Okay, and we're good. Good morning. This is the meeting of the master this gaming commission and we're meeting purchase. So I'll take a little call. Good morning commissioner Hill. Good morning. I'm here. Good morning commissioner. Oh, Brian, I normally start with you. My apologies. That's okay. Being in the car parking and parking lot makes it a little harder to see me. I am here though. Thank you. And commissioner Maynard the morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning, Madam chair. I'm joining you from plain Ridge Park casino. That's great. And we're looking forward to your report. And I think. I lean you've been out at. Encour. Yes.  And commissioner Hill, you're out at. I am out at MGM. It's wonderful. Thank you. And thanks for your good work this morning. one day from what we expected to be launch day for our sports wagering. Good morning, Executive Director Wells and you are at MGM as well. Yes, good morning from Springfield. So do you have any update for us, Karen? So the general update is that we are all working towards the operation certificate and the launch for tomorrow. The commissioners are all the three commissions that were signed to each casino have all been through the properties. I would like to say a big thank you to GLI for working on the internal controls. I know we are right now, we're done with two. One is being finalized as we speak, but this took a lot of work. And I know that the team from GLI has been incredibly busy. They worked through the weekend and I'm just very grateful that they agreed to take on this project for us because we could not have done it independently without them. So they also really did a thorough job. They were not just checking the box.  They really looked at it. So they have a lot of credibility for a good reason. So thank you to Kevin and your team for all your work on that. I really want to just communicate that publicly because it's been rough. It's been a lot of work in a short period of time. Yeah, thank you, Karen. Kevin. Okay. So, Kevin, did you want to add anything? No, we're grateful for the opportunity. We love seeing you succeed and we've got team members that will be there tomorrow. Joe Bonaventhe and Gabe who have done a ton of work on this project and Karen's right. People were working over the weekend and it's really a very satisfying and we were just happy to be able to help out. And your team has been great to work with. So it makes it all the more enjoyable. Excellent. Excellent. The only other matter for the administrative update I was going to turn it over to Director Van Der Linden for an update on the RG side. Good afternoon, Chairman Jed Stein and commissioners. Just a quick update about where things stand. So the voluntary self-expulsion is live as required by statute. We're accepting applications for individuals who wish to enroll in the sports wagering specific voluntary self-exclusion program. On the game sense side, working behind the scenes now for several months even in advance in the sports wagering act passing the game sense team has been attending a number of trainings and in some case been providing training specific to responsible gaming and sports wagering. And so at this point, every game sense advisor at each of the casinos has been thoroughly trained on how to talk about sports wagering with patrons how to understand what sports wagering is and placing bets and they are fully prepared. In advance of tomorrow, they're gonna be fully staffed. They will have some additional staff for the launch when things go live tomorrow. I know a few of you have seen them. They have new uniforms that have very much a sports theme to them but still keep the game sense flare to it. And so they'll be wearing those throughout. We have sports wagering RG swag and brochures that have been developed and they'll be ready to receive patrons who are wanting to place bets tomorrow. And then finally, we've been the requirement for each licensee to provide a problem gambling plan with the advice of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Each licensee has submitted a problem gambling plan. I have shared that with the Department of Public Health that they've provided feedback. I'm happy to report that each of licensee's plan is sufficient for the launch. There will be a few small details that we'll continue to work with them over time as we know more, as they know more, we'll continue to evolve these plans to make sure that they're responsive to the needs of patrons in Massachusetts. So that's it. Any questions for Mark? We did see when Commissioner Hill and I were on the floor, we did see the new game sense jerseys for sports wagering and they look great. They do look great. And I just had one question. Is there any significance to the number 421 that is on the back of all of this shirt? 421. I'm so glad you asked that, Commissioner Hill. 421 are the numbers for the lower risk gambling guidelines. And we don't specifically call it out. It's meant to be there for people to ask that very question. So 421 is, oh geez, the number, so one is the percentage of your gross annual income that you should consider as a form of entertainment if you choose to gamble. Two is the number of types of gambling that you would engage in. We don't want to engage in more than two types of gambling. So if that's sports wagering, it may also be casino games or lottery or some other form. And four is the number of days per month that you should consider gambling in your form of entertainment. Thank you. And the uniforms are awesome. If you haven't seen them, they're like referee shirts and they're green and black and they were superb. We loved them. I wanted one, but I don't think I could fit into any of them. Well, we saw them without a person in them just held up. I bet they look great on the game sense advisor. So very, very, very smart and clever. And the 421 is looks both sporting and betting. So it's very, very clever. They were designed by one of our game sense advisors. Very nice. Not shocking, they're a great group. All right, so we'll get to the next item on the agenda unless people have questions from our, also. All right, Karen now returning to the certificate of operations approval under item number three. Yes, so my recommendation here is we run through them one by one with starting with PPC and MGM. And we'll see if EVH is ready at this point. But Bruce, if you want to just sort of go through PPC that they have applied with each section required under 251 and then go to MGM. And then Crystal, you can share your screen. So sort of walk through that for the commissioners with the PowerPoint. That may make things a little smoother and make sure the commissioners understand that all the requirements have been met. Does that make sense, Bruce? You're on mute. There we go. Okay, great. Sorry, do you want me to share it while he's talking or after? I couldn't. What do you think, Bruce? I think while he's talking. I don't want to confuse anyone but I want to be on the same page. Yeah, let's see how it goes too. Let's see how it goes with sharing it, Bruce, right? Yeah, yeah, that's fine. She can share it while I speak. Great, thank you. Just one second. I have one tiny edit that I noticed in before us. And you wanted to start with PPC, you said? What do you think, Bruce? I'll leave it to you. That's fine. Well, give me one second to reorder and we can do that. Slides are so flexible. You gotta love that. Okay. The PPC MGM and then move on. I think we're in good shape here. Okay, I will share. You know, I'm thinking, Bruce, we also may want to start with Commissioner Maynard if he had any concerns or last-minute comments because he is at the property and did get a chance to go review what's going on on site. Sure. Mr. Maynard, how did you enjoy your tour this morning at PPC? Everything go well? Do you have any concerns? Oh, thank you, Bruce, and thank you, Karen. I just want to thank Andrew Steffen for letting me use his office. I appreciate it. Sturl and Andrew took me around the property, met with North and some other folks from the team, got to look at the cage, got to look at the software and also the kiosks. It was a great presentation. I had no concerns. It looks to me at this point, pending anything you tell me, Bruce, that PPC was in really, really solid shape. Okay. Well, I will go over our observations of PPC here in a minute. Let me see. I can't really see, Christian. Yeah, I've been scared yet. I just wanted to make sure you were ready. Yeah, I'm ready. Okay. Didn't want to cover Jordan's face. Yeah. All right, screen two here. And should be. Okay. Sorry, balancing. I read that. Oops. So I have two computers moving at once, so you're good now. Okay, the first thing that I have on our checklist is whether they requested a certificate of operation, which PPC had, which one are you on here? Maybe we're not in sync here. Hey, Rich, Mark Casino. Do you see that, Bruce, on your screen? Yeah, yep. So shoot, yeah. Yeah, I got it right here. Requested certificate of operation on January 13th. They did. On, for pending issuance of certificate of operation, will be posted in the sports book cage. GLI has to the next screen. Is it showing small? I have a full screen here. Okay. Yeah. Hold on. Wait. Okay. Yeah, no. Yeah, there we go. GLI's reviewed, PPC's internal controls, and they are all in compliance. They received the list of all the sports wagering employees and vendors and non-sports wagering vendors.  The certificate of occupancy and necessary permits were received on January 1st. Then the conditional upon Plain Ridge Park completing operational audits, that was one of the conditions placed on them of wagering procedures, practices and technical security controls as required by the commission's technical standards, governing supporting wagering and within 90 days of commencements of sports wagering operations. And Bruce, that had been a recommendation by GLI. I don't know if Kevin, you want to comment on that, but that was a recommendation. That's not something you would test beforehand that you really want that testing and that audit to take place after they're in operation. So I know Kevin, if you want to comment on that, that's a general best practice, correct? Yes, that's been the standard practice that we think has worked quite well. The logic behind it is that you don't want to test these in a theoretical or a test environment. You want to test the security in live environment when it's actually operating and you want to observe and review the internal controls when they're actually being executed by the employees. It's one thing what it says on paper, but it's another thing to observe what they're actually doing. And so we think that that has proven to be very effective method of risk control and that's what we've recommended here. So my understanding is the recommendation is that that be a condition on the operation certificate, correct Kevin? Correct, and it's in the regulations as well. Great, thank you. So second director Wells before Bruce continues, just as a reminder to the public, I believe there's also an associated memo that director band has prepared and this is a PowerPoint to go through the checklist. So Bruce, your summary that you're going through is your checklist on accordance with the regulation that the commission promulgated. I think just to go back on this list, item C, you might have just skipped over, but that's with respect to the actual physical facility. How do you feel about that?  