 How about now? Hi! Hello and welcome to the show. It's me John Park. Good thing I can see that one VU meter over there that wasn't doing anything. I was like, wait a second. I think I am very, very quiet. Hello and thanks for joining us here for JP's product pick of the week, as is our custom here on Tuesdays. I like to show you a cool new product or sometimes an oldie but goodie and give you an enormous discount on that product so that you can go and pick some up and enjoy yourself with them. So this is the URL you want to head to if you want to check out this week's product pick and I'm going to go ahead and refresh mine to double check that yes they have gone back in stock. They are listed at half off, 50% off. You can go there. Just go to that QR code there, that URL. This show is playing from inside of a tiny little window, maybe not so tiny, but a window nonetheless inside the product page. So you can watch the show and read up on the product and see if it's something you want to get. I can stop being so mysterious about it though and let Lady Aida tell you what this week's product pick is. So take it away Lady Aida. The HUSB 238. Yay. I've been working on this for a couple of years. It suffered from a silicon shortage. Now it's back. This is a really cool chip. So we like USB power delivery here. It's a great alternative to infinite DC power jacks in a bin, in your basement, or under your bed, or having USB-A cables that can only provide you with 5 volts, maybe 2 amps max. So USB power delivery for USB type C and we have a guide all about it, can give you up to 20 volts and up to 3 or 5 amps depending on whether the cable can handle it. And that's really great because a lot of times you have say like a monitor you were showing me and it needed 18 volts, 3 amps and you're like where am I going to find an 18 volt adapter? Well if you have USB power delivery, it's easy. You have only one adapter and that adapter can provide any voltages you need. So let's go to the overhead real fast and I'll show power delivery, power supply. So this is a power delivery capable power supply and you'll see here, I mean this has a couple outlets. That's why you're like why is there so many numbers? Because it can do 100, 120 and then this is an 18 watt adapter. So you see here on the USB-C it's like I can give up to 100 watts, 5 volts, 3 amps, 9 volts, 3 amps, 12 volts, 3 amps, 15 or 20, up to 5 amps. But you're like how do I actually get that out? If you use a normal USB-C cable to your device unless you know how to request those higher voltages you'll always just get the 5 volts. So you need a chip that talks to or firmware that talks to the PD source chip in here. You need the sync chip type to the source chip and say hey I want you to give me 20 volts. It's not going to give you 20 volts by default. It'll always give you 5 volts default and you have to request the higher voltages and that's where the HUSB comes in. So if you look at the top of this board, by default you'll see there's a jumper that says 5 volts. If you cut that jumper and solder close to 9, 12, 15 or 18 or keep it open and it does 20, it'll automatically request from the power supply that voltage that you wanted. And on top of that it also has a USB, sorry, iSquared-C interface that you can use and we have a library written Arduino that you can tell it the chip hey what voltages are available and then you can pick and choose dynamically changing the voltage so you know your your robot or your motor or whatever starts out and you're like well let's try nine volts and then some at some point they're like wait I need even more power you can boost it up to 15 or 20 and you can adjust back and forth based on what's available. So let's look at this demo. So I've got here the HUSB and this is plugged into one of these wall adapters I just showed off with the USB-C ports and can provide multiple voltages and then I have here a this is just an ESP feather I just chose it because it has a nice display it is communicating over iSquared-C I've got it wired up to iSquared-C and it's requesting different voltages and then if I plug into here no if I plug into sorry I'm gonna leave this okay this isn't to ground and I have my multimeter and my multimeter is working there you go you can see that the voltage coming out is in fact going from 9, 12, 15 up to 20 and then it cycles back to 5 so you can dynamically you know change whatever voltage you want you request what's available and then you can cycle through it but if you don't want to use a mic controller you don't have to so try unplugging this if you hold on I have to reset this because it was just you know it was just programmed over iSquared-C so by default I have this jumper you say I try to be jumper setting I have the 12 volt jumper set and so by default it will now give me 12 volts output so you don't need a mic controller I you do need to power cycle it if you just programmed it over iSquared-C but by default it will go with what the jumper says and then over iSquared-C you can set it to something else so it's kind of the best of all worlds for usbpd it's inexpensive I've got this nice chunky pass transistor here and set it with jumpers if you like and it's fixed you can solder in a terminal block if you like or use iSquared-C and you have you know a more dynamic customizable usbpd experience so you know either way also you can use it with a mic controller and not use the iSquared-C you can use it to get your voltage and then you know this could do some some other work with the over usb because I have the d minus and d plus lines brought out here so this could be your main connection for usbc and then this goes to your mic controller just one I just gotta warn people this v plus pin don't forget it can go up to 20 volts so if you're using this to power your project you need a regulator that can take up to 20 volts if you request it and bring it down to 3.3 or 5 volts ah yes indeed look that's this week's product pick it is the h usb 238 usbc power delivery breakout this is a really cool board what this allows you to do is take any of these modern fancy usbc power delivery