 Live from New York, it's Ask an Engineer. Hey, everybody, and welcome to Ask Engineer. It's me, Lady Aida the Engineer, with me, Mr. Lady Aida on Camera Control. We just got off doing show and talk. Well, show and talk. Well, but it's late because it was so good. Oh, where is it? We'll talk about it, but it's also gonna be up on YouTube in a minute. Let's get right to it, Mr. Lady Aida. What's the code and what's on tonight's show? Code is switched to 10% off the native restart all the way up to 59 PM. User Lizzie, you'll see it free stuff along the way. We'll talk about some of our live shows, including show and talk, which we just did. Some, Desk of Lady Aida, including Great Search. Got JPE's product pick of the week highlight. Gonna do some factory footage. We got some 3D printing. We got INMPI, Printed by Digikey. This week it is triad. We got a bunch of top secret. We got new products for answer your questions. We do that on Discord, adafruit.it, slash discord.dg, slash adafruit. That is where we answer your questions. We also have some adafruit.io news, all that and more on, you have to ask an engineer. Okay. Okay, so Lady Aida, when people buy stuff, what does it get? When you buy from adafruit.com, you get freebies and you get also the warm feeling of supporting us, which is awesome because we don't have VC or loans or funding. And so we kind of make money by selling good electronics and then giving some of it away. Selling you things without selling you out. Yeah, we're not even selling our data to open AI. That's a cool thing to do this week. Sorry, $99 or more, you'll get a free VCB coaster with this beautiful adafruit gold logo on it. You get a bumpers too, so it doesn't scratch your desk. I have one on my desk. It keeps my desk from getting little rings on it when I put my coffee on there. $149 or more, you'll get a KB2040 microcontroller board. This is a lovely little board. It features an RP2040 chip. It has eight megabytes of flash, to make you tea, a button, a NeoPixel and USB type C. It's pro micro pinout compatible, which means it's a great upgrade for those pro micro projects that want CircuitPython or Arduino and lots more RAM and flash and memory. $199 or more for UPS ground shipping in the continental United States. That's trackable, insured and wonderful. And we still are giving away $299 or more Circuit Playground Express all-in-one electronics dev board with the SAMD21. It runs Arduino or CircuitPython or MicroPython or code.org CS Discoveries or MakeCode. And it's got NeoPixel with buttons and sensors and LEDs and capacitive touch and everything. It's a great way to learn coding and electronics without needing to do any soldering. Just plug it in and you're ready to go. Okay, great. Don't forget. Go switch and you use those together. A little bit of news. We are returning the Aida box as we talked about last year. And our goal was... Did we do it? Yeah, our goal was to get some out by the end of 2023, which is a couple months ago. And then we shipped thousands, a few thousand in fact. And I can say that we're pretty much ready to take on your subscription. So if you want an Aida box, here's what you can do. You can go to aidabox.com right now. We're going to make a few... We're still giving some folks some time to update their credit card and addresses. But for the folks who don't, we can't get hold of them. We will cancel subscription. Sorry. You can always subscribe again. But we want to make room because there's been a long waiting list. So go to aidabox.com. And let me see if I have... So you can go to aidabox.com. We also have our unboxing date on here. It's March 20th. There's going to be a live video and more. And we have the latest and greatest. So... It's a secret. Yeah. So we'll be updating the text on here shortly. But we're giving folks just a little bit more time because, you know, it was during part shortage. Yes. Was it possible to ship Aida boxes? I will say if you have a subscription and you've got to notice... Or first off, if you have not received your Aida box shipment, don't forget about it. Yeah, email supported. Email supported AidaFruit because the Aida... We have shipped every subscription that was from, like, previous to a week ago. If you just signed up yesterday, it might take a couple days to ship. But if you have just been subscribed for more than a week and you've not gotten your shipping notice yet, email supported AidaFruit because chances are, your credit card maybe has an issue or your address has an issue. You need to fix it. And then we have your Aida box sitting waiting patiently to go out. Yeah. And then you have until, I think, the 8th to update your address or credit card. Otherwise, you're going to release your subscription and let somebody else sign up. Okay, and thanks. And we always fill up. Yeah. Thanks, folks, for also letting us know you got your Aida boxes in the chat. Okay. We do a bunch of live shows. We hosted the show and tell this week. It was packed. It was a good week to do show and tell. Thank you, AidaFruit team who have been hosting. We alternate. Melissa, JP, Liz. Thanks for that. So Jay, stop by with a new font. That was digit. Yeah, it's a little head tracking thing. Really cool. So yeah, using, I guess, what's something? Solarometer. Yeah, like solarometer to kind of keep. If you've ever seen the videos of like chickens where you're kind of like hold a chicken and move its head, dance about like that. It's like that, but with a robot. Yeah, what he showed. The M2 or M.2 boards. Yeah, particle boards. If you want to see the latest and greatest from particle, check it out. Also, some circuit sculptures. Melissa showed a C4 emulator. Liz showed a really cool, I think good use of some of these AI tools. You take a picture with the open source Memento. You send it