Yes, that's the sportsways you've been built in the first quality. Yes, all, yes, they have top quality. Great, thank you. Then we can go to the next one. Thank you. An evaluation of the test period was done on January 19th and it passed all excess. Excellent. Commissioner, is there any questions on PPC for director band and commissioner Maynard? I guess I'm just, yeah. Okay, wanna continue? Okay, go to MGM next. There you are. Okay, MGM Springfield. They requested their certificate of operation on January 13th. Pending the certificate of operation would be posted at the sportsbook cage. GLI reviewed MGM's submission, determined them to be in compliance. Current, we received their current list of sports wagering employees, sports wagering vendors and non sports wagering vendors and they're with our licensing department. Sports wagering facility is built to superior quality and in compliance. The emergency response plan certificate delivery is on file with the police and fire departments as of January 9th. Certificate of occupancy and necessary permits were received August 5th, 2022. The condition of MGM Springfields, completing operational audits and wagering procedures and practices and technical security controls as required by the commission's technical standards, governing sports wagering within 90 days of commencements of sports wagering operations. Next screen, the evaluation and test period was completed on January 18th, 2023 and was completed to be satisfactory. Any questions? Any questions? Maybe we can turn to Commissioner Hill. Have you had a chance to gain any impressions? Do you wanna share with us, Brad? Sure. So I wanna also thank the crew here at MGM. I'm not gonna mention any names because I'm gonna forget somebody, but we had a nice crew downstairs and we toured the area where the sports betting will be taking place. We got to go into a kiosk. We were able to take some bets and the test went very, very well. We were able to open up the kiosk, see the inner workings of it. And again, everything was great. I was concerned on a couple of things. I shouldn't say concerned. I wanted to see our RG messaging, our responsible gaming. And when the kiosk came on, immediately right on the screen at the bottom, there was RG messaging and right on the machine itself, outside of it, there were two RG messaging platforms that you could look at. So I was very happy with the messaging that MGM has set up for responsible gaming. We then toured the floor of gaming so we could see where some of the kiosks were placed so people could go out throughout the casino. Very happy with the placement of the kiosk on the floor. And again, right near game sense. And that's how we were able to go and visit there today and see those beautiful new shirts. We then ended up at the cage. And oh, and by the way, on the kiosks, when you hit the screen in order to start your betting, you immediately brings you to a screen that helps you learn how to bet so that you can do it responsibly, but also the rules were right there for you. And when you hit the button, as clear as day the rules on sports betting. I know that was something that we were concerned about and very happy to see the rules were very, very easy to get to on the kiosk. So we ended our tour back at the cage and we were able to do some betting there as well. And the staff there was just great in everything they were doing. And again, I wanted to bring up the, make sure that there was responsible gaming messaging going on and they got a pamphlet set out there so people will see it. And on the back of each betting slip there was language for it as well. So I'm very, very happy with the messaging that's gonna be out there for responsible gaming. We were able to place the bet, everything went great. I pretended as though I made a mistake and they were able to void my bet and they showed me how that all works. So very, very happy with everything that we saw here at MGM and looking forward to tomorrow's kickoff. Thanks commissioner. So questions for director band or commissioner Hill with respect to MGM Springfield. Karen, do you have anything to add? No, I think my recommendation is that the commission could vote on PPC and MGM. The recommendation is to approve the operation certificate with the condition that was outlined in that section F on the PowerPoint slide. And then we could then go to the next agenda item we'll circle back and see if EBH is ready or if we need to put the meeting on hold while we wait for that information. So just an update on Corbassen Harbor there's still some work that's underway. Correct. Okay. So director Bammel will just pause for a moment on Crystal's PowerPoint that assisted you this afternoon. And then the memo as I understand it will be in the public packet and we'll turn to council Grossman for an update on his matter regarding the tax liability and child support issues that we addressed on Friday. And then we'll circle back to on court the very least I want to hear from commissioner Brian and then we'll turn back to see where EBH is. Okay. Thanks. Good afternoon, Todd. Good afternoon. So the MOU updates are still a work in progress. They have been in communication with the department of revenue and they are working on the edits to all three we've made all three licensees aware and to be on the lookout for these. The changes are relatively straightforward as in pertain largely to just incorporating sector 23 end requirements and include for example updates to the definition of intercept threshold which is the level at which the intercept inquiry has to be performed. So it hasn't been completed yet. I don't have any reason to believe that it won't be done by the end of the day but it's not, the drafts have not been circulated to the licensees as juncture since they haven't been completed yet. That's where we are with that. The second part of it is just ensuring that the kiosks themselves are set to recognize the taxable event. And I understand that they are but that's the other thing to double check and to make sure that the staff is, the licensee staff is aware of this requirement and ensure that they perform the checks that will be discussed in the MOUs. So that's where we are at the moment. Again, it appears like we can get this done by the end of the day, but it hasn't been completed yet. Second, Director Wallace. Yeah, so my recommendation, obviously needs to get done today or before tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. So my recommendation is that be placed as a condition on the vote and that we get that done today. Well, so the MOU, we've seen the drafts we've seen the completed versions of for gaming. Commissioners have wanted to see the MOU that would be executed. Sounds like that's underway, but not yet, has not yet been received by either our legal team or the licensees. So let's just put that one in the parking lot. Let's go to the more, the technical issue. And we have Councilor Mulally. I'll use your legal term. We have Kevin from GLI who did indicate on Friday that the kiosk were ready to go. So should we clarify the technical side? Now, Karen, to the extent it can be clarified. Yes, the change which involved a minor addition of a zero to a liability limit for the operator. We're not on this? No, we're not on that issue. That issue isn't before us. My understanding of that issue has been resolved by change management stuff. The issue that's before us right now is the issue of whether the kiosk are prepared to address the tax liability and the child support which we addressed on Friday. And I thought Kevin, you said that the technology is ready and that the thresholds are in place. Yes, that's what I'm told, yeah. I can confirm. I also spoke with Sterl last week and based on that conversation, it seems like it's all in place. Yeah, and that would be for all three properties. I believe so, yes. So it seems as though we have to probably put this meeting a bit on a pause because we're waiting for Encore Boston Harbor with respect to some work. It's working with you, Kevin and GLI on, is that right? My recommendation, commissioners, is that we also ask that with respect to the tax and child support issues that we get some certainty around that because I believe we have to be in compliance tomorrow to launch in order to collect those liabilities and we wanna make sure that that is all ready for all three properties.  I'll let you weigh in here. No, I agree with the process that you just talked about. It seems like the approach we need to take today. Okay, Commissioner Hill, are you in agreement? I'm fine with that, Madam Chair. And then Commissioner Maynard. I'm fine with that. I do wanna point out, and this of course needs to be looked at by the MGC team, but I did have the opportunity to ask about the child support and the tax issues and they assured me that they will assure the MGC team that they can take care of that. Excellent, so that they could have full compliance. That's what was really relayed to us on Friday. So I took a lot of comfort in that, but I guess we just wanna have a certainty with our team, right? So that's great. Thank you, Commissioner Maynard. I totally agree. Excellent. So before we go back to the process, I do wanna have Commissioner O'Brien weigh in on her morning, if you would like. And then we can also circle back when on course ready. Sure, so I was a little bit of a round bug today since I was there for the launch, the soft launch of the casino itself. So I met with Lewis Christian, the game sense team, walked around with Jackie Crumb and Tom Coffey, the head of security. And they showed me where all the different kiosks are gonna be, we did not do a mock bet. Lewis kind of walked through how they had done it earlier, hadn't had any issues with it. They have a particular area upstairs where their giveaway section is, where they have a number of kiosks that they're hoping to send people who are maybe newer to the experience. And they will, similar to what Commissioner Hill said, they are going to have a number of game sense, pamphlets, personnel and presence up there as well, particularly that those are people who maybe need some more guidance and information to get into this. We looked at the cage, we looked at the sports bar, you know, an interesting thing to note about the cage is they did a test on sports wagering to see if people could transfer over into that area. And they have a large number of women who are going to be at the cage in the sports bar area, which was an interesting thing to see. And I did go down to the B1 parking garage and it is done very well. They've taken what used to be almost like the VIP area and had it sort of an easy in-out right by the entrance. There was one matter outside that's been wired for ATMs. There's probably gonna have to be some movement there in terms of measurement out from what has been redefined as the edges of the gaming establishment. There's nothing there at the moment. It's not an issue for launch at all, but something that may or may not come back before us given the layout that they go forward with. But everybody was getting ready and we wait on what needs to be done with GLI, et cetera. But in terms of what I saw on my end, everything was fine, it was good to go. Excellent, okay. And I did see the t-shirts on people and they do look great. Do they look good? Yeah. Yeah, they do. And I suspect they would have one that could accommodate Commissioner Hill. I bet they have a shirt for everybody. Yeah. That's right, that's right. Okay, so Executive Director Wells, it's about 40. First off, I should check, Commissioner, do you have any updates that you want to provide? Besides, of course, the ones that you just did on your properties. I wanna thank you for