This is John Park's workshop. It's going to be a noisy one here today. There's construction, including an air compressor pump that's currently running out there that you may or may not hear, but I hear. So if I'm talking louder over it, that's why. I don't know how much this lav picks up, except I can see kind of a floor of noise there when I'm not talking. So please bear with me. Also, there may be a chance that I will not be doing the show next week because of continued construction, including this roof getting ripped off and replaced. It's about time. For that, it's been quite a few years. And we don't want leaks. And I want some additional insulation and reflective modern materials. So possibly I won't be doing next week.  So yay. Yeah, DJ Devon 3 over in our Discord chat said it's not loud enough to be a bother. That's nice to hear. Hello, thin man. Hello, Mike P. Hey, Andy Callaway. Jeff, DJ Devon 3. Mike P. Have I said those names all over and over again? Yes, I have. Thanks for stopping by. Hey, Sea Grover. I'm not only watching the chat over in our Discord server, but also on our YouTube. So if you're over there. Hello, thanks for watching. If you're somewhere else and you're wondering where the chat is, you can head over to our Discord server and look for that live broadcast chat channel right there. Our Discord server is at adafru.it-slash-discord. And you can jump on in there and hang out. There's plenty of other channels, too, on our server. If you've got some specific questions, interests, things you want to help out with, look at those. Look at a bunch of those other channels there. Let's see, so what else have we got going on for the show today? I've got a coupon code to give you, a 10% off discount you'll be able to use in the Adafruit store if you want to buy some things. We'll also be doing a recap of my Tuesday show, the JP's product pick of the week. I've got a fresh, spanking new Circuit Python parsec to share with you. What else? I have some updates on the glove. The Brick Tune synthesizer is now in convenient wearable, self-contained glove format. And I'm excited to show that to you. It's moved from the prototype phase into a more wearable, usable device. So I'm excited to show you that as well as some of the updates to the code that have been going on in the behind the scenes here. What else? I think I wanted to show you a cool little recycling project that I've maybe taken on based on something I found while I was walking my dog. So you know how I like to pick up weird things in alleys? So I've got a new one to show you there, a couple of them actually. And I think that's going to be the show. So let's get on with it. First of all, let's see. Hey, look right there. That's your discount code. If you want to go and buy some stuff in the Adafruit store, just type in that coupon code right there, Brick Glove, Brick Dash Glove in the coupon code feel. Here is Adafruit.com. You probably know where that is. Go to Adafruit, main page. Adafruit.com is the store front. You can check out things like products, little product drop down here, the gift ideas, the what's new. If you click on the what's new, the latest things, including some of these cool funky displays that we have coming that work with some of the driver boards, the RGB666 driver boards that I think just went out of stock last night. But that right there, this QALIA display, we're working on getting more of these in the store, this ESP32S3 QALIA display driver board you can use on some of these cool displays. But if you want to get yourself a discount on the way out, just remember to use that right there. I just lost it. There it is, Brick Dash Glove. Type that in.  Also, if you want free stuff and who doesn't, when you are shopping, when you're here in the store, just check out Adafruit.com slash free. And if you check this out, you're going to see the different freebies that you can get at different purchase levels. So if you spend $99 or more, you're going to get the cool coaster, this thing right here, the Adafruit coaster with the gold Adafruit logo on it.  For $149 or more, you can pick up a KB2040 right there for free and the coaster. So you'll stack these. If you spend $199 or more, you're going to get UPS Brown shipping for free in the continental United States. So maybe you're not in a hurry, and maybe you live within trucking distance. No need for ships or planes. Assume that's still what that means. Then you can get that for free with $199 or more purchase. You'll also get the KB2040 and the coaster. And then if you spend $299 or more, if you've got big, big plans, you're going to get a free circuit playground express that right there. Excellent board, fantastic for learning, fantastic for taking your software skills and turning them into hardware skills because it's got a billion sensors and inputs and outputs all built into it. Works with Circuit Python, works with Arduino. So $299 or more, you'll get the free circuit playground express. You'll get the $199 shipping, free shipping.  So head to the store, check those things out, and don't forget to type in that coupon code before midnight tonight, East Coast time in the United States. That's one that poofs out of existence. So what else have we got? So hey, I've got this show on Tuesday. Some of you have probably seen it. It is my product pick show. I like to grab something from the store and show it to you and give you a big, deep, deep discount on it. This week it was the Hallowing M4. Do we still have it sitting here? This right here, there it is. Hallowing M4. Did a little talk about it.  And here's a little one minute recap of that. Check it out. It is the Hallowing M4 with this beautiful screen as a display for your Halloween projects, for your spooky projects, for your skull-based projects. I have a config file. It's called config.i. I'm going to go ahead and turn the iLids back on. So upper iLid and lower iLid. I'm going to uncomment those lines. I'm going to save this file right onto the drive.  And you'll see it boots up really quickly. And now we have the lids. Just the pupil color. I'm going to make a red, terrifying red pupil. And I'm going to change the slit pupil radius. We get done, done, done. Really cool. Let's do the sclera with the reflection maps. Dome environmental photo that looks like a chrome ball type of thing. It is the Hallowing M4. Yes, it is indeed. So I think we had about 100 of those in stock. Do we still have those in stock? Let's see. Let's jump over there and see if you can still get those. The coupon code is, or rather, the discount of price is only during that show. There's actually no need for a coupon code during the show. That's out of stock. Those are all out of stock. I don't know if we're going to get any more. So that may have been our last hurrah for those very Halloweeny things. Unfortunately, those are at SamD51 chip-based, which had been impossible to get forever. We finally got them. But we have, I think, the biggest item that people wanted most was Feather M4. So we threw a lot of chips at that problem there. I think there were only about 100 of the Hallowing M4s around. And they got bought up. So show us your projects, though. I'd love to see what people are doing with those. It's a fun one for all kinds of projects, but particularly Halloween-based ones. All right. So hey, next up, let me get set up here for a Circuit Python Parsec. And here we go. Yes, Circuit Python. Hey, all right. For the Circuit Python Parsec today, I wanted to show you how you can use debouncer as a timer with a button inside of Circuit Python. What you'll see here on my desk is I've got a Feather M4. And I have one of these little convenient PCB-mounted buttons plugged into it. But any kind of button or switch would work for what we're going to do. And I just have the yellow one here plugged into that. And what you're going to see is if you look over in my code window at the bottom there, I have the REPL that's giving me feedback on things that are happening here. I'm going to press the button, and it says Timer Started. So what happens is as soon as I press that button, it starts an internal timer. It makes a little note. Hey, we've started a timer. And the next event, which is going to be me releasing this button, it'll tell me how much time elapsed. So in this case, it was 13.982 seconds. So you can see here, if I hold it for about a second, let go almost exactly a second. If I try to be fast about it, I get 0.059 seconds. So a really nice, easy way to set up a timer here that's really simple. I'll show you the code for that in a second. And you can imagine you can use this for things like figuring out not only just timing an event like a stopwatch, but also for checking for long presses or short presses. This is one way you could do that. There's also some convenience functions inside of the debouncer that do that for you. But this is the sort of fundamental timing that you can do. And the way this works, if you look at my code here, I'm importing the board library, digital.io, and the Adafruit debouncer. Then I'm setting up my button as a digital in on pin A1. I'm setting it with a pull up resistor. And then the button variable equals debouncer, and then that button pin. Then during the main loop, we do a debouncer update. In this case, it says button.update. Just looks for something to change, an edge case of something pressing or releasing. If the button falls, then we say, hey, the timer started. If the button releases, we print time, and then we print this line time button.lastDuration. So the last duration is that timer that says, as soon as something happens, we're going to start counting, and as soon as the next thing happens, we're going to let you know how long that duration was between the events. And so that is how you can set up a timer in Circuit Python using the debouncer library. And that is your Circuit Python parsec. Yes, Circuit Python. Hey, I almost tricked myself and didn't turn on my mic, but I caught it. Caught it the last second. All right. So next up, I wanted to talk about the progress on the Bricktoons synthesizer, which is now built into a glove. So I'm going to head on over to the workbench for this. Give me a second to set up over there and show this off. You may have seen this on Show and Tell last night. I'm going to go into a little more detail. Now we'll also look at some of the code, but also the build. So if you're not familiar with the project, first of all, the idea behind this is that I have a set of LEGO plates in this case, these 2 by 6 plates that I've set up that give me a nice surface area by laying four of them of each color out. And what I've done is I've selected 12 colors that are really nice and distinct from each other in the eyes of this little color sensor that I have here. So this is a breakout board color sensor for the AS3741. And this uses I2C to communicate with, in this case, I have a feather. This is the PropMaker Feather RP2040, which happens to have an I2S amplifier built into it, which makes it really convenient for this project because there's essentially no soldering required. I've got my color sensor plugged in. It has a little built-in LED over the Stem-AQT wire, which is running through the glove out over to the feather. Feather is plugged in to a LiPo battery. It has built-in charging on it. And then I have a speaker plugged