 Life in New York, it's Ask an Engineer. Hey, everybody, and welcome to Ask an Engineer. It's me, Lady Aida, the engineer that we pinkified with me, Mr. Lady Aida. Not pinkified, but it's us two here again for Ask an Engineer, the most fun, longest living, one hour engineering show on the internet. We're gonna have so much good stuff, lots of fun new products, another Toy Hacker segment. Yeah, that's a fun show. 3D Hangouts is back. We've got Ion and PI, JP's Pick of the Week, and more. That's right. Mr. Lady Aida, what's on the show tonight, and what's the code? Tonight's show, the code is PM Feather, 10% off of native restore, although we have tilling 59 PM Eastern time, or when I remember to turn the code off. So, user lose it, get 10% off, and of course, it's because we have a prop maker and feather wing, so you can wait till the end of the show to watch and see what this is, or you can just add it to cart now and get ready. Talk about some of our live shows that we do, including show and tell. We just finished that up. Did Descalade and Aida on Sunday, including a great search. We'll have a little bit of recap of that, including JP's product pick of the week this week. We'll do some factory footage. We got some 3D printing videos. We got Ion and PI. We've got a special top secret, which is a twofer, because it's our My Little Hacker toy hacking, and it's also some upcoming cool new product, plural products, I think, that we're gonna be releasing for people who like to make animatronics to music stuff and more. Have some new products. We'll answer your questions. We do them on Discord, and for .IT slash Discord, we can join all, like almost 40,000 of us now. We're a bunch of us there. All that and more on, you guessed it. Ask an engineer. Yay. Okay, so, codes PM Feather, 10% off, and you get free stuff when you add stuff to your cart, including. We have the freebies back. $99 more, the standard Chroma Proto half-sized breadboard, still available when you order from Adafruit.com, $99 more. We also have, oh, skip, that should be last. Oops, sorry. Yeah, it's okay. $149 more, you get a black KB2040, the K is for keyboard and B is for block, I don't know. It's an RP2040 board with the same pinout as the Pro Micro, so it's a great update, but it's got STEMI QT connectivity, built-in button, RP2040, dual core, 130 megahertz processor, eight megabytes of flash, and USB Type-C. We have a good UPS thing. Well, I'm just, I put these in the exact wrong order. That's fine. $199 more, you get free UPS ground shipping in the comes of the United States, and now. Yeah, because we put a new graphic up and I just went the opposite way when I, it's this, and then it's this, and then it's this. I just did a numerical order. $299 or more is the backing stock, Circuit Playground Express, a sign that the world in chip shortage is healing. In there. We're getting chunks of Circuit Playground Express's backing stock, because we've got 7021 chips in the house. This is our all-in-one development board, GWT for using with Circuit Python or Arduino, it even has some micro-python support now, West and Golang, it's got LED sensors and buttons, and more. We haven't done a lot of Circuit Playground projects lately because they haven't been in stock, but now that we're getting them back into the shop, I think we'll start doing some more projects again. Yeah. All right, we do Desk of Lady Eda every single Sunday. It's in two parts. Lady Eda, what was part one this week? Well, I wanted to give an update because we missed the previous Desk of Lady Eda, so we skipped a week because we were out of town. So this week we did a update on the Teddy Rock spin hacking. I talked about that last week on the show, but Desk of Lady Eda, I got into more depth. I showed some of the files that modded Android versions, running on Raspberry Pi, running in an emulator, running it on Raspberry Pi 2, Raspberry Pi 4, so many options. How we got modern, leaked libraries and showing a live hacking of a story file. So we'll show a video of that later. Yes. So that's the toy hacking we're doing. So that's actually almost done because we finally had an easy way to modify the audio files in the Teddy Rock spin. So that's what I did on the first half. Yeah, and then for Desk of Lady Eda, when we looked at things on digikey.com, what did you look up this week? Okay. So this week we did a special question we did too for. We did a special request. Somebody tweeted at the Adafruit Twitter account and Phil saw it and they requested an analog output hall effect sensor that would detect a magnetic field and give you an analog output based on the strength of the magnet. And that's exactly something that digikey has tons of stock of. So I found a good option with different polarity configurations, different strength configurations, low cost, I think it was like 40 cents or less from TI and can detect both North and South magnets with one volt being no magnetic field at all. So a really good option. Okay. And then every single week we do JP's product pick of the week where we broadcast live from the product page. Here is this week's highlight. The Neo Driver I square C Neo Pixel Board. This is the Le Potato from Libra Computing and this can't drive Neo Pixels on its own. I now have the Neo Driver Board plugged in a right square C to the Le Potato and then I have power coming from a five volt DC supply and then I have a nice Neo Pixel strip about 60 Neo Pixels plugged into these little terminal headers here. This is using Blinka that and rerun it. And here you go, this is not slow. At first I thought, oh, oh, this is, well all these warnings is this gonna be disappointingly slow and we're gonna be sad, but no, I'm here on a little single board computer that can't on its own do Neo Pixels. And yet with our little Neo Driver we are doing some very respectable Neo Pixel driving. Is the Neo Driver. It is an I square C Stema QT Neo Pixel Board. All right, and tomorrow is JP's workshop and Friday's is deep dive. Let's do some Python on our heart. We have like breaking news that we're gonna talk about. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Blinka, what's the latest? Well, just a little bit of reminder. This is our newsletter, sign up for it. It is massive. We have the 8.2.0 beta one release. You can check out the notes. We have all the news that we put in. Special thanks to Ann who's doing an amazing job and Ann was on a podcast. So you can listen to an interview with Ann the editor of the newsletter. But since this came out yesterday, Raspberry Pi posted today something that I know a lot of folks are gonna ask about. So I said, hey, Lady Aida, how about we just talk about some Python on hardware relating to the Raspberry Pi Pico W. So as of today, what's new with Python on this particular bit of hardware and what can I do? Okay, so the Pico W is the RP2040 board from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It's like about a year old-ish. And on board is that Infineon, I guess it was Broadcom, then Cypress, now Infineon, CYW43439. And that's a combination Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Bluetooth Low Energy chip. So I think under that tin on the Pico W and it's the thing that, you know, it costs $2. It's, you know, baked into the cost. And Wi-Fi support was added, you know, fairly quickly-ish to the SDK and to MicroPython so you can do Wi-Fi. And we added Wi-Fi support as well to CircuitPython. Arduino also has Wi-Fi support. And then the next side was people were like, well, you know, it can do Bluetooth Low Energy. We want Bluetooth Low Energy support. So there is the ability now to do Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy, so