off to an AI service and you say describe this photo and it sends you back. Yeah, send you back alt text. Really good use in, you actually don't see a lot of demos like this because there's so much involved with this. We actually show you step by step. You can see the code. There's no metadata attached to the photo. It's a photo that you want to take. And she took a photo of a little dinosaur on a table and it's like that's a little yellow dinosaur on a table. Yeah, she took a photo of the fidget toy and it was like you took a photo of a little toy thing. And it can read text. It's a little creepy. Yeah, if I was someone who was doing an AI device company, I would just show that demo. Of course it wouldn't be their product but it actually captures what AI can do. And I know, like I said in the show, until I know there's polarizing extremist opinions, like it's going to kill us all. It stole everything. There's also uses of technology. Any technology can be used for bad. When you send off this photo, it looks at it and it sends back alt text that can be used for all sorts of things like accessibility or describing what's on the photo. Like anomaly detection. All sorts of things. And it's all under your control. It's not being used in a way you don't know about it. So anyways, check it out if you're interested in this stuff. Sun and Moon, LED fashion show. Lots of cool photos from Fashion Week. And probably one of the best collections of what's going on with very colorful, interesting LED wear. It was great to get kind of a front seat. Couldn't make it to the fashion show this year. That was cool. Mark showed off the USB HID interfaces using circuit Python for a flight simulator. That was neat. That was cool. He showed off the display adapter for QDPI using circuit Python. And Nino graph showed off amazing live video of a microscope going into like, you know, sub-null pairs. Yeah, say a thermal camera. So he like zoomed in and they showed how they cut a hole in the thermal camera. With the beam. And then also a MEMS microphone. I just like love it. And it's so fast and the quality is amazing. Yeah. And you know, you're kind of sealed away. And even if you open them up now, it's like, well, what are those things? So we're going to have them back, put in your requests in the chat and also reach out to them. They also have a kit that they're selling soon. There's a lot of stuff that you're doing. We'll sponsor. Like, we'll send them the parts. Yeah. And then they can blast holes. Yeah. So anyways, really neat. And I don't think there's anything else like this. Yeah. Very fun show and tell. Neat. On Sundays, we just desk of Lyeda. Some two parts. What was the first part you showed this week? Okay. So this week I talked a lot about cowbell design. I designed like a whole, you know, some weeks I like, I get to design a lot of hardware. And then like other weeks I'm like, how did I find time to design all that hardware? But I didn't know. I stuck it in somehow. Yeah. I designed a whole bunch of cowbell boards, camera cowbell, a doubler, single terminal block. Just showed off a couple of design decisions on cowbells. And we'll be getting back to the cowbell party real soon. Ding, ding, ding, ding. Okay. And then we also have great search where you help find things on digikey.com. What was the part that you showed off and found this week? Okay. So this week one of the boards that I showed off has battery charging built in. And so I was like, oh, you know, I never covered the simple resistor, you know, set battery charger chips that I use the MCP73831-2CIO2. And so I thought I would talk about them, all the different variants, and a couple of other options. I use this chip, but there's actually other chips that might also work really well for you. So check those out. I also give a recommendation to use officially manufactured and designed LiPo charger chips because that's what I do. I think it's a good idea. Like some stuff, it's like, oh, you know, you can use Grand Market, but I would always say, like, if you're charging batteries, you want to make sure you're charging them with a proper charger chip. Okay. And then just a programming note for the folks who've wanted Raspberry Pi, you know, we have them in stock. I know that they're... We just put some in today. We put some in stock and you just have to make it a factor of authentication. They're still people who bought Raspberry Pi and haven't got them on other sites because they did back orders and they, it was, that's it. That's how it works. We only put them in stock if we have them. So if you want to go to Adafruit.com, you can get a Raspberry Pi 5, 8, 8, or right now. We also have like Pi, so we have zero 2Ws I think as well. Oh, all right. And then on Tuesdays, we do GP's product pick of the week. Here is this week's highlight. The Power BFF and we have the Neo RGB StemUp. I have the QT Pi plugged into the Power BFF. Power BFF is mounted to one of our little swirly grids. I have a 12 volt power supply plugged into the Power BFF. That is supplying power to the QT Pi, five volts that it needs, power and ground from the Power BFF over the StemA cable to the Neo RGB StemA board. And the white wire there is actually running to one of my GPIO pins. So that is sending Neo pixel signals. It thinks there's a Neo pixel there. But we can see this happening here is my RGB strip is plugged into the red, green, and blue and common anode lines, running through color fading demo, a single color. And now we can go through and just set it to individual colors. Is the Power BFF for QT Pi and the Neo RGB StemA. JP's workshop tomorrow. And then either Scott or Tim will be doing deep dive on Friday. See some Python on hardware. This comes from our newsletter. Lots of stuff this week. You have your pick of the week. You can