 I'm Ska, engineer, engineer and ask. Engineer and ask? Yeah. Oh, you're saying along. Yeah. Yeah. It's the song. Maybe I'm the one who's like in the sketchy, like. Could be. Cartoon and maybe you are. Yeah. But here we are together in our world called Ska Engineer. It's me, Lady Aida, the engineer. We've been Mr. Lady Aida on camera control and doing cool video effects while I'm working on hardware. We're a team and this team's gonna be here for the next hour for asking you are going to go over the latest in products, videos, guides, maker, community updates, retro tech, some really cool photos, stuff you'll get some eBay and more. Yeah. They're cool, they're cool things. A lot of eBay's are, eBay's are smokers though. Sure. So let's get right on it. What's on tonight's show and what's the code? On tonight's show, the code is QT Gamepad. QT Gamepad is the code 10% off of Native Restore all the way up to around 11.59 PM or when I remember to turn the code off. We'll talk about some of our live shows including show and tell, which has happened from the desk of Lady Aida, which was on a Sunday. We update our graphics and we'll talk about the new DigiKeys logo by the way. JP's product pick of the week. Child Parks Workshop, time travel, retro tech. Gonna look at some factory footage, some 3D printing. We've got some IonMPI, some fun top secret. We've got some new products. We're gonna answer your questions. We do that over on discord.infort.it slash discord. Join us over there. That's where we answer the questions all then and more on you guessed it. Ask an engineer. Okay, actually I'm gonna skip JP's workshop this week or the product pick week because we have a really long, cool video that we wanna show in the Learn Guide section about the AI magic that we did. Yeah, we're gonna try to get to everything tonight. There is a lot. So first up, like I said, code is QTGamePad, Lady Aida. We have free stuff. What do they get? Put stuff in the cart. Put stuff in the cart at the aidafruit.com shop and you'll get $9 or more a half size from a Proto. Great for taking your breadboard projects and making them permanent. One for an hour more. We've got the cool AidaFruit Gothi Black KB2040s. This is a gray microcontroller to use for all sorts of projects. It's got RP2040 chip, eight megabytes of flash, USB-C, Stem IQT, cast-layered pads and it's pin compatible with Pro MicroBoard so you could upgrade your design, whatever it may be and then free shipping at $199 or more in the cart and we're gonna hopefully get some circuit playgrounds in the next couple of weeks. Some SAMDU chips just came in so we'll get those back in stock and we'll have them. Not the freemies yet, again. I'm gonna skip around tonight with some things just because we have stuff going on so I was gonna do this in time travel, but whatevs. Shipping notice, Memorial Day is Monday, May 29th so keep in mind if you order something starting like Friday around 11 it might not ship until Tuesday. That's a living end by the way. We should try to ship stuff same day if it's next day or all that but assume that Friday orders, Saturday orders, Monday orders will not start going out until Tuesday. All right, we do a bunch of live shows, Lady Aida, show and tell this week. Thank you, JP and Melissa and Aaron for hosting it. You can check out a lot of the cool projects that we're gonna watch that right after the show tonight. We took a well-deserved 20 minute parent naps. Yeah, you know what's amazing? A 20 minute nap actually can make a difference. Totally changed my life. So we're gonna watch show and tell right after this. We have some midnight hacking to do tonight. We're gonna, maybe we'll talk about that a little bit later but you'll see some of our projects that we're doing on the show until probably next couple of weeks too. It will be fun. Desk of Lady Aida, that's what we do every Sunday. Lady Aida, it's in two parts. What did you talk about this week, part one? Part one, we had a bunch of visitors this weekend. We had Zach and Parkal. And we had Eric, so you just took a photo real fast. Next thing I was working on is doing some hardware bring up for the RP2040 bus pirate board. We still have to come up with a name, Phil. Yeah, we have, so for the bus pirate compatible, whatever we're doing. We're thinking of circuit pirate but circuit pirate might be confusing with like circuit pi, circuit python. And then we're like, well, let's think of some other names. Bit Raider is a contender. There's also a bus pirate with a Y. We're thinking of that. We like the pirate themes. And then we're like, why don't we go in a completely different direction and call it protocol droids? And it's all like protocols. But then that's gone. Well, who knows? Yeah, we're making sure things are okay with like our lawyers who look at our product names when we do stuff. And if we've ever had lawyers, they're not super fast, yeah. Yeah, the cadence is sometimes low. So we'll figure it out. But we'll probably have something soon but tentatively calling it circuit pirate. But what- Anyways, I did the hardware bring up. Yeah. You know, my idea for how to do the five volt level shifting didn't quite work, which I sort of knew it wouldn't, but I was sort of like, I just want to get the board out there and I'll figure out