 It's Ask an Engineer. Strumming Liar. Welcome to Ask an Engineer. It's me, Lady Aida. The engineer with me, Mr. Lady Aida on Camera Control. Got a fun show for you tonight with lots of musical guests of the sort, I guess. A lot of robot guests and some cool historical stuff. You can make robot friends and robot bandmates. Oh, cool. All right, well, let's get right to it. Why don't you tell people about the discount code? That's right. It's on the show tonight. Tonight's show, the code is Redbug, 10% off in the Atomford store, all the way up to the 59 am Eastern time. We have a gigantic show tonight with a lot of retro stuff, a lot of top secrets, a little bit of a different show to just celebrate that. Use the code Redbug on checkout. Gonna talk about some of our live shows, including Show and Tell, JP and Aaron just hosted and I got a project that I'm gonna talk about that was on the show and tell. Super cool, so stay tuned for that. We're gonna go over Desk of Lady Aida and some of the great search that we did this week, JP's product pick of the week. And then we have a big retro tip section because it is Marchintosh. We're gonna do some factory footage. So 3D printing, IMPI, and then set a new product this week because we're gonna double up the new products next week. We're gonna have a huge top secret section this week. So stay tuned for that. We're gonna answer your questions. We do that over on Discord, adford.it slash discord or discord.gg slash adford. That's where we collect all the questions and we answer them throughout the show but mostly towards the end of the show. So put them up there and we'll answer them. All of that and more on, you guessed it, ask an engineer. So Lady Aida, the code is Redbook. We'll talk about why it's Redbook soon. People get free stuff as they add things to their cart that helps pay the bills here. An independent venture, capital free, loan free, independent, woman-owned manufacturing company had no banking issues over the last couple of weeks. That's kind of nice because we're supported by y'all. So when you add stuff to your cart, what do you get? First, Aida Bank Republic. Okay, starting off, $99 or more. We're still giving away pro and proto half-sized breadboards, a great little giveaway to take your subtle as breadboard projects and making them permanent. One 49 or more, we've got the pink KB2040. I will say we're about to run out of the pink version. We'll be going back to Adafruit Black. So if you love PCBs, pink circuit boards, order one 49 or more at the Adafruit shop and we'll toss one of these in for free. We actually had someone say, hey, I want to do a project, I need my controller and they're like, wait a minute, I got a free KB2040. Can I use that? And I said, yeah, the project you want to build, you can use the KB2040. And they were like, yeah. Making it too easy again. Making it too easy. Now we just send you stuff that you're gonna need eventually. Before you even need it. Before you even need it. That's so good. One 99 or more UPS free ground shipping in the content United States and 299 or more. While supplies last, we still have a bunch of circuit playground expresses. We're making them as fast as we can. It's our favorite, my controller circuit board. Having this back and stuff shows that nature and electronics are healing because we can get part of it. There's a lot of parts on this board. LEDs, sensors, buttons, speakers, capacitive piezos, all this good stuff, free with your order, 299 or more. We do a bunch of live shows. In fact, just finished up to show and tell. You can watch it on any place where we publish videos, which is pretty much everywhere. Lots of projects, gonna watch the rest of it, but there was one in particular that I figured we would talk about now because the guide's gonna be going up soon. And I'm going to have to send a time coded URL of a video to someone who's being jerky. So this is the idea behind a project that we're doing. There is a lot of stuff going on with AI. It's actually not really AI right now. It's a language model. It does a prediction of the next word that's gonna come along. There's like a token in the cloud somewhere. And it's just good at piecing together text that humans can like, oh, this is words. And so one of the ideas we had was, well, this is great for telling stories, you know, fiction. Yeah, it makes us have stuff. Making up stuff because that's what it's good at. So we thought, oh, this would be neat so you could have an animatronic teddy bear and you'd say, tell me a story about, you say your kid's name and unicorn and then it makes a short story and reads it. And if you remember things from earlier in life and decades ago, there was Teddy Ruckspin, you put tapes in it, there was 2XL. That was your best friend. We have a 2XL video, it was an A-track tape. And then there were things like the movie AI and there was a bear in that. Super toys. So we have a little demo of, Melissa's working on this with a Raspberry Pi, it's a speech recognition. But I want everyone to remember that these are gonna happen and you can build your own and maybe you should because maybe you'll wanna have control over what information it's generating and the stories and if the microphone's on or not. So we have an IoT bill rights that we wrote probably 10 years ago now that eventually it gained a little traction. We started to notice some devices have an off switch, so even physical off switch, so you know there's no microphone. But the idea is like, as always, these technologies come along, we want people to be able to make their own things. And there'll be lots of different ways to do this. So, and there's of course an open source way to do it. So we'll have that pretty soon, but just wanna make sure folks know that the idea is you make this type of thing yourself. And you can hack it, mod it. Yeah, and so I think there's a lot to learn and understand with these large language models. But we always have a kind of a different take on things, which is, this is more like skateboarding. It's like, oh, watch us do this trick with this thing. And it's good at like generating fiction stories. Why don't we have it make fiction stories? Yeah. So you can get... There was this like time for the last, no, it hasn't been recently, but like five, 10 years ago, it was all about like, you're a storyteller. Okay, it's all about storytelling. It's like, well, here we have a storyteller. I was like, it's like a bullshit artist. Yeah, and so I think it's kind of neat. And I think that that's the way, we don't do like fighting robots and stuff like that. Plenty of people do it, super cool. We like to do like robots that like paint or do art or like robot companions or like the video that you saw in the beginning, it could be a band member and the robot can make music with you. So this is similar where you want maybe robots to be companions to tell you stories and kind of combine lots of different things and make it very personalized with like maybe your kid's name. And it doesn't need to be internet connected too. You can have all this stuff happen. Yeah, there's local LMS too. Yeah. So anyways, let's talk about the desk of Lady Aida. So that's every Sunday. We do it in two parts. Would you show up this week? Show us some of the stuff that's coming soon, including the USB host feather. And it's a little demo showing it greeting HAD data from an SNES like joystick. We have some top secret videos that we'll show you. Yeah, we'll show you longer videos with me explaining what's going on. And then I start with the IntelliKeys, which is kind of neat. And we'll be using that with the USB host shield and also some ink