 It's Ask an Engineer. Hey everybody, and welcome to Ask Engineer. It's me, Lady Aida, the engineer, with me, Mr. Lady Aida, engineer in training, on video audio control, and does a lot of other stuff around the factory. One day I'll finally get word to where I wanna go. One day you'll be in Manjir. We're here at the Idford factory, behind us you can see all the machinery and the test equipment that we use to manufacture all the goods we love. Yeah, this AnaZoom background, this is the real deal. No, it looks a little bit fake, but that's because the camera is really focused on us. It's because people don't wanna believe that there could be a woman-owned manufacturing company in New York, so they're like, it must be a background. We get emails like that. It's true. This is where we do all our shipping and manufacturing and testing and kidding and videoing and new products and web development, all that good stuff, but for the next hour, so we're gonna be checking in what's going on in the community and more. We're gonna log on online. Lots of news and we're gonna get right into it, so kick it off, Mr. Lady Aida, with the code and more. Yeah, well, first off, throughout this entire month, happy Pride Month, everybody, let's all come together and be good to each other. On tonight's show, the Code of Space Jam, 10% off a native fruit store, all the way up to when I remember to turn the code off, which could be 10 p.m., it could be 11 p.m., but you should put everything in your cart now because sometimes I get to it at 10, sometimes I get to it at 11. Who knows? No one, well, I do. We're gonna go over our live shows, including show and tell, a little bit of a recap. Time travel, look around the world, makers, actors, artists, engineers, current topics, and more. We got helpwantedjobs.adafruit.com, where you post your skills, or if you're a company, you can get some of the best people in the world to work on the thing with you that you want to have done. I mean, New York City factory footage through your printing. IonMPI brought to you by Digikey and Adafruit. We got new products, we got Top Secret, we're gonna answer your questions. We do that over on Discord, adafruit.it slash discord, where there is over 29,000 of us. Hang out there throughout the show. At the end, we answer all the questions and more, that is, ask an engineer. Woo-hoo! All right, let's pay some bills for all these skills. Space Jam's code. Space Jam? Lady Aidan, when people add stuff in their cart, they see all these free things they can get. What do they get? It's true, $99 or more. You get a free, perma-proto, half-size, breadboard PCB, gold-plated, gorgeous silk screen, perfect for making your project permanent. Gold is best. Gold is best. $149 or more, you get a free, sorry, free. Stemic UT board, we have a range of about $20 or $30 that we stock, whatever we can ship you. You'll get a different one each time if you make an account. Wonderful, I-squared-C, fun, awaits you with the world of Stemic UT. $199 or more, you get free UPS ground shipping in a continental United States, trackable, high-quality shipping. We love it, thank you, UPS. And $299 or more, you get a free circuit playground express or all-in-one development board that has a SAMB 21 and buttons and lots of Neopixels and storage and sensors. And more, it's a great way to get started with Arduino, code.org, CS Discoveries, Circuit, Python, Rust, MakeCode, and many other languages. It's really cool because it's all-in-one, no soldering acquired. Get started immediately for 25 bucks. And it's available, unlike a lot of things right now. That's true, we still have some in stock. So, it's part of our eight different live series of shows that we do every week. It's the ones I'm gonna talk about, but also we just got finished with Show and Tell. Show and Tell, every single week. Jam-packed. It's jam-packed. So, we're just gonna say go watch it on the video platform of your choice. But I will highlight one thing. We had Jenny from Edge Impulse on there talking about this Adafruit Sony Edge Impulse thing you're doing. You'll see it on our website. And then I think they might come back. But we have some cool stuff that we're doing with Edge Impulse. It happens to run on some Sony stuff. And the Sony Spresn is available in our store. It could do machine learning stuff because it's a camera and also runs Circuit Python. So, if you've been thinking about getting into something like that, go to Edge Impulse and look it up. It'll also be on our site shortly. Okay, Disc of Lady Eight is one of those live shows I was talking about. Do it every Sunday. Every Sunday, what was on the first part of Disc of Lady Eight this week? Okay, I think we did, oh yeah. We showed off that we now have ESP32-S2 native camera support. This is a cool parallel capture support. I also showed off this chip I go to drive before. This is the IS31FL3741, which is an RGB matrix driver. We talked about that and also showed off the new Backropad PCBs that came in that are in the new product this week. So, yeah, it's a nice way to get a preview of what's coming down the pipe here at Eight Fruit. Okay, then we have a feature called The Great Search and it's super handy and helpful because for lots of folks, they need to find things and Lady Eight is excellent at it, specifically using digikey.com. So, what did you help out finding this week? Okay, this week, okay, so we talked about that RGB matrix driver, but we need RGB analog LEDs. So, we talked about why am I using this and why is this a good choice over dot stars or neopixels? I also show a couple different sizes and then I show how to find common anode RGB LEDs. They can be as little as a cent on digikey, which is amazing, right, so cheap, or a couple cents, but much, much cheaper than dot stars or neopixels, for sure. So, if you need to have, I think we did the math, over like 64 LEDs, you're better off using an analog LED driver than smart LEDs. All right, and special thanks to digikey for supporting the segment that we do on Desk of Lady Eight, but also, we didn't know there was gonna be a chip shortage coming, but we started doing Desk of Lady Eight a long time ago and it's becoming one of our most popular segments, so we also sliced this video off and just put that as a standalone video across all our video channels, so do check that out. I think sometimes it's not just like finding something, it's how to think about how to find something and that, I think, is the key. It's tough, it's definitely a puzzle, right? It's like there's, there's chips and tricks that I've got from having to do this for a very long time. This is the first massive chip shortage, but this isn't our first chip shortage, there's been a couple over the years, so. You know, I've learned some techniques on how to find, drop-in alternatives or how do we design for multiple alternatives. This is what engineering's all about, it's the difference between just making the one off and making something for production. All right, JP's product pick of the week is back, JP's back from vacation. This week, take it away, JP, for the recap. Neo-key, one by four, QD, I squared C, mechanical key switch board. It has four sockets for placing your mechanical key switches and it has four underlit Neo-pixels, so you can plug this into any board that has I squared C and particularly convenient when you have STEMI QT connectors. This is plugged in over I squared C to a feather board. I've set this up to be a little keyboard shortcut board for use inside of Photoshop. If I press this first button, I switch back over to a brush, switch to the eyedropper, this is the eraser tool and here is a gradient tool. I've also set up my little rotary encoder to be a brush size, I can paint in blue, I can hit my eyedropper, switch over to this pink, switch to a different brush, maybe change the size of that, paint in there a little bit, and we can go in a race, so I'll switch over to that eraser with this little shortcut and then we can start erasing. The product pick of the week is the Neo-key one by four QT. And tomorrow J.P. returns to John Park's workshop. Welcome back. And you'll be able to get the latest Circuit Python Parsec. Also returning this week is Deep Dive with Scott. Scott's back this week as well, so tune in on Friday for Scott's Deep Dive. All right, it's time travel time. We saw Loki, that's time travel thing. That was fun. Yeah. Loki's on every Wednesday, so we'll never see it until the day after. Yeah, but we took advice from Vance as a resident Marvel expert. He says, wait till the second episode's out so you can watch the first two episodes at a time. He says, that's the way to go. Don't watch the premiere because you're just gonna be really frustrated. You wanna get at least two episodes in. I don't