Bluetooth Classic and BLE. I guess you can do both at the same time when you do them individually. Bluetooth Classic is kind of best for keyboards and SPP, those are like the two things people use it for the most. Bluetooth Low Energy is used for kind of everything else, modern style, and for interfacing with apps. In this case, they're using the Punch-Thru Light Blue app, which totally is a blast from the past. Oh, yeah. Punch-Thru design. Yeah. Yeah, that was like six, seven years ago. I guess their app is still available. You can also probably use it with Bluetooth Connect. Yeah, of course. Our app is also great. So there's an update. Since we went live, the Bluetooth support has merged upstream into the official MicroPython repo. Yes. I think it was in a fork and now it's, but it was in the SDK, like a few months ago, they released it was in the SDK. And then now it's been merged into MicroPython. So from within MicroPython, you can make Bluetooth keyboards, wireless keyboard support. HID support isn't in there, so you'd have only Bluetooth, Low Energy, Bluetooth Classic, but maybe for some people they just want wireless. So the next question is, Mr. Ladyata. Well, everyone's going to ask, when is it going to be added to CircuitPython? Yeah, that's what I mean. The answer is, I don't know. The answer is we have to take a look at it. We already have Bluetooth support in CircuitPython. And so what we want to do is figure out, can we make it compatible with our existing API because that would be ideal because it's going to be an existing BLE support. And it also would kind of dance in the idea of adding Bluetooth support, Classic, or BLE through the ESP32. And we're not, again, it's like, we kind of want to figure, ideally figure out a way to support everything and with the same API and without a lot of complexity. And it's not trivial because CircuitPython has a couple of weirdnesses. Like we like to be able to dynamically add descriptors to the BLE peripheral descriptor, like what services are available. And it's not clear whether this stack, I think it's called the Blue Kitchen or the ESP32 has it. It's the BT Stack Library from Blue Kitchen. And it's also, it's not open, it's commercial use only, so it's like, if we use it, sorry, it's licensed for commercial use with the RP2040, which is fine, but we would still want to have it again work with our existing API. The answer is, I don't know. Wi-Fi is a little easier because Wi-Fi is kind of like, you scan, you connect, you open a socket, you close a socket, there's not a lot of weird things about TCPIP over Wi-Fi, whereas, or UDP over Wi-Fi where it's BLE, everyone kind of has their own little idea of how to implement the API. So the answer is, we don't know, we haven't really looked at it. Something might be looking at in the next couple of months, but there's no ETA. So if you need it for your project, go with my Wi-Fi. Yeah, well, you can just drop the UF2 on it and now use it for that, and then when you need to do something. Cross back and forth. I like the fact that microcontrollers are starting to turn into like little computers where it's like, I want to run this operating system on this, because this is what I want to do, like toss Linux on this machine, because I want to do this. Oh, wow, I want to do something else, toss Windows on it. Oh, I want to do something else, toss different operating, or a different flavor of Linux, for instance. I kind of liked it. You can bounce between these and it's a non-destructive way to do it. You don't have to like, kill your microcontroller. You can just drop a new UF2 on it and you're fine. You can have multiple ways to do something. Anyways, so that's kind of neat. So that was our kind of Python on hardware news that I wanted to get out, because it just happened. Folks are going to ask us. And so I'm like, oh, I can just say, here you go. Here you go. And that is our Python on hardware news this week. Don't forget, stay current with anything like CircuitPython. We deliver this to your mailbox every single week. Go and find it on AdafruitDaily.com. We do not do anything with your email address. We decided to have a completely separate website. That way, you know for sure, if you buy something, Adafruit.com, we're never going to contact you unless there's something to do with your order. And then AdafruitDaily is a completely separate site. And we just don't, we don't like spam, probably more than you don't. All right, we're an open source hardware company, LaDiAda, to prove it. We do a bunch of guides. We release hardware. We release files. And saw hardware. Yes, we have quite a few guides this week. We're super sherry. Some weeks we have like a bunch of guides and some weeks we have as many. Yeah, it's a big board this week. We have a bunch of product guides. So Katnie did the NeoKey socket breakout for the both MX and Chalk version, the Chalky on the left and the Skinny on the right. Those two breakouts are very similar, but not identical. So they needed a guide that covers both. Katnie went up the guide. She also followed up with a Encore of the TRS Jack breakout. Doesn't have code in it one, but people want to get the dimensions and they want to get the schematic and they want to get the board file. So we have a guide now for that TRS Jack breakout. Very handy. I personally needed this breakout for me to do some wiring testing because I needed something with the switches. So check that out if you want to download the files or, I don't know, get more details about the pinout. We have a 3D Hangouts project again this week. There's LED UltraHand from Tears of the Kingdom, the New Zelda Switch game. It's a prop project using Nudes and there's no coding, there's a little bit of soldering but it's just a battery and these LED noodles soldered together to make a cool UltraHand two-piece part, one for the palm, one for the arm. Nudes are great. Normally this would have been done with EL wire and EL wire kind of sucks to use. So I'm really glad that we found something better to use instead. And then Jepler had a project he wanted to build an all-in-one CPM emulator that runs on the RP2040 and has DVI output so it has an extra TV like old computers did. And it has USB keyboard input. So he used two feathers, a USB host feather to do the keyboard part and then a DVI feather to do the emulation and DVI output part. The codes in C, I think it's, I don't know, do we know, uses the Pico DVI library and he got Zork running on it and you can, yeah, you can run a CPM, you run a CPM as the emulator and then run programs off an SD card. I think he's got a SD featherway connected to and you can load games on. It works kind of like a hello world. Yeah. It's like, can it run Zork? Well, it's like, can it run DOOM? Well, it's like CPMs, no, they can't run DOOM but it can run Zork. So that's kind of cool. And to check that out. And then I think we had a couple updates in school down. Looks like Liz updated the Pico WHDP server probably out of this settings.toml. And then the reverse TFT feather, ESP32 S2 reverse TFT feather got updated now has the Max 17 048 battery monitor. Ditto, the ESP32 S3 reverse TFT, I think that also got updated from the LC 709 to the Max 17 048. So we had to update the guides to reflect that. And that's the... That's the software. All right, let's do some factory footage. Let's do some 3D printing. This week we're going to just jump right in and play these back to back. This is the Zelda project and a speedup. You can build a prop replica of Link's Ultra Hand from the legend of Zelda, The F***ers of the Kingdom. We were inspired by Link's new ability to