demos with the new ink feather. Prototype as well. All right, then we do the great search. That's when you use your power of engineering to help people find things on digikey.com. What did you help people find this week? So this is following up on last week's video where I showed how to find a UFL to SMA adapter for attaching a antenna to our Laura or RFM 1669, 900 megahertz feather RP2040 board. So this time I was like, okay, let's do the second half, which is how do you locate a good quality whip antenna? And I do a 15 second introduction to how to spec an antenna. And already we had to delete comments from people being like, you did not get every possible detail correct about antennas. Yes, it is a 15 second quick overview. I do not teach the entire semester of 6013 propagation of electronic. I want my money back from that YouTube short. I know. Does it fit in less than a TikTok? It's probably not a full education, but you do get some ideas of what to look for and what to look for in the data sheet as well for getting antennas. It'll get you started. Then you can always optimize and iterate. All right, and then every Tuesday we do JP's product pick of the week. Here's a highlight from this week. That's my product pick of the week this week. It is the return of the QT Pi SAMD 21. Some of the things I love about it. One, USB-C. Two, the fact that it is USB HID compliant all the way through so you can do MIDI projects with it, keyboard projects with it, mouse projects with it. Also because of the STEM a QT port on there, you can plug in the many, many, many, many I squared C peripherals that are available out there. And especially the ones that have that STEM a QT port, it makes it plug and play. We Chuck adapter. Let's use various Nintendo accessories and a little OLED display. So you can see no soldering, just plugging and playing and you can get a project up and running. That is my product pick of the week this week. It is the QT Pi SAMD 21 Cortex M0. All right, and don't forget on Thursday, JP's workshop and then on Friday we have he dive with Tim. So, big. Let's sing this one. All right, all month long is Marchintosh. It's also Women's History Month. There's also something going on every single day. We wanted to do like the museum of technology, maker stuff, like here's every Arduino board, electronics and computers that influenced us and obviously Max, especially old Max, I think helped get us a lot of us here. Yeah. Hypercard we talked about last week. Yes. And just like really weird stuff. In fact, the stuff that we're trying to do for Marchintosh is a month long celebration of Retro Max is kind of the weird stuff. So the first thing that I wanted to show is the Quick Take camera. The Quick Take, yeah, I got it. It's the Quick Take 150. And this was digital cameras years ago. And if you look on Flickr, they have every Apple camera which is all phones now. But then there's three at the bottom and there's I think three pictures that were posted in the last year and it's from our camera. So we still have it. It's like 26 years old. G-Pen's have G-Pen's, man. Yeah, 27, 26, 27 years old. That format in a while. Yeah, so let's watch the video. We have a, we photograph an artist and then there's a little commercial. One of the things that I'm doing as we publish these stories and these old retro photos and people are sharing their experiences. I'm trying to dig up the old ads of what they were saying. Like this is the future and see how it matches up to today's expectations and more so. Here's the first one. Before, after, before, after, before. How do you get from before to after? Simple. Introducing the Apple Quick Take digital camera. It makes everything you do look better. And that was the manual that you can check out as well. And so this, do you know what this is? It's like, is it like a trash can? No, it's a Roomba. No, what, it calls Roomba. This is the first Apple wireless trash can. Now, this is a speaker that goes along with the 20th anniversary Mac. And, yeah. And it's really a beautiful machine. They did this, we have a video with Johnny Ive and it's from a long time ago and you can see all that went into it. Look at that fan, by the way. Look at that fan there. That's like, they would not let you do that now. Yeah, all the Tam and there's this giant umbilical cord style. The connector is, yeah. The connector is like what, it's like what aerospace monstrosity is it? Yeah. And they, like, SPDIF did not exist. They really loaded up it. CD-ROM and had PB tuner, Ethernet. It was neat. And so on it, though, there was a, when you started it up, there was this rendering, like state-of-the-art at the time. This like, you know, three- I don't think you guys see this. This 320 by 240 rendering. So I'm not gonna play the entire thing. It's just, I'm gonna play some of it. It is so 90s. Everything about it is 90s. I love it. And so we're gonna play that. But check out, we're doing most of this on Tumblr. So check out www.atorfruit.tumblr.com. And... I can just smell the RC Cola. Yeah. And, yeah, we'll come back after this video and show you some other stuff. But it's really neat to take a look. Really big fan. That's how far we've come. So here we go. There are some things in life that capture one's soul. Like design that goes beyond the ordinary. Compelling beauty and grace. A sweeping curve. The perfect line. In the pursuit of design, humankind continues to make better and more elegant solutions. From furniture to architecture to the tools we use every day, the unity of form and function can't help but make an impact on our lives. Balance. Contrast. Texture. Color. And some deeper meaning. Art is design. Design is art. Life is kept exciting by the discoveries that emerge. They keep us looking forward, reaching for new ideas and innovations. Apple's 20th anniversary Macintosh. A design for the future. Steve, what do you want to put on the center there? I don't know. Let's put another little one in the middle. Okay, if that's fine. All right, so that's the 20th anniversary Mac. And more head. We have more days in the month. So the next thing, and this I thought would be a special treat for y'all out there and for our lady. This is the Apple II reference manual. Set this by a kind person. I didn't ask them if we could say who sent it to us, but we have the red book. And this was, I'll just show some of the pages. Yeah, it's actually handy when we do the floppy disk. 1978, no, it has been. It was like, this was like sent out with like the... It's a manual. Yeah, you know, you want, here's your computer. You get some schematics. So I'm going to go to the... It's Apple part number four. Yeah, 1978. And let's need stuff. Here's the, here's some, I don't know what happened here. Oh, I didn't do that. I don't know. Well. Let me turn it back off. Well, let's see what's going on here. I want a good overhead. Yeah, I know this. Let's see. Well, luckily we just posted up photos and everything. Unknown, why it doesn't have any signal on our... Oh, that's way too hard. Little overhead. It's our new overhead too. Little overhead. Maybe I'll try now. Well, we also have a sticker. Well, I love that half of this is assembly code. It's literally this assembler, like in the back. Hand drawn. Signal. I don't like this. There should be signal. There's no signal. Main screen turned on. Yeah. Well, the other thing it could be and... Did I kick something maybe? What? No, I don't think so. But I'm kind of determined now. Okay. Hi. Nice. Did you just unplug it and plug it back in again? I defrag the hard drive. You know, form follows function and function follows form. And sometimes you just have