bricks which can give you a whole bunch of different voltages we're used to usb being five volt roughly well uh not anymore all bets are off with usbc and some of the more recent changes we can now request different voltages from this at different current levels so pretty typical five yes nine 12 15 18 20 these are all possible on this one right here and this one is uh an anchor a n k e r brand brick I think these were about 55 bucks on amazon yesterday might have gone back up to around 70 or 80 but really nice brick same with this one this is a mac book brick that I have and I actually don't use this because the brick that my monitor came with now powers everything so this is kind of a spare nice hefty power supply that can give me a selection of voltages except like lady said if you just plug a usbc cable into this it's going to be five volt that's what it negotiates in absence of some other command you're going to get five volts out of this well if you have devices that want 12 that want 20 what you need is this this usb sync chip this is a chip that can say hey power supply give me a different voltage uh there are as lady said a couple of different ways this works one you can use i square c so if some particular needs that may be changing you can use a microcontroller and tell this what to to say to the power brick the more simple use is to simply jumper some of those little connections that you see there's a image right there so in the upper right corner you'll see there by default we have bridge that connection for five volt if you cut that you're going to get the 20 volt as it says at the bottom all open everything else is a selectable so if you blob some solder across the 15 volt there you will get 15 volts and what this is doing is actually just setting different resistor values there's like a 6k resistor and an 18k resistor and depending on which of those the chip reads that and says okay this is the the message i should send over to the brick you can also see there there is a uh this is a nice way to use it as a terminal block there screw terminal block i'm using that on mine to connect up to a couple of wires and a little what are these 2.2 millimeter typical dc power jack with center positive and one thing i recommend for this is label these i've labeled that one it's upside down i've labeled labeled that one 20 volt and that's because i've cut all those traces this one should be giving me 20 volts so let me give you a a little live example of this so i'm going to go to this down shooter here let me put a little miniature me off in the corner uh so this is a little volt meter little panel meter uh and i have one of these little splitters so that i can take my voltage from the usb sink chip there so it's going to plug right into there and then that voltage will appear on this little panel meter and it's going to be available here on this end to plug into something so let me continue the plugging there's going to be a lot of plugging and unplugging during this show here today so i'm going to take this brick i'm going to plug it into a power extension like so get that one out of the way and then i'm going to use a usb c usb c cable this is one we happen to sell in the store that is up to the task not all cables are and i can plug that into one of the either one of the usb c outputs there now you'll see on my little panel meter here when i plug in the h usb 238 it is now giving me 20 volts so it negotiated with the i think it said five at first so it looks like there's like a little lag there but after a moment it negotiated and bumped it up to the 20 volts or 19.7 roughly there so now here's here's a practical use for this i have a bigger version of one of these induction coils this is an induction coil used for our wireless leds so we have these cute little wireless leds here we need a big high voltage induction to to generate the the power that's needed to light these up wirelessly and so this one here this little one that's five volt that's easy the one that's mounted inside of here i can't take it out easily but it's a just a bigger version that one wants around 20 volts so i think it can work anywhere from like 20 to 12 to 24 or something like that so i'm going to give it 20 or this 19.6 here by plugging in the other end of one of those little pigtails there and you'll see all of my little wireless leds lighting up and you can see here i can even demonstrate that it's a wireless no tricks there so that is a nice way to say okay i've got these really great power supplies they can supply two three amps of current i think five amps at 20 volts so great supply and a really nice way to use it in this in this case now i have a different example this is some of these little dc motors on these motorized faders these are running on nine volts so what i'm going to do is unplug my usb 328 that is jumpered for 20 volts i'm gonna take that set that to the side this one here again i've labeled it nine volts dc i just have a long long cable connected there long dc cable and so this one here has the nine volt jumper set there so again i will unplug that from the induction coil i'm going to plug into my splitter i'm going to give this power from the same brick right same brick here that was just providing 20 now is going to provide us with nine so you can see on my little meter here 9.06 volts uh and if i plug the split cable here into my power input for the little uh flying faders here you can see they are now moving around under the power of this power brick that's supplying nine volts so you could these are inexpensive right right now these are $2.98 so if you get a few of these you can integrate them into your projects you probably don't want them all flying cables like i have here but we have a really nice 3d printed case you can use and you can integrate these into your projects so that you can take things that would originally use a dc jack and really just expose to yourself the usbc connection maybe label it 20 volt 10 volt whatever but you don't care right what you're plugging into it unlike life where you're grabbing different power bricks doesn't matter as long as