going out there this morning early. I know it was early Monday morning, but I also know it was probably pretty interesting. So I hope you enjoyed yourselves. We are all traveling out to MGM for the event so that we can be there safely, bright and early tomorrow morning. We'll be visiting, we'll be with MGM at start, then we'll be as a body of five in separate cars, sadly, but that's both assures our compliance with open meeting law and gives everyone flexibility to get home. We'll be going over to Plain Ridge Park, casino, then make our way to Encore Boston Harbor so that we can say hello to the teams there. Also seeing our teams on site, as well as the Game Sense advisors. So we're looking forward to that. So Karen, what do you recommend in terms of the pause? Is it a short pause or is it maybe requiring a little bit more time? So the two things, if you are looking to potentially get a report back that the MOU with DOR is completed, that's possible, I think, Todd. Do you have an opinion? We pause the meeting till 4.30, give folks enough time to potentially resolve this issue, then we could vote on all three at about 4.30. Otherwise- So let me check in, commissioners, do you want to see the MOU and know that there are no issues before we sign off today? So if so, we would need that amount of time. That would make sense. I see Commissioner O'Brien nodding her head. That's fine with me as well, Madam Chair. Commissioner Maynard. So it sounds like we would like to know that that piece of work is really in its final steps. In terms of its execution, I know that Executive Director Wells has, Executive Director has signed in the past, I think a predecessor may have, but I'm less concerned about the signatures to just know the status. Is that fair, commissioners? Do you agree with that? Okay, all right. So it sounds like we might need a little bit more time and we know that we are very appreciative of our sister agency at DOR working to accommodate this need. So I hope that gets relayed to them, Todd. All the commissioners are very appreciative. So, and then that gives on Corporate Boston Harbor a chance to breathe a bit and get everything lined up. They need that time anyway, Karen. Yeah, I'm not sure how much time they need, but there were some corrections and additions and things they needed to do. They're in control controls before we could sign off on them. So I'm sure we'd appreciate a little extra time. Kevin, I don't know if you have an update on timing. I've been kind of monitoring my email as we've been, and there's some less, they're trying to get it out the door. So, we're optimistic that this will be done within a few hours. Right. So, Council Grossman, how you feeling about that? Could we make it? Commissioners, is 4.30 the right time? Do you want? I'm wondering if it should be more like five o'clock so that we have time to actually get out there and situated? I don't know what everybody else is. I wonder if that makes sense too. I will certainly, of course, be checking in on this. And that sounds reasonable to me. Of course, it's other people who need to do certain things. So we'll move it along as quickly as possible. Okay. Karen, anything you want to add? No. All right. Then commissioners, we're going to pause this meeting. Let me turn to Dave. Will you just keep this open, Dave? If we, and if we accept, because you would keep the screen up to let the public know that we plan to reconvene at five. Yeah, we can do one of two options. We can do that. Keep a screen up that says the meeting will resume or we could end the stream. And when we come back, we could have a secondary video popped up that says like, you know, public meeting for number, whatever resumption, but whatever we think would be the best and most accessible. I'm thinking that's a recommendation. If we want to be transparent, commissioners should keep the streaming going. Is that otherwise? And I feel like, oh, it's not done. Yeah. Mills, do you have a thought on that? Yeah, it is no trouble to keep the stream going, but it may be, you know, it may be a bit much just to have a, you know, a stream with nothing on it for a few hours that might, you know, that might not be the best practice. I think it might work if Dave were to end this stream, create a new stream and inform the public via our social media channels. And I'm happy to send a note out to members of the media that we will be resuming this meeting at five o'clock and that folks can find it at the same place, same bat time, same bat channel, if you will on our YouTube page and our website. That works for me. Commissioners, you all sat with Tom's recommendation. Okay, then this meeting, we're not adjourning this meeting, we will resume it and we'll plan out 5 p.m. And commissioners, I think we should probably plan on getting to the MGM and MGC offices for that. Does that make sense? But you can all coordinate with Karen. All right, then thank you everyone. We'll have no motion to adjourn. Let's see you all in a little bit. Thank you so much. Thank you. If we do go, and if I end this meeting, that's okay, correct? If I leave it, thank you so much.


In theme three in GRISP our goal is to come up with a new generation of more sustainable, more productive, more environmentally friendly, rice-based production systems for different regions in the world and of course also in particular for Asia where we know that there's a lot of pressure on land, on water, where labor costs are rising and population growth is still substantial and so we are being forced with the same amount or even less land and water and labor to produce more rice in the future and if possible also higher quality rice and do it with a reduction in greenhouse gases, with a reduction in pesticide use and if possible also with a more efficient use of other inputs such as fertilizer. So in 2011 and in some cases already starting a little bit earlier we've had I think many exciting new initiatives scientists in interdisciplinary manner are starting to think about what could those future new rice production systems look like? How can we transform a typical let's say double crop transplanted rice system in the human tropics, the dry season crop and the wet season crop into more intensified but at the same time also more sustainable production systems? So we have a number of new what we call experimental platforms where scientists are doing this exploratory work looking at the future. Can we grow three crops instead of two? What would these three crops be? Rice and something else? How can we do? Do we need to mechanize this? What will be the long-term implications on soil health on the environment? How can we make these systems fine-tuned? How can we really optimize to achieve all the goals that we want to achieve when we talk about sustainable agriculture and that includes concepts such as site-specific nutrient management, water-saving irrigation, ecological engineering for pest control that need to be brought together and also in a practical sense that farmers can actually use those ideas, these principles and apply them to their fields. So we have started in 2011 a number of those initiatives both on the research sites but also already working with partners in the private sector, in the public sector, in the civil society sector on those ideas, the concepts and how farmers in particular can be benefiting from those.


John Park's workshop, and I was just fixing the title there. I had a typo in my little title there. Hopefully it's fixed now, it looks like it. Hey, thanks for stopping by today. And I am going to do a really silly thing and jinx it all by saying, I think I may have better luck with my upload speeds today. Then I did two days ago on Tuesday, I had a bunch of problems. It seems like I have cracked the case and got on the phone with our cable provider and did a bunch of other things. And man, is it about 40 times faster, my upload bit rates available. So I haven't changed anything about this. I'm not upping the resolution that I send or anything like that. But crossing fingers, we will have no buffering on any of the services today. Yeah, I know, I doomed it, right? Peekery in a hurry over there in our chat, over in the Discord chat said, well now you've certainly doomed it. Knockwood, that fixes it, right? Just knock a little wood. So, let's see what's happening. We've got three different project updates that I wanna take you through today. So that'll be something we'll look at. I've got some housekeeping types of things that we like to do. Maybe I'll do a real mini version of new products because we had no Ask an Engineer yesterday. So I don't have any graphics set up for it or anything like it did back when I was doing the Wednesday shows, but I'll at least show you a couple of new things that are coming or are out now. And let's see, getting questions. Some nice says, are you using a pie hole or anything in the middle? No, on this machine and this setup, I am not. I was using a service that was doing some of those sorts of things, not pie hole. That was one issue, a minor one, but the bigger one was just simply some reprovisioning needed to be done at the cable modem side and I power cycled everything. And now I'm seeing 20 megabits per second upload speeds instead of like 0.4 that I was getting the other day, which really, really sad upload speeds. What else? I've got a product pick of the week recap. I've got a circuit Python parsec. I have a coupon code for you too. So you probably are aware that we, but I don't want to assume anything. You're probably aware that we have a store right here. This is Adafruit's store. We have other stuff too, but there's the shop. And if you check out the shop here, you might see we've got some new product picks up at the top. We've got some featured products, some learn guides that show off some cool products. And this is one of the ways, kind of the main way that we keep the lights on here. We don't charge for content. We don't charge for tutorials. We don't put ads in the tutorials in the learn guide. And so selling products, that's how we make a living here. So we'd love for you to find some cool stuff to get. And we'd love to give you a discount. So today's coupon code is Sunshine. And that's because it's not raining here in Los Angeles anymore, at least for a little while. So the coupon code today is Sunshine. That will get you 10% off on any products you buy in the store. It's not gonna work on software gift certificates or subscriptions, but it's good on physical items. So if you head on over to the store, Adafruit.com, just head up to the shop there. On your way out, type in Sunshine. Sunshine is coupon code.  