to... Hi. Design. Design. Yeah. I do have this giant cable that kind of runs everything. Yeah. Anyways, thanks for bearing with us. Our kid is teething too. I think she was gnawing the wires. Oh, yeah. So why don't you find a schematic page? I think the... Well, this is just cool. So kind of show like, there's like, they're like, hey, by the way, here's like a mini assembler and they just have like... Here, just type this in. Just type this in? Like what was the thought process here? I don't know. Yes. This is their mini assembler by S. Wozniak. Yeah. And a bomb. So that's kind of cool. So they have a couple of different... They have the pseudo machine interpreter. Here's the floating point routine. So that's kind of cool. Neat. This is by Wozniak, 1977. And you're probably wondering, boy, it'd be great if I can get a copy of this. Don't worry, you can't. We link to archive.org where there's a copy of it. This is all the assembly instructions and the flags and the jump and whatever. Okay, here's the hardware, system timing and schematic. So they're like, here's what you put it together. Okay, no problem. Here's what you just put it together. Oh, you start with the preliminary manual. Okay. So this is AC line. And they're like, here's some RF modulators you can use. Oh, do you want to be behind us? Cause we're in the way of the cool text. Yeah, so you can get like the pixieverter. That's a cool name, the pixieverter, or the RF modulator from Berlin games. So they're like, here's how you... So usually it's like, you know, there's no drawings cause it's always like... There's some in there. There's some, but there's not a lot. So they're like, here's how you can wire stuff together. Here's how to connect RS232. And they're like, yeah, no problem. We were just gonna get like a little piece of strip board, wire up a resistor to be, you know, level shifter bias transistor. And here's a teletype routine. You could code in if you wanted to connect to teletype. Let's see. And then here's the layout of the main board. It's a beautifully laid out board. I mean, like, look at that. All the chips in a row. And this is the slots for peripherals. And they're just like, hey, by the way, like, you know, here's the addresses and it's connected to a 74 LS series cassette jack. And they're like, here's the impedance for it. And it's like very, very low level details of like, okay, you want to click to peripheral. It's like, you know, if you're... It's open source hardware before open source hardware. It's like using a microcontroller, right? It's like, you have your IOPort, 8-bit port and then they're like strobe it and you have some interrupts and the IRQ and like the ready and reset lines. You know, it's basically the same thing. This is a beautiful drawing. I like these connectors. The famous power connector, which has plus minus 12, plus minus five. Power supplies. I remember there was a couple of articles. Raspberry Pi, GPIO or something. It's like that, but it's, you know, not quite. I think it's a five volts. I think the logic, I actually don't know if the logic was five volts or 12 volts. I'm assuming it's five. And then the memory map. And it's like, oops, made a little mistake here. So they redrew it. It's kind of nice that they didn't pick, you know, they didn't clean it up. They're just like, go to print. Go to print. All the timing. Oh, this is a beautiful, look at this beautiful drawing. Oh, that's so cool. Zoom in a little bit. Yeah, this one's nice. Look at that. See the peripheral bus and how it connects back and forth between the different peripherals. The video generator, a peripheral IO, onboard IO. And then, hold on, down here, you can see the speaker. Neat. Yeah. This is the MPU 6502. And then this is the oscillator. And they have the little crystal driver here. So this like generates all of your clocks. And you're just using some, you know, some, some simple 195. I don't know what that is. It's like an SL voucher. And then the RAM counters. And these are the RAM chips. So they're just like, hey, you just get a bunch of RAM chips. Yeah, these are, these are just various little counters and dividers. Here's your RAM. Just, it's just one big array. And let's see. The IO port. I like that they have all the, you know, the port numbers and everything. Yeah. And it's like, here's the, here's a 553 quad timer. So this is how a lot of people are like, oh, you know, you have a joystick, right? Which is a potentiometer. But then how do you take a potentiometer to digital circuitry? You use the input of the potentiometer into a 555 or 553, in which case it's a quad timer. And then the pulses that come out, you measure the width of them and that tells you what the resistance is. Cause the capacitive is set here to fix capacitance and flexible resistance. And then there's the speaker driver, just a simple, you know, class A with a Darlington driver. And the little, yeah, I mean, it's like all very, it's, you know, it's funny. This actually would be a great, you know, if you're learning digital circuits, these days, I know like it's all done, you know, emulator style now, but it'd be really cool for somebody to study and analyze like what's happening on each page, like how are all the circuits used? Like, look at this like 555 cursor flasher, right? They're like, okay, we're gonna flash the cursor on the screen. Well, it's just, there's just a 555 that does it. And it sends a signal to the video generator. And yeah, this is just the composite out. I mean, like amazing that he got composite out using just like this logic level circuitry. And if you look at, this is a sticker from 1978, not bad quality, you can, Well, they use lead back then. Yeah, and you can see, you know, this is where the disk cut is. And you could, we could peel this off, but we're not gonna do that. We're gonna store this in a safe place. These are very vivid colors. We also wanted to kind of tell the story. So if you asked, like, who designed that Apple logo? A lot of people to know. It was Ron, sorry, Rob Jenoff in 1977. And he was an art director at Regis McKenna, tested design logo for Steve Jobs. They wanted something to show it was an Apple with a bite out of it. You can look at the previous one. It's like this new, like ink drawing. It was a beautiful drawing. Yeah. Yeah. And they didn't want it to be mistaken for a cherry or any other type of fruit. They also wanted to show that it was color because that was a big deal, color screens. So. Yeah. You can see the color. Not, you know, it had like eight colors. So continue to check out our retro journey. There's a lot of neat stuff in computing history. And it's fun to kind of watch some of the folks on the social media to say, oh, is this a rendering? Because it doesn't seem real. It's like, what do you mean Apple made a, you know, a digital camera? Now there's, you know, every phone's a camera. So neat stuff. And look at the hashtag Marchintosh. And you can see what's going on. There's a lot of people posting cool stuff. And that is this week's retro. Okay. It's Python on hardware time. And we got some stuff going on. The newsletter is gigantic this week. Thank you so much, Ann, for putting in all the work that makes this, I think, the best and most popular Python on hardware newsletter. Yes. So a couple bits of news, and then we'll go into what I think is a big story this week, MicroPython support for the Raspberry Pi Pika W. It is progressing. If you want to play around with it, you can check it out. There is Bluetooth support for the Pika W and MicroPython does pull requests in progress. And there's experimental builds already that you can play around with. Yeah. Yeah. And you'll