into these screw terminals that are on the end of the PropMaker to connect to the I2S amplifier. So the color sensor can distinguish among these colors and trigger an event. What I have it doing is actually triggering a synthesizer, Synth-IO chime sound based on a physical modeling or a harmonics, a chime, or tubular bell type of library that C. Grover has written, which will be, I believe, is going to be in review soon for adding to the community bundle. So it'd be really easy for people to use. And what I've done is I've integrated it into this glove so that all we need to do is essentially point at or tap our finger on one of these colors, and we're going to hear a chime sound. Now, since it's kind of loud in here, let me know. Actually, I'm going to open up my Discord chat on the phone here just so I can see if people are able to hear the chime sounds, because I don't have this mic separately. I just have the speaker that's built onto the glove there. Oh, good. The compressor just stopped. That's good. And glove starts the compressor. OK, here we go. I'm going to put my mic close to it, so I'm going to lean over here. So you can hear what I have it doing is playing a little five note run, sort of an arpeggio, that is increasing its root note for each of the starting with the dark blue and ending on this yellow. The colors are actually not in any particular order other than alphabetical Lego name color, Lego color name. So this one's blue. I think this one's called light green. And this is light bright yellow or light bright orange. This is bright pink, or maybe that's not the name. This one's coral, medium purple, I think. This is dark turquoise. I forget this guy. He's a lavender, lime green, red, sand green, and traditional yellow, which it doesn't want to pick up right now. Hey, why are you not? Hey, I wonder. Oh, I think maybe I'm interfering a little bit with the spotlight. It's actually kind of amazing it's working as well as it is. Let me shield it from my, it works a little better. So I have a key light over there that's a little, a little bright. It's probably also color temperature is messing maybe even more than brightness is the color temperature messing with things. So you would ideally tune this for the environment you're playing in or set this up with a little bit of shielding. So you can imagine if I put some little Lego brick walls or put a little, I was thinking about using some heat shrink tubing on this just to give it a little sort of stethoscope like chamber of darkness, which would help. But impressively, this works in a different environment than where I originally calibrated it pretty well. Sound is a little low, DJ Devon 3 says. Yeah, you know what I'm going to do? Just for a second, just for the fun of it, I'm going to take my lav mic. Sorry for the noise. I'm going to hold that to the speaker. Try to shield from that light too. So you get an idea of that. One thing I probably could do, let me put this mic back here, I'm just going to put it on the outside of my shirt. Should stick. One thing I maybe do is add a little feedback. Neopixel color feedback would be fun to light up kind of the same color on this on-board Neopixel on here, which would just be an added little bonus and let you know when it sees the color. And right now, it's actually working quite well to distinguish these from each other. The only one that I heard get a little confused, and this happens sometimes, is if I'm a little far away from this lavender one, it will register a false positive for this darker purple. So if you listen to the dark purple one, a little far away. So it actually registers as very similar. If I come at it from the side, it should be higher. That was a higher pitch. So that is now the only one that's doing that for me, which is kind of cool. And something also that I found really impressive is how well it does at distinguishing some colors that, to my eye, are actually quite similar. For example, this lavender and this pink, or here we have essentially three different kinds of green. And this green has quite a bit of yellow in it, but it's very distinct from these orange and yellow. You can see here I have some regular bricks that match almost all. I didn't have all of them, but almost all these colors. You can see that I'm able to recognize those, even though they're smaller samples. And you may remember when I originally started the project, I was working with little 2 by 2, so even smaller, but basically half the size of that. Now something else that's interesting, I worked pretty hard to find the optimal for me semi-scientifically, semi-not so scientifically and more experientially the best 12 colors that would work for this without false positives. And that was starting from, I think, about 60 colors or so. If I reveal some of these here, these are not colors that are being used. And we'll see if any of them do get picked up. I'm pretty sure some of these will be close enough to the tolerance to pick up. So here's a couple blues up here. Let's see if any of them pick up. Nope. So far so good. Let's make sure everything's still working. Here's the red one. OK, so this purple, really similar to that one. That one picked up or violet. This dark green just got picked up, I think, as it's got picked up the same as the sand green. White shouldn't. Oh, what? I don't know what are you picking up as. Oh, interesting. That white is picking up the same as this purple, which again could be because I have some cool light color coming from there. Not quite sure. But anyway, the nice thing is that I was able to strike a balance of the number of samples that we're taking. So you can get more accuracy by taking more samples in the sensor. But then it's going to be slower to register. So you can see I've got pretty responsive. Obviously, it's nowhere near as responsive as something, some instrument like a keyboard that you would play really quickly. But it's got more of this sort of mystical quality to it in the way I've designed it. And by choosing these sounds to be a little forgiving of the speed that the sensor is taking to register these. Probably this could be tuned and improved even further. C Grover, who created a bunch of the comparison code for this, does still have some ideas about integrating some other clear channel on this, which is the white, light, or brightness level. But works well for what we're doing here. So what I wanted to do is show you some of the code here. I've shown you some of this before, but some things have changed. And also talk a little bit about the glove itself. So let me start there since we're right here. I'll take this off. So this is a hardware store work glove. I picked it because it has these rubber pads on it, these little sort of knuckle and kind of a back of a knuckle protector thing. I don't know who's smashing themselves on the back of the hand with their glove, but maybe that's helpful. So what I reason I wanted that is I could poke some holes from the inside and run nylon M2.5 screws up to mount things. So rather than mounting with tape, I wanted to mount these with some screws, which means I can unscrew these. I have standoffs there and nuts. So I can unscrew these, take them off, put different hardware on there if I want. Even the speaker, same sort of thing. In fact, let me zoom up quite a bit closer there. So you can see I've got hardware there. A little hard to see it. There's a standoff. There's another one there. And to keep it from sort of restricting your wrist motion, I only mounted the speaker in one spot. I didn't bother also adding screws down here through the fabric. I thought that was good. It's also pretty nice and lightweight. You can see I've just simply tucked the battery underneath and I wrapped a little bit of like an elastic hair band around it to get a nice snug fit in there without having to create special hardware for it. So that's, I think, a 420 milliamp hour battery there. And that just charges by plugging in. Right now, I don't even have a reset or rather an enable switch or a power switch on it. I'm just keeping it plugged into USB most of the time. That could be an addition. If you didn't mind soldering a little extra wire and switch on there, you could add an on-off to it. It should be nice. But for now, the way I'm using it, I just keep it plugged in. And then what I did for the sensor connection here is you can see there was this little palm pad here. And I just used a seam ripper to pull out about five stitches here and another few down here and ran one of these nice, I don't know if these are the 400 millimeter long stem of QT cables, but they have almost like a telephone line, like a POTS line type of modular phone line covering on them, which makes them stiff enough to snake up through here. Actually, I started from the finger and snaked my way down there, pulled it through. So that keeps it nice and neat. And then the sensor, I'm going to block the light there a little bit, the sensor, stem of QT board here, I stitched with just some black thread in four spots on the mounting holes. Not conductive thread, I'm not doing any of that kind of stuff. It's just some polyester thread, I think it was, to keep that in place. Now, you could potentially, I think we can do, from not mistaken, there may be two addresses you can use this one on. If you can, that might be a way to do two different color sensors on a glove, so you could play little pairs of notes, which could be kind of neat. Or you could, and I mentioned this on show and tell last night, you could build a whole second glove, because when you buy one of these gloves, you've bought two of them, right? You buy a pair of the gloves at the hardware store for about 20 bucks. If you wanted to, you could have one on each hand, it's fully self-contained. This is based on an idea that Jay Silver, or a project that Jay Silver built back at the MIT Media Lab that Lamor was telling us about. I haven't seen it, so I'm not sure quite exactly how it worked, but she mentioned, she thought it was a MIDI controller, which is super cool. This one just differs primarily in being a self-contained synth, using SynthIO running on here, so we're not adding a second instrument or software synthesizer and MIDI, which could go over USB in this case, or could be even a Bluetooth BLE MIDI if you wanted to in a project. That would certainly be a possibility. I did that with the Nintendo PowerGlove project. If you look on Learn, you'll see a project about that. But this one is kind of neat, because it's just a self-contained synthesizer with its own little speaker. So it is what it is, and there it is in action. So another idea I had for this is that you could create some music for it, so if you played a series of bricks that were arranged in a melody, maybe it's not playing these little chime arpeggios, but instead single notes, you could basically use it like a sequencer or like a piano roll. You could set up your bricks in a row and move your hand, or if you wanted to really decouple this from the glove, this could be a fun Lego synthesizer, mechanical conveyor belt type of project if you build like a Technic Lego belt with links and a movable, flexible conveyor belt. You could put bricks on it, mount your color sensor in a spot where it's gonna be nice and protected from outside light and have it read. You can probably get that to be really nice