the details later. And then in the meantime, I found out that the RP2040 can technically be five volt compliant as well. So it actually might be just okay to use as is. So I have to put grounded it some more, but I just brought up these boards and got Scott one so he can keep working on the firmware. So that's what I was working on. Talking about the grading. Sir, you are cut the pirate. And then we have the grade search. It's for Lady A to find stuff on Digikey. And if you look really close, by the way, Digikey has a new brand. I'm gonna talk about that in the time travel section. Oh, wait, you updated this, but you guys- Yeah, so, you know, we're all over it. Any time there's Digikey logo now, we got the new logos, we got some of the branding stuff. So we're gonna talk about it. And then in INAPIO, we got a new logo. And so, you know, I got their thing. They didn't ask me to do this, but as like a logo geek, I really like the direction they went. So I'll talk about that in a bit and show you what they did. But we have the grade search where you're looking for stuff on Digikey. Yes, and I was looking for Zeno Diodes. Zeno Diodes are so handy. They can be used for like tons of different weird, cheap, simple, level shifting, choking, dropping, whatever you wanna do with your voltages and your currents. Zeno Diodes can do them. It's also sort of Z, so great. And they got some of them in stock at Digikey like hundreds of thousands. So we just sort of showed how much power you may need. Also posted some links to tutorials and idea blogs about what to do with Zeno Diodes. So they're kind of, yeah, they're very useful for all sorts of stuff. Okay, and Product Pigs of the Week, like I said, you can watch this on YouTube, Dippy's workshop is tomorrow and then Deep Dive is on Friday. Time travel. Gonna go back in time. Gonna go back in time. Time travel this week. Gonna talk about Digikey's new logo. So check it out. We got Preview and then it's now live. I don't know, if you're into electronics and everything, this is like when Pepsi or Coke updates their logo. It's kind of a big deal. So I grabbed some of the things that they posted online. If you look closely at their brand identity, you can see that they're using like components now. They got rid of the dash, which I think things make easier. A long time ago, someone at Digikey was like, hey Phil, make sure you put the dash and use capitals, because I'm normally doing like low-key. Thanks for the low-key. And then like religiously in every email it was like capital D, dash, capital K. But now I can get away with the capital E. Think what you're saying, 10%? Yeah. And so for a large company that's been around for a really long time, this is a big deal. There's committees, there's things, there's like you got tons of packaging, you got buildings, you got like everything. And I think over the course of the next year they're gonna be rolling out stuff. I think they did a pretty good job finding a way to have a nod to the past and then having something that looks very, very modern. This is the hard stuff. We did, when we first met, you're like, hey, I wanna update my logo. That was like a big deal. And like we were fine. Yeah, you helped me a lot. Yeah. And then over time, we wanna continue to evolve our logo. So it's always interesting to see what like, the older sibling is doing out there. So they post up a video, I grabbed it. I don't think they care if I show it. So I'm gonna show, this is what was behind the Digikey rebrand and some of the things they're doing. So they didn't ask me to do this. I think this is interesting. It's our show. You might think it's interesting too. Some people are made different. The tinkerers, the solderers, the builders. The ones who can pick out their inductors from their resistors from their thyristors blindfolded with one hand tied behind their back. What makes them tick that different kind of fuel they run on is that they're technical. In the Digikey, we get technical. So well, in fact, we could draw you a schematic. Because the technical aren't just who we serve, but who we are. We get experts because we are experts. We know the ins and outs of our bytes and bolts, contacts and housings, and how each piece in our inventory helps innovation click into place. We get engineers because we're engineers. We build industrial strength relationships not just with suppliers and customers, but between suppliers and customers. We get hard workers because we are hard workers who know one delayed part can scuttle the whole idea. And let's face it, the future waits for no one. We get you because, well, we are you. We're technical and we get technical. Digikey. Sorry guys, I thought that was interesting. Let's do some retro. All right, retro tech is two parts this week. So one of the things that we're doing, we have a little kiddo now. So eventually a kid is gonna have a computer. So I'm cobbling together some stuff I had, some stuff that we're hacking and modding to have it work together. And one of the ideas is like a kid computer that's kind of funny, interesting. Maybe some stuff that's not available anymore. We have some Hasbro and Mattel and like baby Einstein stuff. You can see some of our guides like a game controller that's also like a USB game controller. And