check out all the latest and greatest. There is a micro Python update. There is a circuit Python nine. We're getting a lot more bugs. Thanks everybody for putting those in. Yeah. We had seven bugs. And apparently now we're up to 14 bugs, which is actually good because it means people are testing stuff and opening. It's running a Raspberry Pi for a long period of time. Lots and lots and lots of news about Python, especially if you're thinking of picking a programming language or some things that we have. We usually have what employers are looking for. Or if you're thinking about data sciences, Python's a pretty good choice. So we have those. But this week, highlight of the week, Lady Aida. You have this one. It's Project of the Week, Mickey and Minnie. Two things. There was two audio projects. Yeah. So this is the MIDI kalimba, which I just thought was cool because I love people using the MIDI at HID and capacitive capabilities that we have in circuit Python. Three things that are not available in some other Python, micro Python like versions for the Pico. And so I think I love it when people are using like what circuit Python is really good at, which is USB devices. And then there's another project. If you go, scroll down. Top of the book. Keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going. Yeah, that was wrong. Look at all this content. Yeah, there's so much content. It was the... Oh my God. Sorry, there's so much. There was... There's a lot of projects. There's another thing. I don't know what it was. It was the... Now I feel bad. I should have given you the link. There was the MIDI synth and then there was the project that was like the synthesizer. I feel bad. I don't remember. Well, I keep going. Dad, dad, dad. Yeah, we're committed. I'm committed. I'm not going to give us a popular new net. It was one of the projects. There's Memento, Web workflow, the Gemini, Micro wake word, Hourglass. I thought it was... Oh, there was. Yeah, the synth sandbox. Yeah. Can you go to this? Okay, we're going to... So this was kind of cool. So this is, you know, we had the synth... IO capability and circuit path on. And this is a person who like actually made like a synthesizer out of it. It's like they made a library that makes it easier to use synthio to like the keyboard PCB with like battery and they use a Pico and then they overclock it and stuff. So I think it's neat because it's like we did synthio and I was like, I hope somebody makes this either out of this and somebody did. Yeah. I didn't say anything. Just goes to show you how big the newsletter is. It's so big. I can't find stuff. It was, yeah. So check it out and look at it. If you're daily, you can get it in your inbox. We do not spam. Subscribe. You can put on GitHub. We also have a permalink. We have an RSS feed and more... Let's place on the hardware for the week. Okay. Okay. For open source hardware news, open source hardware and more, we have a call to action for Adafruit.io because this is the section where you usually have a bunch of talk about what we were doing in open source and open source hardware. Just like we did with Circuit Python for 2024, we have... But we're a little bit late, but that's okay. Well, fashionably. We want to do the same thing where we're like, hey, what type of things do you want to see? So you can go check out our blog post and we mirrored it or mimic the Circuit Python 2024 post where the developers and designers of Adafruit.io can get a chance to hear from you. So we can develop all the features you want for Adafruit.io. And here's some ideas that we're going to work with. It's a little power mode. We're per snapper on more boards, revamp actions, iOS app, Raspberry Pi and Python support, and your feedback. So... Yeah. Do these sound cool? Yeah. What other things do you want to see? Yeah. And you can tag us. You can put it in the form. We'd love to hear from you guys. Yeah. You can also email iotnews at adafruit.com and we'll add all these to our list. And just let us know what type of things you're doing with IoT and what type of things you want to see them from Adafruit. So check it out. It is on. Yeah. A lot of this is like whippersnapper, but some of the things that affect IO and not just whippersnapper. So, you know, they're kind of, they're BFFs, right? Yeah. Like the actions you see we've done Blockly actions, the iOS app, you know, we're actually working on a simplified app right now. Raspberry Pi and Python support, that's... We have Adafruit IO support for Python, but we wanted to add whippersnapper support also. Yeah. Actually about... We'll talk about it in a minute. Plug and play Raspberry Pi as like a whippersnapper device. Yeah. But, you know, keep in mind we're not doing this for shareholders or to monetize your data or to sell it. Again, we're not going to have to open an eye. We're going to have to open a box. It's not mid-journey or anything like that. So what we're... So what we're doing so what we're doing is we want to hear from you. If there's features you want in an IoT service built for users. Three, that's that's what we're here for. So please check it out and let us let our team know as if you know the history of Circuit Python a lot of the features that people last work they get. Other little bits of open source hardware orders before we go into the guides. We've certified more open source hardware so we're up to 736. Oh, that's great. Altogether out of 200, sorry, 2722. Okay. So there's a lot. Yeah. So 736 altogether. So we'll continue to certify our hardware. It doesn't matter if you do if you're doing open source hardware, but it is a signal and a symbol and all that stuff's up there. I know there's the trend of companies saying something's open source. It's really not or saying it's open source hardware and it's really not or