 Live from New York it's Ask an Engineer. Hey everybody and welcome to Ask Engineer. It's me your engineer Lady Aida with me Mr. Lady Aida on camera control. Type it in answers and getting questions to me. I'm putting the whole show together. He does a lot for us all. Thank you very much Mr. Lady Aida. We're broadcasting live from the Eight of Food Headquarters in downtown Manhattan where we do all the kidding, testing, manufacturing, shipping, coding and more but right now the factory is at rest because we have one hour of Ask Engineer. We're going to cover the latest and greatest news for the Macker. Maker, hacker, engineer, artist, community and more. So why don't you tell them what's on tonight's show? On tonight's show the code is probe clip 10% off in the Eight of Food Store all the way up to a limb 59 p.m. Eastern time or when I remember to take the code down. Remember you get 10% off in the Eight of Food Store. Anything we have in stock use it or lose it. Eight of Food live series shows we're going to be talking about the show and tell which we just did. Maybe we'll play a little bit of a clip as well. Time to travel around the world makers, hackers, artists, engineers and more. Chip shortage everyone's favorite segment sort of this week. It's going to be Texas rinse. We'll talk about what we can't get and what we need this week. From the mailbag a little bit different one this week speaking of shortages. This one has something to do with how to get the things you need and what made for help wanted post from our jobs board. You can post your skills up on jobs.eatafruit.com or if you're a company and looking for cool folks to work at your organization you can post on jobs.eatafruit.com. We have some advanced manufacturing made right here in New York City from the Eight of Food factory. We'll show some footage from our factory here. We got some 3D printing. We've got Ion MPI this week. We're featuring Maximum and Analog. They are now one so those are two as one. Some new products. We've got some top secret. We're going to answer your questions. We do that over on Discord ateafruit.it slash discord join all 34,000 of us. We're going to answer your questions towards the end of the show. All that and more on you guessed it ask an engineer. That's us. Okay so let's pay some bills ladies. The first bit is probe clip is the code for tonight and when folks order stuff in the cart they'll notice that there's things that get added to their car for free. For free. Okay $99 or more if you order from the ateafruit.com shop you'll get a free perma-proto half-sized breadboard great for making your projects permanent people keep them and then later on they're like hey I need that and they have it ready to go. $149 or more we've changed out our STEMIQT boards. You now get a KB2040 it's a like a pro micro shaped board it's designed for keyboards but hey you can use it for actually anything. It has an RP2040 chip which has circuit python, micro python and Arduino support USB-C, neopixel, STEMIQT connector buttons and cast-lid pads. It's great for all sorts of projects. If you've got something with a pro micro you can super boost it with this powerful chip. $199 or more you get free UPS ground chipping in the content until United States. Alright and just a reminder if you want to buy a Raspberry Pi or probably almost anything soon you should make sure you have a verified account just check your email after you get an account on ateafruit.com and then do two factor authentication that's good security and it's also a way that we can make sure you're not buying Raspberry Pies and buying a bunch of them and reselling them and put a big markup on them. That's not nice and it doesn't work out for everyone. Every week we put in hundreds of Raspberry Pies and we want to make sure hundreds of people get them so this week I'm going to skip around a little bit and go right to Mailbag. Oh yeah because Mailbag is you know I can kind of say hey things are working out this the system in which we're getting Raspberry Pies to people is working but the reality is and I'll have packed at the Mailbag entity help me the reality is you know we live in an age where facts don't matter so I'm just gonna show factual society matter so instead of just telling folks yeah we're able to get hundreds to people every single week a hundred of ones you don't have to be a previous customer just can't be a repeat Raspberry Pi customer over and over and so today we released I don't know a few hundred and then one of the folks who runs the there's a bot alert it's called RPI locator on Twitter folks instantly will say oh wow I got one so this is the thing that I put in Mailbag this week thank you your alerts help me secure one awesome thanks I was finally finally able to pick up one your alerts works fantastic got one I've been trying to get one for work for months thank you for your tool finally got one been trying for months finally got one thank you very much for the alerts and then this person not only did they get one but we sent them their shipping notification and they're gonna get it tomorrow so anyways I do know that there's gonna be some folks that are disappointed that they got caught abusing the system and now they can't order stuff maybe we'll remove that at some point but we really can't allow folks to keep trying to get around and getting another Raspberry Pi another Raspberry Pi when we catch you after we said don't do it we're just gonna ask you to go seek a different vendor for a while I think that's reasonable it's not personal we just want to make sure that we get as many Raspberry Pi's as many different people every single week and that this is one of the ways so appreciate the understanding and for all the folks out there that are playing by the rules and getting Raspberry Pi thank you because that's what we're doing it for doing it for you okay so we do a live series of shows Lady Ada including this one right here this is live yeah I mean we have I've had to prove in the past that it was tight my name in so some of the live shows we do one show until we just did show and tell and one of the things I wanted to do for this year is make our show until even more advanced more more interesting more more more more but one of the problems is it's it's 730 it's also one of the good things about 730 Wednesday nights forever and so you know for your time traveler you know where you could like beam in and find us but if you're in a different time zone or you're somewhere else and you're working or if you have other obligations and you just can't get online for that period of time what can you do if you want to show and show your project so I did a separate video with art by physicist kitty