So that's today's coupon code Sunshine. What else? We've got a job board, as you may know. So if you don't, you can head on over to jobs.adafruit.com. That'll help you out if you're looking to hire somebody or if you're looking to get hired. And as you'll see right there, we have a position open. It's the Employee Resources Assistant open position in New York at Adafruit headquarters. I believe, yeah, this is a full-time position. I believe it can be part off-site, part on-site, but it is a full-time, you'd wanna be in New York. Don't give yourself a huge commute. And you can check out the details there by clicking on that. Also you'll see down one below here is someone looking for a CNC programmer and maker at Machine Histories in Los Angeles. I don't know what that is, what is that? Why have I never clicked that? Looking for a machinist with a wide-ranging digital skillset, preferably in Rhino. Hey, I know Rhino. I don't think I'm leaving. But this is in Los Angeles, full-time fabrication job on-site. And let's see, it looks like the link is a little goofy. I wanna go check this out. Hold on, let's, let me go to this other browser window. What did they call it? Machine Histories? Machine Histories. Machine Histories, wow, my caps lock is on. Machine Histories, what is this? Oh, we can't go there, apparently. Something won't let me there. But I'll check that out later. Maybe you should too. It looks like it's a, yeah, where is that? That is near a Harbor Freight. Oh, that's good. All right, I'll dig into that later. But check that out, check out the jobs board in general. It's free to use. You can post positions if you're looking to hire someone. If you're looking to get hired, you can add yourself to the available for hire link up at the top. Let me go back to that page there. You'll see there's an available for hire link. You can go there and you can fill in info about the type of work you're looking for and the type of skills you've got, and what you're open for. Let's see, what else? So, Tuesdays, I've got that show right there. That's the JP's product pick of the week show. Take something from the store, either old or new, and take you through it. Do some demos if that's applicable. Show off all the little bits and pieces, which was the case this week because I showed off this parts pal and gave you a 50% off discount on it. 50% off, not too shabby. This week, I did have some streaming problems with it, but I've uploaded a clean copy now so you can go re-watch the show if you want to, a clean version. I recorded it locally, so that's stored here before it went and got buffered up on the internet. And I also do a little one minute recap. So here's that. It is the parts pal. So parts pal is fantastic as a beginner kit for doing a lot of the types of projects that you wanna do when you're learning how to use microcontrollers in particular or just electronics in general. Get this nice case. Breadboard, jumpers, breakaway headers, LEDs, pacitors, resistors, transistors, voltage regulators, a 555 timer and op amp, diodes, the piezo buzzer switches, slide switches, potentiometers, photocell, vibration sensor, thermistor. You'll frequently do these types of things with it when you're just first learning. Usually have your microcontroller and then it'll say, okay, plug it into a breadboard and then add these parts to these pins. So here you can see I've got ground going to one leg of an LED. The other leg of the LED is going through a resistor and then through another jumper wire back over to one of the pins and I'm sending it a really basic blink project. It is our best friend, the parts pal. Yes, indeed. All right, by the way, that one hung really neatly on my pegboard. I didn't, if you saw that, but this thing does have a nice little hang tag. If you don't snap that off of there, you get to hang that on your pegboard for emergency use only. All right, so let's see. Anything going on in the chat? Any questions? Andy Calloway's noticing CRT monitors in the back. Yes, we'll be looking at one of those. I've got a bit of an obsession with collecting CRT monitors before they go into the landfill. So I've been on the lookout and doing well, adding CRTs to the collection. Well, yeah, we'll take a look at something on one of those, the GVC. Let's see. Yeah, so next up, how about, this is a good time for a Circuit Python Parsec. Yes, Circuit Python. Okay, so this one is pretty specific. What I wanted to do today is show how you can determine which pins on your microcontroller can be used for I2S audio. So we have a couple of different products that use I2S audio standards. A really high quality audio standard allows you to send digital to an amplifier, which can then send out beautiful full rich sound. And when you use these, you may need to do some juggling around of which pins you're using for what? Because not every combination of pins can be used to do I2S audio. You have a bit clock pin, a word select pin, and a data pin. And you're not gonna usually see those on the typical pinouts for a microcontroller. So this was actually a really cool little program that Catnay developed, and I'm gonna pull up my code view here right now. What I'll do is I'm actually just gonna run this again. So I'm just gonna resave this to my little Feather Microcontroller. And now what it's going through and doing is testing different sets of three pins to see if it will allow those to work as combinations of those three pins that you need for I2S. For any of them that actually passed this test, they show up in this list. So now you can just go through and find a combination that works for you for your project. Now there are a lot of possible combinations on a board like this Feather RP2040 because it's just got a ton of pins and a lot of them can be used for this. But this is particularly useful if you have some sort of fairly small constrained board like a QT pie. And what it does in code is it's using the, essentially it's attempting to set up an I2S audio on a set of pins and finding out with a try and accept if that works or not. So the key thing here is this function called is hardware I2S. And then it has inputs of three pins for bit clock, word, select and data. Then it goes through and tries pins that are available on the microcontroller which is initially determined using the microcontroller library pin class.  And then it gives you this nice list here. So now you can go through and find a set that works for you. I like to go to some of the digital pins here, some early ones let's say, okay D4, D5 and A0. That's a nice little set that I could use. And so you'll see that this is a really useful program. You will find it just by looking up some of the I2S amplifiers in the learn guides, eight different learn guides. You'll find this sample code there. So you don't need to copy this off my screen. Just search around a little bit and you will find this really, really helpful code that Katnick created. It's called CircuitPython I2S pin combination identification script. So if you look for that, you'll find it. And that is how you can find out which pins on your microcontroller are gonna be able to be used in CircuitPython with I2S audio. And that is your CircuitPython Parsec. And it is no coincidence that I used that example today because I'm using one of those I2S amps in a project. It's in the C&C. And I'll show you both the fritzing diagram that I've been working on and the sort of prototype that's going on right now. And I'm using KB2040 and I don't know which pins I could use. And I already knew I needed some pins for a couple other things. I have a 10 IO pins I'm using for buttons. So I needed to make sure I got that right before I went and fritzed things or if you're not familiar with fritzing I essentially laid out the schematic for it in breadworm form. So really useful and thanks, Katny, for putting that together. I believe you can do some queries of all the pins capabilities and then maybe get lucky picking a combination of three but this is a much better way because it does the work for you. It attempts to establish that I2S audio object and if it succeeds, then we get that print out of the trio of pins you can use. Right on. Okay, so let's see. We've got, I've got, okay, I've got some updates. So first one is if you remember last week, I believe it was last week, I showed my PCB design for doing the Pico plus a DVI HDI output plus the SD card reader and a little on off switch that I can use for both DVI video projects and my Pico NES emulator. And I had originally built that emulator on a breadboard and it was just a lot of wires. So I wanted to find a, a neater way to do it. So I designed the PCB. Those came in about three hours after my live stream last week. So that evening, a box of five of these little PCBs arrived from where I get it from JLCPCB, I think. Oh, it's not on there. Did I check the box that said, don't write your name on this, I guess? Usually they put their name on there. Yeah, I got this from JLCPCB. It was $2 plus shipping, which I think the shipping might have been $18 or something like that and got them in like a week, which is incredible. I'll show you the board. Here, this is the unpopulated one. I'll show you in my little down shooter here. Let me get a tight focus on that. That's not bad. And let me boost that exposure just a little bit. There you go. So I don't have a bunch of the parts sitting right here, do I? No. So I have a fully built one that I'll show you. So I have a fully built one that I'll show you in a second and I'll do a demo on it. But you can see right here, I've got the surface mount pads to put the Pico, which has those cast-alated pads on the side. In fact, you can see, here was a different project, but similar idea, where I was just using some pins. I actually hung this off the edge here because I wasn't using these. But you can see here, you can use the cast-alated, that's that little kind of arched cut out there on the side. That allows you to surface mount, solder the board, which just is simpler. It also makes your routing of things simpler. You don't have any holes on the bottom to worry about routing pins around or traces around. So Pico goes here. You can pretty much see the traces, right? I've got the enable or run pin is running up to a little slide switch up here. I'm gonna get some of the point with. There's a nice set of tweezers that'll work. So this trace right here goes from the run pin to one leg of a slide switch. And then that center pin on the bottom is routed to this ground plane. So basically the whole bottom, other than where you see the darker green, that's all the ground plane there. So that is how we can essentially turn the thing on and off regardless of how it's being powered. Then this is the SD card, which is an SDI interface. And not SDI, SPI, SDI interface, SD card reader. And then here is the DVI HDMI output sitting right here. So I'm gonna actually unplug this one over here from HDMI and power and the game controller and show you an assembled one. So here you can see, I guess that's how I had it oriented, I'm gonna switch this around. Here you can see we've got our DVI output, we've got our SD card reader and we've got our Pico. Now you see the Pico is nice and flat on there. I think I could have done this one flat, but we have some components in the way. Maybe you could have done them all flat, but I put these up on some small nylon standoffs just so they were kind of nice and proud of the board there, which might be nicer for an enclosure. I haven't designed an enclosure for this thing yet, but your HDMI gets plugged in there, your power gets plugged in here and here's your little SD card that you put your ROMs on that if you're using this in the game emulator mode. By the way, I did put the, it's kind of small, but if you're wondering what the code is I'm running, it is this GitHub right here, F-H-O-E-D-E, F-hoda makers slash Pico dash InfoNest plus. And so it's a Nintendo Entertainment System, the Famicom emulator, takes standard ROMs here. Now, I can't remember if I showed this last week or not, but this works out pretty well. This is the right angled sort of condensed version of the on the go cable splitter. So sometimes that's a Y adapter of cables. This one is nice, it just passes the power through here, plug in power and that's power and data that'll go to the Pico and then it will send power to whatever peripheral device you have plugged in here. In my case, it's the PlayStation controller and that allows the Pico to read the USB PlayStation controller that I'm using there. So there it is and