want to use our Blue Fruit Connect if you want to, like, actually use it. Yeah. I mean, we have a great app that implements and uses the Nordic, sorry, the Nordic UART standard because BLE doesn't have a profile for UART. So, like, Nordic kind of made one up. And it's sort of standardized because, you know, Nordic has so many chips. So you can use our app. It's a great free, ad-free little chat app that you can communicate now and forth. And we just updated it on Android. CircuitPython 804 released a couple of updates, fixes, enhancements, the printing, the software reboot message that works now, and then some board-specific changes. Still have some new issues, but please check it out. We're going to be doing more updates and then we'll be releasing, of course, probably, like, final, final as we... I think we're waiting on some GIFIO fixes. But, yes, we're getting close. Getting close. You know, whenever we do a big release like A8, there's always going to be a ton of churn right afterwards because we get so many bug reports. And we're doing a lot of work with IMX as well. And then, of course, unending stories. I think some of the neat things in the newsletter is what's going on in the community, what other folks are sharing their stuff. This is PyDog. This is a Raspberry Pi 4 running Python. And it's a dog. You can make your own little dog. Make a robot dog friend, not a robot dog enemy. This is neat. Charlotte has an interview with Embedded FM. If you've seen her work, it's really great. And she's a lot ofator for her stuff. A lot of circuit Python too. And then, just go through and look at all of the projects and more. It is never ending. There is something to do with Python on hardware everywhere if you have anything that you've ever wanted to do. Stop here first and just get some ideas from physical computing, interfacing with things that maybe we're never meant to be interfaced with to making your own games to a menagerie of hardware. It's happening in a lot of it because of the community of folks out there producing libraries. And that's what our big news this week is. We're up to 100 libraries in the community bundle. That means what? Thanks. Fan. Library fan. Yeah. Ah. So what are the libraries? So why don't you talk about what are the community bundles? Yes. It's a community bundle. There's 100 of them now. And then maybe you can give an example of something that's worked out really well in the community bundle. So we have the main Adafruit bundle. And that's the bundle that Adafruit employees and engineers and people that Adafruit pays. Design libraries, sorry, write libraries for mostly our designs. And it allows us to support our hardware. And we kind of maintain them and keep them to date and close PRs and issues and stuff. And then there's people who write libraries for CircuitPython that, again, will work through Blinka with any Linux computer or even desktop computer through a USB to GPIO converter. So it's like you write the library once and then it runs everywhere. That CircuitPython or micro, sorry, CircuitPython or CPython will run. And so we have a couple hundred libraries. I don't remember how many. It's like 200 or 300 libraries. But then I saw recently Cgrover put in some analog to digital converters and some PWM generators and also FOMIGuy and some other community members have been working on a lot of Adafruit display IO, which is our display like Sprite and layered base graphics engine for CircuitPython, adding more built-in devices like gauges and gauges and scroll bars, not scroll bars, but slider bars, buttons, like other user interface elements by like building up the frame buffer image. And like they just need to have their own little object. And so they're kind of spitting out a lot of those graphical elements. And so there's quite a few in the community bundle. Anyone's welcome to do a PR to add your library and there's some benefit to it. You're like, why would I do that? First up, we will automatically, every time there's a new CircuitPython release, we will, and every night that there's a new release within your GitHub repo or GitLab repo, if you've pushed a version update, like if you've tagged a new version, we will grab that code, we'll stuff it into the zip file that you can download every night that gives you all the libraries, all the examples. And then we'll also perform the compression, which I can't remember the name of, the MPY compress. We'll run that on your code so people don't have to like do that on their own. They get like the .mpy file. And I believe also if you're using our CPY pip, sorry, it's not MicroPip, which is the MicroPython version, it's CirCup, which is like an automatic updater for your CircuitPython boards. Make sure you have the latest libraries. People will be able to get the bundle and that'll automatically, like instead of going to every repo, they go to the bundle, it has everything, and then they can update all their libraries at once. It has all the dependency graph as well. So it's kind of just like our little way of making it easy for boards to automatically update themselves, code to know what dependencies they have. And like we make all the bundle very nice and pretty. So whenever I start a new project, I'll usually download the latest bundle so I can get all the latest libraries. So I'll be like, oh, I want this, this, this, this, and you pick and choose a little bundle. Yeah, go to circuitpython.org. You can always get the latest build for your board. And then you can also get the latest libraries that keep you up to date. And there's a lot of UI element dashboard widgets, all these things for the big... And lots of sensors. And like, we don't have every sensor and device. Like people are like, I want to add this OLED display. And I'm like, I don't have that OLED display. But if you want to add a driver and you put it in the community bundle. And yeah, it kind of just kind of gets kept up to date so it doesn't have as much link raw, I think. This is the big deal. I think that the next chapter of microcontrollers is this where we've all spent a lot of time having the appiled code that's kind of over. You can now just kind of do real-time stuff. And then like, oh, like how do I update my board? This is impossible. I can never find the latest firmware. Uh, we made that easy now. It's getting all the drivers. And community bundles also like automated. So it's like, there's a human that does the final PR approval, but a lot of it is pre-checked for you and to make sure that everything is named correctly and within not all like coding standards, but just we look for like really obvious mistakes. We're like, hey, you like made, you have like a serious typo that might mean that your code has bugs. We do have automated linters that check that for you. Yeah. So hopefully this will continue to do what it's been doing, which is getting you making things, sharing things as fast as possible. Of course you can dig in really deep and do a lot of other stuff, but this is when you want to do that project and you just want it to work and prototype fast. Great for educators. You're spending more time doing instead of managing. And one more thing, we have a guide in the learning system on how to write libraries and submit to the community bundle. So if you're like, I want to do this, check out the learning system and just type in how to write circuit Python library. It's one of the guides that comes up. We deliver this newsletter every single week to your inbox. It's a separate site for daily.com and we don't harvest your emails, you don't track, we don't spam, we don't do anything like that. So go over there if you want, or