just deciding not to do open source hardware or requiring NDAs. All these things that's not open source hardware. We're doing open source hardware. So that's where we put our open source hardware certifications. Yeah. So we can have we also have guides for all this. We're almost up to 3,000 guides playing it out. I get it. How many guys do we have? How many guys do we have? Yeah. Like 2,980 or something like that. Okay. Okay, so we have three new ones this week. What's on the big board this week? Okay. So this week, new projects we've got. Tyeth wrote a guide on using Blockly for Actions and Adafruit IO. This is actually kind of cool and kind of a big deal. And so if you use Adafruit IO, right, you're using our cloud service to get data from your device to Adafruit IO, the free cloud service that we run. So like sensor data or button presses or whatever back and forth is bi-directional. But then maybe you want to have something happen like when my temperature and humidity get below you know 20 degrees and above 80% humidity, I want you to send me an SMS or when this feed goes on, I want to update this other feed to turn on a buzzer. You know, you want something to happen. If something, then something. And people, we have a tie for Zappier if this and that. But folks who use the services quickly know that there's a delay of 15 minutes which makes a lot of if this and that and Zappier kind of like frustrating to use unless you're willing to pay them a bunch of money. So what we have now, what we've had for a bit is actions, which is the ability to say like when the feed goes above a value, send me an email. But that was like very specialized. It was like a form and you could only like pick certain things in the form and you couldn't, like you didn't have any flexibility. Like you couldn't say if the humidity is above 20 and the temperature is below 30 or you couldn't like do any math or you couldn't have like delays or times or comparisons. And like you couldn't compare two feet together, for example, you could only have like feed compared to a number or something. And so one of the cool things that we thought of was like, well, we don't want to support this form which is limited. And we want to have it be like free so people can kind of come with their own functions and actions. So Blockly is like block based drag and drop programming. And so we've integrated that into Adafruit IO. So now you can have like nested complicated blocks or working on the nesting part a little bit, but you can have blocks that you drag and drop to define the behavior you want. And you'll be able to kind of do whatever you can have like a much richer language of what capabilities you want Adafruit IO to have because you're not limited by whatever we programmed into this form. And we also have to don't we don't have to maintain this form anymore. So it's like a twofer. So I think Blockly is really neat because it's really easy. It's well defined. And I think it works well with the kind of thought process that people have for cloud services. So check it out. It's very new. We have it. It's right now we have a very like limited capability but we're going to be expanding it soon. We just wanted to replicate the behavior we already had. That said, you know, go it's free to use. It comes with Adafruit IO. Try it out. Only SMS's you have to use IO plus because we have to pay for SMS's. But for just email sending and stuff it's built in. And you can use the Blockly actions right now. Okay. What else? Next up. You have this really cool case. I think we have a video for it. Case for the new Itsy Bitsy ESP32. And Liz wrote a guide on the Itsy Bitsy ESP32 including using web workflow with CircuitPython. Yeah, we have CircuitPython support for the ESP32. Did you know that? What we do and you can use web repel and web file editing. So you don't even have to do like a thing that uploads files over the command line if you don't want. Okay. So more guides as we march to 3000. Let's do some factory footage. It's a glimpse into the factory. Do some 3D printing. We're going to play these videos back to back. And then we're going to go right over to IO and MPI. Afterwards, take it away. Knowing Pedro. This is the new Adafruit Itsy Bitsy featuring the ESP32 Wi-Fi Pico module. It comes in two flavors, one with a WFL antenna connector and the other with a PCB antenna. These come packed with goodies like 8 megabytes of flash, 2 megabytes of PS RAM, 20 GPIO, and a StemAQT connector. They also feature Bluetooth classic BLE and an ultra low power deep sleep mode. With a Wi-Fi connection, you can use CircuitPython web workflow to program and debug your dev board. This works great with any Wi-Fi enabled computer or mobile device. It's also compatible with the WLED firmware so you can build advanced lighting projects with Neopixel LEDs. The CircuitPython web workflow lets you upload and browse files on your Wi-Fi enabled dev board. You can also view and edit text files making minor edits quick and easy. You can use Adafruit's web serial ESP tool to install firmware over a USB connection using the Google Chrome browser. For all the details and documentation, check out the product guide on learn.adafruit.com. The CircuitPython web workflow is in beta but it's open to the public. It supports most of Adafruit's Wi-Fi dev boards so it's definitely worth checking out. You can 3D print our snap fit case for the ItzyBitzy ESP32 to keep it protected and mounted to your project. The board press fits into the case and gets secured with a mounting plate using fasteners. You can secure additional sensors and display breakouts to the top cover using the built-in mounting slots. With StemaQT, you can daisy chain I2C breakouts and plug them directly to the ItzyBitzy ESP32 so no soldering is required. For antenna users, you