you can see I've got a whole bunch of space right here. I posted this, grab one of these, I just have one in here. I posted this thing to some social media yesterday. I've got a tangle of cables here. I have some dreams of adding support for a shift register based proper video game controller, which I have a OEM original NES controller here. I've got two of them that have become entangled. So this type of controller, you can get these real ones for probably 10, 20 bucks if you're going and finding them online. Sometimes way, way less if you find them at a yard sale, sometimes a little more if you get them at a retro gaming store. But there are also clones of these that probably work the same and are super, super cheap. I know we have a SNES clone in the Adafruit store that's $5 and I think it would work just the same. This is the sort of D shaped port that's on the NES controller. It's different than the SNES. I just got a pack for just a few dollars of these sort of replacement. This won't really work in an NES, but this is a port for that controller that should allow me to, if I make a footprint or find a footprint for that, I can add that port right there, which would be really cool. And then if we can get the code working with this emulator or other software to use the Pico to read the shift register that is how this works. It reads the buttons kind of sequentially really, really quickly. This one chunk of data comes over that has all that info on it. That'd be amazing because this current version of this emulator really requires a specific controller. It's either the DualShock 4, the PS5 controller or there's one USB clone controller of an NES or Famicom controller that's hard to find. I found one on eBay for 50 bucks. So if we could get that working with these, these have arguably the better compatibility from controller to controller to controller. They're all kind of gonna send the same thing. So it'd be really nice to get that on. So that was one of the reasons that I built this with some space. I wasn't quite sure what all this would get on it. It's maybe some buttons, knobs, who knows, but that's my first run of that. And why don't we take a look at it? I'm gonna head over to the workbench. You can see I got this nice looking BVM working over here. That's actually a JVC. So it's not a BVM or a PVM, but it's a JVC branded version of a production monitor. And while this puts out, I don't want to confuse, I've shown this before on HDMI monitors. I figured it'd be fun to show it on a CRT. I'm using a real inexpensive, we sell these on Adafruit, real inexpensive HDMI to composite, which often looks less than optimal, just because a lot of TVs that accept composite don't really love the signal that's coming off of an HDMI thing. But, hold one second, I've got to put this thing on, do not disturb, because something's blowing up in the text. This one happens to be working well, I think it's partly because this is a sort of professional CRT that can deal with non-240i or 480i or non-240p images. So let me switch, I don't know if this will work right now. No, we'll just keep this camera small for a moment. So, oh, you know what, actually, let's do this right. Let me get switched over to that, down shot, that main view for a second, and let me goose this camera controller here so that it's, let me switch from the workbench. Okay, so HDMI out, that would be the same even if I weren't using this converter box, it works great on HDMI, it actually just puts pillar box black on the side, if I remember right, and the game is still at its original roughly four by three ratio. The adapter here plugs in, I will give it my controller. So that's this dual shock four, this one's called dual something four. I think it's dual, not dual shock, but dual something four, PlayStation four controller. So here's my USB power, and now I'll flip this on and let me switch the, no, is this not working? Wake up thing, I'm gonna manually switch my camera, I'm not sure if that's unplugged on this end. All right, so over here, I can zoom that in a little bit, there you can see a little closer, that's the sort of screen saver that's on this thing, but this is a, it's the screen a little better. This is just the file system that's built into the emulator for picking your games, I'll go grab something colorful and full screen looking, let's see. Here's a Super Mario. So here it's doing a little handshake in negotiation, and this says 576p, progressive, it's 60 hertz, which is nothing your regular TV would do, so I'm not sure how this all would work on a regular TV, but there you can see we got our Super Mario and Duck Hunt. This would work presumably with a real NES for a light gun, but not on the emulator, so there you go, there's Super Mario looking pretty good, it's at full, what did we say, progressive, it's like a five something line progressive scan, so we're not getting any of the sexy scan lines or anything in there, but it is a playable game of Mario that is being emulated right here on our little pico, some music, I'll die immediately, that's what happens when you don't pay attention. So can just hit both of these to go back out to the file list and pick different games, just turn it off with the little switch right there. So yeah, camera switcher is down, so I'm really happy with how that turned out, it's just a nicer setup than the previous incarnation using the breadboard. David G, the emulator does not support the light gun, well, you know, that's actually, I shouldn't say that, I don't know the answer to that, the light gun, maybe there's a USB light gun that it would work with, I actually have not looked into all of that, but light gun that I have is just a NES one, so I don't currently have a way to plug it into that, into this pico emulator board because it's USB, so that would be the question mark there, is there a USB light gun you can use or some other way. Andy Callaway, 576, that's PAL, isn't it? Yeah, good question, I swapped the output of that between PAL and NTSC, this TV does both, so it went through a little reset and played the PAL signal that was coming out of the box and the NTSC signal, so you got me, yeah, it's not really what it's meant to do, what it's meant to do is show up on this TV, which I think I showed last time just a regular HDMI, which is way, way more likely for someone to have in their house than some adapters and CRTs, but anyway, not bad for, I don't know what the total cost is, say $4 for the PCB with shipping, $4 for the pico, I think $4 for the DVI thing and another four for the SD card reader, so I don't know, call it 20 bucks or less, it's not bad. Of course you gotta have the controller, which is why I'm hoping we can figure out something with that using a real NES controller, that would be awesome. All right, so that's the update on that. I'll probably go through another iteration of that PCB and noodle around with it some and then put those files up if anyone cares to get one. Yeah, David G, light gun would fail on a non-CRT screen anyway, exactly. It's a very edge case to use this emulator and a light gun on a CRT, so. Yeah, P. Curry in a hurry asks, so the light gun works by looking at a lit square when you pull the trigger. Yeah, because of the horizontal scan line that fills in every other line for one field and then jumps up to the odd field and does that. On a CRT, the program can actually see one lit up screen, one lit up pixel. And since modern displays are progressive, it just shows the whole image at once. We don't get that little sort of coordinate point that we want. I think there are light guns. I mean, the Wii doesn't use the screen at all. It uses a combination of looking at IR LEDs with a camera for triangulation as well as the built-in accelerometers. I don't know about other light guns for games how those work nowadays. Tapas says use a Pico W, make a wireless Nest controller that talks to it via Wi-Fi. Possibly laggy, it's a guess. I don't know, Bluetooth? I think most people don't mind the input lag on like a model. I think all these are Bluetooth, right? Like the PlayStation controllers are all Bluetooth. Good question. Yeah, BLE, that'd be cool. Okay, so next up, let's take a look at the CNC project. So I showed this last time. I've got my CNC, which is all pulled apart but essentially it's toy where you point the arrow at something, pull the lever or the string and then it plays a, oh, speaker just came off. That's okay, I needed it to play as a sound. And so I'm replacing the guts of this, some of the guts and keeping some of the other guts so that we can put a microcontroller of our own choosing in there, our own amp and use our own custom sounds. So here's what it's looking like right here. Let me refocus that. And so this board is, I showed this last time, there's essentially a high point on a plastic ring here that presses depending on the dial position, one of these 10 rubber pads, just like a video game controller. And when those get pressed, they in this circuit that's built in there will make a sound. But I was able to use this with a, there's a common VCC point and then there's 10 of these, essentially digital IO pins. So I have a demo running right now, let me find power for this. Oh geez, I don't have a, I still have these, gotta find a USB cable, that's the right cable. So for testing, I just soldered these little bodge wires onto the traces that get contacts, get closed by the little carbon pill on the underside of those rubber domes. And so I just for testing, have it plugged into a metro and a metro should light up. Let me reset it, is that really working? Okay, it's powered on. I think that's a loose USB connection, that's not good. So we have, I have the Neopixel on here, should turn red, and then when I press, something's loose there, sorry. When I press one of the, oh gosh, let me get that cable out of the way there. When I press one of the rubber pads on here that's connected currently, I think I have four or five of them connected, we should see the Neopixel change to green. There you go, so that is now working on a bunch of these. Yeah, I've got a really flaky USB cable here, sorry, let me try it in a different point on that hub. Let's hope it's the hub, oh, I think it is the hub, okay. No, oh geez, it's resetting itself, I'm not sure why. Okay, so that's working well enough, so you can see I'm just pressing different buttons on here. Right now I'm just, any button press is a counts as gonna change the color of the LED and that was just to check that my soldering and connections there were good. I don't know what's going on, maybe this might be a faulty cable or something. So in putting this together though, there's a lot of connections, so I decided I was gonna put this diagram this out inside of fritzing, so I wanted to share what that looks like. Yeah, do I have a five volt for a barrel jack or an 18 makers bill? I almost went to grab one, it's a really good idea. Yeah, I think I'll skip it for right now, but yes, that's a good idea, I have suspicions about that USB powering that one. So here is what I did, I took a photo of the PCB from the toy and then you can import that into fritzing as a image essentially, I think they call it a label, but you can make a label object and then go and find a PNG image, it actually even allows transparency so that you can see through if something were underneath this we'd see through it. Now, you can't bolt wires and fritzing onto sort of nothingness, so I actually stick a bunch of these little perf board things underneath it and kinda hide them under there, make the smallest ones, I think these are the