then this, I thought this was interesting. So this is the Crayola. Let me make sure the easy type keyboard. And there's a mouse that goes along with this. But it's a kit. It was called the easy type. It's an also key. Yeah, it was called the easy type keyboard and mouse computer kit. It's a very kid's of mine. The keyboard has this squirty, you know, large, but it's not your normal. It doesn't look like your normal keyboard. There's some things that people either will love or hate with it. I like the proper arrow keys. Yeah. And then there was another one that came out. This is, you know, the internet occurred. So this came out in 2010 and it was from Socar International. It's basically like the, I think someone said this is the big keyboard. It was something that was rebranded for Crayola. You can see they have little crayons and it's colorful. This is the back of it. See some of these things. And you can pick these up super cheap. I think I got this for like five bucks. And then, you know, here's both of them together. So this will be one of the keyboards for one of the like key computers that we do. It's USB, so it'll work. Also plugs into lots of different things. There's a mouse. I'm not gonna probably get that. There's an optical mouse and then there's like a mouse pad and you can put like a picture in it. That wasn't that interesting to me but I thought this was kind of neat. These are really colorful. I mean, I don't look cool. Imagine like rolling in with this to work. They have another little game pad? Yeah. And then this, I used to do a weekly article on Engadget called Watch This Ones. And it was just like weird watches. And we have a collection of super weird watches because we have done or wanted to do some DIY watches. But these are like just, this is kind of just for fun. So these are gaming watches but they don't play games. This is a reference to the console war. Back when it was Sony PlayStation 1 and the Sega Saturn, like, you know, fight to the death. And... It's a great book by the console war's book. Yeah. I read it. It was hilarious. And yeah, it's brutal. And so you could see the neat thing about this. They're wristwatch, but when you flip the top instead of it being a game because you don't see these, these are, you know, it's all the time. And I thought this was neat. So this is going in our pile of cool watches that we like. I know I'm in America. Where'd you get this from? This was from Japan. And they were inventing machines. This is totally an apihabra thing. It gets all your attention. It's like... I think they were called Gashapon. Gashapon machines. Yeah. So anyways, that's our retro this week. Enjoy! All right, Python on hardware time. Blink-a-blink-a-blink-a-blink-a-blink-a-blink-a-blink-a-blink-a-blink-a. This week on the newsletter, please subscribe. By the way, I'll talk about where to find this out. Lots of things going on. We're almost ready for 8.1 release. CandidZero is out. Lots of great projects, including a physical motorized Minecraft box made with Lego. And there is a review of MicroPython 1.20. Since we're getting close to 8.1.0, CandidZero, you were going to talk the synth stuff has come along, right? Yeah, it's not that I'm most excited. Well, I mean, there's a lot of bug fixes. You want to scroll down because there's some... Yeah, there's a list of many gifts. First off, PsyLabs contributed and do 24 port. And we're actually chatting with them. So we might make a board or stock a board from their stuff. We got a contribution for NMA gift support. So you can now play gifts within CircuitPython. DVI support for our native DVI. So you can have CircuitPython where Apple go to a TV screen, which is just hilarious and fun. And you also do HDMI graphics from RP2040. You can also change the CPU frequency dynamically on the RP2040, which is part of that DVI, the FICO DVI project, because you have to overclock the chip. The synth stuff is really cool. That is what Jebler has been working on. He says he's kind of finished for now, but if you want to make fairly complicated synthesizers natively, it's not a sampler. It's like you're creating waveforms of LFOs and you add them and subtract them and do stuff and you have envelopes. Check out the synthio interface. It's something that I wanted CircuitPython to do. I thought it'd be really fun to be able to make synthesizers from within CircuitPython. That's one of my favorite stuff. There's also a lot of bug fixes as well. And as mentioned in the chat, kind of a big deal. Silicon Labs contributing a core. Kind of a big deal. This is happening. We have a momentum. They're actually like, hey, this is important. We want a lot of people to use this. It's been battle tested. Someone today, I don't remember which social media site I was on, they're like, wow, I started off at CircuitPython 3 and now you're already up to eight. This is kind of neat and the board they had, it just worked. Yeah, it keeps going. So before I talk about that, and speaking of is I think that this project is worth noting kind of cool. This is reviving assistive technology with Quirky and MicroRider keypads. So this is, you can see your hand on it like that. You have to quarter. But it's an LCD. Yeah, and you could tell you could do one handed typing, but it's CircuitPython code for