and we played it and it's from the same system that we use for the show and tell which is we use a system or a website called a stream yard and it works really good and there's a recording feature and now the recording plays really well with it you know we always try these new features and so we did that so I'm gonna just play the first like 30 ish seconds of it it's on the show until we were able to seamlessly add that so if you have a project and you just there's no way that you can show your project live no problem we could do stuff like this we just need a little bit of time to coordinate and all that and it worked out well so here's the first 30 seconds or so of kitty showing off the blue tooth flowers all right hello kitty how are you hello kitty good to see you okay you're a pretty well-known maker we actually stocked one of the things that you make in the store it's kitty flowers pair of bluetooth wearable broaches are by physicists tell us a little bit about it and then what you're up to yeah thank you so much for having me on yes as pd just showed on the screen these are the bluetooth flowers it comes as a pair so they are actually connected through bluetooth that's why it's called bluetooth flowers I'm just turning them on right now zoom see on to the flowers yeah so you can see on the front there are some very beautiful LEDs that that creates the flower and and you can watch the rest of that segment in the entire show until on any of our video properties from YouTube to twitch the Facebook to LinkedIn any of those you can watch kitty go over all of this and then all the other folks that were on the show until they're all you know our favorites I did like joey's custom LCD project this week okay on Sundays Lady Eda we do from the desk of Lady Eda and it comes in two parts the first part would show okay the first part I just showed some stuff I was working on had some samples I had some cool LEDs I got some sonar transceivers I'm working on feather ESP 32 s3's all that good stuff so new products and samples come by my desk for final approval and I showed my process and we've been doing this great search thing for a while turns out it was a pretty good idea before the crisis of lack of parts and so each week Lady Eda shows how to find things on digikey.com that you're gonna need for sure but might be a little hard to find unless you're a Lady Eda that's been doing this for well you know the part short is still going on and you know it's interesting it's like some weeks it's like you can't get really basic parts some weeks you can't get really advanced parts it's kind of all over the place so this week the the part I was looking for is I have this regulator that I use for all of our breakouts and feathers and I have some but I don't have enough to last me till the next shipment and so I need something to kind of help like thin out my my daily usage because right now we're using about a thousand a day of this part and so finding a regular that maybe is the same you know pinout same size but maybe less current capable that I can use for breakouts so I can keep the really nice high current LDOs available for the feather boards that really need a 400 500 600 milliamp regulator a lot of the sensor breakouts we have do not need that much they're very happy with you know 50 to 100 milliamps so if I can use those on the breakouts I'll be able to keep the AP 2112's when I really need them and hopefully it'll help me kind of like you know the same this week is extend your runway extending my runway with regulators all right and then on Tuesdays we do JP's product pick of the week that's where we do a live broadcast from inside the product page now there's two things that are great about this maybe three so the first one is JP doesn't the second one is it's in stock for sure because we're broadcasting from the product page and the third one is you don't need to put a discount code in because it's already applied so if you you like you use some JP which we do and you're worried about well might get it ever be able to find the products or parts I need yeah because if you're watching it then it's in stock and then oh you know I'm so tired it's been such a long day I don't want to type a discount code don't worry it's automatically applied so here's this week's highlight from JP's product pick of the week A&O navigational scroll wheel rotary encoder and breakout board clicky clicky I have soldered a itsy bitsy RP2040 onto it I can use the click wheel plugged into the iPhone and now I can go and choose let's say cover flow scroll back from MF Doom to Bartlebeats or that won't get us in trouble I can click on that so now I can click through pick a song hit play and all I'm doing with this pause that is using the controller as a USB HID device like sure yeah that's convenient because it's already in your pocket but this this is actually fun A&O rotary encoder scroll wheel with navigation buttons and breakout PCB dual product picks of the week but wait there's more and then on Thursdays we do GP's workshop and one of the things segments we do is circuit Python parsec and that's a nice little snippet of what you could do at circuit Python we do this every week and if you're learning Python or you're interested in microcontrollers this is a good little snapshot something unique cool interesting that you can do with microcontroller and Python brought you by JP for the circuit Python parsec today I wanted to show how you could make a cool little randomized by color LED matrix using circuit Python and just a little bit of code so if you have a look here I've got a circuit playground blue fruit and I have our little gizmo little proto gizmo there and I've attached this I squared C backpack for a bi-color matrix and it just gives us this kind of nice little sci-fi readout type of look the computer is thinking that's that's probably what's going on there so if we look at the code here what I'm doing is I'm importing some libraries including time board so I get pin definitions random and from random I'm getting the random integer or rand int and then the library for this actual display which is the HT 16k 33 backpack I bring in the matrix 8 by 8 by 2 that's the bi-color and then I set up that display on I squared C is the matrix I'm setting its brightness at 0.1 and then I'm defining a little list here of colors and you'll see here I've got LED red LED green and LED off which I've actually placed in there twice just to sort of adjust the odds that I won't have an LED lit and here's what's going on in the main loop we set a variable called x which is a random integer from 0 to 7 so that's going to be one of the horizontal positions we set a variable called y for a random integer 