's very normal for us. So would you just explain us what it is and for which application it is to use? Yes, so what are we doing at NavVis? Our larger mission is to make scanning a lot easier, faster and more cost efficient specifically in the indoor space. And the VLX is a new iteration of many, many years of first fundamental research, why we were still at the university and then of course of product development at NavVis and together with our customers. But why did you decide to wear it at the body? Because we saw a robotic at the floor, we see them at the air, but this one you wear actually just like a jacket around you and a helmet. A lot of research and as well specifically user research has been put into the form factor. And of course the mission was to bring the speed that we already see in mobile mapping on cars, outdoors into the building and move away from stationary scanning, which was of course a market standard now for many years and we are a software company by heart. So the modern world of algorithm and allows us now to bring incredible quality into laser scanning while you're moving around. And of course while you're moving around you're held out faster and you can see things from many different directions. Yeah, I see the cameras around there. Exactly. The processor and the electricity and so it's all in there. It's all in there exactly. And of course that ambition translates into of course certain elements in the design and the form factor. And that's perhaps you know start with why you wear it in front of yourself and why it's not a backpack. Yeah. Which might be the first natural thing and you know if you run around here you see some backpacks. So our designers, industrial designers worked a lot with backpack prototypes. But of course these are very kind of fragile sensors.  It's just when you wear your baby also at the front. Exactly. I don't wear my little baby on my back. That's the perfect analogy that we have been using. So this is your baby. Exactly. You really want to take care of and you know you want to move consciously.  And there's another big advantage. You know we have a touch screen here. It's a very high resolution that gives you all the real-time information. So you see in real-time how the 3D map is building. You see as you are changing stories. You see you get a color coding that tells you how well have you already scanned certain areas. You see your whole trajectory. You can do the whole data set management. And of course it's very helpful to have that in front of you. And still can take your hands totally off the device. Because that's as well something I think everyone who works in reality capture knows. Not always is the place that you want to scan perfectly tidy. You might need to open doors, move furniture around. And if you have a handheld and a smartphone. And then you need to open the door or you know move some stuff around. That's actually not very practical. Okay this is smart. This is clever. So after going through many iterations it turned out that carrying a scanner is really kind of best done in front of you. And that is really really helpful to have a screen right in front of your eyes. Okay so what is your actually target audience? So who are you looking for in the tree who uses this exactly? So I think what is really revolutionary about this is that we are now capable of delivering data quality that is very close and for many use cases on par with what you could previously only achieve with stress regulator scanning. And of course mobile mapping, dynamic scanning has been around for many years. But it was actually restricted to use cases that would be fine with very low data quality. And the VLX combines two 16 line LiDAR scanners. One in the vertical and one in the horizontal. And five camera that give you perfect 360 panoramas while of course not showing the operator.  A huge part of your panoramic image will be occupied by the operator. And we hide the operator perfectly in the blind spot so you get very very clean data. And then I think the other thing that is really very special for our target audience. The device is perfectly designed to tie into traditional means of surveying. So we can read ground control points, we can read wall control points so that you can easily kind of use your surveying network, tie the mobile scan in. You can of course even scan in more ground control points or kind of survey points that are necessary to make sure that you've got the system over determined and can calculate automatically using our software the error and automatically correct the errors. So I think that is what makes the device really revolutionary. It's the speed. But the first time that speed is actually coming with the data quality that is actually really applicable for I think most of the use cases around scan to BIM, construction monitoring, all kind of standard surveying work that you would be doing around as documentation, as build documentation, drawing of all kinds of plans. We've as well by now gained a lot of experience in very difficult environments with reflective surfaces. And here again the fact that we are seeing things from so many different perspectives and that we have the chance for the lighter system to, if you walk around to perp every surface from the perfect angle as well results in very very clean data and almost perfect coloring. Wow, that's really cool. So thanks again for presenting that revolutionary device to us, to our audience of Introduce TV this year at Introduce 2021. Did you have time to stroll around in the halls or get some impressions? What's going on here and how do you feel? What do you think of Introduce 2021? Yeah, first we are incredibly thankful for Introduce to happen again. 2019 was the last time I was personally at Introduce. We were there last year digitally, and these two years were a huge transformation for us as a company. We have almost doubled in size. We launched the VLX before that. We had cart-based systems that were already good in data quality, but of course by far not that versatile and had a very different price point in the market. So we are of course very proud to be back two years later as twice a large company and it was a very large boost. And I think the reception in the market has been awesome for the last year, even through COVID, and it's really good to now feel that and see that in person with such a large audience. So a lot of people, please, everyone come by. I think there's a lot of activity. You have the chance to play around with the technology, scan our booths or a part of Introduce here live. No, it's good to reconnect with people, not only in a digital way, but as well on a very personal level. That was I think what always made Intergeo special and it's as well good to see a lot of friends from the industry. So we are very happy about the show and very happy to be back. Thank you very much. Felix Reinshagen and Michael with the VLX, our supermodel today for presenting that revolutionary device. So thanks for joining us.