the Raspberry Pi Pico version of the Quirky keyboard based on the work done by MicroRider. The device emulates a USB, HID, US keyboard and no specific driver. But if you use the Adafruit HID CircuitPython libraries, you can do quite a bit more. So check it out. I think that's another neat example of being able to take hardware that really can't be used with modern equipment but using something like CircuitPython. And then as you follow along with CircuitPython, and this is like one of my favorite makers. So I'll go over to this screenshot. Yeah, so this is, let me move us for a second here. This is always kind of neat because here's a maker that has these like mini-fig CircuitPython compatible devices. And every single time there's a new version of CircuitPython right away out of the box, it's fully supported. You just drag over the file and right away you get all the new features. So this is one of the things that was important to us is how do we empower makers who wanna do their own boards and they just don't wanna like manage firmware forever. Yeah, support firmware. Well, basically support your board forever as long as you don't do anything special for it. But we have so many different chips that are supported out of the box that if you submit a board definition, it'll be CircuitPython forever. And that's how we got to over 400 boards. Yeah, and I think, you know, we just met with Eric from SEED, Zach from Particle. And I was trying to do some rounds with talking to some of the folks out there from Arduino to every board maker. And there is like a drift in the market. Like there is, you know, companies that are just going in a different direction than like making things for others to build off of. They want you to buy their platform only use their services and that's it. And if you're someone who wants to build a business or build an ecosystem, that's kind of hard because you can't really do a lot of stuff with it. So seeing this maker, Ben, who's been doing this for a while and then seeing well more than half of the 400 boards that are CircuitPython compatible, people being able to build companies and businesses around them, that's really neat. So that's why I think this one is a good example. It's like everyone when they see this board, they're like, oh my God, it's a keyboard. But it's a good example. This person doesn't have to manage firmware. It's always just works. No builds required. It will generate all the, you know, every commit generates all the UF2s and bin files necessary. So we can always test the latest. And one other note, if you want to learn more about that board, I think we have a little note here. Yeah. So the CircuitPython show polls in the chat here. He just interviewed Ben. So that's coming up soon. You'll be able to listen in about this board and more. So that's kind of cool. There's some sort of pipeline show. The newsletter is available at itforddaily.com. Deliver to your inbox every single week. And we don't spam, we don't do anything with your email address. It is just to get you this newsletter. And that is just a completely separate site. But we have it for daily than itford.com. Cause we don't want to commingle those two things. Open source hardware news first, especially thanks Eric Pan, stop by. Itford, I haven't seen Eric in a really long time. We have some ideas and more with seed that we might want to do. QTpy, Shell, our siblings, Grove and Stemma. And quick, we want to try to figure out ways to pull maker companies together to maybe figure out like maybe we can all have connectors that work together, board shapes that work together. We shall see. But it was great seeing Eric. We're probably going to do some co-lab, as they say in the biz. And more on that later. And we have some ideas with some of their enclosures. Refreshing. What? Refreshing. Oh yeah? Yeah. We have guides. And there's so many guides that when I hit refreshers, it's going to be more. Thank you. Sick now. This is what happens with the caching stuff with them. I'm using Brave as this browser for whatever reason it caches and I have to hit refresh two times. Okay. Anyways, we have a bunch of guides, lady. Okay. Let me have the mouse. You want it? Yeah, just have to scroll up and down. And that's always easier if I just do it myself. Okay. So for this week, last week we did the Epcot Spaceship Earth with WLED. And I think the Feather RP2040 with RFM95 guide that either went live this week or late last week. So that's a new guide for using our all-in-one Laura RFM2040 board. And then this week, Carter, this project, the PyPy Pirate Radio, I mean, like we just happened to not call it that, it's a Raspberry Pi Python Pirate Radio board that uses a small FM transmitter to actually like make an FM station. And we have these FM transmitter chips on breakouts that you use over I squared C to set the frequency and then use the audio output from the Raspberry Pi into the headphone jack to actually emit the audio. And we got this idea from a hacker who said where somebody was like, what are some cool projects that you did for your own personal desires? And someone said that their grandparent really likes listening to on the radio. They don't have an iPhone or an iPod, but they wanted to like tune into the radio whenever they wanted to hear