0 through 7 so that's going to be the vertical position and then we're setting a color variable which is based on grabbing one of those items in my list either red green off or the other off then we set the matrix this is how we light up we say matrix x y so some position that was selected equals whatever this color is and then we sleep for a tiny little bit of time and repeat that and so we get all these really nice blinky random types of lights going on in here and so that is how you can set some random lights on the bi-color LED matrix inside of circuit python and that is your circuit python parsec like a pocket doctorate theopolis so on Fridays we do deep dive with Tim foamy guy 2 p.m. a civic time 5 p.m. Eastern where you can literally take a deep dive into the innards of circuit python and learn all sorts of things specifically how it works and watch someone step-by-step go through all the code to make the thing that you probably want to make it's time for time travel let's go back in time go forward in time yeah so you know a lot of our lives now are just saying here's stuff you can't get right away so 8 a box we're going to be shipping it we have been moving the date for when things are available we thought it might be winter and no no no it's gonna be spring so we'll see how that goes so thank you for your patience don't forget we don't charge your credit card until we ship the 8 a box so you don't have to worry about that and we appreciate your patience there's chip shortage and speaking of this week we need stuff from Texas Instruments so Lady Ada what is the thing that we don't have that means we can't make electronics for all the kids out there who really want to build robots and more what do we need we need some more of the DRV 8833's and the PWP package oh not too picky I could always redesign my boards by prefer it just to get in this package we have a bunch on order I think we have like 8,000 order couple thousand of them will help us this is a dual H bridge driver chip from TI we really like it because it's high current I think it's about two amps and up to 10 volt so it's great for you know we use it on motor driver boards in the cricket we like that package you see with the with the power pack on the bottom we can use it with two DC motors or you can use it with one stepper motor how nice is that you want these chips we want these chips this is what I want I want them to rain down on me I want to be like hallelujah it's a rain and chips so this is the this is the chip and what do we use it in we use a well that we have a breakup board but we use it a lot for that we can't get back in stock is our cricket boards which are all-in-one robotics development platform you can plug in a feather into where you can plug in a circuit playground express we have one for the micro bit we have one for feather and we won't have we have one for circuit playground boards the the classic express or Bluetooth and it's like it's one of those things where it's like we have every other part to make this board except for the DRV 883 and you're wondering like okay what type of projects could you do with a cricket that that that are now not possible because of this part and I have a little video that I did from a long time ago so wholesome and this is a this is a cricket project that we did here together one night so I'm gonna just play this video ti think of think of all the things that we could do how wonderful would be if we could get this chip so here it is it's how many of these do we need so we could do more projects like that look I need like a reel of like a thousand couple thousand would be really great we would use them only for good no kids would be crushed only true love love that transcends the human body and the physical instantiation of our spirits that's right yeah so anyways I'm gonna send this video do you believe in love yeah send us some DRV 883 I'm gonna send this video the Texas Instruments and either we're gonna get chips or they're gonna say never contact us again so that's a speak chip shortage they'd help wanted so we have jobs dot Adafruit comm and like I said before you can put your skills up if you can do some cool projects but one of the things that we're seeing and this is a good example this week is there's folks who they have Adafruit electronics and hardware and they're a company or they're doing a project and they're just like oh we'll use the job board so this person Bob property LLC in Tampa Florida contract job is looking for a matrix portal product using project utilizing Wi-Fi so if that's you got the matrix portal library the hardware it's all working you just have to get some circuit Python code together yeah speaking of it's Python on hardware time okay so this week the newsletter is gigantic so hug report this what we do here at Adafruit to Ann and all the contributors to the newsletter it's a monster newsletter so we go over our 300 boards on circuit Python.org slash downloads I'll talk about a couple other things last week we mentioned we were able to help MicroPython hit their first tiered goal that they wanted to get to yes which is and 4% more so that they can their second goal yeah I think all together it boosted it up over 10% and I think 30 people we'll talk about circuit Python 730 in a little bit in the RP2040 stuff with USB teeny we're now a topic on GitHub you could check that out this is a way for folks to tag things with circuit Python throughout the site on GitHub and more there's new Python implementations for this neat pico zero Python thing check that out and all the regular kind of unending projects news videos the project of the week I thought this was kind of cool this was multiple displays I think I talked about this and you can show two displays which is you know and then we have a really neat portable circuit Python yeah these are the tiniest ways to program with circuit Python so what I thought we'd do is go to some of the highlights this week so first up if you haven't already I put this in a press section on Adafruit.com so Adafruit.com slash press you can check out Tom's hardware or Anne did a cool video the pie cast over on Tom's hardware and then we're up to the final version of circuit Python 7 release yeah so what's the latest and greatest idea well a lot of us have been bug fixes if you you know if we're still finding people who are like hey there's a regression please fix it and we're fixing them 7-3 added a bunch of stuff floppy support PIO support merged Python 1.18 you know a lot of boards a lot of ESP boards were added a lot of graphic stuff was added you know we added f-strings to all builds that came in recently and also Dan spent a bunch of time on improving neopixel timing