 OK, on MPI, I brought to you by DigiKey Needed for this week, it's FTDI, wait a minute. That's right, FTDI Chip, it's one of our favorite electronic chip companies. One of our first breakout boards was for the FT232R, which is from FTDI Chip. They're an awesome company and we know that the CEO, we interviewed them. Check out our blog many, many years ago, but we did interview them. So FTDI, they released a whole bunch of cool new chips that improve on some well-known chips that they've had, the FT232 and the FT232, which are kind of popular. So let's go take a look at them. So this is what the chips look like. So the ones I'm going to look at, there's a whole family, but I'm going to look specifically at the FT232HP and the 233HP. And that the P is the important part. So what's the P stand for? The P stands for power delivery. So the FT232H, which is a chip that we've used a lot, has now been upgraded to add USB 3.0 Type-C power delivery specification support. What that means is that it still is a USB device, it's a high-speed USB device. It can do all sorts of peripheral communication, like people love from the FT232 series. But what it's added is also the CC1 and the CC2 pins that are used to request higher voltages and higher currents from a USB port. And that can be really useful if you're doing a product and you need more than, say, five watts or five volts of power. So the FT232H, you might be like, hey, that sounds really familiar, that's right. We have a breakout board for the FT232H. We recently actually even revised it. When we revised it here, I want to show it's got iSquared-C, and it's got those 8 GPIO pins. Actually, sorry, it's got 16 total 8 GPIO pins, it's got lots of GPIO. And it's got iSquared-C, and it's got SPI, it's high-speed. And it can do JTAG, and it can do 8-bit parallel. And we updated it here to add that USB-C port on the left. But I want to note that this board, the H, not the HP, all it does is have two 5K resistors on the CC lines to tell the host device, hey, this is a five-volt USB device. It doesn't do any power delivery negotiation, which actually requires a separate microcontroller, basically. It's actually quite complicated to do. So in this case, you would not be able to use this board to get more than five volts out of USB-C. Just because it uses the USB-C connector doesn't necessarily mean it fulfills the full USB-C spec. So just watch out for that. You see something with the USB-C connector. The connector is just the physical shape that's type C. Whether or not it actually connects to the CC pins to do the power delivery specification, well, you're going to have to read the data sheet for that. So if you do look, there's two versions of this board. There's the 232, which has, I think, 8 GPIO plus a couple. And then the 233, which has the 16 GPIO you might be used to. And you can see on the pin out here that they have CC1 and CC2 connections. The 64 pin 1 has both sync and source. And I think we'll watch a video at the end, which actually shows a demo of the syncing and sourcing. So if you get the 64 pin version, the 233, it has two USB-C ports, and it can go bi-directionally. The 56 pin 1 is only a port sync. It can only request data. It can't supply data. Sorry. It can only request power. It cannot negotiate with something that's requesting power. So USB-C is like that. Again, the port's the same on both sides, but the data is not bi-directional. Each side has a sync and a source. And here's how you wire it up. So you definitely will want, of course, a USB-C connector. Because if you have a USB-C connector, you can wire up the CC1 and the CC2 pins. That's what's used to do the negotiation with the power supply or the laptop or the computer to get those higher voltages and higher currents. OK, but besides that, the way you actually program the power delivery is kind of interesting. So there is this program you can use. I know I use it in Windows called FTDI Prog, but I think they have it for other operating systems as well. And then you connect an eProm to some of the chips of the FT232 HP. And inside there, you tell it, do you want to have an I-squared-C peripheral? So you have a microcontroller that it can connect and tell it what it wants. Does it want 12 volts or 15 or 20? Does it want 3 amps or 1 amp? Or you can use GPIO pins. And you can set up the GPIO pins from within FTDI Prog. So you'll have to do that once. But once it's programmed, then you can use the GPIO pins to control and connect how much voltage and current you're requesting. OK, so in addition to all of the USB-C power delivery stuff, the FT232 still has all the really great GPIO. That's what we really want from the chip. It's not just a power delivery chip. It has GPIO. And so there's all these capabilities it has for all the GPIO pins. For example, you can hook it up as an RS422. It can be an RS232. You are. It can act even as an RS485. These are pretty common things you want to convert to USB. But again, remember, now you can also request 12 volts power from it. So if you have an RS485 device that is controlled or controlling RS485 and also wants 12 volt power, you don't need a separate power supply. You can get that all over USB-C. Very nice. Very integrated. So this is all the extra functionality. It's got that USB 2.0 high-speed connectivity. So you can send data back and forth pretty fast. If you have it in the parallel 5-for-mode, you can go up to 40 megabytes per second, which is incredibly fast for a USB peripheral. It also has JTAG, iSquared-C, SPI, BitBang, UART, and then a couple of different parallel port methods. They have libraries you can use and see in Python, and then we also, of course, have our Blinka library. Now I haven't been able to get this chip because I don't know if you're aware, but there's a global chip shortage. But when I do, I want to make sure that it works with Blinka so you can use it with our circuit Python libraries because it's super fun to connect this board over USB and then program it through the computer. So no microcontroller programming is required at all. It is a very fully integrated device. I think there's a lot of products. You get rid of the DC power supply, you can get rid of the microcontroller firmware programming, have it all done by the FT232 or 233. So I'll say, like I said, there's a global chip shortage. However, I did check the lead time, and it looks like there's going to be in about like four to six weeks, these will come into stock. So you can back over them, or you can sign up for notification and Ditchkeys will let you know when it gets back into stock. Again, there's two versions, the FT233, 64 pin has an extra eight pins, two digital ports, 232HP only has one digital port. All right. And it's available on Ditchkeys site. To sign up for, or back order. So check it out. And as soon as they're available, I'll definitely respin the board that we have for the FT232H, for the FT232HP, I think it'll be great. I mean, you can plug it in, get 20 volts, 12 volts. You could like power your robotics device and control it all over USB-C, which is sure you're all here. Sweet. And then get searched for it there. Yes. And then we also have one minute video. Yes. In this demonstration, we have interfaced a light sensor to the FT4233H device. The board is connected to a laptop using port one on the left hand side. An application is also shown, which is running on the laptop and is taking readings from the sensor. As you can see from the USB power meter connected in line, the board is also providing approximately 20 volts to the laptop to charge its battery. At the top of the board, we have a wall charger connected to port two. This powers the board itself and also provides the charging current to the laptop via port one. When we now unplug the wall charger from port two, you can see that port one now switches role automatically to become the power provider. As you can see from the direction arrow on the USB power meter, the laptop is now providing five volt power to the application board. The data communication is unaffected by the change of power source and the laptop continues to take sensor readings. If we now connect the charger to port two again, the power delivery controller switches roles back again. The charger now provides power to the board via port two and port one becomes a provider of power to the laptop again to charge the battery. The data communication between the laptop and the sensor continues uninterrupted.