and consistent and play little piano rolls, little Lego piano rolls. So I'm not gonna do that, but maybe you are. And the reason that I'm excited about this project is I think it really helps, oh, I wonder what it just read. I think it really helps to make this particular sensor really nice and usable by having this sample code that does this very specific kind of thing, which is sort of the thing we wanna do with it, which is tell a bunch of different colors from each other, not just red, green, blue, but you can see we've got a dozen colors here. And depending on your needs, you could move it up more than that. I think at one point I had over 20, maybe close to 30 individual bricks that it was sensing properly. It just took longer, so it wasn't as playable as an instrument. So that is the glove. Now let's go plug it in and I'll show you what the code is doing, how this is working now. Let me just reattach this mic here. Hopefully it doesn't fall. And let's jump to this view here out of the way and unplug that. Goodbye feather. And I think I'll bring back this. And by the way, if people are interested, I could in the guide publish this exact model that I'm using since I built it already in Bricklink Studio, if you felt like ordering those parts. A lot of them came actually from the Pickabrick wall or whatever they call it now at the Lego store. Some others I ordered online from Bricklink, but if you want, you can publish instructions out of Bricklink Studio or just the model file if you wanna look at it. So what I'm gonna do is set that there. I can brighten that up a little bit or a lot. And you can see here is the little plug or USB-C plug on the side of the feather. So it just plugs in like that. And now it's charging and we can code it. And it's, oh, that's the startup. If you heard that, that's the startup sound of it doing the whole scale that I have built into there. So let's look at that. Let's look at that scale and some other stuff. I'm gonna go here. Yeah, you can see that. And I'm just gonna reconnect to that board. Should restart again or no, it doesn't need to, okay. In fact, let's talk about that. What's going on in my serial output there in the REPL if you look. Oh, sorry, one second. I just wanna look. I didn't have the YouTube chat visible and I wanted to say hello to Randall Bone and Dave Odessa and Gavin Bell. Hello, thanks for stopping by. This was a question Randall had that I missed from earlier when I was showing the feather debouncer. So this debouncer will, I had it printing or rather the code was rose and fell. So rising and falling means it's going from a high to a low or a low to a high voltage on the pin that it's measuring. So this sort of acts like a voltage divider and it'll pull the pin high or low when we press that. So rising and falling is rather than just a state of true or false. It says we're going from one to another. We're going from low to high or high to low. And that's the terminology of the debouncer. If you look up the Adafruit Debouncer Library in circuit Python, that's the terminology that's used. And you can in fact go to our, let me show this real quick, to be thorough about answering this question. If you go here to Adafruit and click on the learn link, type in debouncer and you'll see there is this Python Debouncer Library for Buttons and Sensors. This was Dave Estels who wrote the library, has a really thorough and excellent explanation of how it works and it should make some of that make a little more sense if you're curious about it. And so thank you for the question there, Randall. All right, Zeezy Gavin says, publishing the Lego plans would be great. Thanks, yeah, happy to. Oh, Yanisku7 says, how does the Lego Mindstorm Color Sensor work? I don't think I have one of those. I had an older, let's look. Hold on, let me show this webpage. So this is a link to the EV3. I had the older Mindstorm set, which I don't know if it had a color sensor or not. It may not have. So this is a link about the EV3 Lego Color Sensor. Yeah, I'd be curious. I bet if you Google around, it'll tell you what chip they're using. Looks like they can detect black, blue, green, yellow, red, white, brown. That's at least what they've set up here. Really cool, neat. I've never seen that. All right, so back to the one that I do have here and running, the, if you look in my little serial output at the bottom there, says when I, I'm gonna go over new color, I'm gonna go over the blue. So you can see it went from saying no brick to sensor color. And this is giving me eight wavelength readings. So this sensor reads eight different wavelengths. It's the AS7341 for color. And then it reads a infrared and a clear, they call it. So we're just reading these color ones and they're each like the 415 nanometer and the 495 nanometer. And so it's these little chunks of wavelengths that it's able to sense. And what I'm getting on that blue brick when I look at that is this here, about 76 on the lowest end of it, which is the violet roughly, like to put into color terms. Violet, indigo, blue, cyan, green, yellow, orange, red. That's what these eight wavelength subsets are. So when I read, when I read this right now, I got, let's just look at that violet channel, 76. In my code here, I have it printing out what is the reference sort of my calibrated original sort of hand calibrated number for violet. It was 94. Okay, that's pretty close. If you look when I tap on green, it has 119 in the violet. So that's roughly the same distance away from violet as the blue was. But it's the aggregate of all of these, if that's the right word of it for it, of saying, okay, we were 76 on violet, but we were 966 on indigo, and the green brick is nowhere near that on indigo, right? So we're doing this big comparison of this set of values. And so when it tells me, hey, I see 76 on that blue brick for violet, and the reference was 96. Well, what we have is a tolerance value we can set to say, how close to this sort of aggregate of values do we need to be to have a perfect match, or not a perfect match, but an imperfect match that we're gonna allow, right? What's the sensitivity level or the tolerance level? So the value I have here, if you look at the top of my code, tolerance equals 800. So this is, again, something you could tune. You could even make maybe a dial or something like that on your device to tune that. And the color matching tolerance index is zero to eight multiplied by the maximum sensor count. And the maximum sensor count in this case is about, I think, 6,000 something. I forget what it is. I think we can go up into the tens of thousands on tolerance, depending on what you're trying to do. The sensor, also, I mentioned, has this how much time you wanna take to be how accurate. It's this little balancing act you can do. So we have the steps and the time, the integration time for the step count. And so I'm using 128 steps. So we could go quite a bit faster if we dropped that, but we would maybe miss values outside of the tolerance range. So this is the little sort of balancing act you do between a number of steps, the amount of time that you spend reading a step. Then this also has gain. There's sensor gain and the LED current, which I think Cirova was saying he wasn't noticing a difference on. I thought I had, but I can't remember now. Let's see, I'm gonna set this to one and watch this LED if it gets dimmer. Not at all dimmer. Okay, I imagined that back when I thought it did. So that apparently doesn't matter. That might just be an error in the library that could be corrected. So the, yeah, print max sensor count. I have that, let's reload the code here. Maximum sensor count, hey. Oh, I'm scrolled way down. Why are you not printing? All right, let's give it a little delay here. I'm actually becoming a fan of my code playing a little tune for me when it restarts. Hey, this is weird. I don't know why it won't print that. What, let's print it a little lower in the code about. Cause I see it printing my welcome to brick tunes ready. All right, let's print it right there. Wow, it refuses. Why do you refuse? Do you really need more time? It is very strange to me. I don't know why it won't show up. This is the code I'm running, right? Huh, or is it? This one doesn't show my, yeah, this is what's running on there. All right, let's print it after we say brick tunes ready. This is really mysterious. Why wasn't it printing that? That's bizarre. Okay, yeah, the max sensor count here is five, nine, five, six, five, seven, nine. Oddly, it's not now, it's now not printing the brick tunes ready. Okay, something goofy is going on there. Close the file and open it fresh. Okay, let's do that. Good idea, Todd, thank you. Yeah, okay, well, it's busy thinking about stuff down there and it does not like doing both of those things right one after another. I've got one more, sorry, this is not that important but I'm gonna fight it. I don't want to print here, I want to sleep. Oh, and also press reset on the board, Todd suggests. This is another good idea. I will, it refuses. I am weirded out by that. I'll have to deal with that later. Okay, so let's look at some other stuff going on the code here. There's a lot happening. So this is the magic color comparison code that C Grover wrote. It's compare n channels colors. So it compares two integer multi-channel count tuples and so that's like the eight channels of what I'm reading versus the eight channels of the sort of look up chart, look up table that I've made. You can see that below here. So there's my kind of averaged, held it in some slightly different lighting conditions, held it for a while and looked at the number settle and said, okay, yeah, that's a pretty good value. Yeah, Andy Calloway says Python sometimes does weird things like that, it sure does. Todd says it's because you're printing out stuff before it's available to your hosts USB. If you control C and control D, you might see it. All right, I'll try that. Still no, bizarre. So this, I don't pretend to understand the math of this, but this is this deltas of the color index minus count to IDX count enumerate color. Okay, I'm gonna get C Grover to write up and I'm some of the explanations in here, but I'm hopefully gonna get him to write up a little bit in the guide of how this works. This is, like I said, the list of the colors that I came up with that works well in their sort of reference values. Here's their names. I may switch this into a little dictionary with a key value pair set just to make it easier to look at, but that's what I have. Then I've got a little list here that's called brick states and this is a set of, it's a little list of whether we are looking at a brick or not. And I use this to, if we wanna use this to sort of sustain a note and then stop playing it versus play it instantly, regardless, we have a little bit of leeway there to say, okay, are we looking at a brick or are we looking at no brick? And that's when you see in my code here and it says bright green and then that means the state right now is true for that one. Then when I move off of it, it says, okay, no brick, we're not looking at a brick. And this was a cool suggestion from Todd. I originally was looping through eight times or however, 12 times, however long the list of colors is. He said, okay, you can kind of optimize this by saying your list name equals and then in the brackets, false and then multiply that by the number of entries of false you want inside that list. And I always forget how to do this, but he reminded me about it, so thank you. So this is essentially saying brick states equals the word false times 12. 