so a neopixel should you know work much better no matter what weirdo neopixel compatible chips you're using and 730 we're probably going to do 731 but we're probably not going to do another mid level release until eight because I think Python 1.19 which just got released made an update to the format for MPY files which we may merge in in which case we would bump up to a major version so that would be eight we're gonna be doing more work on Wi-Fi workflow maybe you know ESP32 S3 is gonna get more development we got a lot of plans for eight so we're we're thinking about what the arts gonna be we'll release it so we know the theme of eight and some said the newsletter might not be mobile responsive so I'll guess the team it should be but if not maybe there's some tweaks that we can do so it's easier to read on a phone thanks for letting us know about that and then next up this was in the newsletter but I thought this would be good for a lady to talk about so the RP2040 can have additional USB ports for free here's a little video but what does this mean for folks who aren't familiar with this well this is I think tack doing a demo tax been working really hard on integrating this cool project from a group of Japanese makers I think to add USB host support using PIO to manage the differential with E plus D minus lines and we've been you know USB host support has been kind of coming into TV USB but one of the things that was difficult for me to get USB host going is I don't like it when USB host was only also only on the same as the USB client because usually that's how you upload code or debug it so it's like if you're you only have one USB port can be client or host that makes it tough to do host projects so it's really nice about this teeny USB version for RP2040 is that you can use any two pans which means that you can still run say circuit Python Arduino you can have the output you can upload code and then you have two separate pins that are used for USB host okay so that's a demo showing you know HID demo and you can see the output on the ripple and all these news stories more can be delivered every single week to you check out a different daily comments completely separate site that we have because we don't want to tie to your store account because we don't want you ever get an email and think that you didn't sign up for something or whatever so it's a really separate site and that is our Python on hardware news for this week is our Python promise yeah all right let's do some open source hardware news and then get on to the guides so last week we talked about micro Python micro Python is open source and the hardware that micro Python makes the source hardware same thing with circuit Python and unlike micro Python Adafruit selling much hardware micro Python right now they can't get chips and so they said hey we're doing some fundraising we have the GitHub sponsor program Adafruit contributes to them directly and we also buy their hardware when they have it we also donated to micro Python so we try to make sure that not only do we show that we do open source but support other open source projects especially ones that we use so every year we do donations you know we certainly don't have buckets of money but we try to do the best we can and at the minimum it if we don't have as much money as we'd like to donate for something we can at least sometimes donate some time and get the word out on things and have other people help out with sponsorships or have people think about what open source software that they use and I think one of the things that's really tough for maintainers and people who work in open source is it's not necessarily the money because you're not doing it for the money because if you were it would be really hard to get a for the amount of time you put in what would make the most sense you're doing it for another reason and if if you can't send a signal even if it's like let's say you open up an open source app once a month or every single day if you were able to do like ten dollars a month and just write them a note that impact might go further than you think so as we've been developing whipper snapper for a to fruit IO one of our developers Brent said you know I use platform IO a lot and they've been on our list to make sure we let them know thank you for doing this thing not only for us but for a lot of other people but let's make sure we donate as well so we donated to the platform IO project here is a little receipt we got and here is the note we received sorry the note we sent them and the note we sent them was we became interested in looking at platform IO since they recently announced mainline support for the expressive Arduino ESP32 board support package please keep this up since then we've been using it to build a to fruit IO whipper snapper a very large Arduino application with loads of dependency platform IO super fast and we like supporting open source software thank you Ivan Miller and Max a to fruit and so that's what all of us can do if you use platform IO they have a recurring thing they have a one thing you can put in a note please consider doing it because I feel like that's the signal we can send to any open source maintainer that it's worth doing this it's worth pouring all of yourself into it because a lot of times you only hear the negatives you only see the the github issues you only see the mean tweet or at least you only remember those and so that can go really far for a lot of people so see what you can do and we'll always try to lead by example so that's what we did that's why we wanted to put this in the open source section this week but speaking of we have two thousand six hundred and seventy nine guides lady what's on the big board this week okay guides this week starting from the right Liz and Catney both teamed up to write a guide on how to install drivers for the WCH USB serial chips some of our boards will be changing from sneezing from the CP 2102 CP 2104 it is like a high-poly I even I got alert on my my phone that said hi yeah I was like someone said are you okay I'm just like yeah I'm a little tired and I also think just the trees are exploding with pollen and also New York is this constantly under construction yeah and we have the windows open to get some air in so so you know for Mac and windows just instructions on how to install that driver because you need to download an EXE and run it to get the driver installed Linux has it by default a short guide but I think we'll refer people to it a bunch because it's a new chip that people aren't used to knowing Pedro did the Lego phone holder that they designed for using with camo which is this app that turns a phone into a webcam that Mr. Lady Ada found