know. It's like have the entree with the soup, I don't know. All right, so first bit of time travel, if you don't get Adabox, you can't go back in time and get it and you wouldn't go back in time that you do something else. So here's the thing, I just got the email notification. We have less than 200 slots open because we opened a bunch more because we're not doing EU, UK and Switzerland. So we added a bunch more slots. They went really fast. We have less than 200. Go to Adabox.com, get it now. You're gonna like this Adabox. You're gonna like this Adabox. And with chip shortages and stuff, the way it goes. That's the only way to get it. Here's for the deal, with chip shortages, if there's a chip that I can't get and it has to go into Adabox, Adabox gets priority. So if there's something on the site that you're like, oh, that's so cool. I really want that, but that's weird. It's really out of stock. Why is it out of stock? It could be because there's a chip shortage and I'm reserving it for Adabox. So if you sign up, you're guaranteed to get one. Guaranteed to get whatever's in the box, which who knows what it is. All right, speaking of guaranteed, do you want a good time? I want a good time. I guarantee you'll have a good time if you watch some of Colin's lab notes videos. Take away Colin. You know that feeling of satisfaction when you finish soldering both rows of header pins? You go to pick up the board and, I don't know. Oh yes, you've soldered it wrong. Definitely, but we can fix it. Please note the following technique is not perfect and does pose risks, primarily the risk of permanently damaging your board, but it usually works. Use sharp diagonal cutters to divide the black stabilizers into strips, then use needle nose pliers to slide them off, leaving only bare pins. For each of those remaining pins, use needle nose pliers to get a good grip on the longer end. Then heat the top side pad with your iron and when the solder melts, smoothly remove the pin. It's quite satisfying, really. Use copper wick to clean up any remaining solder on the board and look at that. It's like nothing even happened. Before sending your PCB design out for manufacturing, it's always a good idea to print out a one-to-one scale copy of it on actual paper, yeah. It takes almost no effort and it gives you a physical preview of your board before committing to copper. It's surprisingly easy to overlook certain details while your design is still stuck on a screen. So place chips and connectors on the paper and make sure all the outlines and pin counts are correct. With a sheet of foam placed beneath the paper, you can even simulate mounting components. Check for any necessary slots or mounting holes and that you don't have two objects trying to occupy the same physical space. That's a good general rule. If your board has them, try using any buttons, knobs, or displays. You can patch up any ergonomic oversights now instead of having to wait for a revision too. Okay, where were we? Right, rail-to-rail op-amps can output signals with the full voltage range of their power supply, which might not sound like a big deal until you build a buffer circuit with an older design and you only see part of your signal at the output. We can get the full picture by swapping it out for a newer design like the TLV2462. Ah, there's our five-volt sine wave and we didn't have to increase the power supply voltage to get it. Thank you TLV2462. In addition to rail-to-rail output, this chip is also a low-power design. So with chips like these available, why are old op-amp designs still being manufactured? Well, not every application needs a wide output voltage swing and the LM358 goes for about one-sixth the price of a TLV2462. That'll do it. If you happen upon one of these ceramic ICs with gold-plated pins, you may be disappointed to learn that no, you have not found a golden ticket. In fact, this chip probably won't perform any better than its more forgettably-dressed siblings. Still, it's an eye-catching view into electronics history. The earliest IC packages use similar ceramic housings. Ceramic offers great electrical insulation, heat dissipation, and it's quite good at staying airtight. But why gold? Well, pure gold does not react to oxygen, so no oxidation. And no oxidation means basically zero corrosion, so a pin conductor will keep working for a very long time. Looking fancy is really just sort of a side effect. All right. This is a good-looking chip. Tune in every weekday, unless it's a holiday or Collins Off for some of the Collins Love Notes video. All right, I have a follow-up. Guess who got back to me last week? I don't know, who? There's a lot of folks who've just never got back to me. But somebody did. Somebody did. So I had emailed Siemens. They acquired Supply Frame, which owns Hackaday and Tindi. I can't put the Tindi dog in the middle there. It's like the third eye. It's where it looked good when I was putting together a graphic. And so they acquired, they as in Siemens acquired Supply Frame for what's being reported as 700 million. And part of that sale means that Hackaday, which is owned by Supply Frame, is now part of Siemens. So for folks playing at home for the first time, I founded Hackaday over 16 years ago. I have nothing to do with this at all whatsoever. I just read Hackaday like all of y'all. We have no special powers. Nothing at all. So it's interesting to me because I designed Hackaday, the logo, came up with the thing, worked on it for a bit, and then wanted to do other things. So it's now changed hands twice. But I like that it's something that's like 16 years old that is still useful and interesting enough to be part of these sales. So they got back to me and I just wanted to go over some of the questions. Special thanks to Noah who works at Siemens and the PR group. I sent them over and I said, answer whatever runs you want. I think they're good. I wanted to be a good advocate for the community. Mentioned things, also a good advocate for the people who work there. And so do check it out. It's on the blog, but I'm just gonna summarize these things. So basically I said, hey, you're buying a bunch of companies Siemens, like what are you doing with all these different companies? And the response was Siemens vision relative to the plan of acquisition is clear. Supply frame will be the nucleus, competence center and strategic core for future Siemens digital industries marketplace offerings. Acquiring supply frame provides Siemens with an outstanding opportunity to accelerate our marketplace vision and compliment and expand Siemens ecosystem of digital services. Software and platform offerings. Supply frame, software as a solution solutions are ideally positioned to bridge- Software as a service solutions. Software as a service solutions. Software as a solution. Soft sea shells. Position to bridge the chasm between manufacturing and supplier. The buy side and the supply side resulting in cost optimization, increased agility and highly informed decisions. And finally supply frame offers Siemens the opportunity to enhance a range of Siemens DI products. Digital industries. Okay. Okay. So then I said, hey, the businesses events that supply frames own like Hackaday Supercon will soon continue to do it. How independent do Siemens intend to keep supply frame and Hackaday from Siemens? And then what does Steve, the CEO of supply frame, or who does Steve the CEO of supply frame report to and who the mic, the editor at Hackaday who does he report to? So here's the answer. Although it's too easy to speak of the specifics of your question, we could tell you that our plans for supply frame is to remain a separate standalone unit within the Siemens digital industry software under the continued leadership of supply frame, Steve's flag who will report directly to Siemens digital industry software president and CEO Tony Higelmgarn. Hemelgarn. Hemelgarn. And speaking more broadly, Siemens is committed to keeping the DNA of supply frame as an entrepreneurial entity over the past decade. Siemens has successfully integrate 40 acquisitions with digital industry software, including the recent integration of Mendex, www.mendex.com, which accelerated the growth and substantially improved the market position as they've remained a separate organization and the intention is the same with supply frame. Okay. Next up. Hackaday, IO hosts a variety of unusual products. Will Siemens exert any content restrictions over independent creators there? Will Siemens provide staff to care for and manage the Hackaday community? Siemens not respond to this question. Like literally they didn't say that, they actually just didn't respond. Yeah. So we want to make it clear. Yeah, Siemens not respond to that question. Next up, we had under which privacy data policy