12 is just the length of that list right there. So thanks for that reminder. I like that syntax there. That's pretty efficient. Then I'm doing some of the typical audio setup and I'm using the I2S amplifier that's built into the prop maker feather using the audio mixer to set the volume. I've got it set to full volume here just so you have a prayer of hearing it, but you can make it a little quieter when you're in the privacy of your own home in a quieter space. And then I'm using this chime, if you look up at the top at the libraries I'm bringing in, I'm using this Cedar Grove chime library which he designed to do wind chimes. And I think he showed that off on show and tell a few weeks ago, very cool project. I asked him if I could use it for this, for the Lego bricks. And you can see here it has these functions for the chime, the scale that you're playing, the voice, the material and the striker. And we'll look at what those are a little bit here as we scroll down. There are chime scales built into the library, but I wanted to use my own particular scale and that's because I was doing these sort of arpeggios and I wanted sort of pentatonic arpeggios here. So I have all these whole notes and I have three octaves of them listed. You could make any scale you want in here. You could make a spooky sort of minor key thing for Halloween if you wanted. And then I'm making the chime object using that scale. And then I'm also setting the materials so you can have this be different materials and it'll give you harmonics that are different based on the physics of those materials. Both the object that's getting struck and the thing that's striking it. So if I wanna make a much different sound here, I'm gonna hold the mic to the speaker or bring the speaker to the mic here when I play this one. I'm gonna make this ceramic. So you can hear that, does not have any of that big ringing type of sustained harmonic. It dampens very quickly because it's a ceramic material instead of brass or aluminum or steel. Let's do, I think there's copper. Very luxurious, the copper sound, I like that. This is my little startup thing that I'm so happy about which is just, hey, when it starts, since we're doing something with sound, kinda nice to just play the sound rather than wait for it to fully boot and have me instantiate it with a color. So this is a nice way to listen to the scale that you're gonna play there. So that's what this little loop is here. Then I battle with these print statements here which someone, I think Andy Calloway said, yeah, Python sometimes does weird things like that. Sure does. Oh, and sorry, Cgrovers said in the chat, the LED brightness is in milliamps but the resolution is in four milliamp increments. So the next brightness current value is eight, I see. So it should be four or eight. Okay, thank you. Then in my main loop here, you can see I am, I mentioned this before but I'm still doing this which is, I just, since the Indigo channel tends to be the darkest one on these based on the colors I've picked, anyway, I can tell if we're not looking at any of the bricks by just saying if it's less than 70, then there's no brick there. That's what says, okay, we're looking at darkness. And that was both something I can use, like I said, to release a note or to just not bother calculating all the color values all the time which probably speeds things up a little bit. If that does go higher than 70, then we do the full check here. So I create this variable called data which is all the channels. So we get, in this case, eight. No, we get 10 channels actually, right? Is that right? No, I think we just get the eight color channels. I think the other channels have different names. So that, yeah, that right there, sensor color grabs the first zero through seven. Okay, yeah, so sensor all channels does grab, sorry, it does grab the IR. Sorry, I haven't dealt with this in a while so I forgot. So that grabs IR and clear, but then we're just saying we're only gonna look at the first eight of those zero through seven. If we're in debug mode, I print the sensor color kind of the whole time I'm over a brick and I'll show you that right now actually. So if I go back up to the top of the code and just say true, okay, now what I'll do is I'm gonna hover over this blue channel and you can see now I'm spewing out the color values constantly. I'm wiggling it a little. I'm gonna see if I can stop touching it. Okay, so hands off of it, you can see it's pretty stable. Those numbers are changing by maybe the ones, like one value on some of them.  That doesn't appear to be any known color to it so it's kind of ignoring it, but this is also partly why I'm doing the whole keep giving me info while we're above 70 on that Indigo channel and actually I should probably lower that a little because we're really close. But now I went to no brick for a moment and then it saw the brick again and it played the sound and now we're back to no brick. So that debug mode there is kind of how I'm looking at values when I need to calibrate right now. By the way, I just have to point out, sorry, I don't have a screen to share for this, but over in the YouTube chat, there was a statement about the Nobel physics prize, they were able to get 802nd resolution using waves. Paul said 802nd intervals and someone solved the frequency to say that's a million, Mike Jones says that's a million gigahertz according to chat GPT and Ricardo Madgello Esquire says one 802nd wavelength is one quintillionth cycle per second frequency. That sounds like a lot. All right, so back to the code here. We are building that little list of the color channels and then here's where I do the color match. I say for I in the range of the eight full spectrum values, sorry, I in the range of the 12 different color sets, sorry, we look at each of those in that lookup table and then we do the compare. So the color match is compare and channel colors, whatever I just read versus my reference table, my lookup table, their brick full spectrum value. That's this list of numbers here. So we just go and do that comparison. I say just, this is fantastic and amazing that this works so well and thanks again to see Grover. The color match returns either true or false. There's also some interesting stuff you can get from it like a delta to say how far from the reference are we? And that's also helpful for tuning this to your lighting environment. If the state is false, meaning we're not already looking at a brick, then we're gonna go ahead and print the brick name, play the chimes. You can see I have a little sort of algorithm for these chime intervals that play. I have a little tenth of a second delay between chime strikes so it plays them sequentially with a little notable sort of space between them. And then we set that brick straight state to true so we know we're on it. We don't have to like keep repeating it. We don't have to keep looking for the values unless we set that debug to true and then we flip the value of the gap state and repeat. So that's what it's doing now. I'm getting close to done with this. Clean some stuff up a little bit and publish this into our GitHub so that's available for everyone and then that'll set me up to write it up in the learn guide. So thanks for letting me talk on and on about this. I'm excited about this project. It was a really fun one. Thanks, Lady Aida, for suggesting it.  So let's come over here and take a look at this. Let me just set my camera switcher, which I need to restart. And what this is, is a server power supply. I found this little Dell personal server power edge, I think it was called. I forget the model number on it, but it's essentially a desktop chassis with a server in it rather than a rack mount server, but it has redundant power supplies in it. So I got two of these. They were easy to unscrew and pull out because they're meant to be hot swappable. This is a, I believe, 580 watt supply and it does 12 volts at 48 amps. It has a, I believe, a positive and negative 12 volts on these little sort of blade looking funky, I think it's a Molex or maybe someone else, but this is a funky little connector because this just slots into the back. It's meant to, you can see, it's even got the little rail there and a latch. So you just pull that, there's two of them. So one will keep running, you pop the other one in and that's the idea to keep your server running.  And I'm interested in getting these running because they're pretty cool. I think it potentially, looking at some stuff online can give me five volts positive, negative 12, positive 12 and maybe 3.3. And the way that it is controlled normally, as you can see, there's these little Dupont space, 0.1 inch space connectors right here. And those have different, this plugs into a little receptacle in the machine and then some of those are gonna be just hooked up to like your power switches or soft power switches. Some are gonna be computer controlled configurations or temperature controlled configurations. I believe there's fan speed control like two states you can do on it. And some of that just comes from jumpering these wires. So it's a little hard to find the pin out but I think I found one that's working for this. And I don't think I'll fire this up right now. I did have it up and running and giving me fan spinning and four volts on one of these. So something was wrong. And one of these was acting like ground and the other was positive, I think or maybe it was a differential and they were not what I thought they were supposed to be. So anyway, clearly I don't know much about it right now but it is fascinating. These probably go for $30 to $50 online if you try to get a replacement or a used one but kind of a nice alternative if I can get it configured and user friendly enough kind of a nice alternative to a little mean well supply for getting a LED light strip, motor, Halloween thing, Euro rack synthesizer power supplies are always on my mind. So cool little form factor for the supply and I'd be curious if anyone here has experience with these. I think they're popular among RC car enthusiasts who charge batteries off of them. I guess either they're getting these down to seven volts or they're maybe they've got 12 volt charging going on but neat, neat little supply. Got a couple more for free. Made by Delta Electronics Ford Dell and it is the DPS580AB that's a reference number. The model number is D580ES0 and I've been searching those things and related things. It might be like the T510 was the power edge server something like that. So hit me up in our Discord server if you have info or interest in that because yeah, it's a fun potential free power supply project. Who can say no to that, right? And I was walking the dog so I couldn't carry the whole thing home. So yeah, 12 volt, 48 amp, nice, nice supply. All right, I think that's gonna do it. So what's going on Skr? We have signal. All right, wait, I gotta see what did Steve say that got that response? If you elicit a, all our base are belong to you. Set him up and learn. Are you talking about C Grover? He is set up and learned. He's written us some really cool projects before and he's got, I hope you don't mind me sharing this but he's using our fairly new feature. Let's see if I can find it of these playground user pages. If you go to learn and type in C Grover, use slash C Grover. So learn.datafruit.com slash use slash C Grover. That won't get you 10% off in the store but that will get you to, let's see, is this, are these not the playground pages? I'm confused, sorry, playground. All right, let's try that. Here it is. Okay, it's so much easier than I thought. Just go to atafruit slash playground.com or on the main Atafruit page, at least on the main learn page, there's a menu up at the top. Click on playground and you'll see, here's a guide by, or a user page, a playground page by C Grover right at the top there. It's using this same light sensor. By the way, when I asked Jan about this sensor, he said, oh, I've got a project I've been working on to do a backlight behind the TV that matches sort of an average color of what's going on on the TV set. Kind of like, I think it was a Philips Hue project like that at one point and we have, I think a Phil Burgess project using Arduino that does that. So he was able to use some of that info to help me with my Lego project. If we click on that, do we get, oh yeah, okay. I think I lied, I was confused about a different thing. Jan's also helping with this BN0055 sensor calibration tutorial, so he's also got his palette faders. So anyway, these playground guides, they're new, so I'm confused about them, but they allow you to write up your own little mini learn guide pages using some of the same tools that are in Learn Guide.  