which is super handy especially if you have an old iPhone hanging around use it turn it into a webcam and then it's a really good quality camera with autofocus and of course high-resolution great color and skin looks really good on it traffic like conference badge lids wanted to do a fun project with our cute model traffic light and so she made a little conference badge and she made it look like a little diorama as a fun art project and JP did video nub chank which is I don't know I guess it's a very descriptive name you're never gonna forget it basically running the ESP 32 Pico and turning into the USB video dongle using some example code written by a bunch of people including Ross Amar who's friend of the fruit and meet me to see I think I remember the exact name who wrote this very cool vaporwave clock we also have a demo for making NTSC test generate test image generator which I need because I might constantly testing displays with NTSC in and it's a little dongle like this plug-in and quickly generate an NTSC test signal okay and then we have a one-minute video from Liz for this cool traffic light wearable project you can direct oncoming human traffic with this traffic light conference badge the traffic light can symbolize your socializing preferences in the moment when you're out and about at a conference or convention red for no contact yellow for minimal contact and green for wanting to chat with anyone you can change the color of the button on the side of the enclosure the enclosure is 3d printed with raised details for you to paint and deck out like a tiny diorama to match a traffic light there's an opening for a stem of cable to plug into the QT PI ESP 32 S2 you can use it for your favorite sensors your SAO format badge add-ons or a small breadboard area learn how you can build your own by checking out the learn guide at learn.aidafruit.com it's time for some advanced manufacturing made right here in New York City pollen filled New York City and wouldn't be made New York City for us right now unless it was that's right the Disney building across the street every day that's our new view all right 3d printing so for this week on 3d printing we have two videos we've got the web camera project and then also a cute speed-up with a little VGA looking thing that's right hey what's up folks in this project we're using our mobile phone as a webcam we design and 3d printed tripod adapters that feature Lego compatible studs for adding mini figs the built-in tripod screw lets you hold up your phone so you can use it as a high quality webcam it sits over our laptop screen and doesn't obstruct the built-in webcam or any of the nearby sensors with the reincubate camo studio desktop app you can set up your mobile phone as a webcam you can adjust camera settings to get the best image for your streaming setup we think it's a great way to improve the quality of your streams and your video calls the 3d printed bits to build your own camera tripod can be printed in your favorite filament a tripod screw adapter offers a rigid setup that can hold up the weight of even the largest mobile phones built-in threads allow for easy installation using a flathead screwdriver you can use a quarter 20 to quarter 20 tripod screw to add a pan swivel ball head so you can add your favorite phone holder right on top be sure to check out the guy to get all the parts to build this project the mounting base features Lego compatible studs so it just snaps on top of the webcam holder it features extra studs for adorning your favorite bricks and minifigs just sit it over your laptop screen bezel in the center right above the built-in webcam then all that's left to do is to personalize it with some minifigs we hope this inspires you to check out the camo studio app and try using your phone as a high quality webcam that you've always wanted thanks so much for watching and be sure to subscribe for more projects from Adafruit you can learn how to make all this stuff and more on 3d hangouts every single Wednesday am okay lady to let's do some Ion MPI ready mm-hmm this week's Ion MPI is Maxim and along devices lady to what is your new product introduction by Digikey this week all right this week's Ion MPI is the max 31329 a low-current real-time clock chip as shown here it's a 10-pin TDFN chip so it's pretty easy to use in your surface mount project it's a 5 by 5 millimeter chip and it's got a lot of cool things going on in it I'm always looking at real-time clocks and so there's a bunch of stuff in this MPI that caught my eye this is the chip so it was originally I think designed a maximum and then Maxim was recently acquired by ADI and so that's why it's got max in the part number ADI on day sheet so this is a real-time clock a lot of people use these you've got a product where you know power may be lost but you still want to be able to keep time and do so in a very low power way you know initially you know this is what real-time clocks used to look like they'd have a battery built in they have the chip built in and they have a crystal as well and this was used on like said computer or motherboard so that even when power was lost that computer would keep time which is which is great this is actually what I didn't like about VCRs as a kid is you lose power and it loses time as well she had a real-time clock inside of them I think nowadays DVD players they've had a real-time clock it's a little bit more expensive but basically lets the product keep time again when batteries low or powers out so like if you have a device that's off for very very long time you know in the internal real-time clock battery also dies that's when it's like hey I don't even I think it's like 1970 and it's noon so this is like you know real-time clock the way you know we carry them and have a breakout for this is the DS 1307 it's a classic real-time clock so the chip itself is in the middle that's the DS 1307 and then the rectangular thing is the crystal there's a 32 kilohertz crystal that's used to keep time and then a battery so you know the real-time clocks tend to use less than a microamp which means that they can really sip a battery even a small coin cell can last years or even a decade so you know no matter what happens no matter how long the product is depowered it'll always know what time it is when it wakes up so that's the old-style RTC this is the Maxim 31329 so one thing that I thought was very cool about it is first off it's got the crystal built in to see the oscillator inside with a little x1 x2 kind of in the top middle you know there's a there's a couple implications for it but one is you don't have to pay for a separate crystal which is usually 20 to 50 cents and second you can get more accuracy which