terms of service will Hackaday and Tindy fall under after the acquisition is completed? Will there be any changes to what the users own and what Siemens owns? Siemens did not respond to this question. Next up. This is primarily a question for the current staff since they may not know or probably would want to ask, will Siemens do due diligence around equity and share salaries and titles around roles at supply frame Hackaday and Tindy? Siemens said, until the deal closes, it's too early to answer all the specifics of this question, but we could tell you that Siemens strongly believes that the people at supply frame are the main reason for supply frame success. Therefore, we are highly focused on retaining role-class employees. Next up, we asked Siemens as the new CEO as of February, Roland Bush, how does Roland perceive the hacker maker community, especially compared to the traditional engineering industry? Siemens has historically serviced. Siemens says, Roland's been quite clear in his commitment to continuing Siemens digital transformation and expanding Siemens to new segments and to reach customers, including makers. Siemens has invested over 10 billion euros in acquiring new software and has plans to continue with additional acquisitions. Acquisitions add value for Siemens and our customers and supply frame is a prime example for such an acquisition. Next up, has any Siemens staff posted on Hackaday, a project on Hackaday IEL, or purchased something or sold something on Tindy? Siemens said, not in any official capacity. Next up, we asked, will design labs space in Pasadena continue to host community events and residency programs? Siemens did not respond to the question. Next up, we asked, or said, Altium acquired, Octopart and Clivia, Mauser owned by TTI acquired, CrowdSupply, Avnet acquired, HaxterIO, Dragon Innovation, Autodesk acquired, Instructables, Upchain and Eagle, Newark is, Element 14. So it appears there's a consolidation for electronics, tools, community and mind share. What are the types of maker type acquisitions or companies is Siemens looking to acquire? And they did answer this one. They said, we cannot comment on the future acquisitions plans at this point in time. And then I gave them a statement, wasn't a question. I said, sorry, 17 years ago, I started Hackaday, the site, the mission and design logo that is still in use today. Please take good care of it. The supply frame book did a pretty good job. This is not a question. So, y'all had questions? We tried to get answers. I asked them and... Some got answered. There you go. So check it out. I still have some questions out to TTI about their Fork of Circuit Python on TTI calculators. We wanna know like, hey, this is cool. Can we talk to some of the engineers and ask, you know, what's the future of calculators and more? That might be the next one. Our code is running on some calculators. I wanna see what they're doing with it. So that might be the next interview we post. Speaking of TTI. Speaking of TTI, great segue, lady. Here is the continuation to the Speak and Spell video that Philby did. Show a Speak and Spell to a group of 80s kids and it's guaranteed within 30 seconds someone's gonna say, I heard there's a secret button combo that unlocks swear words. Or, if you type a bunch of bad words, it eventually scolds you, I've done it. Cool stories, bro, but also, bulls***. As explained in last week's video, every letter, word and phrase that Speak and Spell utters is a complete recording. It doesn't build words from smaller pieces. So it can repeat the letters of the foulest word in the galaxy, but it can't actually say that word. We know this with absolute certainty as for the sake of emulation, the ROM has been dumped and picked through bite by bite. Other speech synthesizers of the time sounded even worse, but they did have an extensible vocabulary and people might be confusing the two. I won't leave you empty-handed though. I did find one word that was recorded but never connected to the spelling games. You can only hear this through emulation. Mosquito, mosquito. You're the first to hear that. Okay. I like the clarification that mosquitoes know it's a swear word. Yeah. Mosquito. Hope wanted jobs.afer.com. Yeah. This is where we put our jobs for that. Yeah, people looking for jobs, offering work. Yeah. It's a good time to be a maker, an engineer. We have two of them this week. First one is, this is really neat. It's for an experience electronics and LED technician for a patriotic memorial in Omaha, Nebraska. It's full or part-time. That's cool. And a cat engineer for these Eliza dolls. These are like Arduino compatible dolls for kids. They're really cool. These are great jobs. These are super good jobs. These are cool. Turn around the jobs board. And we look at each one of them. Make sure to not sketch your scammy. I love patriotic electronics. That sounds cool. Red, white, and blue LEDs, maybe. I would say if you're a USA manufacturer, especially in New York, all your electronics are patriotic. It's true. Even now some. All made in the US. Sometimes some folks, I don't think. I think there's a big divide. Some people have different ideas about patriotism. Anyways. But I don't care, because I'm an American citizen. Yeah, anyways, Python on Harvard time. We have a newsletter. Sign up for adforddaily.com. We don't spam. We don't harvest your emails. We don't do any of that. You can not subscribe anytime. But what it does give you is a once a week newsletter that is the best Python on hardware newsletter out there. So, MicroPython 1.16 is released. You looked at it. I think the cool feature that everyone's talking about is that command line thing to control. The cool thing about this, yeah, MP1 was cool, the cool thing about this is how fast we were able to keep up to date with upstream. So there's many reasons for this multi-layered, like a snake. I think snakes have layers, right? So Scott did a massive push before he just did, he won on vacation, of merging three years worth of MicroPython updates. I think we were on like 109 or 108 or something. We merged up to 115. And Damian, who's the maintainer of upstream MicroPython, was like, I want to do more smaller, more common releases, more often releases, which is good because it means it's actually easier to keep up. It's tougher to merge six months of stuff. It's easier to merge like a month of stuff just because there's not as many changes and tweaks to do. So the 116 release, we were on 115, 116 came out like a week ago. And within a week, Jepler was able to do a PR to catch us up. And this is cool because now, as we're adding stuff to Circuit Python, like Jepler found a cool way to also compress some of the flash by like the way we store objects and like having an extension to the infrastructure, whatever, you know, cool hack. And historically, if we were like six versions behind on MicroPython, the chances of us getting that into upstream is it just gets tougher and tougher because there's so many things that could be like, you know, forked apart. Bringing it closer together means that Damien is on the PR and is giving suggestions for how can we add this optimization and then get it upstreamed quickly like Cherry picked into mainstream, which is something we've wanted to do. We've made many contributions to MicroPython but they've had to be, it's really been very like surgical how to extract that contribution. Now we can collaborate so much better. This is really great for MicroPython because they get all of our improvements. We have the three core DABs working on it, Circuit Python day in, day out, and they can benefit and also we can benefit from improvements that the MicroPython team is doing. And I think it's kind of added to a more harmonious co-living situation. I mean, like we've always loved MicroPython but I think they've always been like, hey, we want more of your improvements but because you're behind, it's harder for us to- It's only 13 commits off as of yesterday. Which is awesome, right? So I'm gonna call it. So the ports are still separate, right? So we support, we don't have like ESP32 for example. We have ESP32 S2 and SAMD21 and we have RP2040 in a good way. This is why we did that because MicroPython, if you want to use that particular chip, use MicroPython for that. But the core stuff. We have other things like it has to support USB. Yeah, we have a different, it's sort of like Linux, right? You can have some people like Debbie and some people like Mint and some people like Ubuntu and some people like Slackware and some people like Gentoo or Arch or whatever and the kernel is the same but the stuff around it, how you actually interface with the kernel may be different but you still want to have all, every distribution ideally is on mainline kernel and