So if people wanna just click on them and learn more or buy them, you've made that easier, so that's nice. Anyway, go check those out, and that is C Grover sharing a lot of information with us. So thank you. All right. Is that gonna do it? I think that's gonna do it for today. Thanks everyone for stopping by. Like I said, this is the coupon code that you can use if you wanna get 10% off in the store, type in brick-glove, that will get you 10% off in the store until midnight tonight.  Why not? All right, thanks everyone for stopping by Graded Fruit Industries. I'm John Park. This has been John Park's Workshop. I will see you. I plan to see you next Tuesday with a product pick of the week so long as the roof is still here. It's a good chance I won't be doing this show next week and I'll just push it to the following week. Okay, thanks everyone. Bye-bye.


Good evening. Thank you for participating in tonight's forum. This is the third of our three little mini forums Thank you to our candidates My name is Kathy Campbell.  I am a member of the Amherst League But I do not live in Amherst, so I won't be voting in this election And so I hope you will accept me as an unbiased alternative Tonight We're going to hear from the candidates We are hearing from the candidates for the new Amherst town council as you know There are 26 of these and in order to hear from all of them in the space of three hours We've organized these forums differently than our usual forums All the candidates have been given three open-ended questions in advance They're based on questions that we received from members of the community during our August forums There won't be any opening statements, but each candidate will have an opportunity to make a short closing statement at the end We have a timer on here that's down here on the table That's visible to the candidates and I have a version up here that has three little buttons on it that you can see We thank the town of Amherst for making this timer available to us For the 90-second questions Answers the yellow light is going to come on at 30 second when you have 30 seconds remaining We all I also want to thank the Amherst schools for making this facility available to us and Amherst media Which is recording the event For rebroadcasts during the next two weeks and the run-up to the election on November 6th Candidates will need to wrap up very quickly when the red light starts blinking at the end of their time and If necessary, I will interrupt you We ask that the audience silence their cell phones and remain quiet until the end of the last closing statement So now we have going to hear from the candidates from districts four and five They are seated to me starting with district four David Resson Evan Ross Jacqueline Maidana Maidana and Steven Schreiber and from district five the candidates are Darcy Dumont Paul Bobrowski I Guess we got a little Samuel McLeod and Shalini Balmill the first question Is going to be the as follows The shift to a town council Manager form of local government is a big change for Amherst What is one of your biggest concerns about the role of town council in this change? And what will you do to address that concern? We'll start with the candidates from district four and we'll start with Steve please Lucky me So first and foremost we need to make sure that the council is focusing on the right problems So we need to set priorities We've heard a number of campaign promises that range from parking meters to climate change And so really that's an ominous task for the the council to wade through those And to really figure out what the highest priorities are Secondly, we need to make sure that the council is focusing on the right job So we are moving into a system. So when we had town meeting Select board form of government There was some intermingling of the executive branch in the legislative branch where basically the select board was both The town manager was both and the finance committee and others were both So now we have a complete separation of the legislative and executive branches So we need to make sure that the town council is willing and able to serve as the legislature and really let the executive branch Do its job? The council needs to move quickly on some issues. We're inheriting things like two crumbling elementary schools Some an impasse it sounds like on what to do with downtown which was largely developed as a 1950s automobile focused one-story strip malls and really competing Priorities for what that should be so the town council needs to take leadership on that, but we need to take that leadership quickly Thank you Jack The new Form of government will have enormous powers and will bring new challenges I'm because I'm concerned that the town council will be slanted in one direction I want to work to bridge that divide We are a diverse community and I believe that all citizens deserve to be heard I Intend to meet more than twice a year and that's what the charter had recommended But I think that it's important that we meet more frequently with our community and our constituents and I also plan on attending the other district meetings and There'll be weekly meetings. I believe in town hall bulletin boards and and Perhaps even something in the newspaper that we could have a column in the newspaper informing Our citizens about what's going on in town we will have this opportunity to Hear what people have to say and learn about their concerns Who will need to work together genuinely listening to many perspectives compromise With needed when needed and come to informed decisions This will be an exciting opportunity to develop better communication among people of all ages and persuasions with new methods of keeping The public informed of our government's activities. Thank you Evan Okay So can you all Henry one of the things that's important to me is making sure that town council is not just responsive But also representative of the communities that it serves Amherst has a number of diverse communities from students to seniors Renters home owners young families People of color immigrants and we need to make sure that everyone feels like they're being represented On town council and so throughout the campaign I've heard a lot of people say things like I want to elevate the voices of the LGBTQ community or I want to elevate the voices of people of color Well, if you want to elevate their voices elect them right put them in government And so I'm happy to see that we have a somewhat diverse pool of candidates I'm happy to see that we have a student running I'm happy to see that we have a working mom of a school-aged child running I'm happy to see that we have immigrants running And I think the first step is to elect them But then we have to do more and that's where the community participation officer plays a role This is a position that was designed to help engage underrepresented groups in our government And I think at first it likely will not be a full-time position the money just isn't there But I think over the long term our goal should be to make that a full-time position to make that a position That has the resources To accomplish that goal to make sure that no matter who you are in Amherst you feel like you are being represented on council That's one of the reasons I decided to run as a millennial as a renter as a member of the LGBTQ community I wanted to make sure those communities had a seat at the table And I think that with the council needs to work to make sure that every community has a seat at the table Thank you David First thank you to the league for holding this forum that I press a button here that shouldn't have been put you're fine I'm okay. Thank you My main concern is how well counselors will listen to all sides of an issue with an open mind and a willingness to compromise Unlike other opponents in district four. I have not pledged any group or pack to vote in a certain way How can a candidate promise a vote when we don't have all the information that's needed? Counselors must be flexible thinkers who carefully study issues and show respect to each other Another important concern is how the council establishes procedures for choosing members of three critical communities the planning board Zoning Board of Appeals and the finance committee in the past residents have only had to complete a citizens activation forum we need a more detailed process including interviews Committees need to have members with a variety of experience and points of view We also want dedicated volunteers to represent a diversity of residents and we must develop ways to make that possible. I Have served as a case manager with the Hampshire County Sheriff's Department for many years and in that capacity Nothing and I truly mean nothing phases me anymore My common sense and respectful approach would be a strong asset to the council. Thank you for your time Thank you moving on to district five Charlene So I'll be sharing what Many others have shared on this Forum and it also echoes the voices of the people I've been speaking with So having spoken with over 400 people what a common concern I've heard is Will the 13 member council be representative of the diverse voices and the perspectives? So I'd like to approach this Concern by focusing on three specific areas one diversity to communication Channels and three building trust. So in terms of diversity, I think people have already mentioned. We're looking at not just People of color or immigrant families at different income groups, but students senior citizens businesses different stakeholders And also just making sure the different perspectives are being heard what I want to emphasize here is also inclusion and equity as the Educator Verna Myers's diversity is being asked to the party