make a 3D printed prop that uses LED noodles. It's a two-piece wearable that fits over your arm and the palm of your hand. The LEDs wrap around the armband to resemble the ability's effect like in the game. LED noodles are a flexible strand of tiny LEDs that can be powered by a three volt coin cell battery. We made two different sizes to fit both human-sized hylians and smaller players alike. The armband has three LED noodles powered by a nine volt battery while the palm uses a single LED noodle powered by a coin cell battery. The LED noodles are pretty bright compared to EL wire and it's even viewable during the day. Get the parts to build your own Ultra Hand from the Adafruit shop. We 3D printed the parts in copper PLA filament that looks great without having to do any post-processing. You can modify the open source design in CAD for a precise fit. Just update the sketches to have the parametric model update so you can make an exact fitting prop. Start by soldering together the LED noodles in series with the cathode connecting to the anode. Be sure to check out the guide on the Adafruit learning system for a full step-by-step tutorial. This current limiting resistor is soldered to the ground wire of a JST connector for a plug-and-play assembly. The LED noodles are press-fitted into the built-in channels on the outside of the armband. This joint was soldered at a right angle to accommodate the design of the channel. The wider channels allow the noodles to band on itself for a tight fit. Hot glue secures the JST cable to the inside of the armband to keep it concealed. A separate mounting plate is secured with screws for the 9-volt battery holder. We'll need to replace this battery's DC jack with the JST cable so we can plug it into the wired LED noodles. Then we can place the battery holder onto the mount and snap-fit the cover over the holder to make it blend in with the prop. The battery holder features an on-off slide switch to power it on. The palm section only needs a single LED noodle with the ends fitting through the notch. Secure the coin-sealed battery mount and fit the battery holder into place with the snap-fit cover placed on top. Solder the battery cables to the noodles' pins with an inline resistor. Remember to add heat shrink tubing to insulate those connections. Elastic straps or rubber bands can be used to keep the prop secure to your arm and your palm. Now you can use the slide switch to power it on. We had a lot of fun putting this one together and hope it inspires you to check out LED noodles for your next light-up prop. And before we get over to INMPI, I don't forget the code is PM Feather. It'll all make sense soon, but if you wanna put stuff in your car and start loading up, that is it. It'll expire tonight, around midnight. Let's do some INMPI. Hi, I'm INMPI, brought to you by DigiKey, and everything at DigiKey. This week it is from Texas Instruments. Lady, what is the new product of the week this week? Okay, this week's new product will get you on track. It is the BQ27427. Oh, that's a mouthful. It's a new impedance track battery charge monitor for lithium-ion, lithium-polymer batteries. This one is kinda nice. It's a system-side, so if you're using it with any battery, does not go into the battery pack. It goes into the thing that the battery plugs into. She makes it perfect for products where you have these batteries that just plug in directly and you wanna monitor their charge state. Now that I think about it, it has an integrated sensor resistor. We'll chud about that. And it has the impedance track algorithm going on inside, which does a really good job and better job of keeping track of the battery charge state percentage, whether it needs to be charged. How many, you know, how old it is, how many times it has been charged back and forth. That does affect how much current you can draw from it. And it's I squared C, so it's really easy to integrate. And there's a separate data sheet with all the registers, information. And you can also tweak the algorithm by classifying the battery using the TI BQ studio. So let's get right into it. Lithium polymer battery. The lithium polymer battery is very common for people designing portable battery-powered recharge products. You know it, you love it. Some cool things about it. They're very high-density. They're easy to get in almost any size. They're very inexpensive. They have a nice high nominal voltage 3.7 volts, which means you can often use a linear or buck converter to power your 3.3 volt electronics off of it. Put some protection circuitry in it and it's a pretty safe choice. One thing that's a little annoying about them though, is it can be hard to know what the battery life is. And a lot of times when you're using a product, you need to know what percentage of the battery life is. Is it like 2%, 10%, 25, 30, 90, 100? Because that's gonna tell you how long you can use it before you need to recharge. And I can also change your use case like with my phone. Scissors 10% less. I'm going to dim the backlight, turn off the audio, stop streaming YouTube because I wanna keep the device going as long as possible. So that information is very useful. The thing about lithium-ion batteries is if you go back one. So it's printed on it the nominal voltage 3.7 volts and the nominal storage 1200 milliamp hours. But that nominal voltage 3.7 volts is just kind of like a rough number. Depending on, in this case, your discharge rate, this is from a TI white paper, which is gonna be linked in the text, how much current you draw from it is gonna affect what the voltage is because there is this built-in impedance inside the battery to the higher the current that there's gonna be a little bit of a voltage drop. So if you draw as low as a couple hundred milliamps, you're gonna start at about 4.1, 4.2 volts. And then you're gonna sit kind of in that 3.7, 3.8 to 3.6 volt range for like 90% battery life and then it gets near to the end and then it kind of plummets very quickly down to about 3.0 volts. But if you're drawing three amps or one and a half amps, you'll see that there's this depression to the voltage, which makes a purely voltage-based monitor hard to use because if you don't know how much current is going through, you don't know which curve you're on. And so if you're reading 3.5 volts, that couldn't mean that if you're drawing a couple of amps, you're still at 90%. But if you're drawing only 300 milliamps, it means you're at 5, 10%. So knowing how much current you're drawing is going to affect which curve you're gonna follow to determine the current battery life. Likewise, another thing people know about lithium-ion and lithium-polyl batteries is that they are affected by temperature. Especially in cold weather, the voltage is going to droop as well. At normal 20 degrees C, you'll see the standard 4.0 to 3.0 voltage over the life cycle of the battery. But if you are at negative 10 C, because you're in Fargo, then you're gonna start at 3.4 volts before drooping down to three volts very quickly. So what curve you're on, current, draw, ambient temperature range is going to affect it. Another reason why, just measuring the open voltage of the battery or the loaded voltage of the battery is not gonna necessarily tell you where you are in battery life. So also, certainly aging, as batteries get older, the voltage drops and the impedance goes up. That can affect, based on the current draw, how much voltage you're going to see there as well. So these three things are reported to track how many times you've charged it, what rate you're charging at or discharging at and the ambient temperature. And that's where impedance track comes