that's not true all the time. Sometimes distributions have split off of the main kernel and they have changes. They don't get the mainstream and so it's like, it starts to get little wobbly where it's like you'll end a distro which is on Linux three and one's on Linux four and one's on Linux five. Like it can really diverge. So having a similar core means even though the packaging is different, the core functionality and improvements can be shared. So this is a really good thing for the community. Even the people who aren't doing core MicroPython or CircuitPython, I think everyone agrees this is a good thing. So I'm going to call it. Call it. I think in the beginning when we were doing like CircuitPython people were like, why are you doing this? Why are you doing that? But now as the cores are so, as they're like only a few commits behind each release and it's getting easier and easier. If you look at what our team is doing, they're supporting open source in the best way. They're adding and contributing. Things are getting added upstream. They're getting cherry picked. They're getting added. We're picking out things. We're adding it. And then we're also supporting MicroPython financially. So unless I get told different, I think we're the largest public sponsor financially of MicroPython. So this works. Open source can work. And a lot of people, they'll call something open source. It's not. There's a lot of folks that are doing open source. And they say it can't work or they stop doing open source. But there is a way to make it work. It just takes a very curious group of people that's dedicated that maybe had some things happen to them in their life. So there's more in the newsletter, but that's the thing that's really cool about 116. Yes, it's cool that we merge 116, but what's really cool is how fast we merge 116. Anyways, congrats the entire team. And I think Scott's in the chat. So give Scott a shout out. Python Visual Studio, there is beta of Python 3.1.0. See Python? Check that out. We have a bunch of keyboard stuff, because this is all keyboard all the time for a lot of the things that we're doing. And if you look at the newsletter and you want to get an idea of where Python and hardware is going, they're just electronics, look at it quickly and scroll down and then look at the project that you want to do. And it's like, wow, like this is that easy to do now. These are all the different things. So speaking of, this week, my pick of the week from newsletter and Python on hardware. Yeah, you picked stuff out? I do, is the latest hack space issue. So this just came out and there's a few things in this issue. Wanted to mention, first up, congrats Simone on the cover there. Yay, Simone! Got some Margrino and Pico. And in the things that are circuit Python and Python on hardware related this week, Lady Aida. First up, there's this little Halloween pumpkin. Yay! This is Slupy. Spoopy poopy. Spooky poopy. Circuit Python. Circuit Python, it talks when you go near it and everything. And then, hack space, they're fast. And Ben's a really good author. He's the editor-in-chief as well. Oh, this is cutting edge. This was Circuit Python on MicroPython. This was using the libraries of Circuit Python combining the hardware support of MicroPython. Yeah, so this is based off of the work that, of course, Melissa's been doing with Blinka. She's just been rocking it out. Blinka is our compatibility layer that we originally wrote for MicroPython. But nobody really used it. And so we sort of diverged the code and started focusing more on CPython support so that you could use our Circuit Python libraries on Linux computers like the Raspberry Pi or the Beagle Bone or the Onion Omega or the Banana Pi and also on desktop computers running CPython using a USB dongle to convert USB commands into GPIO commands. But then when the Pico came out, there were some people who were using MicroPython but wanted to use our libraries. And there was like, I think people were like, I don't understand why can't I use the Circuit Python libraries on MicroPython? We're like, you can with Blinka. And people were like, well, it doesn't work. And we're like, oops, it should. And so Melissa went in, cleaned it up and published how to do it. And we're going to make it even better. It's a little bit unusual how to do it because of the file system stuff. With MicroPython, you have to use their file system manager. But we're going to hopefully make it even easier. Again, we would love for MicroPython to have our API but since they don't, we can do the second best thing which is offer a shim. Yeah, okay. And that is this week Python 100 News. All right, open source hardware time or an open source hardware company and open source software company. Here's something I'm working on folks and I will just follow up. We do open source libraries. A lot of ours are in the Arduino IDE and there is now a close source binary in the Arduino library manager. It's the Arduino underscore M-C-H-P-T-H touch. And it comes with a license. It's like microchip touch. Yeah, it's microchip. It comes with a license that basically says you can distribute the binary blobs but there's no source code for it. Correct. This is for the Q-Touch. Now we name microchip touch because it's they, Quantum was purchased by Atmell which was in purchase by Microchip. So they renamed it, but it's still Q-Touch. So if people remember from like three or four or five years, I don't remember how long ago, I reverse engineered it because I wanted to add that binary into the Arduino IDE so it could link to it and then we would be able to use it. And Arduino basically said, no, we really only want to have truly open source libraries. I said no, the library manager, the libraries are only gonna be open source for like, we're just fine. Hey, that sounds great, cool. So I reverse engineered Q-Touch and created Adafruit FreeTouch which is a library that basically allows you to do capacitive touch on the SAMD 21 chips without needing to link to this binary just by like twiddling registers. And it doesn't do everything that the Q-Touch library does. It has some like calibration stuff that we don't do but we just want raw values which like a lot of people honestly just want raw values for capacitive touch and moisture sensing. It works great. And the reason that I was looking at this was I was searching for something else and this popped up and I was surprised because this again has that closed source binary which again, I don't have a problem with. Yeah, let's be clear. It's totally cool. We don't care if Arduino is doing closed source but when we asked them about this in the past, they said, oh, that was a mistake. It, this closed sourcing shouldn't have gone in there. So we're like, it's back now. And I'm fine with it. It's back now. We link to closed binaries all the time. In fact, if you do expressive stuff, that's a closed binary. We're not the open source hardware police. No. Raspberry Pi doesn't do open source hardware. Pymary doesn't do open source hardware. We like them, it's all fine but the thing with Arduino is this is different for us. We're the, I think the top contributor for all the Arduino libraries. So this is different and unique and they said that's not what they're doing and if you check out the license and everything, it says like you can distribute it but there's no source code. If you're on the developer list, we posted about it. Like I, you know, I think that it, it would be interesting to hear what other people think. I again, don't care. I think it's totally fine. Do whatever you want. To link to closed source binaries as long as you make it clear that you're linking to closed source binaries. However, other people may have opinions. Traditionally, Arduino has been a no binary blob in the core distribution. If that changes, that's cool. Like I know- I think they just need to communicate if they are going to allow closed source in something that's never had closed source in it before. That's it. Just communicate that. So I'm gonna run this down much like what I do and I sent some questions over to them. Put on the developers list and we'll see how it goes and I'll let you all know. Next up. Either way. Speaking of open source, here is our guides of the week. We have 2,494 guides. This is a Catney and Dylan double header, double, double header. I got two guides from each. Good work. From Catney, we've got the Trinky QT2040 and the Slider Trinky guide. We're getting caught up on some products that we released. Getting guides out for them. So if you've got those products, we've got the Arduino and circuit Python code ready to go. And from Dylan knowing Pedro, we've got a DIY quiz show controller system with a circuit playground, blue fruits you can make a wireless keyboard. So, you