can pan mount a WFL antenna to the special case. With access to the header pins, you can connect external components using socket jumper cables or even a breadboard. We hope this video inspires you to check out Adafruit's new ItzyBitzy ESP32 for your next Wi-Fi enabled project. And that's some 3D print. Okay, a little reminder before we go off time and don't forget to switch, get free stuff. It's still not too late to subscribe to Inbox as we get the last ones. New product introductions brought to you by Digikeet and Adafruit. This week is Tranlady. Adafruit, what is your introduction to NPI this week? Well, I'm excited to have a new vendor on NPI as well. I mean, don't get me wrong, I love the STs and the TI's and the analog devices, but once in a while, you get something new. Triad Semiconductor. So this was featured on digikeet.com slash new. This is the TS4631. Make sure you get the part number right because I have a couple in the family. And this is an infrared light analog front end specifically for VR and AR uses. So this company, this is from their website for Triad. They're kind of like the specialty ASIC maker that makes the chips that are used for tracking devices in AR and VR, but also might be useful for other kinds of 3D tracking which we'll talk about. So even if you're not like making an AR or VR product, but especially if you are, this product might be interesting to you. So the TS4631 is the latest in generation of their light digital converter. And basically, you know, at the bottom right you see how you connect it up. It's kind of the usage diagram. You have this chip. You give it a couple little passives. You give it a big IR photo diode. And then it can send the envelope and data from infrared lighthouse transmitters to a microcontroller, ideally one that has, you know, wireless connectivity like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or ZigBee that can then be used to track the item with millimeter precision in a 3D space like a room. This chip is used primarily in the HTC Vive or Vive. I don't know how to say it. I'm going to say Vive, but I could be wrong. The VR system that you can even see like there's these little divots in all of these little products and that's where the infrared receivers would be. And then the two things and the top right and top left those little square round-ish boxes, those are what are called lighthouses. And they look and it's a beautiful creative comments public domain photo of the lighthouse. They were just like a lighthouse works where inside is those boxes are these really bright infrared lights. So you don't see them with human eyes but sensors can see them. And this is from the presentation from Alan Yates who I guess worked on developing those base stations. This is actually not what it looked like in the end. This I think a prototype. But basically there's like these really bright infrared IR lights and then there's X and Y scanning motors which you can see like in that photo and the lights are on the top and the left and the bottom and the right are the scanning motors. And the scanning motors rotate consistently I think like 30 Hertz and flash the infrared light around the room as a line. So basically scanning the room. And so what you would do is you know you connect the photo diode to this chip and it you know at first it flashes a the lighthouse flashes you know a big sync pulse to get everything to be like okay you know I'm about to send you this X and Y scanning pulse. And then the sensor looks for the X and Y scanning pulse and measures how much time it took from the sync pulse to the X and Y pulse to get to it. And then you know this is from the homebrew interface for these lighthouses from Tremel Hudson using some math and you can see like you know these envelope pulses on the on the bottom there you can see he's got four boards with the earlier version of this triad chip I think this he's got the TS4231 you see little photo diodes the big silver things in the center there you get the pulse and envelope data and you can see it being graphed out and you know you do a bunch of matrix math which is documented here and in a couple of other libraries if you don't want to figure out the math yourself and then you can get within like a couple of millimeter precision XY coordinates using only two lighthouses although you can have up to four and then you have a base station that you can communicate to and say I know where I am in XYZ space a lot cheaper than you would do with ultra wideband because infrared light is going to be a lot cheaper than having you know four radio transmitters that are trying to do time of flight and you can do time of pulse distance a lot easier than time of flight as well and this chip is actually this is the latest generation the 4631 built on the 4231 I saw this person who did some teardowns on social media of various controllers for SteamVR and this is like you know as of like 2023 this is what everyone's using this new generation is a lot lower power has like good deep sleep modes but you can see it's like a very small chip very easy to use and then you can see the photodiode is much larger than the chip itself and even all the passives and this is a you know basically I think chip with code compatible but a smaller die and lower power usage so this is how it works and you know I think even Tramel Hudson and his write up which I looked to in the text for this video in this post he kind of shows like you could build this all with analog electronics but it would just really suck because you have to do like gain management and offsets and you know detecting the envelope detecting data coming out so it's nice about the TS 4631 is even if you have a powerful m33 microcontroller whatever you still want to have all of the analog stuff handled on this