we'll talk about because it can be tuned with the loading capacitors usually you the loading capacitors are specified for the crystal but you don't really know what it's going to be until you know there's always a little bit of variation but with this it's internal but it's very similar to a lot of RTC's it runs off of I squared C there's an optional clock input you can see D in which is it's quite nice there's two interrupt outputs into a and B clock out clock in sorry data in is for it's not the clock in data in is for interrupt support into the device so I could wake it up and then VBAT is the secondary power so some RTC's don't have a secondary power supply you know there's the main supply VCC which is usually you know power or wall or you know 3.3 volts from the main system and then VBAT is the secondary lower power supply for when power is cut out again some RTC's don't have two power pins and they make you have to manage that on your own I like that in this case it can auto-detect and switch over to the battery when main power is lost that's that's the first basic thing a second off it's again pretty small it's not a big SOIC or a TESOP it's a nice TDFN chip all the pins are used you know it's very it's very convenient especially since the crystals built in only five by five millimeters so two of things that really I think feature quite well on this RTC one is the battery management and the battery life so this is a low power RTC uses 240 nano amperes and that is about half of what most RTC's use I think at the DS 1307 I looked up it's about 500 nano ampere so great you know the last twice as long the battery there's also a trickle charger that can charge an external supercap or if you have a rechargeable battery I thought the supercap especially since it uses half as much current a supercapacitor which looks like this it looks like a coin cell but it's actually like a 0.07 or 0.2 ferret capacitor there you know it's basically like a battery right but you can charge it very easily and discharge it and by using the maximum supercap calculator you can see that even you know I think in this case a two milliferous supercap running at the 240 nano ampere typical current will last you I think it says like 60 or so hours so you know you can allow or you know a couple days worth so if you think that your power is not going to be out for more than a couple hours at a time then you can use a supercap it means you don't have to do with the lithium battery which is always like shipping management gets more complicated because you have to label it as containing a lithium battery you can't recharge a lithium battery and a supercap of course it'll automatically recharge instantly the moment the main power gets turned back on so I thought that was nice you know especially with the lower quiescent current timekeeping current it makes more sense there's also you know the built-in trickle charging circuit you can see here how it's hooked up you can select which resistor to trickle charge through and they even put in the shocky diode how handy is that so it's very very inclusive really if you all you need is a supercap on the VBAT pin and you're ready to go the second nice thing about this is oh if you well it won't show up but this is the DS 3231 and this is the high extremely accurate temperature compensated crystal real-time clock that we carry and these are like this is kind of the highest and most precise real-time clock you can get plus or minus 2 ppm for room temperature ish and this is what it looks like it's really big it's a it's a big RTC so definitely not like you could put it in a wearable or anything it's it's a chonker it's it gets 16 SOIC and it's got the crystal and then a temperature sensor to do a temperature compensation whereas what's nice about yeah what's nice about this the max 31 39 sorry won't get the right part number and there's a lot of threes max 31 329 is that if you see at the bottom below in benefits features at the bottom integrate crystal load capacitors tuned to plus or minus 5 ppm so compared to the DS 3231 it's it's not going to be 2.5 or 3 it's going to be 5 ppm so not as precise you know but given the fact that it isn't temperature compensated and the price is significantly better like you're you have to pay quite a bit to get the temperature compensated RTCs you know the internal crystal and the load capacitors that are tuned and trimmed at the factory mean that you're going to have much better clock accuracy than your typical RTC where you have an external crystal usually the crystals are you know plus minus 20 ppm so you'll get like you know four times better accuracy with and also you don't have to purchase that component separately so yeah so you can also pick up an eval board it looks like an Arduino shield compatible that also comes with a dev board a maximum micro controller dev board if you'd like but you can remove that and just plug it in again it's I scored see so you know use wire or use whatever you know a lot of dev boards have Arduino pinouts on them you just use I scored see follow the register map and you can set the alarm set the times all the good stuff that you expect from an RTC and also take advantage of the extremely small size full integration high accuracy and low power available did you key and it's in stock it's actually not it's not but it will be in stock I'll add it down past sorry it's I just was so good I don't want to pass it up it's going to be in stock in a couple weeks the eval board is in stock but this really is new NPI I know this is so new you can't get it but it's not like it's not like the other things that you can't get this is this is coming this is this is actually coming it's gonna be in stock in like I think two or three weeks so I actually have some on order that I'm gonna get on the horizon look it's a chip shortage time but I still want to celebrate these good chips I think this one's worth waiting for okay and that's I am here and PI soon okay don't forget per clip that's the code get some free stuff just make sure why you're doing this make an account and to factor authenticate it because soon there'll probably be more things that you need an account to order stuff because let's go to new products a new new new new new new new new new new new new new new alright first up okay we've got a couple accessories this week this is a a WFL slash IPX3 slash MHF3 to RP-SMA adapter and we have our handy ESP32 feather with a WFL connector not WFL it's smaller and this little adapter has an RP-SMA connector at the end because that's what's used for almost all Wi-Fi adapters sorry Wi-Fi antennas. Check your antenna make sure it's got the right polarity usually it's this way and then this