music they liked. And so this person set up for their grandparent a micro FM transmitter that just transmits radio from when their grandparent was a kid. So it felt like they were kind of going back in time and listening to music. So I was like, oh, we should totally, I think there was, of course, no tutorial. We just described this thing. I was like, well, we have all the stuff to remake it. So Carter did that. Thank you very much, Carter. We've got a guide for the ANO rotary and Coder to I squared C adapter that was last week's new product. I take turns a little iPod classic like rotary with navigation switchboard. Maybe I'll go down to show it. Yeah, so it uses this directional encoder wheel and it gets the encoder value and the five buttons over I squared C. So it's a lot easier to use than actually wiring up all those GPIOs. And of course they'll also work on stuff like Raspberry Pi, single board computer or a chip that maybe doesn't have enough timers to handle the rotary encoders. And you can have 16 of them on one I squared C bus. Thanks to Cuddable address jumpers. We've been updating the Adafruit IO and Ripper snapper guides. Thanks to Tyler and Brent. This is an older guide, but it's been going through so much revisions. We're adding new diagrams and descriptions to clarify Whippersnapper versus original Adafruit IO. Catney couldn't get, they might be Giants song about a blue canary nightlight watching over her. And so she was like, I have to make a project based on that. It's nothing just Twitter, by the way. It's pre-Twitter. So she worked with Nine Pedro to make a very cool smart nightlight. It changes color from, it knows when sunset is and so it changes color from blue to red at night. So it's not as bright. And also you can have it act as a Wi-Fi detector. So if your Wi-Fi goes out, it'll blink red to let you know like, hey, it's not you, your Wi-Fi is down. Go reset the router. A beautiful 3D print model going on here. Check out this. It's cool. They're like rendered it with like chrome, like aluminum metals that look really neat. Anyways, check it out. And that's with the QDPI BFF. And then the big project this week is a DIY, it's a little bit from the- Oh, wait, just take one break. So we're so privacy-focused, focused, but for whatever reason, it says it doesn't comply with the do not track thing. Oh, no, it does. But it does. But it's brave, probably doesn't- Yeah, brave. So anyways, we support do not track. So anyways, that's why that's like that. I don't know why. No, that's normal. It's if you, you didn't, you're logged, you're not logged in. If you're logged in and you select- Yeah. That you don't care, it will- Yeah, so we do all the right things, but the way it displays a little confusing. It's like the embedded content doesn't respect do not track. So we don't just put the YouTube video there. If you have do not track turned on, we don't allow it. We don't allow tracking. So anyways, that's our, I'd like to get credit for that because we're one of the few companies that does that. So this is a- We'll show the video in a second. Yeah, we'll show the video. This is a physical book that's been cut out. It has a Raspberry Pi and a seven inch Raspberry Pi screen in it. And it uses voice recognition with a microphone. And you tell it what kind of story you want it to tell you. And there's a little prompt text that it uses as well. So it has like, you know, it says like, we only need children's story and don't, you know, and the character's name should be the kid that's reading it. And then you'll say, tell me a story about a dragon and a princess named Lady Eda. And it will then use chat GPT to generate a story for you within a certain length. And it animates the text on the screen. And it's like a living storybook. So it's like a little bit like a young girl's animated primer from science fiction, but made real. And it was, you know, like this is kind of, it's very advanced because he uses voice recognition and he uses chat GPT and he uses a lot of grass. This is an epic video. So the team spent a lot of time on it. So we're going to play the video. Yes. And I'll see you on the other side. Oops. I want a story about a mermaid that had a hundred pet jellyfish. In the depths of the ocean lay a mermaid kingdom ruled by Queen Luminia. Once Luna had a little pet goblin who gave him well just every single day. Hi, I'm Erin St. Blaine for Eda Fruit. And for today's project, we're going to make a magic book that tells endless stories. This book is a really magical device. Inside is a raspberry pie with a touch screen that talks to chat GPT using voice recognition. So all I have to do is talk to the book and ask for the story I want and it will write me endless stories. First we'll do the electronics build. I'm using a Raspberry Pi 4 attached to a seven inch touchscreen. And then I have also soldered on a few accessories. I've got a magnetic read switch so that the book knows when it is open or closed. I have a little neopixel for an indicator light and then plugged in a little USB microphone so it can hear me talking. Solder a power ground and data wire to your neopixel and trim the connectors off your read switch. Trim and tin all your wires and add some heat shrink. Remember all the wires to your Raspberry Pi. We've got