know, when you press the button, they'll actually send a key command so you can actually play games with it. But also there's a lot of people who wanna make quiz show controllers and so this shows how to do it with whoever buzzes in first gets to answer the question type thing. And also have a guide on using the Earl Philhauer core for Arduino with RP2040. There's also an Arduino core. We'll do a guide on that. We're starting with this one because we had already gotten all our boards in. And so if you have an RP2040 board and you want to use it with Arduino, check out this guide. It is beta, but it seems to work okay. Okay, it's time for some New York City factory footage. It wouldn't be New York City factory footage without a crane filled sunset from the construction going on across the street. This is Disney, they're still building stuff. This is where they house all of Scrooge McDuck's money or they will. All right, 3D printing. Noah and Pedro have a couple of things. We're gonna play these back to back. This week we've got the Jeopardy buzzers and then we also have a little cute speed up. So take it away. They're not Jeopardy buzzers, they're DIY quiz controllers that are Jeopardy-like. Jeopardy compatible. Jeopardy please. Okay, let's watch the videos. Yeah, someone turned this in the Lego and like we wrote back and like. Don't do that. We don't use the Lego trademark wrong, by the way. Anyhow, take it away. Hey, what's up folks? In this project, we're making a Jeopardy-style game controller with the circuit playground. We set up our key buttons as buzzers so whoever presses there first will light up the host controller. The circuit playground is fitted inside a 3D printed case and the NeoPixels light up in the player's color of choice. Dylan Harada wrote the code in Circuit Python and set it up so it can also work as an HAD USB controller. You can even enable wireless Bluetooth control with the onboard slide switch. The code is commented really well and it's fully customizable to add support for additional buzzers. The circuit playground has tons of built-in goodies that make getting started with Circuit Python really fun and easy. You can get the parts to build this project by heading over to the Learn Guide. Links are in the description. The parts to build the case are 3D printed, snap-fit-together, and printed with minimal supports. The enclosure is printed in translucent PLA filament. Normally labeled as natural clear, this diffuses the NeoPixels so it can evenly illuminate the case. Hardware screws and nuts can be used to connect the wires to the pads on the circuit playground. You can bend the pins from jumper cables to make them right angled so it's easier to bolt and fasten. Check out the Learn Guide for a full step-by-step tutorial on building this project. The circuit playground is fitted into the enclosure with the USB port lined up with the cutout. It's secured to the available mounting holes using M3 screws. To boost up the sound, a Stema speaker is mounted under the case. Additional screws secure the speaker to the bottom of the enclosure. This bottom cover has a speaker grill and snap-fits under the case. The wires are routed through this hole so they can plug into the arcade buttons. For the host controller, an LED arcade button is used and gets mounted to the top cover. You can use cables with quick connects to easily plug them into the arcade buttons. Once installed, the top cover snap-fits over the enclosure. The buzzers feature a similar assembly but with a threaded screw on top. The jumper cables can then be connected by plugging them into the JST connectors. It's a fairly modular assembly so you can easily disconnect things and put them back together. We like using it as a stand-alone controller and use it alongside an iPad while playing Jeopardy. We're having lots of fun with it and hope this inspires you to check out the Circuit Playground in Circuit Python. And don't forget 3D Hangouts every single Wednesday at 11 a.m. Eastern Time. No, Pedro, learn how to make all this stuff and more. This week's IonMPI brought to you by DigiKey is Intel's RealSense. That's right. Check out that cool new Intel logo. So this is the RealSense family. We actually covered RealSense LiDAR cameras like eight, nine months ago but they came with a new product that I thought was cool. Now, people who watch this show know that I am a total sucker for sensors and edge machine learning devices because I really like machine learning but I also think privacy is very important. So this is a identification system, a facial identification system that's completely on the edge and very affordable. So this is the module. This is the F450. Not to be confused with the truck. And the F455, which is the enclosed version. Same technology, but one of them is the bare PCB and one of them is enclosed. So I played with the enclosed one because it's of course easier to use but for your final product, you'd use the bare PCB. But even the enclosed one, it's got a lot of mounting holes. Look at how nice this is, a full aluminum enclosure that's easy to use, come for the kit with a little tripod, USB cable, starting pack. So what is this? This is a depth camera. It's not a true LiDAR. It uses, I think, an infrared scatter and two cameras to do depth recognition, to do facial authentication on the edge. So you don't need to be connected to the internet. You don't need to have a cloud computing thing. Everything is stored on the device and it's really easy to use. And what I thought was really cool is they specifically talk about, I mean, some people might say this is like, it's accessibility, but it's still like recognizing faces and they don't like any kind of facial recognition. But that said, it does work on a wide range of people with different hairstyles and facial hair and glasses or prostheses and works for people of like a variety of heights. So if you're going to do a facial recognition system, I think this is the least bad, right? Because there's no cloud and it's tested to work with a wide range of human faces which is good if you're doing that sort of thing. So this is what's inside of it. So there's a chip, the flash memory, the projector, that's the probably infrared projector, the illuminator, IR, illuminator, IR LED and two cameras that lets you do basic depth mapping and avoids people like holding up a photo of your face and having that work. There's also a secure element. This actually allows you to, you can communicate with it over USB or you are using encrypted data packets. I won't cover that here, but it's in the SDK and the datasheet. So if you're like, I want to have it everything fully encrypted, you can do that. So even if you're sniffing the connection, you wouldn't be able to see what's going on. What's neat I think about this is on the board itself, you have two ways of connecting. You can power it from three to five volts, so this means it can be powered from USB or from a LiPo battery, a couple of nickel metal hydride batteries that are rechargeable. There's your end USB connectivity. The USB of course gets you full video, but if you just want to control it on a device, like as an embedded device, you can use UART. So you can use it with a microcontroller or a microcomputer. That's what it looks like. There's a full datasheet with all the connectivity. Bottom right is that flex connector, which has like 54 pins and all of the pins will let you basically reach in and basically get the video or get the infrared data or get like the point map from the infrared. Here you can see the projector and the LED are 850 nanometer IR, the IPX host connector for again embedding it. Or if you want to use it with a computer, like if your system is using a normal desktop computer or a single board computer, just use USB. This was the FPC connector and then all of the pins. So you can look, I'm not gonna go through all them. Everything is brought out. So you can integrate this very deeply into your product using a flex connector. So all that hard stuff is to take care of. Here is some examples of, it says audio, but it doesn't actually, it doesn't speak, the audio would be handled separately because it doesn't have a speaker and the module. But you could have it speak, you could have, here's some of the error codes that you can get, how to communicate with the user, to enroll people without a computer and also detect faces without a computer. There's a full SDK, Intel RealSense has a GitHub repo. They have an SDK and example code for a variety of use cases and different languages, which I thought was really cool. One of the things that I really liked about this is it's like really embeddable, it's all done for you and the SDK is simple but effective. It's just all the things you want and none of the nonsense