smallest ones they allow, there's probably some better object I could use, I don't know if there's a single pin object. So I think I might be able to group these things so they move together, but it doesn't matter for me right now the way I'm using this, but that allows me to place all of my wires on these test points that very kindly Fisher Price put next to each of the contacts. Actually this is a nice view you can see here of how this works. So you'll notice here's the common, this is labeled VCC, and in the original toy, this does in fact run up into the circuit in a couple places where it's using this for the exact purpose I am, it's measuring whether a contact gets pressed. By cutting this connection right here, can you see my mouse, let me see? Yeah, by just cutting this trace with an X-Acto knife, now that VCC test point is out of the circuit of the toy. So that means I can use it freely without fighting whatever capacitance and things are going on inside of the circuit up here. So there's two places where those traces from VCC went up into the circuit and just by cutting it right there at that sort of T-junction, it's now severed everything up here from the input section. So now I just run that VCC up to power on my microcontroller. Now you can see I'm gonna use, rather than the Metro, I'm gonna use something smaller, so I'm gonna use a KB2040. And the rest of these points all just go to GPIO pins that are available on the KB2040. So I've got like five of them up here, five down there, and those are all just what, A0 to 3, I'm gonna have to grab the serial clock pin there, which I'm not using anyway, and then 2, 3, 4, 8, and 9. Now the reason I'm skipping 5, 6, and 7 is, I'm not, oh, those are in use, okay. I'm confusing myself. Oh, okay, I'm not using 2, 3, 4, sorry about that. 2, 3, 4 I'm using as, you can see here, I've labeled them just to keep some sanity, the I2S audio. So this was the reason that I went and did that thing in CircuitPython with Katniss Program to find out which pins I could use for I2S. So it looks like 2, 3, 4 as bit clock, word select and data pin are a legit allowed set, so great. So I haven't even tested that yet. I haven't plugged that all in to test that, but I at least have some confidence in designing the layout here that I've got a reasonable choice for those pins. So then you can see here the I2S audio amplifier here. It's got those three control and I2S pins coming from the microcontroller. I've got it going to ground. I've got a resistor, I think it's 100K. Is that right? I can't read resistor labels. Yeah, 100K resistor running from V in to the gain pin. This chip allows you to change the gain. I think that gives me a 15 plus DB gain. This chip allows you to select the gain just by doing some different combinations of running that gain pin to other things. If it goes straight to ground, it's one thing. If it goes to the V in, it's another thing. So kind of cool, it's just a little selector and then which value of resistor you use changes it. So, oh yeah, thanks for having me guys. So that's a helpful tip for sure to fake your, there's plenty of times when you don't have the real thing in fritzing. And so you can just take a nice photo or make an illustration of it and throw it in there. Yeah, if you don't anchor these, there's no way to really keep sanity with these. Oh, maybe I'm lying. Oh, that went to my pin, sorry, yeah. Let me make a new one. If you don't anchor those to something, I think you won't be able to put the bend in it. So if I just run this to overlap on the image there. No, maybe something has changed. All right, maybe I don't need those. However, you can't just grab all those ends. So by anchoring it, we can do a move on all of that stuff, which is kind of helpful. So let me zoom out here. That's the reason, yeah, now I've remembered. So if I go and select like this, I can move all of that. If we didn't have all those anchors, then that's what would happen. All the wires would fly, would stay behind. And then you'll also notice on, sorry, getting back to the I2S amplifier. This is the Max 98357A, by the way. Same one I used in the walk person project. It's really nice. Dave G asks, did you check that those pins are I2S compatible? There will be a circuit python parsec for you, if needed. Thank you. The power on this, one thing I found on the walk person project is I don't believe this amp will run off a three volts or it may have some degraded performance. I think I was getting like crackling and stuff. I think it wants to be run off of five volts. And since the toy just has, you can see here, this two double A battery pack. And that really just runs right here to the board. So I've got the two lines coming off of that battery pack. A little more suggestion to me was, hey, see if you can run the whole project off of those double A batteries. So you probably could maybe get away on a fresh set of batteries running the KB2040 just by itself, maybe, if it's 3.3 volts. But I just don't think there's any way that that amp would be happy. So instead I want to run five volts and I'm using this cool little chip here that is the, it's actually not the one pictured here. We didn't have a fritzing for the one that I'm using, but I'm using the Mini Boost five volt one amp. And in fact, I'll show you that in a second. This, the one I'm using looks almost identical. I have one right here. You know, it's on a board right now. I'll leave it, I'll show you that in a second. But it looks similar and the pinout's the same. So this worked out fine. It's just not that chip. So what this has is an input for whatever battery you're trying to run it with. I think it might take like 1.5 volts up to five, I'm guessing, and then gives you a nice five volts up to one amp output. So it's this little Mini Boost chip and it, in this case, is gonna get roughly three volts when the batteries are nice and fresh of two alkaline batteries. Dipping down into the 2.4 range, typically, or if you're starting with some sort of rechargeables. This usually live more like 1.2 even when fully charged. So it doesn't matter. I can feed it that, these two AA batteries. And you'll see here, I kind of use some convention to not have my red mean two different voltages just to keep myself from getting confused. So red is the roughly three volts coming from the batteries and then pink is what I chose. This is kind of wild magenta as my five volts. So you can see that's actually what I'm running to the breadboard voltage rails here. And then I'm picking up that as the voltage input on the Max 98357 amplifier. And just confirmed this morning, this does work. You can run the KB24 even though it doesn't have a obvious voltage input on it. This pin labeled raw can be used for either grabbing five volts off of a USB if you have a need for it. Or in this case, feeding five volts to it. So what this does is it makes an end run around the three volt circuit if you jumper the jumper on the bottom of the KB2040. So there's a little jumper there. It's the only one on there and it's just for this. It's just, you wanna use the raw pin. If so, we can then feed this five volts and it seems to run fine. Much of this is theoretical because literally all I have working right now is powering it up. It's all I got to have. I have basically this circuit built on the breadboard. I don't have any of the inputs from the toy running into it yet, but let's jump over here. Actually, before I do that, I'll, as promised, show you the chip I'm using, the little mini boost I'm using on second mini boost. And here we go. So it is this one. It's the mini boost five volts at one amp, TPS 61023. I just happen, you can see when I bought them. I bought them July 29 of 2020. And by some miracle, I put them in a drawer in one of my parts bins, labeled boost, and they were in there. Which, wow, so glad.  So two to three alkaline batteries is pretty typical to run it on. And it tells you what kind of current you get at different voltages. So I'll probably get up to 800 milliamps if I have two fresh alkalines in there. And maybe, I don't know if that's the minimum. It's probably not. It probably goes lower than two volts on this. I think there's a newer version. Yeah, this purple one, I think that's newer and has a nicer silkscreen than the one I'm using. When was that update? You'll see sometimes these history notes. As of November 2022, this was updated with Penguin, so it's got the really nice silkscreen. Oh, that doesn't look bad on the one I've got over here. So that's the one I'm using. It's $4. Let's jump down to the workbench camera and I'll show you what this looks like and just a proof of concept that it seems to power some things, which I'm glad of. There, and excuse me while I zoom us in a good bit. So, what's going on here? I've got a little two AA battery holder, which I just found right before the show. In fact, I had to, I don't know if I can hear anymore, I had to jumper a four AA battery set up to, sorry, let me zoom this camera out. There we go. To make it work earlier and then right before the show I found, oh, I do have a two AA. So, two AA's. I'm using one of our little wire connectors there to run that to some ends of some jumper wires to plug it in instead of this stranded wires on it. So that's going, you can see ground is going to my ground rail. The in is going to be in on the TPS 61023 mini boost, ground to ground. Five volt is, now I'm not using pink wires here in real life, sorry, I don't have any. But there's my five volt that is on this rail which is running into the raw pin on the KV2040 and then that's going to ground. I don't have the amp plugged in at all yet. Actually, I've got ground on there but I didn't fire this up yet. And then you can see here I'm using this enable pin, which is kind of cool. There's an enable pin on the mini boost so you can just ground that and it turns the whole thing off so power doesn't go any further than this, which is great. Often you'll power your project with the microcontrollers enable pin or run pin on a Pico. But that means that this thing would be on all the time doing its thing and wasting heat and energy. So nice that this has this little, you can use any minimal little switch here. It's got no current, barely any current running through. And there we go. I flip it on and I got blinking lights over here. You can see the green LED flip it off, flip it on. So sorry, that's as far as I've gotten other than planning it out and verifying that at least I've got, I think a workable solution for using the battery, double A battery alkaline box that's built into the toy, which is really cool. I've done a few of these projects where I've gutted a toy to some degree or another. And I've always had to come up with my own battery solution or power solution for it. So if this works, I'll definitely keep this trick in the bag of tricks for taking over toys and other consumer electronics that have a little battery pack in them. Because usually it's two or three, taking those and turning them into the five volts that this will run on is great. And then we have other solutions for different voltages depending on what's coming in, what you have going out. But this one should be perfect for this. So let me turn that off. And let me know if you have any questions or thoughts on that. I'll check in with the chats. By the way, let me know how the stream itself is going from your end. It looks at least from a bandwidth perspective. Things are pretty good. YouTube is saying it's good health. It doesn't love the bit rate though, so that could be some settings on my broadcast side. So yeah, there was