a full build tutorial with wiring diagrams and pinouts at learn.eadafruit.com. We'll solder on the read switch, add the neopixels and then finish up by adding the wires that go to the touch screen. Plug in your USB microphone and then add the ribbon cable that attaches to your touch screen. Plug in the power and ground wires from the Raspberry Pi to the touch screen and assemble it together. I screwed mine on upside down because it fits better inside the book that way. Test to make sure your read switch is working by holding up a magnet to see if the screen goes to sleep. Now we're ready to put it inside our book. I found this fabulous old book in an abandoned paper mill called the Esoteric in the California foothills. There were so many moldering old books in this room. The rain and the rats were destroying them and I rescued this one which used to be a book of poetry by Sir Thomas Moore. I've kept him in here for posterity. I have to tell you, it was not easy to take my bandsaw to this book and destroy this work of art but I think I made it a little bit better. So let's get started. I started by finding the center of the book screen with a template and sandwiching the pages between a couple pieces of wood which I then screwed together so that they were nice and strong and firm. I used a drill to round out a couple of the corners. The corners are kind of the hardest part to do on the saw and then took it to the bandsaw and carefully cut all the pages out. This worked really well. They came out in a nice block and it wasn't that hard to do. I used Mod Podge to paint around the inside and the outside of the pages to turn them into a solid block. I set a magnet into the cover and made sure it would line up with the cutout I made for the read switch. I also made a cutout for the NeoPixel and cut out of the sides of the book a little hole for the on-off switch and for the charging port. I glued the battery down and then filled up the rest of the remaining space with craft foam so that the Raspberry Pi would sit flush with the top of the book. To make the outside of the book look a little more magical, I used a black wash over the whole cover which is just some black acrylic paint diluted with some water and then wiped it all off with a paper towel before it was dry. This gets the black kind of into the cracks and crevices and really emphasizes the detail on the book. I put a coat of acrylic black paint over the gold lettering as well. I added, and then for the inside, wanted to decorate the title page with a fancy sticker that I made on my vinyl cutter. I've got the files up at learn.adafruit.com if you want to use the same one. I used my book template to carefully cut out the middle of the page just so that it would line up perfectly with the Raspberry Pi inside. The trick I used to set the Pi inside the book was to use a template and cut out just the perfect size for the screen out of one of the pages that was attached firmly into the book. Then I took this page and I glued it to the front of the Raspberry Pi so that it would stay down and that the Pi would be held gently inside the book but that I could still lift it up from behind to access the back of the Raspberry Pi if I needed to. To make the new pixel accent I used a little bit of UV resin inside of a piece of scrapbooking jewelry that I glued right above the new pixel. This makes a real nice diffusion and makes it seem real magical. I finished up the book by adding a couple of book corners and a 3D printed oren which is a symbol from the Neverending Story movie. I put that on the side as well. We've got a full build tutorial on the Adafruit Learning System at learn.adafruit.com with links to the products and step-by-step directions on how to build this thing. So if you want to build your own magic book head over to learn.adafruit.com and don't forget to click that subscribe button. Have a great day and thanks for watching. And we will roll right into some factory footage. This week in the factory let's do some 3D printing and play these back to back as well. This is the two projects of the week from them. Here's also a speed up we're gonna play that one too. You can build an IoT nightlight that changes color based on the time of day. This canary nightlight is 3D printed and uses Neopixel LEDs to light up blue when you're awake and turns red when you're ready to fall asleep. You can put this canary in the outlet by the light switch where it can watch over you. Powered by a Qtipi ESP32S3 this has a 5x5 Neopixel Grid BFF started to the back for a low profile build. This Qtipi features the ESP32S3 with eight megabytes of flash and 13 GPIO for making IoT projects with CircuitPython or Arduino. The CircuitPython code uses Adafruit IO to get the current time and sets the Neopixels to be either blue or red depending on the time of day. It also has a network down detection feature that will make the Neopixels blink red to let you know if your internet is down. Check out the guide on the Adafruit Learning System for a full step-by-step tutorial on building this project. The bird was designed in CAD and features 3D models of Adafruit parts. You can download them from our GitHub repo links are in the description. There are different types of translucent filament that will diffuse the LEDs