and Inclusion is being asked to dance so just making sure that we are doing that and creating equal opportunities for everyone to participate the second thing I want to emphasize is setting up some systems of communication online and offline and Making sure that we have multiple avenues for people to speak with us and the last is building trust Which means creating policies so everyone feels safe to speak up and be heard. Thank you Let's go on to Sam, please Hi, can you hear me One of the concerns that I have for the new council is that we have a smooth and smooth process of transition And that we continue to offer high quality services to our town I want to ensure extensive resident input and transparent government. I want us to reach out to our residents All the way from South Point to Amherst Woods in District 5 I think it's crucial that we understand that our role as a council is a representative leadership role and An oversight role we need to set up processes to make sure that all of our residents have a voice I Have an MBA and I've been working in the field of management effectiveness and human resources for the last 19 years Organizations come to us seeking solutions. I have an in-depth understanding of workplace processes and effective processes We need to define the vision policy and set goals as we move to best practices We need and we must empower our town manager and our dedicated employees to do the tasks that we set for Worth for them to do I Want to avoid any semblance of micro management of our employees because we need to set the broad objectives and the goals That they can achieve this is going to be a major transition for our town and it needs to go smoothly for all of us We need to work together. We need to understand our roles We need to have clear procedures and maintain open lines of communications and I'll see to it that occurs. Thank you Thank you Paul Good evening. Thank you to the league My concern my biggest concern about the new council is the fact that there are there's a serious division in the town Largely around the schools, but somewhat also about the charter and I think the council plays a role in either enhancing that divide or fixing it and I hope that the council can heal that division and part of that is how we set things up I act as special counsel to towns in western, Massachusetts on zoning and regulatory work and I can tell you that I also teach seminars for the citizen planning training Collaborative and a lot of those seminars are about how to have meetings how to have transparent fair In equitable meetings both in terms of substance and in terms of appearance I mean, I think both are important when the council gets started so I think I can bring those skills to the council and The best I can say about trying to heal the divisions is that I will reach across the table to anybody that I don't agree with And I think the key word here is compromise Because politics is messy democracy is messy and what that really means is that no one gets what they want exactly?  Thank you Darcy My greatest concern is making sure that all members of our community have access to the council that our actions as a council are Transparent and that we're responsive and accountable to all parts of our diverse town This is key because we'll only have 13 members of our new legislature Representing 40,000 people I'm going to work actively to recruit a pool of volunteers diverse and race class gender age and viewpoint Including parents and guardians of school children for participation on our boards and committees I'll call off. I'll call for sending out a mailer to all town residents in Spanish and English and Advertising on social media inviting parents to apply for the positions The people we need to hear from are not necessarily the ones who'll come forward. So we'll have to seek them out Frequent open roundtable dialogue sessions must also be implemented between the council and the public and also with boards and committees I'll hold regular office hours and monthly constituent meetings in district 5 Will hold listening sessions for groups with special concerns meetings in the common rooms of the apartment complexes and I'll participate in district 5 events and provide a rapid response to constituent questions and concerns Thank you for our second question There has been a lot of discussion of development in the central downtown Amherst But for this question, we're asking you to consider areas that are not contiguous to downtown Specifically what options do you see for commercial development and affordable housing in your district and what concerns? Do you have about these options? we'll start with district 5 and Sam could you start out for us, please? We have a lot of opportunities in district 5 for commercial development and affordable housing We have some of the majority of a larger group of affordable housing in our district than in other districts already Atkins corner and West Pomeroy Intersections village centers of the primary locations We need to understand that commercial development is driven by entrepreneurs and businesses and our task is to Set the field and make it inviting for people to want to invest Multi-use buildings with designs that accommodate resident concerns Changes from some of the issues that happen downtown form-based zoning will assist in this area I want us to enforce inclusionary zoning with affordable and workforce housing We can have first floor wheat retail shops coffee shop merchants Retails there's a lot to do District-based events that will support our businesses We can have partnerships with the local colleges and Hampshire College where some of the students will set up events And they'll hold them downtown some of the actions that we can take as a council is to expedite the installation of appropriate sidewalks and Crosswalks at Atkins corner West Pomeroy village centers and intersections We need to prioritize our inspection services for commercial requests Expedite the process so that our businesses don't lose time when they're investing. It's a critical factor to encourage development We need to market Amherst as a business-friendly and sustainable community. It starts at the top Sorry out of time You need to Continue with shall shall any please So one of the viable options that I want to share today and having spoken with Many community Neighbors around there and professionals is the creation of an Atkins cultural trail District and what that means is we could create a cultural district that has trails and sidewalks Bike paths crosswalks between the different points of interest in the Atkins corner We already have amazing institutions there like the Eric Carl museum You dishbook store Hitchcock Center, Hampshire College Applewood at the Arboretum There's the Atkins market and so if you could create a very lively cultural district And there's a lot of funding that's available for Facilitating these cultural districts such as from the mass cultural council The state recreational trade trails program and what this would might look like is Encouraging our tourists our neighbors employees to walk along the trails experiencing art colorful signage pop-up performances historic storytelling to really build a sense of place and Down the road a future idea could be to invite development. That's mixed used mixed income in that area That's not yet developed. We can build a model of what a resilient Community looks like with maybe housing that has shared community gardens We have mixed we have the kind of businesses that support our art spaces and thank you cultural district. Thank you Darcy Mentalist I believe that development should be concentrated in downtown and the village centers and fully support thoughtfully developing our district five centers It would provide both needed revenue and affordable housing to the town as As with downtown, I would want to make sure development is inviting Maintains the character of the town as a whole has adequate parking and connections to bike paths and public transportation I'll seek the opinions of district five residents about development atkins corner in Palma Roy Lane Both are places where we could develop low and moderate income housing And appropriate commercial space according to what residents want Each proposal has its issues has had its issues in the past for example Traffic calming is needed at Palma Roy Lane for development to be workable and really should happen now We need more development in order to keep our property taxes as low as possible Amherst is in need of moderately priced housing for low and moderate income folks like town staff College staff and faculty and new families I propose encouraging moderate scale and price development such as the green river commons in Greenfield Which provides net zero ready town houses? That's the type of housing we need so moderate income folks like me can afford to live in Amherst Thank you Paul We have two village centers as was mentioned earlier We have the Palma Roy Lane area and we have the Atkins corner area both our zoned Residential Village Center, which means that you can have some small business there and different types of housing Then you would find in the outlying areas of town We also at Atkins its business Village Center, which allows for a little more intensive business things like shops Tailors attorneys accountants that kind of thing And both areas allow for apartments By special permit which means that inclusionary zoning for affordable housing would be part of any Apartments that were built there that were permitted The other idea that I think we're pursuing now and it's not my idea. It's been around for a while State law was passed in 2004 for chapter 40 are In chapter 40 are allows for an overlay zoning district which allows for more intensive Affordable housing projects the beauty of 40 are overlay districts, which we don't have yet But I think the town is trying to identify some areas is that We have control over the look and feel of the buildings We have control over the design standards and we get incentive money from the states So for example in North Hampton, they have a 40-hour district They got over three hundred thousand dollars from the state and that money goes into the general fund and they can spend it any way they want Thank you Jacqueline will you start off for us for district four? My district does encompass the town center But one area that is not contiguous with my district is the University Drive And we need to encourage landowners and the University to develop more affordable housing for students without negatively impacting the town center In addition, I support the Amherst Municipal Housing Trust recommendation to sell East Street School Attracting builders who share our commitment to affordable housing the new North Amherst Development is an example of Adding affordable housing Along with commercial use Development must be environmentally sustainable. It must take into consideration the community and the butters and and how the residents feel and I think keeping scale and sight line in mind is really really important This is something that has not happened in the center of town So I think that it's really important that we Keep an open mind about new development, but it's also important that we be very careful about keeping affordable housing For forefront Thank you. Thank