a question about the goal of this toy. I'm actually trying to keep everything except for the brain. So I'm gonna use my own amp and my own microcontroller. And then the toy has the nice input buttons that I'm reusing and I will need to use a power switch or some really clever sleep code in order to not have it run all the time. I'm assuming the toy has some really efficient sleeping code so it just wakes up when a button gets pressed. And so then I'll be able to play wave files off of the RP2040 through that amp and the existing speaker that exists in the toy. Let's see. Yeah, the exterior should look stock. Not sure how I'll do the power switch for it if I do. And that's right, yeah, I need to get this toy ready in time to send to baby Aida. DJ Devon 3 says the raw is only for the input power rate. It doesn't shift the whole board to five volts. That's right. I think that the most of what's going on in the KB2040 is still three volt, three volt logic. It's just that that pin can normally be dragging five off of USB for purposes of someone who's got other stuff plugged in, particularly keyboard projects that was designed. So yeah, I think I'm running the three-ish volt alkaline into the mini-boost. Five volt comes out of that, goes into the raw pin on the KB2040. Raw pin converts that to internally three volts or 3.3 volts. I think that's how that works. If anyone knows otherwise, let me know. All right, good, okay. And then last thing I want to do is give an update on the L-Cars project. So this is the, let me clear some stuff here. Talk about what this is. This is a panel from a spaceship in the Star Wars, Star Wars, the Star Trek, sorry. I didn't do that intentionally problem. In the Star Trek universe, they have this computer interface system that has this really beautiful style, really recognizable geometric style. This is a panel that, you're not gonna see it that well right now because it's not being backlit. But these are meant to be backlit on the set. A friend of mine wanted me to turn this into a kind of a piece of wall art. So it's essentially a vinyl sticker, which you can see some of the indents there of the vinyl process, and then a piece of frosted acrylic. So you could just back like this and it looks great, but my friend wanted it to actually have some animation to it. So let me show you what this is looking like with a, oops, wrong camera, sorry. What this is looking like with a matrix portal and two pretty high density matrix panels, RGB matrix panels. And I cannot promise this will look good on this camera. I may have to turn lights down and stuff. It looks good in real life, but on cameras it's been difficult. So matrix portal, I designed and laser cut a piece of acrylic framing just to hold the two. This is two panels. Hold these two panels together as if it's one just cause I couldn't, we don't sell one. I couldn't find this kind of density in this two to one ratio, which is essentially what I needed. And then I've also made a sort of light blocker to go on top that'll prevent bleed from sort of this one cell to another. And let me plug in power. So I've got a five volt four amp power supply for the RGB matrix. And then I've got USB-C to power the matrix portal. And let me find, and this is sort of the recommended thing with these portals you don't really want to try to run all those LEDs just off of the USB-C connection.  Let me just try once to, I'm doing this blind, but let me see if I can find a shutter. I don't like any of those, sorry. Let me go the other way. Okay, that's good. It's a little glitchy, but now you can at least see some of the intentional animation that I have going on. So what I find out is I looked into it a little more and typically the outer frames are still on these and the, yeah, sorry, it just does not look good on camera. I'll have to find ways. This will probably make it really blinky. Yeah, that'll really improve it. Oh, that's not bad.  What I'm doing is I've designed a sort of larger outer frame so it'll hide the electronics and plugs and allow me to do an enclosure front and back that I'm probably gonna do just out of acrylic, maybe with a wood veneer and that'll allow this to just prop up on a desk or something like that or hang on the wall depending on how you wanna do it. So I do have, let's see if this will work. I do have a button on here that just locks it in place so this is not animated at this point other than the flickering you're seeing. I had a dim mode that looks terrible. I tried just dithering the pixels to see, could I, because I don't think you can dim these panels. So I just wanted to see, okay, what if I just put a sort of dither pattern on the pixels will that look dimmer? So it looks like that, but it really shows through. I could probably, if I got this whole thing further away that might work, but I think we're not, I think I'm gonna bail on that idea and just go with, sorry, here's the brightness of this and you can just go between animated version or not. The way I'm doing it is just with a sprite sheet. So there's an SD card, is there an SD card? No, I don't think I have it on an SD card, but I might, I might switch that to an SD card. I think that's the SD card reader. But you can plug the matrix portal into your computer. There's just two bitmaps on there. There's the one that's just the still, although I could probably encode make that simpler and just have it go to the first tile of the sprite sheet. And then there's a sprite sheet. So sprite sheet right now, I think has like nine. Hello, so sorry about that. The batteries died in my mic pack, two, oh four. Okay, it was three minutes ago-ish. Yeah. Okay, so good. I'm glad that wasn't like the whole time I was over there. Let me know what the last thing I said was and if you saw anything that I was talking about that seemed like something you'd wanna know. Hopefully I was just talking about how the BMPs work or something like that. Please fill me in. Yeah, sorry about that. That's funny, that was at a high enough level at the beginning of the show that I thought, unfortunately these mic packs just show you three bars of battery health. I wish it were finer grained than that. And yes, I really need to find a good solution for the one that's docked over here. It doesn't need to use batteries, but let's see. Oh yeah, so good points. So C Grover pallet fader can be used to dim the panel now without dithering, that's awesome. I will definitely check that out. Dave G also says you should be able to dim it with colors, right? So if I made it 120, 120, 120, that's another way to dim stuff. Has nine is the last thing we heard. Has nine what? Nine, okay, I was talking about the bitmap tile. It's the sprite sheet. Okay, it has nine of these little images, these little, what are they? 128 by 64 pixel images. I just have copy pasted them and then I deleted out some of the blocks there. Let's see, catching up on anything else. Thank you all for trying to tell me I was hearing boop, boop, boop, and I should have paid more attention. Lars chews through the cable. It did ding, and I heard it. Thanks, ATMakers, Bill. Good, yeah. Backup wired mic. That's the receiver side of this setup. And yep. Cool, we're caught up. I'm so glad that wasn't like the entire time I was talking about that. I'm glad it was a dead battery. Yeah, it did sound like you were just really engaged. So they're having a good conversation back there. Okay, I think that's gonna be it. Oh yeah, is there another question? I thought there were some other questions in there. I missed, let's see, just cute dog. Oh my gosh, eyes on that thing. Can't hear you, Gina, I know. A flickering enterprise would be upsetting, wouldn't it? Yeah, actually, Pete Curry in a hurry. Someone asked about doing touch for that. What would it take to do, or some other way of knowing when you're touching that screen. Pete Curry in a hurry, do you plan to do parent voice samples for the C&C? Actually, Lamora said she wanted city sounds since they usually have cows and farm sounds and they live in city. So if you've got suggestions for city sounds, that's what I'm gonna go for. Good, okay, I think we're caught up. David Esses says maybe you could set up a TTS for the chat. I don't know what that is. Is that like a captioning system? Teletype? I don't know what that is. Let me know what that is, what you're suggesting. And I'll wait for anyone to chime in with that and otherwise that's gonna do it. Oh yeah, there was text to speech. Text to speech for the chat so I could hear you. Oh my gosh. Maybe that'd be a role that we can add for some people who wouldn't abuse it. I'd abuse that, that'd be fun. Okay, hey, thanks everyone so much for stopping by today. It's been fun giving you some updates on these projects and doing all the other things we do. I don't wanna forget to give you that coupon code again. If you want to support Adafruit by buying cool stuff and support your own projects and learnings or give gifts of cool electronics stuff to other people, why not get 10% off while you do it? And you can do that today by typing in sunshine in the coupon code field on your way out of the store. Oh, and you know what? That also reminded me that I did say I wanted to just take a quick look at some products. So let me jump back here, products, new products, view all. We've got two new products in the store this week and they are two variations on a USB cable. So this is a woven USB-A cable that has magnetic tips. So you can take the little magnetic tips, put them in your device and then just bring the cable head near it and it snicks into place and provides power and data. We have variations in one meter and two meter lengths and these come with a USB Micro-B, a USB Type-C and an iOS Lightning connector for the end. So you get all three of those with this. You don't have to get separate cables. It means you can plug in one cable that maybe you bring three different devices by to charge and this will do it. So here is the one meter long version. You can see it right there, very handsome. I like these woven cables and there's a data sync and power, passes across this for up to five volts or rather five volts up to two amps that you can use on that. So we have that two meter version and then we also have the one meter version and then we also have the two meter version. This also says that you have to be aware that this is gonna be limited to the five volt two amp. You're not gonna get higher voltage or higher current power, whatever, over USB-C and I think it's a minimum set of connections on data compared to what you might find on some USB-C cables. So here, please note this cable only carries the power and data plus minus sync cables, not the extra set of pins on USB-C. That means it's not compatible with some of the other devices that we have USB-C things and I don't think you'd be using that for lightning cable types of things that usually have USB-C on the other end. This is USB-A. All right, so those are our new products. Two new cables, go pick some up and get yourself a discount on the way out by typing in sunshine and that's cause it's sunny in Los Angeles. No big surprise, I know, but it was really rainy. I think that's gonna do it. Thanks everyone for Adafruit Industries. I'm John Park. This has been John Park's workshop. Please tune in tomorrow to check out a deep dive with Tim Fomey Guy, Tim's in the chat so you can ask him, hey, what you're working on, if he knows and then we have other shows lined up starting again next week. Come on by in all of the usual Adafruit broadcast D kinds of places. Thank you everyone and I will see you next time. Bye-bye.