in. So impedance track is the trademark algorithm from TI that uses the current cool of counting, which is basically counting the current going in and going out, as well as calculating the impedance, looking at the voltage to figure out what is the state of the battery, what percentage of capacity, as well as how long it's gonna take to charge up, whether it's charging or discharging. Everything you need to know about your battery is that you don't have to do the work, especially if you're using a device with, not a lot of my controller cycles to spare, you can outsource that all to this very low quiescent current chip. It'll keep track of all the spore you and you don't have to try to measure the current going through a sensor system to determine how much current is leaving or entering your battery. There's a lot of details about impedance track. I'm not gonna read this, but you can pause the video and look at it. But this is an algorithm that happens inside. You do wanna have some details about the battery pack. Like you'll need to know, of course, what is the nominal peak voltage? Is it a 4.2, 4.1, 4.3 volt battery? That depends on the chemistry with the battery pack sizes. And also it depends on the manufacturer, the quality of the battery. You might have lower or higher impedance. Also the protection circuit is gonna affect that as well. All this, you can program into the impedance track calculator by writing some couple of registers and you'll get more accurate results. The benefits we chatted about, basically does it all for you with the trade off of that you have a sensor resistor. And normally the sensor resistor is external. You'd have the component to add as well as any pull ups or pull downs, capacitors or so. And what's really nice is how simple this chip is to use. So it's, I didn't put the footprint here, but it is a nine pin BGA. I think it's like 1.6 by 1.6 millimeters. It's quite small, but even though it's a BGA, the center pad is shared with an outer pad, they're both ground. It's kind of nice. It means that you don't have to use a bug via or like we're routing to try to get that center pad out. So you can kind of think of it as a eight pin BGA, not a nine pin, just, you know, short the center pin out to the ground. You've got I-Sport-C-S-A-L-S-D-A, so you use that to communicate with the Mac controller. There is the integrated sensor resistor C on the right. And then the output V-SIS, that is, you know, you plug in the battery to bat, VDD and VSS you see in the bottom there. That's just the internal LDOs. You have to put a capacitor there. You have the battery voltage coming in, it goes to the sensor resistor and then out to V-SIS. So this goes in between the battery and your system voltage because it has that integrated sensor resistor on the high side. The cool encounter is used to calculate the impedance track algorithm. And then there's two more IO. There's the GP out, there's a general purpose output. You can use that as like an interrupt. It tells you when the battery voltage is low, it passes a threshold that you've programmed in. And there's also BIN, which can be used as a thermistor input, or it can be used if you have an external thermistor inside the battery pack for internal battery pack monitoring. There's also the possibility of using it as a switch input so you know when the battery has been cycled. That way you can reset the algorithm because otherwise the cool encounter is going to go out of sync if somebody's replaced the battery on your device. You want to kind of start over and say, okay, we have a new fresh battery. We don't know how many times it's been cycled. We don't know what charge state it's at. So it kind of resets the internal algorithm. As you mentioned, you will have to, when you boot up this chip, you want to tell it what it's connected to, to the best of your ability. So there's a couple of things like the chemistry ID and the battery pack size, a new program that over I squared C, and they give you a list of the commands. There's also the ability to create a golden image, which is if you have a battery from your lot of batteries, especially if it's not being removed and replaced with some off the shop battery, if it's like something in a well-known battery, you can do a learning cycle where you have a dead board from TI, you plug your battery in and it kind of does this charge, discharge, relax cycle and it calculates some of the details about the battery and how it responds and charging and discharging that you can then enter into your I squared C programming. I squared C programming and this is gauge studio. So you use the eval kit, you plug in the battery and it runs it for you. If you're doing a large run of a product and you want to get like really good, accurate, precise battery statistics data, I recommend it. If not, you can probably get away with just putting in the voltage and the current. This is an example of how you use the I squared C commands to program in the chip. Note that it does not have eProm. It's a low cost chip here. So it's all in RAM. So when you turn on the right controller, you're gonna have to program it every time. So yeah, that's a trade-off of this very low cost chip. It's like 70 cents in quantity. You do have to program it each time, but it's not a big deal. You have like this key you have to insert and you put in the capacity and the voltage and all that do every time and you're good to go. It's not in stock, but it will be in stock soon. It wasn't stock when I first picked this, but it looks like it's gonna be in stock in a couple of months. They sold out pretty quickly. It's a nice little chip. I mean, it's very small. It has integrated sensor resistors. It's like one less thing. You really need two passes connected over I squared C and for under like 70 cents, you can have a really high quality battery monitor for your product. You probably want stuff on battery. You wanna know exactly what the state of charge is. And that's me. That is this week's IonMPI. IonMPI. Okey-dokey, we're gonna jump right into new product. New, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new. All right, let's kick it off. Okay, got a couple of revisions. This is a revision for the ESP32 S2 Feather. All these boards got, there's like a bunch of revisions because the battery monitor, just speaking of battery monitors, the battery monitor chip that I originally used when I designed these feathers, the LC709203, very, very cool battery monitor. It got discontinued. And so we had to replace it. So it's all got re-spun to use the Mac 17 048. And also we did the silk screen rails at it. I think it's much more legible using Penguin. It's otherwise the same. So we're gonna update the tutorial for the Mac 17 048, but I love this new battery monitor. It's basically just as good. Maybe I'll update to the BQ battery monitor because we just covered that. But it's been revised, so you can get the new version and you can see on the back, it says Mac 17 048 battery monitor, that's how you know what version you have other than the fact that the silk screen is fancified. Next up. We've also updated the 1.2 inch 7-segment LED backpack. It's featuring the HT16K33. It's an I squared C to LED matrix driver. We have these in a variety of configurations sizes. This is like a massive, chonky 1.2 inch high digits. You do have to, this is just the backpack is that the LED display itself, which, if you see in the next image what the outline of it would be. And what's updated is that, it was kind of, we talked about how the 300 revisions. So one of the things I did is, first off, it now has Step-M-Q-T ports, so it's plug and play, much easier