you, Steve Thank you, so I Think about this question all the time Because I've been on the planning board for almost 10 years and I'm an architect And I'm the chair of the architecture department at UMass So in fact my students right now are looking at This exact issue on an area that we're not supposed to talk about which actually is in district 4 Which is the area next to the old virtuos cheese? so they are looking at how affordable housing and mixed-use development can be designed in that area in a way that isn't as Confronting as perhaps what we all read in the newspaper over the summer I also have a series of questions that I so rather than answering your The question with an answer I have some questions that I think that the town council should be pursuing So we are getting this started in the midst of a vital town-wide Conversation about what we want and expect from development in town How do we want our downtown and village centers to look like in 20 years? I think these are important conversations. How much development is too much development? How much do we want in need in order to diversify our tax base? Serve our residents and keep our downtown bustling while also preserving the trees and green space that make Amherst such a great home This is one of the great opportunities of town council to have these conversations In a group of 13 involving the community Thank you, David Thank you District 4 does include downtown I am concerned that the current planning board has given so many waivers and special permits which have created some problems Large apartment projects marketed to students must include affordable housing Handicap units parking and green space which currently they're lacking It is an honor to build in our famous college town and Developers need to work with us for a balance between their private property rights and our needs Zoning laws must reflect our town's priorities We need an overall plan for smart growth with a variety of buildings not just a few stories Stores on the first floor and student-oriented housing above Any commercial commercial development outside of town must be accessible to all residents by walking on maintained sidewalks shuttle transportation biking and PVA bus routes We need to attract developers willing to build affordable small cluster housing with a combination of strategies The East Street School is one of those buildings that could be a small cluster affordable housing unit New and interesting commercial development could both attract residents and visitors I know my time is short, but I'm committed to a creative art center And if you listen carefully to what's going on I would invite these folks to come and serenade us When they're through over here, and this is an example of the creative arts that could be endowed in our town. Thank you Evan so one of the areas that we haven't talked about yet that is in district four is East Amherst over by Southeast Street and College Street already there. There's a decent amount of commercial development. We have Stores retail. We have services. We have offices. There's also a diversity of housing in that area You have single-family homes. You also have apartment complexes like Aspen Chase But there's also a decent amount of underutilized land in that area if you're going down College Street if you're at that intersection There's a lot of potential there for infill development that will allow us to increase residential and commercial space Without encroaching on our neighborhoods And doing so outside of Amherst Center. It's also an area where we already have a lot of Focused on affordable housing. We have Watson Farms there, which is an Amherst housing Authority complex There's also the proposal as mentioned before to sell the East Street school and use that to develop affordable housing So already we're looking at East Amherst as a place for affordable housing What we have to make sure of course is any any time not just in East Amherst But any time that we're increasing residential or commercial development We're making sure we have the infrastructure to support it So any time that we're going to increase traffic whether that be vehicle traffic pedestrian traffic Bicycle traffic. We need to make sure that we're also Have that have a corresponding investment in our sidewalks and our roads in building bike lanes as someone who is Biked down College Street and through that intersection It's a little harrowing and so if we're going to encourage people to live there in a walkable bikeable community We need to invest in the infrastructure in that area to make sure that that works. Thank you For this last question we're asking you to select one of your top Priority goals for the new town council over this over its three-year term What is that goal and how will you translate this goal into explicit town council actions? Let's start with David in district four please Thank you The council needs to prioritize capital projects and develop a financial plan that taxpayers can accept My wife and I have raised six successful graduates from Amherst public schools So believe me when I say this I know a lot about budgeting Taking our loans were necessary and obviously paying back debt I'm going to talk a little bit later when it comes to my Closing statement about other aspects of my work life that have a lot to do with this budgeting aspect My top goals when elected will be a solution to the elementary schools followed by a south Amherst fire station a DPW building and perhaps those two last projects could be on one site Other capital projects need to be examined carefully to see if they are needed or if existing town buildings Can be used in new ways Most important the council needs to be conscientious about hearing all sides and either either to reach consensus The council needs to listen carefully to the details of projects proposed by the school committee the Jones library the DPW fire station advisory committee Since taxes from the new developments cannot be counted on to make a significant dent in our property taxes We need to question the need for borrowing and overrides and live within our means So they're really the question comes down to what do we want? What do we need and most of all what can we really afford? Thank you. Thank you, Evan So it's hard to pick just one priority There are a number of need the town needs from the capital projects that David referenced to Lessening the burden on our residential taxpayers who are feeling that But as a renter who is grappled with Amherst difficult rental market Affordable housing is one of my top priorities and I think it needs to be one of the top priorities of the council And it's a it's a priority that affects a lot of different communities from low and moderate income renters who are being Who feel like they're being forced out of town? To young families who are looking for a dwindling number of starter homes to seniors who are looking to downsize and looking for an affordable apartment To homeowners who are on High Street or North Whitney Street Who are worried that an LLC is going to buy that home next door and turn it into a student rental and change their Neighborhood so there's a lot of pieces to this There's no silver bullet But part of that is looking at our zoning and our permitting to unlock housing production Part of that is pursuing form-based code as Sam mentioned earlier to make sure that new housing projects are Acceptable to the character of our community It means utilizing the tools that we have like our inclusionary zoning by-law or like our affordable housing property tax credit That helped create 26 affordable units in North Amherst It also means pursuing a 40-hour district that it allows developers to More densely develop but in exchange for creating affordable housing and also opens us up to some state funding Paul mentioned the three hundred and twenty thousand dollars of state money that went into North Hampton for its village Hill Neighborhood in the 40-hour district. That's hundreds of thousands of dollars that we could invest into schools and into infrastructure So there's a lot of things there Jacqueline Thank you It's clear that the new town council will be facing many complex issues prioritizing capital projects a new master plan and Appointments and reappointments to boards and committees One major concern is the large dorm like buildings in the town center The fact that the current planning board has given so many waivers and variances without requiring affordable housing or Adequate parking is a serious problem Amherst clearly needs affordable housing Many young families cannot afford to live in our community Student housing in the heart of town does not provide desirable housing For individuals like seniors or young families The town council will appoint new members to the finance committee Planning board and the ZBA it will be our job to make sure That the new members will respect Amherst's commitment to affordable housing while working to maintain our small-town charm I think this is really Our job to make sure that people in this community can afford to live in this community I've lived in Krishman Village. I've lived down by the Gris Mill and now I live in the heart of town and I'm really grateful to Amherst That I can actually afford to live here now. Thank you Steve So the number of my number one priority is focuses on smart growth How do we encourage development that nurtures diversity and caters to a broad spectrum of residents and visitors? I'm proud to have been Volunteered on town meeting for eight years and planning board for ten years working on this issues I think that we have achieved a lot in those ten years including Basically unlocking development on these 1950s strip malls in downtown. So where there used to be we filled lots There is now five stories of new residents in Amherst 300 new beds have been added in In downtown Amherst of people of all ages So I'm very proud of those accomplishments that were Really a great example of town meeting and planning board working together And I'm looking forward to future collaborations like that with town council and planning board I have particular problem-solving expertise that will be useful on town council as it works with the community and planning board To update the master plan and to ensure that the master plan is a guideline for sustainable development and conservation In particular, there should be a clearer connection between the master plan and land use regulations I support another look at form-based zoning which I've been working with for 30 years and infill development in our village centers Thank you Darcy we start first District five. Thank you I'm proud to be the only district five candidate to be endorsed by the Sierra Club and my record demonstrates that Sustainability will be central to be my approach as a counselor. I Want to talk now though about what I'm hearing from fellow residents in South Amherst We've been talking to a lot of residents And the sense I'm getting that is that most of them have concerns about money What the town spends it on how much it spends? How high taxes are how it's really hurting them They also talk about downtown development Mostly in a critical way regarding the new buildings and share concerns regarding parking sidewalks style, etc About downtown buildings, I plan to ask the new council to