you can just read on the web. There's RSS feed for two. All that stuff, it doesn't matter. We want you to get the best way to read newsletters to you. We're an open source hardware company. To prove it, we publish our files, we have guides, we do all this stuff. What's on the big board this week lately? A couple of guides. I think we have only like two guides this week. Yeah, I was going to go behind us. Yeah, because we're kind of huge. Okay. We've got a super great guide from Liz. It's the MIDI-controlled robot liar with circuit Python. She's been working on this for quite a while. I just thought it'd be fun. You know, people are always like, oh, I want to make a robot harp. Harps are really big guys, but a liar is a small Mediterranean instrument that has fewer strings. And so it actually is practical to try to make a robotic version. Liz did a great job. It sounds beautiful. It's of course, MIDI-controlled. And she has all the files that you can build your own. I think we've done the robot drumming machine. We did the robot metallophone and now we have the robot liar. So we're really close to having the full robotic band. Super psyched about. And we have a little short video to play. In this project, you'll build a robot liar that uses MIDI-controlled servo motors to pluck its strings. The robot uses the PCA9685 to drive the servo motors. It's connected over I squared C to a Feather RP2040 running circuit Python. The circuit Python code listens for incoming MIDI messages over USB. If a note is played that matches the array, then the corresponding servo is moved. The build rests on a piece of acrylic paired with 3D printed parts. These include a cage that places the servos directly above each string and horn extenders to pluck the strings. You can control the robot liar with a MIDI controller via USB MIDI host or through a DAW by configuring the robot as a MIDI output. See how you can start building your own robot band by checking out the learn guide at learn.adafruit.com. And some factory footage. That's what we do during the day. All right, let's do some 3D printing. We have a speed up video. We're going to play that. Then we're going to jump right into IMPI and then a gigantic top secret section. So here we go. IMPI brought to you by DigiAdafruit this week is Nordic, Lady Ada. What is this week? It's new product introduction. Glad you asked. This is the Nordic NRF 7002. It's their first Wi-Fi chip. Very exciting. We love to cover the new stuff from Nordic. Here we've covered like all the NRF 52, 53, the 91 series. And now they're kind of heading into, they're charting new territory. They're going into the Wi-Fi chipset zone with the N7002. So seven series, which is Wi-Fi. And what's interesting about this is that this is a Wi-Fi like accessory chip. It doesn't, there's obviously a microcontroller of some sort inside, but you don't write code for it. Instead you sort of load a binary blob and then you can communicate with this chip over SPI or QSPI and it does like the Wi-Fi part for you. It's like a Wi-Fi module, but it's just like the chip. It's very simple. It's fairly inexpensive and it's very powerful. It actually has a couple of things going for it because a lot of people might be like, well, why would I use this instead of like an all in one Wi-Fi chip? Like an expressive, there's reasons for using the NRF 7000. We'll talk about what those could be. So here's some details. So first thing they put, which I think is kind of the most interesting is it does two channels. It does both the 2.4 gigahertz standard and the five gigahertz. And that's not usual. Most Wi-Fi modules and chipsets only support one, you know, usually 2.4 gigahertz. Another thing is it has coexistence for like an antenna. So it will not bash over. Like if it won't transmit 2.4 gigahertz data while the Bluetooth is trying to transmit at the same time and like thus collide in the air, you have a coexistence interface pin so it knows like, okay, now I can go and then they switch off turn by turn. It can of course act as a station or an access point for provisioning. It has QSPI as the interface or SPI so it can be either like very simple or very high bend with data transfer back and forth. And this is, you know, this is their glamour shop. It also shows that outline is all the components that you need to run this. So you have to cut, you know, your standard crystal. A bunch of passives looks like, you know, one inductor, a couple of big caps, some small caps and that's it. It's very simple. It's very integrated. And then on the left you see, there's I think an antenna switch, very low cost Balan. And then you just put in your antenna, your 2.4 slash 5 bigger antenna and you're good to go. So the host connection, you know, as you see here is you have the host MCU. They do target the NRF 53, I think the 52 and the 991 cellular series at this time. Well, you know, you could use other host MCUs. I'll be honest, right now the code is really like optimized for their own. You see, there is the SPI interface, there's the IRQ, there's the buck enable and then the coexistence interface. So if your host MCU is say, you know, like I said in NRF 53, you have a Bluetooth antenna, you don't want it to send data at the same time or try to receive data while the Wi-Fi is transmitting because you're gonna get overwhelmed with the Wi-Fi signal. It just has a smart coexistence, which is quite nice. So it's well suited for using with their chips. You will need a pretty beefy chip. So in this case, the NRF 53, which I think is a Cortex M33, if I recall correctly, and it has, you know, probably a mega flash and like quarter mega RAM. You do have the entire Wi-Fi driver running on the NRF 53, including the SSL stack. So, you know, it's non-trivial. You will need to have a good amount of memory to buffer your packets, send data back and forth to the chip, which has, you know, it has its own RX and TX buffers, but like you're still gonna have to do quite a bit of work. So you can't run this on a low grade microcontroller. You'll need something probably a Cortex M0 at the least to connect through their networking stack. They do have code available through the SDK, which of course is really good. There's Zephyr, so that's a RTOS, it's very popular. I do recommend it. I'll show later that there's an example that somebody got the Zephyr version working and they have it stacked by step instruction on how to do it. There's also OSAL, that's like a operating system, something layer, interfacing layer. So, in theory, you could port this to other platforms if you wish, but again, a lot of people so far have been using either, basically using Zephyr within the NRF SDK. So it's interesting that this is because you're like, okay, you know, like there's a separate chip and like what's the deal? Why didn't they just make like a chip with one of their ARM Cortex cores inside? But it reminded me a lot of the NRF 8001. So the NRF 8001 is, for those who remember, was Nordics like first Bluetooth chip. Again, like eight Bluetooth one first. And this was an SPI. You can see the SPI pins at the bottom, two VLE converter chip. And this was like actually kind of like the first chip that allowed you to do something like this. Previous Nordic had been doing like the NRF 24 series, which is about 2.4 gigahertz. And then they were like, we're so good at 2.4 gigahertz, so let's go and do Bluetooth LE. So they did Bluetooth LE and we, you know, there's books I think that are even published about using this module. One of the nice things about it, it was simple enough that you could connect it up to something like an Arduino. We have a bunch of projects. This is