that you don't wanna deal with, so you can really quickly integrate this into your product. This is a software architecture, I think in here, I think it covers some of the encryption stuff and all of the stuff that you can touch. Again, I'm not gonna touch, talk about the encryption, but you can have it be fully encrypted and it doesn't store photos of faces, it stores only points, vectors of how it identifies the face. It also does a fuzzy learning and so if somebody's face ages or they're wearing glasses or they're not, or they grew a beard or they're not, or their hair's up or down, or they're wearing a scarf or wearing a mask, it can still identify faces and we'll show that in a little video. You can upload, so download it. If you wanna get started quickly with Windows, there's an application, you download it because this is new, I updated the firmware. There's a console code, so you can actually see the UART data sent back and forth which could be really good if you are like, I wanna debug my UART code and how is the application working? So you can see all the packet data being sent. I enroll my face, basically just kind of get it nice and centered, tilt to the left, tilt to the right. It did take me a couple tries to get used to how it wants you to scan, but I think a lot of times when you're enrolling people, there's somebody there to kind of get you enrolled, like it's a security system and so it's not so bad because once you know how to do it, it's very easy to tell people how to do it, but I definitely think you should enroll with somebody around to start and get used to it when you're starting to enroll your group of people. As it's enrolling, you can see the video output and you can see it's purple because it's doing infrared and point cloud stuff and then once you do that, it can authenticate you so you can just say like, detect who it is. Boom, Lady A detected and as I moved around, it kind of followed me with the green box. So did a pretty good job of detecting and detection is very fast, it's under a second. So. Available on DigGate. Right, you can get the module or again, like I said, the all-in-one starter kit. You're not gonna be able to get anything cheaper than this. It's like under 90 bucks for a full, ready to go, two cameras plus IR projector. I mean like this is the cheapest edge machine learning face recognition system I've ever seen that you have to do no work to integrate. Like this one didn't make me feel bad. No IDE was installed. This cloud thing is gonna be bad. No, there's no cloud thing. This is good and what's nice is that because you can get the data over UART, the rest of your system, if it's a security system or a lock or like authentication, whatever, it doesn't have to be that complicated because all the really heavy duty computational stuff is outsourced to this module. You can run this with an Arduino. Like this could be plugged into an Arduino if you wanted. Ape and microcontroller could communicate with this because it's all over UART or if you have a full computer plugged in over USB, mount it and it's like all weather-proofed and nice to go. So you have two options. Did a very good job here. Easy projects with this too. Like flip a relay, open up a box or something. So here's a video. Trivial to do. This is their presentation that they did at CES that was like only a few months ago. Showing, this is the engineer showing, you know, of course there's the mask demo. It works even when you have a mask working. Yeah, nobody has to do a mask demo now. And this is interesting. They actually showed it at slow speeds. You can see at half speed what is going on. It illuminates the area with the LED. It shows this guy, I don't know if he grew a beard or he pissed one on a mustache. And glasses, it still works with headphones. I'm pretty sure that's a fake mustache. You don't think you grew it in like five minutes? No. I don't know, man. Different angles. One of the things that they really focused on was like even in different light, different angle, it'll still work. One of the cool things about Edge is you don't have to worry about like if your internet goes down, can you not get into your apartment? But this worked really well showing, you know, it can't be spoofed with a cell phone image because that's like some old face recognition systems. You could do that. Pieces of paper or cell phones won't work, right? It's gonna illuminate it. It's gonna be like, no, there's a flat object in front of me. It's gonna be a human-shaped head. Yeah. Okay, so that's a good one. Okay, and that is this week's IonMPI. Okay. IonMPI. All right, before we do new products, Space Jam is the code I really wanted you to. Yes, new, new, new, new, new, new, new. All right, starting off this week. Okay, so you're gonna see if we revise a lot of our GPS products. The GPS module, the ultimate GPS module we've been carrying for like a decade, no longer being manufactured, but we found a drop-in replacement that is a little bit taller. It's four millimeters tall instead of like two or three millimeters tall. However, it's pin compatible and so we were able to drop it onto our devices. The only thing that's a little different is this is a GPS plus Golognas. It's like it uses, it can also receive the Russian GPS system. So that might be good. You have a lot more options for satellites to get data from. It's still very fast, very low power, up to 10 hertz, update rate. A couple of the commands that you use to detect the antenna change slightly, but it's all in the datasheet. And this is a great drop-in replacement. So, thankfully we're having all those GPS units, all those GPS products that we're getting out of stock, they'll be coming back into stock with this new version. Thanks a lot. You have a Trinky, but you wanna use it with your latest MacBook where we've got a USB-C to type A converter. It's great for anything that uses type A USB, you wanna type USB-C. Like a light up Adafruit key. But it's great for Trinky, so you can just slip on the end, plug it in and you're good to go. Next up. Okay, we also have a couple of new key packs. So this is a pack of 12 Kale Red linear keys. This goes with the MacroPad kit. So we got them in a pack of 12, so it's very easy. You don't have to worry about like two packs of 10 and whatever. You got a full 12, so you're good to go. We also have singles of Kale Black linear and Kale Blue clicky. So... I think I put both of these together. No, it's okay because what the linears, these are black linear, they're a little stiffer than red and then the blues are clickies but they are sold in singles. We're gonna try to have 10 pack in singles so that way you can get just the number you want or if you have a NeoKey you don't want a whole 10 pack, you just want one. So we'll also get singles of the reds and the whites eventually. Then we have these. We also have, these are the clear translucent DSA key caps. We stock these in packs of 10 but now we also have them packs of 12. Why? To go with the NeoKey, sorry the MacroPad kit that's a 12 key MacroPad. So you can still get these in packs of 10 but if you're like, I need 12 and I don't want two packs of 10, this 12 pack is ready to go. Nice symmetric, translucent, clear DSE key caps. Feel great and snap on to any Cherry MX compatible switch. And stars of the show tonight besides you Lady Aida, our customers, our community, our staff is, the MacroPad, first up the bare bones one. Bare bones, why are we stocking the bare bones kit? Well there's a lot of people who are in the keyboard community and they just want like the bare PCB because they want to add their own key switches, they want their own rotary encoder knobs, they want their own enclosures. No problem, we got ya, we got ya. This is just the bare bones MacroPad PCB, it's fully assembled and there's no soldering required. It's got, it's a MacroPad so it's got 12 mechanical keys that you can plug into those slots. They're KL sockets or compatibles. Each one has a NeoPixel that goes underneath, you can blow through the key. On the back you've got the RP2040 from Raspberry Pi, it's a great little chip which we can run Arduino or circuit Python on, eight megabytes of flash that go with it. Each key is connected to an individual GPIO so you don't have to do any matrix driving, it's just like one key per. We also have a 128 by 64 monochrome OLED which I think is just, it's super fun if you want to display what you're typing or have some feedback or overlay details. There's also a rotary encoder that we solder in, it's a detenti rotary encoder, so it's like 20 detents per revolution and there's a push button, push button in. There's also on the back a little speaker. So the speaker is eight millimeters. It's not like a high resolution speaker but it's good for like