to use. You don't have to solder in that head or if you don't want to, it can take wiring much easier. Second, I've added a little boost converter. So one of the things about the 1.2 inch LED segments is that the LEDs, there's two LEDs in series in each segment of the digit. And so you really need five volts for it to look good because it's two volts plus two volts. If you want it at 3.3 volts, it's very damp. You only want five. And so historically I said, well, you can run it at three volt logic, but you'll also want five volt power. Well, I've updated it now so you can run it at five volt or three volt, any mix and match you want, because built-in is now a five volt little boost converter that will give you 100 milliamps, which is all you need to drive the segments at five volts cleanly, even if you're powering it from three volts. So great for use with Step-M-Q-T because oftentimes you're plugging into a three volt microcontroller like an RP2040 or a Sandy 21 or a Raspberry Pi or whatever, and it has three volt power and three volt logic. So a very big update, two big updates, but this one I think this will make it a lot easier to use. Next up. Okay, next up, we've got a Pan8302 breakout. We've had a breakout board version of this, like breadboard friendly version for a long time, but I want a one that's plug and play that is pre-soldered, ready to go. You don't have to do any soldering to get it working. You have terminal block on one end for the speaker. You have the JST for audio input on the other, and it's just a kind of nice, you know, three watt, classy amp, low cost, simple. By default, it gives you about 14 dB of gain, but into a four ohm or eight ohm load. But if you look at the next photo, there is a little volume control knob. It's a potentiometer that you can twist to reduce the input from, you know, can be up to three volts peak to peak input. You can reduce it down to reduce the gain so it doesn't, you don't blow out your setup. So I have a little demo. We have a demo. I have a demo showing the kind of configuration because there's, you know, we have a lot of amplifiers and I'll explain why you want one or the other. So, oh man, I just, oh no, sorry. I was about to hit autofocus and I hit power instead. We're back. Okay. How did we, how did we survive? Hold on, it takes a second. It does, but then, then it's all ready. Okay, fine. You can zoom in if you want to. Well, I have a lot of stuff to put on. This overhead can boot up faster if you accidentally turn it off. If you turn it off, why would anyone do that? Yeah. I don't know. Okay. So here is that, again, it's solder free. This is a prototype. It's green. The final version is blue or black, but green, I don't know, sometimes I'm feeling green. Inside there's a JST two millimeter pH input with, and you can use, we have cables that are like a dollar piece. Black is ground, red is power, three or five volts will work and then white is signal in. And the signal is capacitively coupled here so it can be DC reference. It doesn't matter. AC coupled on the input and then the potentiometer is the gain and then there's the amplifier. There's a couple of capacitors and then output you can, is a bridge tag load too. In this case, it's a four ohm speaker and a three watt. So it's, it's fairly loud and I don't want to get us into YouTube trouble. So I'm just going to quickly turn it up. Stop it. Okay. Right. YouTube police. YouTube police. Everyone's a cop now too. Everyone's just like, they're just like, I'm going to turn you in because you're doing something. Yeah, I know. But this is great. Like for example, this is circuit Python and it has three volt peak to peak output. But, you know, I also tried this with line level output from my computer and it works great, you know because you have enough gain and then you can use the, use any flat head screwdriver to adjust the gain and, you know don't play copyright music ever. It works with pretty much anything. It's just a straight analog audio in to class D amplifier out, very simple but really great when you just have my controller on your PWM or pure DAC output and you want to amplify it to a speaker. Okay. Next up to start, let's show up a side too. Lady Aida, our community, our team it's higher stuff for the community and it keeps things going in all sorts of ways. That's cops. That's a, you know there's nice cops too but I'm just saying like everyone needs to stop turning each other in and let's all get together and make a chair stuff. Anyways, start over the show tonight. The product is Da-da-da, it's the prop maker feather. So let's, I'll show this demo on the over. Okay. So let's go straight to it. So the prop maker feather is the latest in our RP2040 all-in-one feather line. This is because we had a lot of people who were making projects with our prop maker feather wing and the feather M4 and the feather M4 has been really hard to keep in stock because the Sam-D51 is still affected by the chip shortage somehow. And people started to solder together and there's two pieces and like they wanted better quality audience. I was like, oh, you know, maybe I'll just make an all-in-one feather. Actually, I, you know, that's giving myself too credit. Dan Halbert said, why don't you make an all-in-one feather? And I was like, that's a good idea. So I did so. So what this has, let's go to the next image is on the left-hand side, you've got your USB-C and your battery input and your RP2040 chip. So that's a dual-core 130 megahertz processor. So you can do sensing, playback audio, do circuit Python or MicroPython or Arduino with it. There's a reset button. There's a bootloader button. You can also use it as a user button. After it's booted, you can use it as an input. There's a STEMIQT port, eight megabytes of flash, so lots of space for storing audio files or sound fonts, whatever you want to call them, or animation instructions. There is an accelerometer kind of in the top right corner. It's a LIST 3DH, three-axis accelerometer with tap detection, so really good for motion sensing. On the bottom right, there is an I2S Max 98357 3W digital amplifier. So this takes digital signal I2S from the RP2040, so it gives you really high-quality audio output. Up to 3W, so it's good for, you know, powering fairly large speakers for props and robotics and electronics. There's also a little servo port. We had a little space leftover, and I was like, well, what are we going to use it for? And I think Phil B was the one who was like, can you stick a servo connection there? I don't know. Somebody said so, and I was like, yeah, good idea. So I did, so you can plug and play a servo inside. And then there's terminal blocks for the outputs. So the NeoPixels for a button input and for the speaker output, you've got these terminal blocks so you can really quickly wire up a project. And there's probably a lot of projects you can do with minimal soldering, and you don't have to solder to the feather itself. You just use a terminal block. So let's go to the overhead. One thing I'll say is, you know, a while ago, I think it was a decade ago, I'm just like, you know, it'd be really cool if one day Disney did like Imagineer in a Box to have the next generation of people who were doing like all the cool animatronics and more. And like, Disney's so gigantic. Now it's like, it'd probably be impossible to find anyone who could help make that happen. So I'm just gonna call it that. It's like, this is one of the things that you can do. Video, sorry, audio. You can do robotics. You could do lots of things in a really compact package and make your own, this could put you on that path of making like pretty intense