pause approvals Just long enough to amend the zoning bylaw to make sure that downtown development is proceeding as residents want And about property taxes in addition to increasing the commercial tax base We need to do a deep dive into the budget to find where we can save with the least impact on residents One area ripe for savings is an energy efficiency and conservation Our being a sustainable town will mean major cost savings over time With both our zero energy buildings and initiating a program of community choice energy Also, I intend to critically analyze the budget and find ways to reduce spending We need to be able to maintain quality services while reducing the impact on residents. Thank you I was going to talk about the four or five capital projects, but I think I'll address the Situation downtown. I think the situation downtown comports with our master plan it comports with smart zoning If you read the UN climate change report that came out earlier this month We are in a severe crisis and it were further along in it than we thought even a year ago and Part of the conclusion of that report states that the entire world Needs to learn how to live a different way and part of that is Density and living and the buildings downtown are a good example of smart growth Less carbon use because people won't have to drive. They're on a transit route It also helps our town. There are problems with those buildings, but it also helps our town Those buildings will generate roughly a million dollars in revenue a year every year not one year, but every year and The people that live there will patronize the businesses downtown and that will generate more revenue And that will help us with our four or five capital plans So I support that I also support small zoning changes for the look and feel of those projects that we don't agree with Rather than a large building moratorium Which will create dissension at the council level and I don't think we want to start out that way so I support that Thank you Sam I've made it very clear since I started campaigning how I feel about the need for common-sense solutions for our downtown development The buildings that are currently there don't pass the test of my 90 year old mom who passed away three years ago There's not adequate sidewalk space in front of them There's not parking and they also lack affordable housing having said that they're not inherently a bad thing We need to adjust to hear the needs of all of our residents I'm gonna talk about a different goal though, which is I want us to adopt in our first term a complete streets and sidewalks Policy to ensure future safe access and use of our primary roadways for all of our residents and Transparenly generate and display and updated and prioritized listing of our safety concerns by June of 2020 Based on an urgency and expense our transportation advisory committee is already working on this We need to do the following things we need to approve and appointed members of the transportation advisory committee We need to support this committee's advancement of completes streets policy planning We need to appoint a council member liaison between the committee and the board and we need to actively promote and advocate for Resident input for issues that they have in their own district. This is significant for South Amherst residents We need sidewalks and crosswalks at the Atkins corner and at the West Street and Pomeroy Village Center intersection We also have safety concerns at South Common Middle Street and East. Thank you. We can make this work So we're all coming in with different priorities that we'd like to start with mine, but my personally is to make decisions that lead to a resilient Amherst for all our residents and to be a strong and Clear voice for district 5 residents But the question is whose priority will be a priority which means How do we make decisions? So I feel a first order of business as a council is to set up the new structure of governance of Setting up the processes of how are we going to prioritize and how are we going to make decisions? I'd like to focus on assessing and shaping the council processes our committee structures and community engagement So we have more than 30 committees Deciding defining what are their job descriptions and how can they work with the community participation? Officer for more community engagement How can we set up the processes for more public engagement to make sure that the public our district 5 is Informed of what we're doing in the town council What's going on over here and to incorporate ways for them to be heard to participate not just the usual people who participate But really reaching out to people who don't have the time and figuring out what are their obstacles to participating? I'd like to take all these inputs and create a shared vision Who are we as a town and set our strategic planning and goals accordingly? Thank you. All right, each candidate will now have 45 seconds for a Closing statement the yellow light will come on when you have 15 seconds left and I'll start at that end shall any you all right So as y'all can see I'm an immigrant I'm a woman of color and I bring in many Qualifications and experience that can contribute to this new town council. I have a PhD In marketing. I'm a charted accountant. I'm a small business owner and I'm a certified mindfulness teacher from the UMass Medical School Center But I don't want you to believe what I'm saying right now. I would like you to Actually see what I was doing before my campaign see my work at downtown mindfulness my published research I'd like you to see how I'm running my campaign The recycled wood signs have used created collaborative Opportunities for the council to work together and that's how I'd like to work for you as your town council Inclusive collaborative and a creative problem solver. Thank you Sam We need to do everything we can to expedite a temporary bridge repair for the station road bridge that's out I just want to put that out there We need to pressure the state I've been a part of this community for 55 years I'm one of the candidates who have children attending our schools. I invested in this community We need common-sense solutions and somebody who is willing with an open mind to hear all different viewpoints and work together We need to bring our town back together. We can do this We need to look for win-win scenarios that respect our residents and reach out to everybody I'm very committed to this town I think we can have a very successful New town council, but you need to elect somebody who is independent Open-minded and has the appropriate background and capacity to listen to everyone. I'm asking for your vote I need your vote. Please vote for Sam McLeod. Paul, please There's not much I can say in 45 seconds except please vote for me The tagline for my campaign is experience matters and I believe that but it's really up to the voters to determine if that's and if that's a Component to my campaign that they care about I've served as special counsel to towns in Western, Massachusetts on land use on zoning and on smart growth initiatives and in town I've served on the finance committee the planning board the housing board the housing Commission and I've served on town meeting and some lesser committees if you want to hear about how I think I've produced some Unscripted videos on my website Paul for Amherst org And thank you for listening Thank you Darcy Thanks to the League of Women Voters for providing this forum I want to make Amherst a real model of sustainability inclusion and democracy I have the background and skills as a lawyer a teacher and a grant writer to collaborate with other counselors to do that I'm forward-looking and optimistic I'm optimistic that we can produce a proposal for our elementary school buildings that has broad support Agree on zoning changes that preserve the character of our beautiful downtown Increase revenue and conserve money while also reduced reducing our carbon footprint And make Amherst an affordable place to live I'm a big-picture thinker. I'm creative and bold and have a history of accomplishing what I set out to do Please vote for me Darcy Dumont on November 6th Steve Over the years. I've built a great track record as a team player as someone who can listen Take a large view of important issues and take on complex problems in a careful thoughtful rational way I I look forward to helping establish a town council with a structure and culture that embraces multiple perspectives and where there's respect for all I might be also the only candidate that lives and works in district 4 And I hope you come to the next cup of Joe with Paul which will be at my workplace Which is the John W over Design building and it's a particular honor that I just noticed that John over is dead center there in the audience So please come to the next cup of Joe with Paul which will be right after the election Thank you I'm really grateful to be here tonight. I've been a town meeting member for a number of years and Raised my children here in Amherst. They went to the public schools as I mentioned before I've lived in a number of places in town and I I feel that it's Really important to have independent voices independent thinkers, and that's what I am as a candidate. I'm Not taking any PAC money. I Have no obligation to the university other than the fact that I got several degrees from UMass. I Worked there for a number of years. I also have been a business owner and and as a psychotherapist I was I Learned active listening. Thank you Jackie. Sorry your time Evan So in the four months since I started this campaign, I've worked really hard to reach the voters of district forward and to talk to them I've personally knocked over 700 doors most of them more than once and had hundreds of Conversations with voters because I think it's those conversations that matter and those conversations I hear the concerns of the voters and it gives me a chance to talk to them about my ideas and my priorities And so there's been a lot that's happened in this election I we've filled out more surveys than I think I ever imagined I would ever fill out To inform the voters of where we stand I've been proud of the endorsements I've received from the Sierra Club from the LGBTQ victory front From run for something but in the end I know it's those conversations are what matter And in my hope is to continue those conversations because that's the tape of local responsiveness and engagement I'm hoping to bring to council. I'm Evan Ross. You can go to my website evan4amherst.com four is in district four David I've lived in Amherst for 34 years and intend to be here much longer. God willing My goal is to prioritize capital projects I'm a practical person With many experiences from teaching in a tech school Serving in the sheriff's department to planning future logistics in the international coffee market where I deal with multi-million dollar contracts Continuously serving as a counselor comes down to character for me. Can you trust me to represent your interest? Do I have the integrity necessary to make wise independent decisions? my supporters have answered yes and I know that I have the perseverance and Flexibility to deal with tense complicated situations. I'm David refson and I would appreciate your vote. Thank you Thank you very much to all of our candidates