like an ancient project where, you know, you wire this up to an Arduino. I think it was Arduino Nano or Pro Micro. I don't remember exactly what that board is. Some new pixels and you can control it through our app. Pro Micro, because I think that's the one that we helped. We were accredited on helping design it. Yeah, they're doing a micro. Right, sorry. It's been, it's been a lot of minute. It's been a lifetime. It's been a long time. And, you know, it's funny. It's like you can have 20 characters because I think that's the limit of the packet size that you could send through the NRF 8,000. I mean, we could have had multiple packets, but it was, you know, that was the limitation. It's a very early implementation of Bluetooth LE energy. But this, you know, this was how you basically use Nordic stuff to connect to LE. And then they very quickly updated it and created the NRF 51, which was a Cortex M0 with like, I think 16K of RAM, very minimal. But, you know, just enough RAM that you could run the, the Bluetooth stack, the soft device on this Cortex M0, you could program it. It was like standalone. There was code that you could run that used the built-in Bluetooth interface. And then, you know, after the NR51, they improved it with the NR52, which is a Cortex. I think that was when they went to the M3 or M4. Cortex 52840, which is an M4 and now the 53. So it seems like their natural progression is to start with the SPI separate interface. And then they build up and then I have, you know, I don't work for Nordic, I can't speak to them. But it seems reasonable to me that they're going to update their design for the NRF 7002 and eventually make a version that has an RR Cortex inside, which would be really cool because Nordic is really, really good at low power, well documented, stable API, chipsets, peripherals. Like their stuff is very high quality, very low power. And they've very good support for their API layers. They have like lots of very smart engineers that work for them. And so, you know, even though you can get cheaper Bluetooth chips than Nordic, you can't get better ones, right? So I think it is interesting that they're, you know, when they're approached to getting into the WiFi spaces to go with something like that has dual bands and has like this really cool interface. Like it's a very fully featured advanced chip and then they'll probably start integrating it afterwards. There's also a development kit. So this features on the right, you can see there is the NRF 7000 and then above that I think is the NRF 53. And then there's the native USB above it. And then to the left, there's kind of the Arduino mega-ish pinout zone. All the pins are brought out on the NRF 53 because remember that the 7002 is just acting as a peripheral. You can connect like shields and stuff to it. And there's a Sega J-Link interface for debugging. So this is kind of their dev kits. They're fairly inexpensive. Then you can see there's two antennas. There's a 2.4 gigahertz and a five gigahertz as well as RF test points. Yeah, here it goes. Debugger, debug ports, built-in current measurement, capability, 5340 SoC antennas and antennas. And so you can also test the coexistence stuff with that. I also just kind of peeked around. This chip is quite new. Like really, I think they've just put them in stock. I see Fanstel is going to be releasing modules. So this could be kind of nice because you just pop it on, connect it to SPI and like this is ready to go. So you can have gigahertz band. And I do think that you can use the N52, 53 or 91 but it'll probably get ported to other chips as well. So your IMX series, maybe your RP2040 could all take advantage of this. And Digikey carries the Fanstel module. So when they exist, I'm sure Digikey is going to stock them. There's also a couple of blog posts that I checked out. We're too bad. There's the step-by-step instructions on how to implement MQTT with the NRF 70002 on that DK. They also have a Nifty Provisioner app. So because they're kind of expecting you to run this on their cellular or Bluetooth capable chipsets as like the host controller, you can then use their Provisioner and like they have like quick code that you just kind of link in. And now you can put in the Wi-Fi credentials for like a device for a product via the BLE and it kind of all happens all magically. So you don't have to write that part of your code but if you think advantage of like, oh, instead of doing the access point thing, which you can do but I find very annoying, you can use Bluetooth instead. And then finally, I did see also Goliath which is a friends the fruit and they have a IoT service. They did a really nice step-by-step tutorial on using Zephyr with the NRF 70002 connecting to their API and then doing a remote procedure calls back and forth to your main board. So then it didn't look too bad. It was like, oh, you just have to clone Zephyr and then you run it. It's very advanced. It's a very powerful programming system and debug framework. Rehobo on Ditchki. Yes, they're in stock. Although it didn't load and click but there was 5000 in stock earlier. Press refresh there. But there were 5000 stock, a couple of bucks a piece and the developers are not in stock yet but they will be soon. All right, and they have a short video. We're gonna play that and then we're gonna jump right into top secret which we have a bunch of stuff and get to your questions. Hi, let me introduce you to Nordic's first Wi-Fi solutions. The NRF 70002 dual band Wi-Fi 6 companion I see and the NRF 70002 development kit. Finally available for anyone to start developing. The NRF 70002 is Nordic's first Wi-Fi product. It is the Wi-Fi 6 companion I see adding Wi-Fi connectivity to a host processor. As with all of our products our focus for the NRF 70002 was on what we do best, low power wireless. It takes advantage of the new low power features introduced in Wi-Fi 6. Target wake time allows the client device using the NRF 70002 to negotiate a wake up schedule with the access point that is connected to. This gives you excellent control over the responsiveness and power consumption of your Wi-Fi devices. Orthogonal frequency division, multiple access or OFDMA divides up the channel bandwidth to allow multiple devices access simultaneously. The Wi-Fi channel can be divided into several subcarriers. This is super useful for dense deployments with many devices that don't need to send too much data like sensor arrays. Not all current Wi-Fi networks out there are Wi-Fi 6 capable. That's why we've made the NRF 70002 backwards compatible with older standards. This enables you to build a device that can be implemented into most existing networks. For similar reasons, we also made the NRF 70002 dual band capable supporting 2.4 and 5 gigahertz. This gives the advantage of higher 5 gigahertz speeds and the less congested band or use the 2.4 gigahertz for better range. In summary, this enables you to build versatile products that integrate into most Okay, we're gonna go right into top secrets. So we're gonna play some of the videos that we've been doing late at night and these are all stuff that's coming out. Some of it is like real time and then we're gonna go into three new board designs that you just sent over. These are hot, hot off the press. So here we go. Hey, lady, what is this? This is an IntelliQuiz USB. This is an accessibility board and what we're gonna try to do is get it working with our USB host feather with the RP2040 where it's a very low cost feather that has USB host built in. And it's something that's really interesting but so we'll do a couple of videos but it uses these custom overlays. So this is a touchpad