You're always going to find something or some reason why now is not the right time, you know, guess who's back back back again. Anyways, what's up? It's Adana. I'm back with another video for you guys. So I've been getting this question like what is the best time Adana to apply to PA school? Adana, what's the best time? I mean, I don't know. Like, should I apply now? Should I apply in a year? Should I apply in two years? And I'm like, the best time to apply is when you finish your application and meet all the prerequisite requirements. So if that is now, then yes, now is the best time to apply to PA school. If you have met all the prerequisite requirements and your application is really great, like you feel like it's good, you know, I'm meeting the GPA requirements. I'm meeting all the prerequisites with respect to all the classes that they asked me to take my volunteer hours up, my shadowing hours up, my healthcare experience is where it needs to be, then absolutely apply now. You guys, look, I know that, you know, it's PA school, like applying to PA school is almost having, like trying to plan to have a baby.  And I know that I read somewhere that you have to have $26,000 saved in the bank for your children before you even think about having them because you want to build on that. Look, like if that's the mentality that you're having, honestly, like you're, it's never going to be a right time. You're always going to find something, excuse me, sorry, there's like something on my nose, but you're always going to find something or some reason why now is not the right time.  So now you got to put money towards that. So now it's definitely not the right time to have a baby. You just lost your job. That's a good reason, that's a good reason to have a baby right now. You're poor and you don't have a way to support them. That's a good reason. So let's scratch that one. There's always going to be a reason why you're always going to find something. So therefore I feel like you need to make sure that you're ready. So if you're not ready, if you feel unready and unsure, then don't apply to PA school. If you're looking at your application and you're like, I don't know, I think that I can do a lot better in these next five months, like literally plan it out. Don't sit up here and be like, you know, when's the best time and then you're waiting around and you're not doing the work, you're not putting the work in. Do not be lazy. Okay, don't do that. If you're going to wait, if you're going to take a year, if you're going to take two years, make sure that you are bettering yourself in that time. Because if you're the same applicant that you were two years ago, that's not going to cut it. Okay. The application pool for PA school is just continuing to get even more and more competitive. So it is absolutely important that you also change with the times and make sure that your application is also getting more and more competitive because listen, you might have been extremely great applicant in May, right? You graduated in May. You got all your hours and all that stuff. You might have been like a super bomb competitive applicant in May of 2015. And then you took two years. You ain't really do much. You took maybe like one class, but you've been kind of working here and there. You can't really find the job that you want. And then you're trying to apply to PA school because you're like, yo, life has got to be better than this. I want to go to PA school. No, I'm afraid it don't work that way. And you apply. Your application might be like, wow. Two years makes a difference. A year makes a difference. A few months makes a difference. So again, like let's say you had taken a year and now you've gotten maybe over 2000, 3000 healthcare experience hours. Your GPA is right. Everything else you got going for you. And you choose rather than applying early and as soon as CASPA opens up in April, you choose to apply like in June for schools that have like September, October, November deadlines. Well, y'all, your application might have been extremely competitive in April and May when people were still graduating, still trying to get their stuff together. You got in there early and you could have been a really competitive candidate. But now as you're applying in June, while people have already taken their GRAs, they've gotten out of college, they've gotten out of their undergrad, they're all of their prerequisites, information has now come into CASPA in the past two months. Now you might be average or mediocre. And so you're doing yourself a disservice by waiting. Do not wait. Isn't there like some phrase like don't put off for tomorrow what can be done today or something like that? Never put off till tomorrow what can be done today. Is that in the Bible? Is that in the word? I don't know. I think that sounds like it might be in the word, but I know that I've seen like phrases like that floating around the internet world somewhere. But it's true. Do not put off for tomorrow what you can do today, because what you need to do today or what you should be doing today might just be like a hindrance later on with respect to you're not going to be as competitive of a candidate. So definitely don't wait. Instead of thinking about when's the best time, look at your life, look at your plan that you have for application and look and see, okay, when is my application going to be right? How long do I need to take to make sure that my GPA goes from a 3.1 to a 3.4? If that's what you want. If you want to be that kind of competitive, then what do I need to do? Do I need to take six classes? All right. How can I do this? I can take two in the summer in the first summer session. I can take two in the second summer session. And then I can take maybe two in spring or two in the winter session and be ready for CASPA in April. Make sure that you have a plan. Stick to that plan. If it gets derailed a little, go ahead and see what options. Make sure that you have other options. See what things can happen to make sure that you're still able to meet your goals, even if there may be slight little hiccups on the road. But definitely keep going. Make sure, again, make sure you plan, plan, plan, research and don't wait. Okay.  Okay. Wait for CASPA. CASPA is going to open up at the end of April sometime. Once they open, go ahead, create your account and apply. Pay your... That's another thing, y'all. Plan with respect to the money. Okay.  But you want to apply as early as you can and you want to apply extremely right at the moment that you have met all of those prerequisite requirements. Okay. So that is it. That's kind of like my big soapbox moment. Come on, you guys. Make sure you apply immediately. The sooner, the better. Don't wait unless you have to, unless you know that that time is going to allow you to become a better candidate than you would have been had you applied when you were thinking of doing it and then just bite the bullet and do it, y'all. Don't wait, okay? Do not wait. All right. So thank you guys so much for watching. That was just my little tidbit of information with respect to the best time to apply for PA school. Do it now. If you got nothing else, do it now when you're ready with respect to you've met the requirements. If you haven't already done so, go ahead and subscribe and leave me a comment if you have any questions on this particular topic or something else. I'll be sure to get to it as soon as I possibly can and follow me on Instagram at AdanaThePA. Thank you guys so much for watching. I will talk to you guys next time. Bye.