projects. Yeah, I mean, I think it was, with the Promaker feather wing, we learned a lot, like it was a good thing, but I think I learned a lot. Like people really want high-tooth digital output, sounds really good. And they want terminal blocks. They can plug in unplug stuff in a server port. So I didn't have the server plugged in before. So it was making a little bit of noise. So let's try this again. And this is signal. It can run scripting languages on them. Yeah. Yeah, it's like, pretty intense. Yeah, it can also run off of a battery, which is kind of nice. So I'm gonna unplug it. How much flash is on it? This has eight megabytes of flash. Eight megabytes. Lots of space for audio and more. So runs off a battery here. This is the button input. So one of the terminal pins is just like a GPIO. So in this case, you don't want to press it, the new pixels go. It's also playing audio, but you don't have to believe me. And then this is the servo output. So it's just slowly moving the servo back and forth. But that's handy if you want to do projects where there's a little bit of motion involved. Maybe you want to move a little eyeball or move a head back and forth or have something spinning. You can have those continuous rotation servos as well. And the NeoPixel output has a five-volt level shifter so you get nice clean NeoPixel output. And then the power to the NeoPixels and this servo and the audio amplifier can be turned on off instantaneously. So there's a transistor that can turn off those external power outputs. And the reason you might want to do that is for quiescent power usage. The RP2040 isn't a very low power chip, but still NeoPixels do draw current even if they're not lit. And so this would let you just completely kill all that power and mute the amplifier for sure. And then this boot button here when I press it, it turns this LED white. And then of course you can add more sensors and capability over the StemAQT port, just plug in vertically into it. This one has a broken connector because it's mine, but imagine it didn't have a crack in it. Plug in a gyroscope, you can plug in OLEDs, you can plug in more servo drivers, you can plug in an NFC, RFID reader, whatever you want into the iSquad C. And of course you have all the header pins as well. So you have like 21 GPIO on top of that for any kind of analog reading or digital control, can't get to a TFT, what have you. It's a good regular feather, but I think a lot of it's built in. I kind of like that you may not more circuitry or soldering to get most projects off the ground. Yeah. All right. And that is new products of the week this week. Oh. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no. Okay. So we have some questions lined up already. Yeah. So do go to Discord. And if you haven't already put your questions up, very different. Discord, if you put some up there before, we'll get to them in just a minute. We're gonna do some top secret, which is a little bit of a twofer. So let's kick it off. Okay. So top secret this week is part of our My Little Hacker series. And I liked the intro that I made for this. So I'm gonna do it again. And then we're gonna talk about the latest in some toy hacking. My Little Hacker, My Little Hacker, building a queueing. Okay. So we posted this up on the socials. I'm like, hey, try to guess what this is. So what is this lady in it? This is, and this is the 3D rendering. I like this rendering. So they really give me a good sense of what it is. And this is the CAD output. I finished it out in this morning. This is schematic. So this is replacement brains for the Baby Einstein Tickle Long. Oh, you've got the whole stuff here. No, no, no. Yeah. This is the Baby Einstein Tickle Long. And this is a replacement board. You can pop out the board that's in there. And then you can put your own music in it. And if you know what this thing is, and know how it repeats the same song forever, you probably wanna put different music in it. All right, do I want to? I like this weird chip tuning. Yeah, let's go the overhead. So this is the, this is the toy, which is now off. It's a little like, you know, you needed a toy to entertain a young kid, or maybe an adult, you know, anyone can use it. It's inexpensive. It's like less than 10 bucks. And it's got this button that you can press. And then there's like this little LED. It's like a screen. It's like a weird like, it's like an AI version of an iPod. You know what I mean? Kind of like weird, like mutant. And it plays kind of random songs from the memory. And they're kind of, the speaker's pretty good, but the tunes are just kind of like your generic classical tunes that have no copyright infringement issues. And like make your baby smart, whatever. But we wanna have it play nine genales, or maybe a podcast. We don't know, whatever you want. So we did a previous video where we opened it up and we saw what's in it. It's, you know, of course, this blob chip. There's like three LEDs. I mean, look, they have to make it cheap. I don't blame them. It's a single-sided paper phenolic board. Here's the switch. And then, you know, we did some hacking experiment where like, oh, you know, can we boost this to run a ESP32 S2? And we tried our I2S BFF to make music and like plug in the speakers. We know, you know, we basically got a proof of concept of what we wanted to do to replace the brains. Cause we thought like, let's make a new circuit board that fits in here. And instead of playing these pre-programmed tunes, you would be able to customize what audio you wanna play. So we can go back to the... This is what it is. Yeah. So it's got a microSD. It's kind of visible on the top left. And the main processor chip is the ESP32 S2. I thought it'd be cool to have Wi-Fi because then once you've enclosed it in the case, you could use Wi-Fi. We have a Wi-Fi workflow in CircuitPython and there's also over-the-air programming, of course, in Arduino. And then you could, you know, once you have it set up to look for your Wi-Fi, you could reprogram it and then also upload new files to the SD card. So you can have like new songs. You can change it out. Your kid gets really tired of the pixies. For example, you could change it to Depeche Mode. You know, and then if they get tired of Depeche Mode, I don't know. I guess they can go to the Cure. They can get tired of the Cure suiting the Vanchies. I mean, like, there's infinite 80s goth music that you can have your kid play. So you can put any size SD card and the ESP32 S2 can definitely play Wi-Files in CircuitPython over I2S. There's an I2S amplifier, our favorite, that Max 98357, which we adore so much. We put it in so many things. There's a STEMI QT port so you can attach sensors or devices. Maybe you have it read data or send data or have an OLED or whatever you want. USB-C for uploading code or direct communication if you don't want to do this wireless thing. A little boost converter that's kind of in the bottom center there. That takes the three-volt battery because we want to use the enclosure. So we'll take the three-volt battery pack and boost that up to 3.3 volts because if you're using rechargeable batteries, it's like 2.6. And we tested it. The ESP32 does not want to run. S2 does not like running off of two rechargeable AA batteries. You really want to have a booster to give a nice clean 3.3 volts. And then we kind of sprinkled a couple neopixels like five neopixels around to have the same background animation but it'll be full color, not just three LEDs, a single color because we like color. And then the outline is the same. We kind of moved it out a little bit but the same pads for the battery and for the switch connector and