and then you have different overlays that have different capabilities and it knows which overlay you just inserted if you see these like little black marks here. Like on the other side, this one has like three marks. Inside here are some photo cells that can detect which overlay got inserted. So like when this gets in like so it goes beep. It goes beep. And then if you see on my notepad as I type. Well, this works. Yeah, except I can't type very well. But those are custom overlay makers that you can do. So this is kind of me. It's like a very useful accessibility tool. Thanks to AT makers who made a driver and also let us know how cool it would be if this was able to work on a device that's just preassembled, ready to go, plug and play because the internal chip and you might wonder why can't you just use it now? You can on Windows 10 but it has a special chip inside. It's like the Cypress Easy USB family that downloads firmware when it connects over USB which means that basically since this isn't made anymore it's really hard to get this working with modern operating systems like Windows 10 or Mac. It's not gonna work with devices like iOS or Android or Chrome that don't have the special firmware downloader. So this is gonna be like a little HID remap or type thing where it's going to detect that an intelligent keys is plugged into here, download the firmware in and then turn it into a normal keyboard. This will just look like a regular keyboard with all of the overlay stuff working. So hopefully coming soon to the blog. Hi, Lady, what was this? We are testing out some new feathers here. This is our RP2040 Bones board, RP2040 basic with USB-C buttons, eight megabytes of flash. And in the space left over we've got an RFM69 module. This could also be a Laura WAN module. Sorry, a Laura module that can run Laura WAN stack on the RP2040 but this is just a plain RFM69. We've got a spot for wire antenna, a UFL antenna connector. So it's good for connecting larger antennas, a semi-QT and I've got another one over here and if you back up a little bit, you'll see when I press the button on one it appears on the other one. So hold on, I'll flip this over and then I press the button on here, it sends the message over. So they're communicating with each other and I also get the signal strength which is a good way for me to test that my antennas are working. So all are good. Next up, I'm going to try Laura. All right, Lady, what is this? This is a new feather. This is the RP2040 e-ink feather. So we took our bones file, which is RP2040 with eight megabytes of flash and a semi-QT and in a little space over to the right, instead of a radio module or DVI connector, we've got the circuitry for e-ink display. So the display is kind of all used the same 24 pin connector, which means that this can drive displays from like one inch diagonal to seven and a half inch diagonal. Cause again, they all use the same pinout, nice beefy power supply here and all the circuitry you need. And then it's connected to the eight extra GPIO pins that are not brought out on the feather. So you get the SPI, you get the chip select reset, all that good stuff and a power pin for the NeoPixel so it can be used in low power mode. So they'll be good for standalone e-ink projects coming soon to the Adafruit shop. Hey lady, what is this? This is a prototype of our RP2040 USB host feather. And now you're probably saying, Hey, you know, the RP2040 only has one USB port. Well, none of you bit bang USB hosts with PIOs. And we've got that added to teeny USB. And over here, this inductor is part of a five-volt boost converter, which means you'll be able to run off a battery as well. It could be kind of neat. Got semi-QT, eight megabytes of flash, all the buttons and crystals. And yeah, you got a port there. And then what we're running is the HID device report, which is an example in teeny USB. So when I plug in this SNES, like joystick thingy, you'll see over there the report. And you can even see, like as I press the buttons, different bits go on and off. So this is receiving HID keyboard or mouse data, just fine, ready for some future projects soon in the Adafruit shop. How cool is that? All right, lady, what is this? I'm testing out a new Feather Bones board I made that is specifically designed for ink displays. So it's got RP2040, battery backup buttons and semi-QT. And the little area here is the ink driver circuitry. And I'm testing it out with two displays. One is here every day, 2.13 inch tricolor display. And it's working nicely there. And then this one is a cool 5.65 inch seven color ASAP display. So these displays have seven different colors, red, yellow, white, green, black, violet, something else that I'm orange. And so this is, we have some art from Bruce that has some cool Adafruit characters. This one just takes a really long time to update. But as normal ink goes, once it's been updated, you can remove the power and it stays on. So it's kind of neat, like so. All right, lady, what is this? This is CANception. We've got this new board we're gonna put in the store. This is a CANbus transceiver. It uses the TJ1051, which is a nice high-speed CAN transceiver from NXP. And you got like an on-off switch for the termination and here it is. So you can use it with a board that has native CAN like this ESP32S2. And then to test it, I wanna have like another CAN device that it talks to. So I've got a Feather M4 CAN here. And every time the LED blinks, it's sending a message over the CANbus lines. And then I press this down and it says, okay, I've received the message on the secondary. You know, it's connecting to the native CAN on here. It says, I've received the message from the Feather M4 and I'm even powering it from the same board. So it makes for a very quick test for this transceiver. Very nice in the shop very soon. All right, lady, what is this? This is a new product we're about to put in the shop. It's our CANbus Feather Wing that features the MCP2515, which is an SPI CAN controller. And then there's a CAN transceiver on here as well. It's supposed to use this with any of our feathers, even ones that don't have native CAN controllers in them to connect to and send receive data on a CANbus. Some devices like this Metro ESP32S2 have native CAN. And so we're actually kind of doing a thing where it tests itself by having the native CAN talk to one of our CANPAL transceivers, which then connects to the pads over here on the CAN Feather Wing. And so one CANbus goes through SPI, one goes through native, and they send messages back and forth. And when they beep, you know that data was sent successfully back and forth. So this board is fully tested and ready to go in the shop to add to your next Feather project. All right, lady, what is this? One of the things I've been showing off lately is how we're using this RP2040 to program ESP32 modules and chips very quickly. So this is our Wi-Fi air lift that uses an ESP32. And I used to use a Raspberry Pi computer to program the ESP32 using ESP tool. But thanks to the really good code from TAC that pre-compresses with GZIP, the file is actually quite fast to burn the NENA firmware over your, this time, two megabits per second. It does the MD5 check. And then the last verification is to make sure that this ESP board is working well, we over SPI ask it to scan the Wi-Fi and verify that it sees the Adafruit access point. And if it does, it does a little rainbow dance over here so that we know that it's past test. So this new version of the air lift Feather Wing with Stemic UT is coming to the shop soon. What is this? This is a tester for the upcoming product number 5710 which is the DVI