Poly, Epsilon-Caprolactone, S, PCLs are biodegradable and biocompatible polyesters with great potential for use in drug delivery applications. PCLs can be modified by ring-opening polymerization, ROP, of functionalized Caprolactone monitors to incorporate various functionalities such as hydrophilic or hydrophobic groups, enabling them to respond to external stimuli and target specific locations. These properties make PCLs attractive candidates for drug delivery applications. This review summarizes recent developments in PCL-based drug delivery systems, including their morphological characteristics, drug loading and release capabilities, and targeted delivery. This article was authored by Ubi Badrin, Tejas Shah, Godwin K. Babinaina, and others.


Hello and welcome to CMC Markets on Tuesday the 2nd of December and the weekly market update. And it looks as if it's going to be quite a busy week this week. We're coming off the back of some more weak inflation data out of Europe. We've got declining oil prices and we're going to look at them and the prospects for further declines on Brent. I'm going to have a look at the euro dollar in the context of this week's European Central Bank rate meeting where there is speculation in some parts that we may well see an announcement of full-blown quantitative easing from Mr Draghi on Thursday. I'll outline the reason was why I think that still remains unlikely and also going to be looking at dollar yen as well in the context of continued yen weakness and further US dollar strength. So once again we are trading near all-time highs on US markets. The German DAX has managed to get back above 10,000 again and make a brand new all-time high and all on the back of speculation about further monetary stimulus not only from the European Central Bank but also from the People's Bank of China. There was some chatter earlier today that the Central Bank of China, People's Bank of China, may be minded to further augment the stimulus measures that it's announced recently with a triple R cut to bank reserve requirements. Now whether or not that is true and whether or not that's imminent is neither here nor there. What it has done is it's given risky assets a further boost as has the expectation that we might see further action from the ECB at Thursday's rate meeting. Now I still maintain that full-blown QE remains problematic at this point in time. There still remains significant descent on the governing council as to the effectiveness of any such measures and that's despite the fact that we've posted some very weak economic data out of the euro area already this week. We've seen manufacturing PMIs for Italy, France and Germany slip back into contraction and more than that the decline in the oil prices is reinforcing concerns that the euro area is slipping slowly and surely into a deflationary spiral. But before we get too fixated on this I would argue that actually the decline in oil prices is a good thing for the euro area and it's something that the ECB really doesn't need to get too uptight about. If you look at core prices in the euro area they're at 0.7% so they're still well below 2% but there's certainly nowhere near the 0.3% that the headline CPI number came in at the end of last week. So let's make a start with the Brent crude chart. Now having a look at this monthly chart can give us an indication of how poorly Brent crude has performed on a month-by-month basis over the last six months. Five successive monthly declines. That's the worst performance since we saw the Dow move in 2008 from the highs around about $147 a barrel to the lows of around about $35-40 a barrel. Now there has been widespread speculation that we could see a revisiting of that $40 or even $50 a barrel a mark. While not ruling that out I would suggest for the time being that remains unlikely. At the moment the decline in crude prices has been driven by a price war between OPEC and the US shale producers and we haven't as yet broken that key support line on the 2010 lows around about $67.50 a barrel and that's the horizontal line that I've drawn on the monthly candle chart there. Furthermore if we now move forward to the daily candle chart we can see that there is potential for a significant reversal, a key reversal day on Brent crude. Now that would seem to suggest that maybe we've seen a short-term base. We've seen a similar key day reversal posted in the WTI contract as well. So as long as we hold above these lows that we've seen over the past couple of days then there's certainly significant potential for a short squeeze higher. What I would be hoping to see is for the crude price to hold above the recent lows that we saw around about $67.25 and for a pushback above that horizontal support line from the November lows around about $76 a barrel. So that really remains the key resistance line on the top side. In the meantime I would expect to see crude oil trade in a very very choppy range over the course of the next few trading sessions as traders try and weigh up the next move higher or lower but certainly that reversal that we saw on Monday does seem to suggest that maybe the market is probably a little bit on the short side. So let's move on to our old favorite Euro dollar. Now this is a four-hour candle chart and as you can see we are currently struggling to get above that trend line resistance from the October highs which currently comes in just above the 125 level. Now the key support remains around about $123.50 and the market does appear to be looking as if it wants to retest that level again but while we stay above that then the prospect of a short squeeze remains very much a distinct possibility. Really I think depends on first and foremost the services PMI data that we get out of Europe on Wednesday but also and I think this is probably more important how Mr. Draghi comes across at the ECB meeting on Thursday. It's unlikely that the ECB will announce further measures to stimulate the economy ahead of the December TLTRO that it's due to push out the door later this month. A number of ECB officials have gone on the record as saying that it's very unlikely that they will announce further measures before the first quarter of 2015 and I think markets need to really think about that before they start to put all their eggs in one quantitative easing basket. Now we finish off the week with the US non-farm payrolls on Friday and that's going to certainly be a key indicator in the context of where the US dollar is going to go to next. Now there's been an awful lot of speculation that US rates are likely to rise in the second quarter of 2015. Given the weak inflationary pressures that we've seen out of the US economy over the course of the last couple of days I still think that's unlikely given how weak the prices paid component of the manufacturing ISM number was yesterday. So that really does seem to suggest that maybe Dolly N could well find upside progress much more difficult to sustain the closer we get to the $120 against the Yen mark. What are we looking for on Friday? We're looking for a number of around about 224,000 new jobs to be added an unemployment rate of 5.8%. Also keep an eye out for the revision to the October number because there could be a significant revision higher to that number given the strong ISM numbers that we saw in October but overall is the dollar gains that we've seen in Dolly N overextended. If we look at a daily chart we can see that the price is a significant distance away from the 200 day moving average. Now the last time we were this far away from the 200 day moving average was in the middle of 2013 when we peaked at 103.73 and the 200 day moving average value was around about 87.60. We don't you know and that was around about 18.5% the distance between the price and the 200 day moving average. Now we're not quite there yet in terms of the 200 day moving average and the price at this moment in time but the nearer we get to 120 and 120 to 50 which is the trend line resistance from the 1990 highs at 160 then the more likely the greater the likelihood is I think we could get a sharp correction back from the highs. So keep an eye on Dolly N and be aware that we could get a sharp drop on the back of any disappointment in any US data over the course of the next few days. So that concludes this week's weekly market update. Once again thanks very much for listening just a quick reminder of Friday's non-farm payrolls webinar along the bottom. Please feel free to sign up otherwise that's it for me for this week. Thanks very much for listening. This is Michael Huston talking to you from CMC Markets.