then the elastomer. So it should be a dropping replacement. And then of course it's, you can't expect them to make a product like this would be more expensive than most people want to pay. But for people who want to hack their toys, yeah, this could be like 20 bucks or something. And then you can- Yeah, this is a nice- Gettify the toy. So Kitto has one of these and then eventually it's hard to the music. You can replace the circuit board in it, wirelessly put any music you want in there. Basically make your own Kitto Spotify or whatever. It's the music that you want and then you can over time put different music on there. And I think that'll be kind of a neat parent kid thing and it's sealed up. It's an enclosure that's like battle tested. These are super cheap. There's like millions of these out there. They're never gonna change the design either. And so I thought this would be a good project enclosure. Yeah, nothing to change the behavior like maybe a double click does something or like a hold. Like you can change the behavior a lot easier. I did make the switch do the gain on the amplifier because there's a gain pin on the max. So when you put the switch onto low power, it like drops the gain by like 90 B. So that's still functional. But one of the things I wanted to try to do is one thing I do kind of like about kids toys is you don't have to turn them off. The quiescent current is really, really low. I mean, you use your travel batteries anyways, but it would be really neat if it's like, if you forgive, you know, you're like, ah, I have so much stuff for you. You're not gonna remember to turn it off. And so the ESP32, another reason I like using the S2 is it has very, very low quiescent current when it's in deep sleep mode. And so I have to, you know, I'm gonna experiment, but I'm pretty sure that I can make it so when there's no, you know, after some playing a song, it goes into this deep sleep mode. And then when you press the button, it'll wake up. In between, it should use like 30 or 40 microampere. So it'll be able to, you know, not as little as whatever this 80, 51-chord core is, but enough that it should be able to run for a couple of weeks on a low battery. I don't know, it'll be kind of interesting. I mean, you could also like use text-to-speech. Like when you press the button, they could say, you know, what the weather is going to be or it could have like personalized messages. I don't know, like, I like the idea of like reusing these like really durable enclosures. And then we have, you know, they're not like waterproof, but they're weatherproof. And then using the Wi-Fi workflow to reprogram them. And then, you know, these use double-way batteries. So this will be kind of a fun, you know, moditoy type thing that you'll be able to do a lot. And you know, give these as gifts to people. Here you go. There's some fun songs. The Emojin Heap has a neat song that they engineer to help put babies to sleep. You could just have a single serving thing where it's like, here you go. Yeah, we could have a drift, you know, that like a drift song, they could play it on loop. And then another thing is that you can change the timeouts. So I don't know, I think it would be kind of fun. Like we've done quite a bit of toy hacking. And you know, it's interesting. It's like toy hacking and circuit bending is kind of like an old style. Like, I remember like the, you know, the early make years that was like a really big thing. People do toy hacking, they'd open toys and like change resistors and values to try to retain that. Someone asked, this will retain the baby proofness of it because you're just opening up, changing up the circuit board and then sealing it up again. That's why the Wi-Fi is so cool is that as an adult, you can go in and you can change the code over the circuit Python Wi-Fi workflow. But like the kid can still chill out. Yeah, it's kind of neat that baby toys are all screws. And it's like, it's funny, it's actually repairable even though that's probably one of the last things people repair a lot. Anyways, so then we have a little bit of an update. I'll just play the videos, 38 seconds. This is the Teddy Ruxpin modification that we're doing. Short version, there's these Bluetooth animatronic bears on eBay for $20 or less. It's a rebooted Teddy Ruxpin company, went out of business. So they're just sitting around. You can't put anything on them custom until now. So this is our progress with that project. Not this Wednesday, but the 10 days ago Wednesday is when I got the audio working in the morning. And I don't see which version this is. So now, let's get this. Iki-sikki-sikki-sikki bubblegum, bubblegum, bubblegum. Iki-sikki-sikki-sikki bubblegum makes your hands stick to your head. So now I've got it playing custom audio. So that's a song, Iki-sikki bubblegum, that Ada Kiddow likes to listen to. Yeah, so that last picture, I went over to Majourney and I typed in Teddy Ruxpin, Ms. Rachel. And I was playing around with a couple different images. I'm like, oh, that's pretty neat. That's actually what I'm going to do. I'm going to dress up the Teddy Ruxpin as Ms. Rachel if you're familiar with Ms. Rachel's. She's a music teacher that does singing videos for kids. And so I made the graphic. And of course, I had to then later on deal with dudes on social media that said, why do you have to change the gender of the bear? Because that's what you do now. You wait around until there's a picture of a teddy bear that's in overalls and you care about if it's a boy teddy bear or a girl teddy bear because that's what people do on the internet now. That's what we're at. So anyways, that's what that image is. I thought it was cute. This is cute. Yeah. So anyways, that's this week's My Little Hacker. My Little Hacker, My Little Hacker, building with you is magical. My Little Hacker, wants to build and shine. Okay, we have a lot of questions lined up. We're going to put them away. Ready? Bam, bam, bam. Okay, I'm going to put them on the screen so you can see them here. Yes. Okay. Let me question for the share. First one, Lady Ada. Hi there. I'm working on a need to use the six, need to use six same, iSquared-C devices. I need them all to communicate to each other. Would this be possible using the iSquared-C protocol? If they're all iSquared-C controllers, then I don't think so because the controllers can only have one address. However, for the peripherals, you can use an iSquared-C multiplexer. And we have eight channel multiplexer so that you're well within reason. So if it's like, oh, I want to connect to eight HT-20 humidity sensors, just use a multiplexer and we've got tutorial on how to do that. Okay. Next one. Can you use BLE and Wi-Fi together for the Pika W? It's a good question. I think in the SDK, you might be able to, but in MicroPython, I think it might be a challenge because I know that it's the firmware. I don't know if there's a new firmware that covers both for this, the Infineon Psi 43-43 nine chip or whether it's two different firmwares. Then you can only run one at the time. But if there's one firmware that puts in both modes, you can switch between the two, then you should be able to do both at the same time. But like, boy, I don't know, I haven't tried it. And this is like, this just got at least like six hours ago. What is CPM? CPM is like a very early operating system, which I've never actually used, to be honest, but it was text-based. There was a kind of the Commodore 64 era, maybe it was beforehand. I have a feeling that Jebler used it. I have a feeling that Jebler used it, maybe as a kid. And so as a real fan of wanting to get back to it, but it was a text-only disk