chip and done very small and very inexpensively and it's a 0.4 millimeter BGA9 pin but thankfully the middle pin is ground which is shared with another analog ground thank you love that because it means you can do this on two layer board without any like buried or blind vias even though it's 0.4 millimeter pitch and you know that that is not the issue it's usually getting that middle pin out but they made it really easy to integrate and then the two output pins that give you the envelope and the data are also used for the configuration so it uses the iSquared C there's like one 16-bit register that you can write to and this is you know the sleep modes the gain modes various thresholds you can configure or you can use the defaults you do need to configure it to start like it won't just like boot immediately into usage because it starts up in sleep mode like normal sleep behavior you have to tell it to be enabled so mode one or mode two so you know you do have to use the iSquared C even if you're not planning to use any of the other way distributes as I mentioned this is an upgrade to the 4231 I saw try and send me has a github weeper they do have a library from a while ago for the 4231 the original version of this chip you can probably use it at the basis for your library on the 4260 4631 I also saw there's a lot of people doing cool DIY VR hacking with this chip and so you know I'm sure if you want to make an official product that uses the VR headset technology you can you know talk to try out or you can talk to SteamVR you can talk to HTC and you know sign developer agreement with them but if you also want to do do your own thing DIY something with AR or VR without necessarily going through the development process you can buy these chips and you know the stuff isn't under NDA it's fully publicly documented you can follow along with some of these projects and guides including this really cool white paper that basically shows how to make like a full 3D positioning system there's also from Cian Lorne he wrote Libsurvive which is a Python library runs on desktop that will do all the 3D calculations for you to create your own trackable objects without again having to purchase a track or you can make small ones that use your own technology stack in your own sensors so I think really neat so check it out no but it's okay it's in stock don't forget you need that photodiode but very cool you know I think could be useful for drones could be used for interactive art could be used for like any internal tracking where you know the cost of the trackable device is you know can be made for under $5 bill of material all right and that's this week's sign up piano okay we're going to go off to new products don't forget switch to code 10% off the native restore Lidita what is new this week okay new new new new new new new new okay coming soon by popular demand the high voltage version of our UPDI friend look at this beauty so we have the UPDI friend that we put in the store a couple weeks ago that lets you program your favorite ATtiny UPDI programmable chips but will not give you that 12 volt pulse needed to unbrick chips that were were fused to use the UPDI pin for reset or GPIO now you want most people don't need that but if you do need that because you want to use that GPIO or you have a chip that requires the high voltage pulse this is a similar UPDI programmer but has a little boost converter gives you the 12 volts and then when the RTS serial line toggles which you know the UPDI serial programmer will do automatically on serial port open you'll get that pulse and it'll let you program the chip so very handy thanks now okay sort of combo from last week and then this week we have these beautiful RGB W Neopixel neon strips that run on 5 volts finally we had a 12 volt version and it was all annoying because you know you probably don't have 12 volts hang around this one is 5 volts friendly at like 144 pixels per meter and as you see in the animation it has full RGB control pixel control across and then either cool white or warm white you'll see if after the yeah a nice beautiful warm white LED as well so you can get you know both extremely colorful color changes or white pixels don't forget to set your mode to RGBW on your controller but it's otherwise Neopixel Neopixel compatible and 5 volt friendly which I love all right and then the stars show tonight besides ULE data our customers our community the aid for team staff everybody who makes and shares and makes this whole thing go is it's the max 45 44 analog switch this is by special quest from AT makers but I thought other people could also use this handy board so we sell relay boards that will let you like mechanically switch between you know two options and one's you know common connection so normally open common normally closed and you can switch between the two but relays first off they're a little slow second they click third they use a lot of power and fourth they eventually wear out if you want to switch analog voltage signals you might use an analog switch instead so this is a stemma board so uses a stemma JST pH not a QT it's a two millimeter pitch connector you or you can use the breakout pins on the bottom and you provide it with V plus which is the highest voltage that you could put through the analog signal that you want to the normally open or common normally closed you give a signal and then the signal when it's high one side is connected when it's low the other side is connected you can flip between the two and it's perfect for analog signals like NTSC or PAL or audio or sensor data what it's not good for is power it's not it's not a mechanical connection it's a analog pass through connection with MOSFETS on the other side and so you're not going to get you're not first we're not going to get full