differently. Clear transparent filament has this sharp and distinct look while opaque white filament has a more soft and even diffusion. So pick your filament based on your preference of appearance. A USB wall adapter completes this setup so you can plug it directly into an outlet preferably by a light switch. We hope this inspires you to check out Adafruit's Qtipi and add-on boards for your next IoT project. Thank you again, Pat, and it is now time for IonMPI. IonMPI, I brought to you by Digikey and Adafruit this week. It is Renaissance. Renaissance. Renaissance. Renaissance is a maker of microcontrollers and boards and this week's we're going to be covering the RA series of microcontrollers. They were just featured on digikey.com and even though we've never used Renaissance chips, these chips are all ARM Cortex. I think they're M33s, M4s, maybe a few M0s and M7s. So if you're using other chips that are in the ARM Cortex family, it should be fairly easy to retarget your designs and they've got some good stuff. In particular, because they have to pick one product out of the entire group, the RA4M1 is what I'm looking at and I'm looking at it because as I'll show later, it's used in the new upcoming Arduino R4. So we'll go into the details of all this datasheet. There's just a jam-packed Cortex M4 chip. Renaissance for people in the West who may not have used it because again, it's not a huge brand. It's a conglomerate, it's a merging of Hitachi Mitsubishi Electric and NEC. These are Japanese silicon vendors and they kind of merged forces in a video that we actually showed before. It's really cool. You can check it on their YouTube. It's got the samurai who cuts through complexity and deploys good silicon. And the reason I understood in looking at this is first off, it popped up on the digikey.com slash new products listing. Even though it's not super new, it was kind of a featured product. And I was like, oh yeah, that's the same family of chips that's in the new Arduino R4 and we signed up for the Early Access program and we're getting this chip so we'll make sure that it works with all of our libraries. And one of the things is that the R4 is really changing directions from the previous versions of the Arduino Uno which were based on 8-bit microcontrollers such as the AppMega8, 168 and 328 and those were 8-bit AVR chips with like 32K of RAM at the most, maybe 32K of flash, 2K of RAM at the most. So why move to this chip, the 32-bit Cortex-M4 RA-4M1. And we'll look at it, but it's got a lot of good peripherals and one of the big things is of course it is a five volt compliant as well as has native USB. So it's a really nice step up from the 8-bit microcontroller. And you're looking at this, it's got a lot of peripherals and capabilities that you would expect from both the best of the 8-bit world and the best of the Cortex world. So the biggest thing of course is that this chip is five volt compliant and not, I don't mean like some STM chips, you can run them at 3.3 volts and then you can kind of pipe five volts into one of the IO pins as long as it's powered. You really can drive this whole thing at 5.5 volts which is at max five volts nominal. And that's quite unusual because again, pretty much every ARM Cortex chip we've seen has been three volts. There are a few chips, I think, you know, microchip makes the same C21 and that one is five volt compatible but doesn't have native USB. So this kind of has the best of both worlds. It's got that five volt larger capability and high current, it's got some high current pins as well but ARM Cortex M4 power. The peripherals are really great on this chip. For example, the ADC converter, it's pretty common to have an AC converter but this one does 14 bit conversion. That's nice. Most top out at maybe 10 or 12. It's also got a DAC, a 12 bit DAC. So that's kind of nice. Of course there's DMA, temperature sensor, sure comparator, sure, but there's also like op amps built in. There's four op amps that you can configure. You know, and I think you can set gains and do inversions and set up stuff so your small signal analogs can be then piped into the ADC. For serial communication, that's your standard, peripherals, I squared C, SPI, and UART, there's two of each, which is cool. So it's also SSI-E, which I believe is just I2S. Another thing that's really nice, it's got CAN, not all Cortex chips have CAN, but natively, you'll need a transceiver but the CAN module is built in so that's kind of cool if you're interested in using this with CAN best networks because those are five volt logic networks so you don't need like a transceiver with a separate boost converter because again, you can power everything here off of five volts. Another couple of interesting things that you don't normally see on Cortex chips is got a segment LCD controller. So like LCDs that you see on calculators, you can run those directly. You don't need a separate chip, very handy if you're doing a product where you want LCD, even though a lot of times people use TFTs these days or OLEDs, there's still a lot of products that will use a segment LCD. And this makes sense, Renaissance makes a lot of chips that are used in white goods and a lot of white goods have LCDs. Capacitive touch sensing unit, also very common white goods because you