little beeps or sound effects or tones or audio feedback so you wanna know when you type something it'll maybe say what you typed or give you a sound effect. I will mention that at the time of this video, QMK does not support the RP2040 chip itself and so if you're like, I need to use QMK, you can't at this time. One day QMK will probably support the RP2040. What it does will provide some firmware definition for it but right now this is for Arduino and circuit python use only. Okay, next up we have a kit that comes with a little bit more. This is the add-on pack. So you've got the basics, right? And so you've got the, you could also get the 12 pack of keys that we talked about. You can get the 12 pack of translucent key caps but maybe you want like a little enclosure type thing. So this is two PCBs and a little bit of hardware that you can add on to your macro pad to kind of make it more fully ready to go. So there's like, this is what we call the enclosure or the mechanical part. So there's two PCBs, one of them is a mechanical key plate. That's the part that has all the holes cut out. So that, it doesn't have any mounting holes but what it does is when you snap in the keys, they kind of all hold each other in place and it keeps them really nice and solid. It works very well. It's a stableizer plate for just 12 keys. And then you've also got this really beautiful bottom plate that's designed by Phil B with like a cool like NASA space theme, like Vera Rubin quote. Got some sort of like Voyager probe type thing going on there, space planet. We're going with space theme for the macro pad. You can reverse it either way whether you're like the black and white monochrome or you want like the golden probe display type, whichever you bolt onto the back. It also comes with four bumpers. So to protect your desk, the four screws to attach the bottom plate and then a rotary encoder knob. So this is the add-on mechanical kit. Okay, and here it is. Okay, but let's say you're like, I too complicated. I don't want to get separate keys and key switches and key caps and whatever. I want the whole thing, we get the starter kit. Chances are you want the starter kit too unless you're like a mechanical keyboard person and you know that you're like, no, I want to mix and match. So you get the whole thing. You can make your very own three by four OLED and rotary encoder macro pad. We looked at a lot of macro pads. They're all really awesome. They're great. We just wanted something that was kind of like a little bit of everything. You've got a smidgen of rotary encoder. You've got a smattering of keys. You've got an OLED display, USB-C RP2040 chip controlled. So it's got kind of a little bit of everything but it's really easy to reprogram in Arduino or CircuitPython, which is what we're supporting with this. And I think it'll be neat. You can use this. CircuitPython has great MIDI support. It's got keyboard support. It's got mouse support. You can use our new faster key scanning core in CircuitPython 7 to make your own macro pad. And of course the OLED display. You can use that as feedback to display what the keys are, what they do. Or if you have an overlay or functionality or you just want to have BongoCat going, go to town. So this is our first like macro pad keyboard thing. We've been doing keyboard projects using individual keys but now we've got something all in one that's no solder that's ready to go. So I'm very psyched about this macro pad. Maybe I'll show it on the overhead real fast to wrap up the show. Okay, so this is really close. So this is the 128 by 64 monochrome OLED. And you can see here I've got the rotary encoder. You can detect when it's pressed as well. And then over here, each key has a north facing neopixel. There's a lot of debate. Should we do north or south facing? Well, north facing one, hold on. And then each key here can be detected individually. You can press as many or as little as you want. It's very fast. The OLED is SPI so it updates very quickly. Each key is individually connected to a GPIO. So you don't have to do any scanning. You just quickly check if it's held down. And then rotary encoder add on. And then altogether it's a very beautiful silk screen on the back thanks to Phil B. And we, this was your quote for Rubin. You suggested it? Yeah, and someone said in the chat that Rubin Observatory is starting to open and do some work soon. So it's very on time. Yeah, and you got this really cool, like cool. Cause it's just decorative. The back, the bottom plate is a mechanical, but we didn't want to go with acrylic. We wanted something a little more sturdy. So we did FR4 and this shows you how it's put together. So there's the bottom plate, the standoff that's built into the macro pad. And then this is the mechanical support plate that keeps all the keys nice and sturdy. So there you go. We've got our very own Keeb. That's no problem. Keeb. For how to stock, sign up. We'll have more. We put in 50 and they evaporated, but we're going to put in more. Base jam to code for anything that we do have in stock. While you all get your questions at work, I've been putting them in a text file as you've been going on in the chats and more. You can put them there, adafruit.it slash discord. Let's do some top secret. All right. We did all sorts of stuff this week. Yeah, for top secret, I'm going to play five videos back to back. Actually more, let's say three and three, sorry, six videos back to back. And then we're going to look at a leak. Yeah. So take it away past us. Go past. All right, Ada, what is this? Okay. Here I've got a different clue board. Remember is our micro bit shape board with an NRF 52, 840 Bluetooth and lots of sensors. What are these sensors? We're going to use this with Google's TensorFlow Lite for microcontrollers web demo. So when I click launch experiment, this is the air snare. And then down here, I click connect. And then you'll see it shows up as a wireless Bluetooth web device I compare. And here's the neat thing. So after I've paired it, it will transfer over the TensorFlow model. And you can see here it's saying downloading. It transfer the model over so it can use the accelerometer to do motion detection. And then once it's loaded, I can do this demo where when I move to the side or up, I can do the little kick snare demo and then down, side up works great. Bluetooth. All right, Lady, what is this? I'm testing out a sample I just got. This is kind of neat. It's kind of like a weatherproof alarm like mount, panel mountable thing, but it has USB on the end. Like this kind of get this and then there's a tower light version of the same thing. So these are USB like alarms. So if I plug it into USB, it actually shows up as a serial port as you see here. And then what I can do is I can run a little bit of Python code that just sends serial command data that makes the lamp blink or turn on. So it can be good for just, you want to have like a simple notifier that's nice and durable. And then there's also the tower light which has a piezo in it as well. So you can hear it beeping. It also does like blink modes and stuff. So I think this can be nice if you want to have an alarm, but you don't want like a floor, do we know? And LED and new pixel setup, just plug and play. All right, Lady, what is this? Okay, we're testing out two macro pads, three by four key pads with RGB LEDs. And one of them is a lot faster. This one's a lot faster than this one. Why? Because we're using the new native keypad vector and matrix keypad support. So basically if you have a bunch of keys connected up to GPIOs or in a matrix, the scanning is happening in C, not in Python, it's a lot faster. So if you look up here, you'll see this is doing the whole scan and outputting the text and drawing the screen, all this stuff at four milliseconds. The actual scanning is much shorter. And then over here, you'll see doing it in pure Python takes about eight milliseconds, but you still get the same performance. It's just this one is much, much faster, twice as fast. In fact, so it'll be great for DIY keyboard and macro pad projects. All right, Lady, what is this? Okay, this is a five by six ortho keypad with break apart keys so you can snap the keys apart. And I'm testing it as the full grid of 30 keys, five by six and a matrix. And these are diode matrix together so you can see all the rows and all the columns coming out here to a feather M4 that's running micro, micro, circuit Python, which is a fork of micro Python. And as you look up here, I'm testing out this new PR where we have native support for C vector and matrix keypads. So all this scanning and event handling is handled in C, so it's really fast. So I can like turn on and off these keys and do all the NeoPixels, super fast and easy in circuit Python. It's