is the other side it looks like UFL but it's not UFL it's WFL that's my favorite radio station I know let's look at the look at this on the overhead okay so this is the board and you know there's no on-board antenna instead there's this little connector but you want to maybe have it in a box and have an external you know standard two to five dbi antenna this will do the job and then this is panel mountable so this is great for adding a very good antenna any kind of size antenna you want to the feather ESP32 you know you want something Wi-Fi and you want it to go a couple miles just get a really big antenna you're good deal all right next up next up we've got the Alps EC11J SMD potentiometer sorry rotary encoder look at it looks like potentiometer but it's not so we're doing Coder it's all SMT it's got 30 D tense per rotation is detentee got a D shaft on there and it's also got the button press so it's kind of like an all-in-one rotary encoder it's about the price of a rotary encoder but what's nice is it's fully surface mount now it's not going to be as mechanically strong as a through-hole rotary encoder and especially if you're doing a ton of twisting but that said there are some situations where you just you really need to use a surface mount process for this or you have something on the other side and you can't have through hole pads going through you know this does have really big pads on the bottom you can see you know there's basically one two three four corner pads and then two side pads that are really chunky put a ton of pace down there and connected to a big ground plane and there's also a locating dot as well to help keep it in place you'll be able to have a surface mount rotary encoder I thought this would be a fun probably useful for somebody and stars of the show ish because that you know those code tonight was for are these these are some probe clips you know I thought this would be handy for you know you're programming a board you don't I'm you know I'm always like holding like the why I'm holding like these extra long headers on or wires on and it's kind of tough but you don't want to solder to it for some reason so these probe clips there's two kinds so start at the beginning and we'll just talk about this one so this is a six pin long point one inch spacing so this is kind of what you're going to probably use for a lot of microcontroller boards or dev boards where they just put the programming pins in a row the depth of the board can be one inch or so from the Pogo pins and then they come to the top into that you know these Pogo pin sockets that you can then just plug in yeah you can plug in any socket header into so just show this with a break out board you know your break out you're like I don't really don't want to solder this you clip on it gives you a really good grip and then you just plug wires you can solder wires onto this and when you're done you're done and if you design your board with this in mind you put the headers on the edge you know or one inch away from the edge you can just clip on program you may not even need to have a jig for programming you can just use this instead the second version yeah let's go to that the second version is a 0.05 inch spacing 2 by 5 so this is like what I call SWD pinout spacing or JTAG spacing so this is finer pitch but you know a lot of boards already have this pinout on them so you may be able to take advantage of it and also some people like to leave the pads into folks can solder in a through whole SWD connector it also gives you about an inch from the edge of the PCB and then instead of obviously you can't just plug in you know the pins do come up but you can't really easily plug to them so what it does instead is it has a separate 2 by 5.1 inch header spacing that you can plug wires into to connect to your JTAG programmer so this is an example like here I've got these pads isn't ideal you know you should probably use through whole pads not surface mount pads but you know you can actually get it to line up and touch the 2 by 5 and get it to line up there you go get it to line up without soldering on and then connect wires to these headers if you want to say program this STM32F405 over SWD and then you know you just use your right angle USB cable I mean of course I designed this board before the clip if I was doing it again I would do it from you know the right hand side so I just clip in like that but you know still this was this will work fine for many boards you can see about one inch of depth of feather is about point nine inches so that's how far you can go into the the depth of the PCB and still clip on okay all right so don't forget the code is probe clip we're gonna do some top secret you're gonna show something yeah I'm still like a handmade prototype some questions lined up they'll do right after this top secret yeah forgot we had a graphic all right what is so top secret that the world has not seen yet no hasn't seen it this is my ESP32 S3 TFT feather so we had this board for the S2 but luckily we used the mini module which is pin compatible with the S3 so I just hot aired the S2 off hot aired the S3 on and got it working this is Arduino and then you know it's just got the bootloader going so you can have a nice graphical bootloader and then also circuit Python support so you get all the joy of having you know this really nice dual core S3 it says S2 but it's really S3 with four megabytes of flash two megabytes of PS RAM with a display QT 7 QT connector battery USB all ready to rock all right that's top secret it's top secret okay we lined up some questions thanks folks for posting them up over on it for dot it slash discord I'm gonna be getting through those if there's new ones you can post them there let's do some questions and then we're gonna get out of here and good bad yes and then rinse and repeat okay first can you please suggest a cheap simple audio indicator for example an LED between each guitar pedal via quarter inch mono cables to help troubleshoot where the guitar signal has been interrupted thanks yes it's tough because you don't actually want to put anything in the line of the audio I'm surprised don't have cables that you know can can light up a little bit when audio goes to them but it's tough because usually that no power so the answer is I don't have a very good answer for you it is it is quite challenging you know USB cables they have power so you can like you can light them up because you have a power supply whereas audio cables you don't and you don't want to load the audio and also usually line level audio can't be loaded anyways so yeah I think you might want to get something in line there might be some plug that some you know powerable plug in the