electrical isolation of course the ground is still shared and second you can't source power through it it's only for signals but if you want to like move a signal around like audio is a perfect perfect example you want to switch one connection between two channels or two channels between one the connections are bi-directional but you know analog only and like I said signal not power and then another thing to watch for is you can't have the signals go negative they have to be within between ground and v plus so something to watch out for too but otherwise you know there's no mechanical connection it's like nearly instantaneous it's like five sorry it's 25 nanoseconds to switch there's no wearing out and there's no noise there's no clicking and very low RDS on I think only like two to six ohms of resistance that you can detect so really handy for people doing analog switching you want like a joystick signal or is it a potentiometer signal you want to move like I said audio or video these are common things that people are moving around you know maybe some sensor signal you want to move between two op amps or something the analog switch will do a great job for you there all right and that is new friends okay we're going to do some top secret then we're going to answer your questions we have a bunch that are lined up don't forget to go to switch you can put your questions there if you already put it there don't worry I got it can put it there again if you want don't worry let's do some top secret and then we're going to rule right into your questions from the vault okay lots more trinkies yeah you're wondering why somebody trinkies because I have a lot at samd21 e18 and I gotta get rid of them so no I'm just kidding I I do have a lot but I also had these trinkies that I were waiting for me to have that samd21 ease and stop because they make for great trinkies look at the bottom there's almost nothing on there this has a neopixel and on the other side a little thumb stick I think these are the same thumb sticks used on the psv anyways they're compatible they don't have a press in but they do have x y analog input so you can plug this in you have a little joystick cut to your usb port maybe you would act like a mouse so maybe it would you know just give you x y coordinates over serial port I don't know for now next I'm designed many more pico bells pico bells or pico bell compatibles this is an underplate so if you go to the previous you can plug the pico on top it plugs right in so there's no soldering required and you get a reset button and a stomach qt port and then each pin is doubled there's like two rows on the header so you can plug in wires so it makes it easy there's a little prototyping area on the middle and then a doubler so it's like now you want like a pico bell on the other side and then the other side has battery charging and enable switch on off so this would be really good for like wireless projects when you have a battery charger and you won't be able to turn it off this is a camera pico bell so we do have camera support for the rp2040 for using like the ov 5640 or ov 2640 or whatever the problem is that the wiring is a total nightmare and so this kind of does all the wiring for you it uses a lot of pins but you get full color camera with jpeg or while rgb output and then this little micro sd slot you can save your images a little button for like a shutter and then all the parts by step you need to uh to use it and then finally this people really like this one this was a thing I just tossed off really quickly I took the esp32 s2 feather and took the s2 off and I replaced it with the c6 this is the new wi-fi 6 and zig b slash thread slash matter module from expressive we do have some circuit pipeline support for it although I don't think we have any zig b support or any coming soon in fact I think the zig b isn't even in or do we know yet it's only in the idf this is like your standard feather not as many pins on the little mini module but I kind of scrolled out enough to give you you know analog pins spi i squared c only two pins are shared between like the digital and the analog I have to share two pins but you have a low power pin so disabling the second ldo that powers the neopixel and i squared c port and then a bme 280 and then a battery monitor so this is kind of like a nice like you could could make for a really good matter development board and that's top secret new top secret get in the vault all right we're gonna go straight to your questions that you asked about in the chat when you know we're gonna get through these yeah cool okay first up me device have a seven inch screen on synth I need to point a camera down at the screen and each UI the video out to a flat panel this is because I'm going blind and need to increase reading error I cannot read the synth seven inch screen friends lens and magolas are no good I suggest in the camera module lens I have raspberry pi EPs and 2040s all from made of fruit but always a newbie thank you um yeah a raspberry pi can drive hdmi output so you can drive like a big monitor and just have just one like the there's like a raspberry there's like a like our pie camera demo that whatever's on the camera goes to hdmi and you would just do you would just put it on like you'd mount it onto something so it's like fixed you know what I mean and then it would um I'll put that to hdmi and then you would just put on like a a gigantic monitor um you might need to put a polarizer on it so you don't get reflection so you only think I can think of but I don't see why that wouldn't work yeah um you know you could also get a little projector projected somewhere well hdmi yeah you can do whatever yeah okay I'm thinking of remote cable for me too do you think one of your a and own coders could be used to control