operating system. Next up, the new 803-87 segment backpack is the quick power still source voltage on the other quick port if you need to connect another device. Yes, that it's like, it's three volts, it goes through and then internally on the board, it does a five-volt boost. Okay, why is it circuit Python, FICO, DVI, display library require the use of 24-bit valid entries, but the entry only shows either black or white, no matter what values, the pellets entries have. I know that there is color support, but there might be a bug, in which case you can open up an issue. I mean, it's been a while since I've tried the Pico DVI display library. I'm pretty sure it can do color, but it's going to map the color. But what we tend to do with circuit Python is we don't have special, like we don't know what the display is. We let you use any color and then we'll render it to the best of our ability. And so if you've picked a monochrome display setup, you can, anything that's like darker than 50% gray will show up as black, anything lighter than 50% gray will show up as white. And it does hue calculations to determine, like red, is that considered black or white? In general, if you know what display you're going to use, but the display can change. So we let you set any color and then the display driver interprets that to the best of the display's ability. Okay. Well, this is a good one because I already have something ready for this. What will you do when Autodesk drops Eagle CAD in 2026? We have an entire video segment last week on Ask an Engineer. You can find it, just scrub to it and we talk about that. But I'll also tell you, yeah, it's not really rant, but I'll also say typical Adafruit style as we show us migrating away from Eagle CAD, like some of us use KeyCad on stuff. But as we show it, we're going to show here's some tips. Here's some things we do. We already donate to KeyCad. We already support it in all the ways that, you know, you can, we think we could do some bounties to help add some new features. But just like everything else, we'll show our work as we go along. And I think you'll like it because every single week we'll have something like, oh, here's a new thing that we learned in KeyCad. Here's another thing, here's another thing. We converted from Eagle CAD. Here's some other stuff. So anyways, it'll be fine. But check out the video segment. I'll say, I haven't looked in depth, depth, depth. I don't know what we're going to do yet, but I'm up to either, I want to try both KeyCad or Fusion 360 and I'll make the right decision for me. Okay. Next, Jeff Curling interviewed Ebenova recently who was not exactly positive about risk five for the moment. He seemed to think that it'll be something close to a decade as I recall before risk five because there's some of the mature of up. Compete with ARM for him to consider Raspberry Pi. Do you, this seems pessimistic to me. What do you think? Here's what I think, Eben is really smart and if risk five makes sense for Raspberry Pi products, you'll see it. He's very, he's very close to optimize. Yeah, he's not gonna, yeah. He will go with whatever the cheapest thing is if it has equivalent behavior and performance but he doesn't want to maintain the performance. Yeah, my experience is they usually make really smart decisions. And so, you know, we get asked like when are you gonna switch to risk five? It's like, well, when all of the reasons that we would need to make sense. There's been a couple microcontrollers with like some risk five chips, but not supported, not supported. Yeah, the main core risk five chips have not done particularly well. ESP32C3 is risk five, it's one of the few that I think is successful and actually made it to market and have like real use cases and users. It's very early, you know, and it takes a long time to get the maturity but it's definitely, you know, it's becoming more used. I, you know, I was asked a couple of years ago about risk five where I thought, and I think it's a great replacement for eight bit cores and 8051 microcontroller cores that you can use risk five instead. You get the power of like a 32 bit risk architecture without the cost of licensing arm. But I don't know, I mean, Evan does more about chip design than I do. I mean, one thing for us like if there was like a low cost risk five microcontroller that had USB. Now I'm ready to go. You know, we port circuit Python to it probably. Yeah, like those are things like we have a core set of things that we like to see in microcontrollers if we're gonna port circuit Python to it, but that would be nice. Is there any update on the Nitjar analog electronic bird synthesizer? Get into it. It's just on the long list of things that- I did get the Torhacker thing done and that's been four months ago. So some things have just moved in slow motion between kind of recovering from COVID and part shortage. Like all of these things together just kind of perfect storm. And 300 redesigns. 300 redesigns. Baby. But yeah, but you'll notice like momentum is happening. So we'll get there. We also made a box coming up. It's happening. It's just like, it's sometimes feels like you're running through molasses. But the thing is, if you're running through molasses, keep on running and don't stop. Pressing for the show with the baby hacking as P32 S2 board, thoughts on adding an inexpensive proximity center, reduce the volume. If the baby takes it up to their face, maybe even helpful if the LEDs dim. That's a good idea. And then you can like, easily, easily add with the STEMIQT ports. It's a perfect example. We have a lot of low cost proximity sensors. You could tell, you know, if it's being held, well, let's speak it on the back, but you could, you know, drill a hole and have the sensor point through. And then you could tell if, you know, they're a kid who likes to put it up to their ear because they want to blast their eardrums. Yeah, put on the Led Zeppelin or something or like make it loud. And they can, you know, you could, you could reduce the volume that way digitally. Again, I2S amplifiers make it easy. You can also prerecord your own messages from like grandparents and the kids listen to it. There's a lot of things you can do with that. Quality, not like, I mean, don't get me wrong. I love those, you know, the ISM chips, but man, nothing beats, you know, 44 kilohertz WAI files for good quality audio. What are the blue resistors with the extra stripes? When would they be used over 5% resistors? Sometimes you want precision. They're usually 1% or 0.1%. Sometimes like current sensing, you don't want to have variation. Sometimes they're used for, you know, an op amp circuit where, you know, you don't want a 5% variation in the frequency generated or filtered. So you do use 1% resistors once in a while. These days, to be honest, a lot of people use surface mount and the surface mount cost is almost the same. I tend to use 1% usually for like the feedback of the resistors and the boost converter because, you know, 5% here, 5% there, you don't want your output voltage to vary by 5%. You want it to be like, where's the money? Okay. And that was all the questions of the week this week. Thank you, everybody. That's our show, special thanks to Kara behind the scenes doing some stuff and more in the show. Run smoothly, very much appreciated. I don't know if we can code. It is PM Feather, 10% off. We'll see everybody throughout the week. Thanks for the great questions and hanging out with us. We will be back next week. Yeah, you can see the green part. The green part. This has been an aid for production. Here is the moment of the year. Good night, everybody. Good night, everybody.