middle that you can put audio into and it has a little battery pack and it can tell you that it's getting audio signal that's the only thing I can recommend I don't I don't know of one it's just if I was gonna invent something that's what I would invent okay next up is there an approximate time for an RPI a gigabyte so good news bad news we will put some in stock the emails by the time all the emails go out they'll be sold out when we put things in stock so you might want to look at the RPI locator Twitter account usually we put things in stock on Wednesdays and Fridays but there is a shortage shortage so it's gonna be a little tough yeah so no specific ETA unfortunately speaking Python on her work could someone recommend a 16 by 2 LCD that is easy to use insert Python a standard a 16 by 2 LCD work fine we also have our I squared C slash SPI backpack and that works great in circuit Python as well okay next up enjoy the Tuesday Python a hurry email and you chance to make it text responsive mobile yeah so thank you for the suggestion I'm gonna chat with the team and figure out should do that and if it doesn't it's probably something that we can fix and if it doesn't then that is a good feature that we eventually get to next up I'd love to know how to get time once Wi-Fi or NTC then hand off to RTC yeah I think there's a yeah there's I think we're not an example for that specifically but you know basically you just take two things you you you connect to Wi-Fi you get the time and then you take the demo where you write the time to the real-time clock and then read it back so you just have to take the two examples and just piece them together and decide how often you want to synchronize them okay question is there an I squared C or sorry I to S isolator like the ISO 1540 bi-directional I to C isolator ID 4903 no I don't think you need one I don't think I to S needs isolation because it's a digital audio supply I think you could you could have the amplifier powered separately because usually there's a digital analog supply and you just keep those separate so I don't know of one yeah I've only heard of the I to C is quite a bit of a weird one and I've seen USB but I've not seen it to us okay how far can timed up monotonic take you when you should run RTC RTCs are really you know therefore long-term power outage timekeeping like clocks or things that are like you know remind me tomorrow or wake me up you know every other Monday or something and do something long long-term timekeeping is when you want a real-time clock not real-time clocks are gonna be good for timing events between button presses that's that's gonna take too long that you use the internal counter on a mic controller it's when you want to know when it's Tuesday 8 in the morning that's it that's when RTC is good for okay next up on a different dilly there was a tip that mentioned sorting resistors by third color band clear for what you mean please since you can four or five band resistors I think what they're saying is that you you sort by the multiplier so you know if you have to sort every resistor forever and ever you know you'd have a hundred bins so instead you sort all the you know black band resistors which are like you know one ohm to nine ohm and one bin all the 10 to 99 ohm all the 100 to you know 990 ohm you do it by decades and so that's the third that's the multiplier band okay can the QT Pi ESP 32 S2 do ESP now mode I think all the newer ESPs can but only in Arduino and you'll have to check out the expressive Arduino board support package for example code I've never used it myself okay so in had a neat tip they said they found out about the ESP 32 S2 QT Pi micro controller because of the pie shortage many uses can be handled by micro controller but they didn't know that before trying to use a Wi-Fi enabled micro controller it's it's tough when you know everyone had this gigantic hammer and now it's like hey you know what if you can't get that hammer but yes a lot of ESPs can do it quite a bit you know you'd be surprised a lot of projects getting data from the internet displaying it doing something so good questions are good question what parts would I have to buy for me to create a 3d microphone array we don't really do microphone arrays we do have PDM mics and I to s mics but you know a lot of the hard work is in getting that data synchronized as into an input which I don't have an answer for you that's not easy how do you test your firmware and input I just write a lot of it and I just kind of know what tends to go wrong yeah I would say how we test like some of the things we do is so we have so many boards so like circuit Python is kind of a way of testing a board in some way because we when we do a build it runs on all the different boards yeah that's so you know continuous integration a lot but also we just wait for bug reports we try to we just try to hammer on it and do projects and the projects usually you tell us when there's a bug also I'll say this about our philosophy and approach with circuit Python is there's 300 boards and over half are non-Ada fruit and a lot people run their entire businesses off using open source software like circuit Python so every time there's an update to circuit Python their board gets it for free yeah and it should just work and it so far has and if it didn't we would hear about it so we're you know theoretically testing live when people download the new versions of circuit Python across all these boards that we've never even used it's never done and so that's kind of neat because we're always getting feedback and we're always putting out new new versions always learning okay last question do you have a suggestion for RP 2040 art well I think I meant 24 yeah RP 2040 flash memory is a module with slightly lower clock good I would check the RP 2040 datasheet because they do have some recommended flash chips that are used not I know that not every single chip is supported because they do you know the execute in place they have some recommended chips and I would I would just use what they recommend all right and that's questions for tonight thank you everybody we got through all them yay thanks everybody and another person mentioned libraries also include test code yes we do have an example code okay that's our show for tonight don't forget the code is for a clip thank you everyone thank you our community our customers are a different staff everyone who makes this go we very much appreciate it we'll see everybody next week please continue to be good to yourself you get to others help someone out there it makes you feel good and this has been an eight a fruit production we'll see everybody next week and this is your moment of zener thanks everyone