the buttons and the ring to change the focus absolutely you'd have to add the code yourself but there's like it's really simple to update the code to I think we have a um I think we did one of the projects we did was using touch osc to do remote control of the camera and so instead of having the commands coming from wi-fi you just have it come in from this rotary encoder okay next up any recommendations for usp32 for a flipper expansion board wi-fi dev I don't know sorry good question I don't know how you would do the connectivity sorry would this board be good for automotive realize um it would it would not be good for it would be good for any up to 12 volt analog signal so it depends on like what you're switching like it wouldn't be good for power but it would be good for like oh i want to route audio from one spot to another spot in my car another one can the new analog switch act like a relay it's not a relay it's it's like a it's a solid state switch so it can be used in some cases where relay can be used and relay can be used in some cases where this can be used there's some overlap but they're not interchangeable okay next up is there a i3c version of the mcp23017 i would like to build it working keyboard i don't think that microchip has any i3c expanders yet you can ask them but you should probably be able to use itc i don't think we need i3c to build a keyboard okay next up are we getting closer to lithium yeah lithium p04 i don't know yeah that's it i don't know which i don't know what the term lithium lithium iron yeah p04 batteries and charging them on microcontrol is because i estimated the longer life of your lipo and safety there are chips but you know honestly a lot of people they are heavier a lot of people just prefer the smaller lipo's like that there aren't small you know let lithium ferrite whatever lithium yeah the first thing i look up they're gigantic they're bigger they're you know they're used for they're used for skateboards and they're used for lithium iron phosphate yeah they're used for like skateboards or cars or stuff they're not or here's the build parts yeah but they're still not they like people like the pouchy lithium polymers then and these are not they're they're yeah for microcontrollers yeah okay next up can you make an option for boards that come with pins unsoldered pre-soldered for throwboards thrills boards don't know what thrills boards is but we are we're starting to add more products that have the headers pre-soldered and so you're gonna see that come in it's a trade-off because you know you know some boards is like well you could have male headers or female headers and we can't like we can't have six options we have to like be reasonable about how much space we can show but if you have particular requests for like oh i want to see this board with headers pre-soldered email it to support it in a fruit and we'll put it in the queue there's a little like drop down and the support for like product suggestion so uh what's where is this normal for i2c but for spi cs lines question mark if that's the question is this normal convention for these cs lines i was unaware of you can have anywhere from 10k you know whatever 4.7k to 100k is fine but yes you want to have the cs lines pulled up high so they're disabled by default okay the request plug and play usb host work for all our boards either quick or i spy connectors okay okay um been trying to connect usb keyboard to a macro pad that was told rp2040 can't connect the way needs usb host recommendations for any other host words um you can connect a usb host to macro pad with rp2040 using our usb host library but it's um it's i don't know if it will work with the macro pad for more it's a little more complicated than that but check out you know we have a feather you feather with usb host on it and you could use that to like practice your development and then you would have to wire up the i guess you could use the the stem of qt connector maybe try to wire it up for usb host it's not trivial yeah okay someone else wanted the code again um is the pc a 9685 good only for brush and motors why i tried using it for brush did not get it to work yeah brush motors need a brush motor controller the difference okay and i think we got all of those big chunk of questions okay go to work waiting look at you can you get home assistant via circuit python project is mqtt the protocol of choice we have a home assistant circuit python project and learn where whatever we use there is definitely gonna work all right and i think we got all the questions all right thank you so much everybody that was a bunch don't get to pick up something from the ate it for job please do which um you get free stuff yeah and then if you go to ateabox.com you could still sneak in and get if you want it before for the next one the next one we will run out we we don't have that many slots left over so yeah but we have a small window of time until like you know next week or we went out of slots uh to get into this one yeah so this is the window and we also tried to you know not heavily promote subscribe now because we wanted to get through all the first subscribers i've been patiently waiting during the chip shortage and now's a good time though to subscribe so thank you so much everybody we are an independent open source hardware company manufacturing in new york woman owned we pay our people and we try to have the best possible lives for everyone benefits and pay time off and all the things that people love and then we give everything away they live and work balance and all that but the only way we can keep this up is if you buy something in the store so it's stuff please do we'll see everybody next week this has been an age for production here is your moment zener bye thanks everybody have a great night