you have one of these power bricks that can supply the multiple voltages and a usbc cable that's power delivery compliant plug it into your project your project is going to say cool i want 12 i want 15 i want 18 i want five whatever it is you don't need to worry about it so let me jump over to the product page here so you can take a look at this and i'll also check and see if there are any questions in the in the chats rufus says labeling is key voltage and polarity yes that's a good point i i am guilty in the in this case of relying on the fact that i've plugged into the the plus on plus and a minus on minus and i know these are center positive i think it i don't think that's labeled on there so you really should say with these center positive or center negative uh so there's the product pick right this is product id 5807 and it is $2.98 right now just during the show right so if you want to get one of these or a few of these and get up to 10 at this discounted price throw them in your cart we have 58 in stock as of the last time i refreshed uh oh my gosh we're out of stock i don't need to sell them anymore you guys you guys bottom they're all gone oh my gosh uh i'm sorry if i was yammering and you didn't get any uh i'm sure these will be back they won't be at this ridiculously great price so uh if you got them excellent congrats on doing that and if you didn't i'm very sorry uh but not too bad of a price for what it is even at the full price so if you follow the links down below you can get to the learn guide and the three printed case so here is the learn guide by liz clark excellent excellent guide it takes you through all the pinouts tells you how to connect it up to your power um here's a note this is something i i found out yesterday with the particularities of my power supply my cable if i cut both uh current traces so that it would be trying to get three amps it was actually asking for a little more i think it was asking for 3.25 and my power supply said i'm not going to give you that at nine volts that i was trying to get so it uh has sort of a safety mode it just gave me five volt so it's probably three amps at five volts but it didn't think that the supply could give me what i wanted so i in in the one case just jumper the two amp one and that's fine i'm actually not drawing that much current here but just so you know if you if you see a problem trying to grab the three amps and you're you're seeing the wrong voltage show up probably uh you're asking for more than it can give you you can as as we said before go in and plug into a microcontroller and configure this with i square c lis has a nice example both in circuit python and arduino here so this will show you how to wire that up and there is a library and a nice little code example and if you run this you will just simply see it spitting out to your your meter five volt nine volt 12 volt 15 volt 18 volt 20 volt and it'll cycle through those here is this really cool case that the roose brothers made so you can 3d print this case and it gives you access to the screw terminals there so you can feed in wire screw it while it's all still in its case and it's it's secured in there really nicely no no parts to short out on things and that's a a nice way to go there's also links in here to a typical usb power delivery supply that you can use we don't sell these in the a different store this one might be the one i have yeah this is this is the one i have so it's back up yesterday was the day to get them they were like 54 bucks i should have grabbed a second uh oh but they have a they have a coupon they have a 25 off coupon there so there you go i'm not trying to give amazon our business but that's a nice one you may already have a power delivery supply particularly if you have a modern laptop you've probably got one or two of those floating around and this is the someone had asked in the chat i think rufus this is the little adapter that i'm using in these case in this case but you can use you know any just cut out an old cable i think liz shows how to do that in the in the use case example here under use she attacked an old wall wart and grabbed just a bit of the cable including a nice little uh inductor there um that's not the word for it the thingy that's the thingy called someone in the chat tell me i can't remember oh wow jim henrickson got that supply for 39 dollars a month or two back yeah that thing that thing yo-yos but uh it is uh it is a pretty good one so yes but so here's an example of just taking an old cable you got plenty of length there cut it wherever you want use your multimeter to check for center positive center negative which one is which what is what is your device need which wire is which ferrite bead thank you paul ramasko that's a ferrite bead right that bolus sitting there i think that's a ferrite bead keeps things from being noisy right uh and that'll do it right there so let me know anyone have any other questions did it here was another uh possibility there this one with alligator clips you could attach those to some wire put those into the into the terminal block you could cut this if you want and solder it to it's not super expensive you probably want to do that in large volumes but there you go that's another another choice we have a few other diy options for the for the barrel plugs all right oh ken kevin orbson says 12 volts optional the apple macbook adapters don't support it oh that's that's a good point if it were at all possible for me to read the gray on white text that apple thinks is so clever there's no way i have to put that under a microscope or take a photo of it but these will tell you uh what voltages they support and usually the the current that you can get at the different voltages so that the math works out um but i didn't know that one didn't do 12 thank you for the for the info uh all right that's gonna do it uh so let me grab this one right here uh and finish this up so that is my product pick of the week this week it is the h usb 238 power delivery break out ready for industries i'm john park this has been jp's product pick of the week i will see you next time bye