gonna be great for custom keyboards. Getting glowy. Beep, beep, beep, beep. All right, Lady, what is this? Hey, it's a Sunday night and I spent a bunch of this weekend working on getting my ATtiny817 dev board. It's actually a valve board for the ATtiny817 underneath here. And I've put a shield on top to make wiring easier and I've got like a little bit of everything, this little bento box electronics. And I've got here some NeoPixels wired up and this Arduino compatible is sending iSquared C commands over these wires to this client, which is going to read them and then do stuff. So it's like a little iSquared C to anything, you know, Swiss Army knife. So this potentiometer is being read over iSquared C and then being written back to the NeoPixel brightness. So that's like this little demo. So I got analog input to iSquared C working and then iSquared C to NeoPixels working. So that's what I did this weekend so far, so good. Very glowy. The cut's up. Yep, it's right here. All right, Lady, what is this? Hey, I'm testing out Jebler's latest code release. Look at us, we're trapped inside of a camera. This is a ESP32 S2 Kaluga kit, which is an ESP32 S2, you know, Wi-Fi processor that we have Circuit Python support for. And what's really nice about it is it comes with like a display and buttons and a camera port because the ESP32 S2 can do some like native camera stuff by kind of taking advantage of the i2S peripheral. Yeah, the i2S peripheral. And what we've got here is actually Circuit Python library that's reading the data from the OV2640 and capturing the bitmap and then refreshing the display. So this is all happening in Circuit Python thanks to the hardware support Jebler added for capturing frames from a camera. This is 320 by 240, it's pretty cool. Nice work, Jebler. Okay, and then you have this, this is one of your leaked products. Yeah, well, this is the ortho brick apart that I showed, but I'm actually, it's like, I had to update to it and like I had to update it 30 times. I just took a while, but it's sent out. So hopefully when it comes back, we'll be good to go, we'll get it in the store. That's not a secret. Okay, I have a bunch of questions lined up. We're gonna get to these. Let's get through them. We've got 10 minutes of questions. Okay, question for the QA time. Now that the EU is charging, sorry, changing VAT tax rules, do you think this will severely hurt makers outside the EU? Yes. Yeah. I don't feel like Tindy has intentions on helping makers collect VAT for makers outside the EU. Who knows? I don't know if they even can. I think you as a company, if you're incorporated or you're a single member, I'll see whatever you have to register for the VAT and you have to collect it and it's a pain and it's definitely like we're registered, but yeah, it's tough. And the methods for collecting and paying VAT otherwise feel very cost-intensive for small maker companies. Yep, I know for at least after June 27th, I won't take any more EU orders because I don't have the means to navigate the EU regulatory environment. So my opinion is you should find someone to partner with and resell your stuff through them because that's probably gonna be the way to go because you're gonna have to tap into those bigger resources that are out there. Next up, could Adafruit ever end up being purchased by another company? Inversely, would Adafruit ever buy another company? Absolutely Adafruit could be purchased by another company, we're not looking. We've been approached lots of times by companies you probably know and heard of. And inversely, would Adafruit ever buy another company? We've been also asked by other companies. So, so far, both of those things are possible, have not done it. Next up, did TI answer your circuit pipeline questions? Yes, they are going to send me the questions over about the calculator shortly. Next up, I need help choosing a Bluetooth chip for Arduino project. It needs to connect via Bluetooth speaker and send tone and DFM mini MP3s via Arduino. It's a device for visually impaired so it has to connect without a display. Any suggestions? Oof. Well, I think you can, you know, there's like little modules and chips that can do Bluetooth audio. You can use tones to indicate when it's ready to pair. Actually, I have a pair of headphones that have Bluetooth and it even speaks out. It says like pairing, you know. So that's not too bad. You just have to, you know, the person who's visually impaired, they'll just have to know what the tones mean when it beeps and it says ready to pair. But that's not unusual. Usually there's like a tone that would be going on. So I think anything that has Bluetooth audio output then whatever mic control you have, just have it send tones and the tones indicate it's ready to pair. It might not be the chip, it's just some careful planning. Yeah. With that. Next up, have we ever considered building pick and place machines? No. Those are one of the most complex things. The machines that we have, like everything together is a multi-million dollar setup. They're really hard to do. We had a very small pick and place machine in our apartment. And it's definitely, the cheaper it is, the more contraption like it is. You have to spend a lot of time. Even the expensive ones are contraption-y. Yeah. No, I don't. All right. Next, talking about open hardware without close off where the BL602 chips can do Wi-Fi and now uses serial converters also without closed firmware. I don't really believe that. I believe that there is some closed firmware somewhere but you just don't know where it is yet. Next up, chip shortest questions. I know CMD chips are not available. An RP2040 chip said great timing with the release. How are expressive chips for availability? Could expressive gain a lot of market share? So far, expressive seems to be able to ship but really the lead times are starting to get into two years for chips. So I have no insight into this stuff. I don't know why, you know, it was in January, they're like, oh, by the end of this year we'll be back to normal. And now, you know, as of a few weeks ago, I'm starting to get reports that chips that I'm ordering are going to, I'm not gonna get them until 2023. Yeah. So I'll say now's a good time to look at the RP2040. And yeah, I'd say that we're gonna probably be doing a bunch of expressive face things too, but we'll see. Yeah. That's how it is right now. If my feather won't mount using a proven data USB cable and the red LED is pulsing slowly, does that mean my feather is burnt? No, it means that, well, it depends on what feather should you pulse in the forums, but it probably means that the USB connection isn't working. So maybe your USB connector broke or your USB cable's no good. Okay, next up. Well, someone said, you know, Lady 8MPT at the Helms of Electronics Empires sounds like being in the next electronics revolution. We are. So. Like that's what we're doing right now. We are at the helm of an electronics empire. So, you know, we have things like Adafruit.io. We have the learn system. We have our store. We have our blog. We have this big community. We have this great staff. We have things like Circuit Python. I was approached to be the CEO of a maker rollup. It was gonna, they wanted me to be the CEO of MakerBot, Adafruit, Make Magazine, and then there was something else. And I said, I'm kind of working on this thing with Laura Adafruit. And they said, well, you know, you could just, you could just like do this without her or something like that. I'm just like, you know, we're kind of doing this together. So anyways, did not do the maker rollup. And then next up, can someone tell me the email that Adafruit uses for product notification emails? I think it's just supportedadafruit.com. But don't email that. Yeah. You should sign up on the product. No, they wanna make the shortcut notify you. Yeah, I think that's what it is. And then will the RP2040 run dry? I have no idea. I don't think so. I really have no insight. I don't think so. I mean, for right now, I haven't had any indications yet. And then, yeah. Okay. All right, thanks everybody. I think that is most of everything. Yay. Thank you for supporting this electronics empire. Let's just do a little bit of reminder. Don't forget to code space jam. Space jam. Because we're doing the space theme. Space. Sign up for things if they happen to not be in stock. We'll see everybody next week. Don't forget tomorrow is JP's show. Get back. And then Scott Deepdive and all of our shows again. Thanks for making this a really good hour or so with all of you. Special thanks to Jesse May behind the scenes at Adafruit. Thanks, Jesse May. And the entire Adafruit community and all you all keeping this thing going and more. We'll see you next week. Bye-bye. Here is your moment of Xenar. Boom.