Feather to just update this board which came without a silkscreen. But new pieces will come in and here's the board under test. And what's neat is we're using our own five inch HDMI display as the DVI output test. So this Pico loads over USB, the UF2 to do the test as a GPIO test. And then, hey, check that out. The test okay symbols signal appears on the DVI display. So that's how we know that the HDMI is working. So this tester is pretty fast. Eight seconds a little of the firmware and do the DVI output test on the GPIO. So pretty happy with this. It'll be in the store soon. All right, and then you've got some boards. Yeah, I started, I'm kind of getting back to some designs from a couple of years ago. So this is a DWM, this is a ultra wideband chip set module. They're not cheap, but like they kind of do one thing that no other modules do, which is indoor positioning, which is really hard to do. So this, that's the module kind of above your head. And yeah, this design was from 2020 or 2021. And then again, we couldn't fabricate it because we couldn't get modules. The modules are available again. So this is the feather wing version. And then the next thing is, this is the feather RP20 version, 40 version. So there's like a little bit of space over there where we'd have the DVI port or E-Connect or whatever. So I just stuck that module instead and the antenna hangs over, but that's okay because you actually want to have the antenna unimpeded. It's not unusual to see them hang off of boards because they give the better, you want like a lot of empty space around it so you can get clear signal from the other nodes to do that pinpoint locations. This is the 16 bit, Iceworth C DAC chip. So we have like a couple of 12 bit DACs in the shop. But let's say you want more bits because you're like, I want really precision analog output. This is a nice analog devices chip that does a 16 bit output. It has a built in temperature commentated 2.5 volt reference as well. That is the gigantic amount of top secret we did this week. Whew. So much. Okay, we lined up some questions. We're going to do this and then we're going to bounce. Like I said, this week was all about retro and top secret because we want to get to all those. So next week will be double plus new products. Yes. Okay, they're lined up here. Lady, I'll answer some of these. You can do these. First one, does anyone make breadboards with more columns? No, they don't. If there's a standard breadboard style, what you can do though is they snap together so you can take two half sized ones and you snap them together sideways. And then it's kind of like you have more space. I'll answer this one. Number one. Oh, anyone can ask about Adabox status in the chat. So he's okay. The times that it's frustrating is when we'll let someone know, hey, here's the status. And they're like, no, I demand it to be sooner. It's like we've been in a chip shortage. But the latest is we have our prototypes. We have the redesign and we just need time. So we have to get. Yeah, we just have like, you know, 5,000 or so that we have to prepare and get out. So we're still hoping that it's in spring. It's spring now and New York is starting to get warmer. Yeah, I work on the work. Yeah, we have the prep for the boxes that they all go in. That's all done. That's all done. And there's no reason it won't go out. I guess that's good news. No, it's gonna happen. Yeah. Over the last year or so, there was lots of reasons it's just gonna go out. There wasn't parts. So anyways, it's a good one. And it's still shipping. Soon as we know, like, hey, it's four or five or six weeks out, we're gonna let everyone know because we have a lot of work to do. There's credit cards that expired because it's an authorization. People have moved the dresses. So we're gonna spend a lot of time making sure if you're a subscriber that it's getting to you. Next up, I usually see PCB designs as two or four layer. I know there are boards for more layers, but curious if there's any limitations on the maximum number of layers of PCB can have beyond manufacturing, costing, and complexity. I've seen 16 layer. I think they can go to 20 layer. I mean... What would that be for? Motherboards, where you want to have like a 32-bit bus and it has to be like, you don't want to have anything in the way and you want to get something. That's what you would have. A to B. Multiple layers. Multiple layers, lots of ground, planes, RF boards will have a lot of layers. Anything that tightly packs cell phones, obviously are gonna have easily eight to 20 layers without question. The cost goes up quite a bit. And the yield goes down. It's harder to make sure that the job, it's hard to know what's going on each layer. Make sure that they're all aligned. So, I stick to two layer, sometimes four layer. For the QT-Pie, they'll do four layer because it's just they won't fit. You have to double-sided design and do, yeah, the parts. Here's a question that someone could try to, you could use like a web search engine or a chat GPT, a chat PCB. Use your 20th anniversary math. Yeah, someone could maybe look up, if there's any place where someone has said, oh, this had the most layers of a PCB, like most layers. Like a military application problem, too. You'll never like the stealth, like the stealth bomber, really have long layers. Well, I don't know. Sometimes you'd be surprised. Sometimes they have requirements like it has to be inspectable, right? You can only inspect it, these like. For those too many layers. There has to be something like that. Someone knows somewhere. Okay, what happens to your prototype boards that have been turned into a physical product? The green ones, where do they go? Do they have a special bin? Well, sometimes they work and if they work and they're like the final version, they get used as the tester, like the test the tester, so we call them golds. And what's nice is they're greens that don't get mixed with a regular stock. And so we use them to verify that the tester still functions before we do a PCB run. And then sometimes I just keep them in my bins and sometimes I use them for something. During COVID when there is, well, it's still COVID, but during the different forms of COVID with shutdowns and stuff, we had to use green PCBs. Yeah, I couldn't get to the colors. Okay, last question tonight. Typical boards have a couple of trays if you want to do something like disable LED on the board. Do you see ultra mini switches becoming small and cheap enough to allow for faster change or to avoid resoldering? What's an interesting idea? Gold. I've seen them and like, I'm a little mixed because they can be damaged. You know, they're susceptible to water and moisture and they'll oxidize. So I'm not a huge fan of switches which is for something where not, if I don't feel like in the normal use of it, you're going to go back and forth. Okay. I'll answer this one from the other chat because we've said probably before. Circuit Playground Express RP2040, yeah, probably. Yeah, probably. Probably. And I think Okay. That is it. Thanks everybody. For our show for tonight. Thank you so much everybody. This has been an eight of fruit production. We appreciate all of your help and support and all the things. Don't forget the code is Redbook. Yes. For this Redbook. And we'll see everybody next week. Special thanks to Jessie May behind the scenes, especially to our team. Thank you to the Redbook. Our customers, our community, everyone for helping this thing go. And congrats to all of us working on this Circuit Playground thing, 100 libraries. 100 libraries. Yeah, community bundle. Here is your moment of Xenar. Good night everybody.