don't want to have buttons that can mechanically be damaged, capacitive touch will work through glass or plastic and can work with waterproof things that are in the home, kitchen, or bathroom. And of course it's got the native USB 2.0 full speed. You know, so that's your 12 megabits per second. You can power directly from the USB port and then there is a separate 3.3 volt LDO, but it's internal. It's just needed for the logic level, signaling, shifting for the D plus and D minus lines. There's a few versions, all they're gonna have 256K of flash, 32K of RAM. Oh, I forgot to know, but they also have a 2K of like separate flash. So it's basically like EEPROM, separate than the main flash memory size. You don't have to worry about, oh, you know, I want to store some non-volatile memory, but I don't, I want to make sure it's kept separate from the main code. They provide a separate code area. It does come in a couple of different packages, depending on how many GPIOs you want, up to 100 pins. Right now, you know, I saw them to Jackie and stock at least, they definitely had the 48 and 64 and 40 pin versions, QFN and the LQFP as well. Another thing that you sent me that was kind of neat was Gadget Unisos, which is a couple of years old. It's not a new thing, but they made a really cool, like Sakura pink themed dev boards for all of their popular chipsets. And somewhat interesting, like one of them was like the citrus board where they're kind of middle left is specifically for used Ruby language. So I don't know if it has like an embedded Ruby interpreter or it compiles from Ruby to microcode. There's like a kind of a Flora lily pad-esque round board. The GR Mango uses one of their high-end chips, and it's- You're an investor in Arduino. I hope this is a new Arduino lineup. Yeah, be cool. The Karumi is a little bit like a TNT or a Pro Micro, and then the Mango is Raspberry Pi-ish, and then the Leachy and the Peach are kind of Arduino-ish size, so it's actually Arduino-ish. The IDE, they made some changes so it's pink. Yeah, it's pink, and it's Arduino compatible. They forked it and tweaked it to make it work with their boards. Could be that they actually changed a couple things for their SDK. Another thing that's interesting is, it's a different chip than the Uno R4, by the way. So this is an older project, and it looks like this chip has native Ethernet, which is why they stuck an RJ45 on there, as well as USB host. This is a kind of advanced board. They also have a web compilation system, which I thought was kind of neat. So I opened it up, and it's like, yeah, you can compile from within the web browser, and I guess you download the bin file and you can drag it over the bootloader, and it's got this kind of saccharity to it, and then the packaging also is from this artist. I couldn't find any photos of it online that I could use, but the packaging for this board is also very beautiful from a Japanese artist, and it has these Japanese themes. So that's a separate project in this, but I thought it would be interesting if you were interested in the family of boards, you want to try their online compilation system. Check it out with the Sakura Chipset. Can you go back one? It uses the RX 633N. And again, a lot of this stuff doesn't really penetrate into the Western market, but it's always good to have competition. And what I was talking to a friend of mine who just came back from Tokyo, and she said, you know, when you're in Japan, everything is just a little bit nicer. It's like five to 10% better than it would be in the US. And so I think documentation and usage, and I like that the board, they could have gotten away with future, sorry, fewer peripherals on the RA4 series, but they're like, oh yeah, also LCD, also Canvas, also, you know, DMA, et cetera. So, oh goodness, sorry, go back one. Go back one. So the, it's called, the full part name is the R7FA4M1, a series, there's a couple, so for example, this is the QFN, there's also the QFP, which is the highlight. There's also a dev board for that RA4M1 series if you do not want to wait for the UNO R4, I'm sure it'll come out soon, but if you're like, I just want something immediately tomorrow, they do have a dev kit for this chip, which comes with a Sega J-Link debugger with a separate USB, so you can like debug, like a full, you know, GDB debugging system, as well as the native USB, and there's like a couple peripherals on there, like capacitive touch and potentialiter and push button, and also it's got current sensing areas, so you can like remove the jumper. Available in Digikey. That's right. It's in stock. I'm so excited that we can do INFPI and the parts are available. So check out Digikey, you know, they're doing more with Windows House, and I think again, it's good, like even though I don't know many people who've used these chips, it's always good to have more competition. I think, you know, we've had plenty of European and Western companies and American companies that make chips based on the Cortex standard. Why not check out what's going on in Japan? So how about you? Hi, Anapya. Hi, Anapya. All right, rolling right into new products, I do know. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You should have a revision. You've got a revision of this popular 1.14 inch screen. Oh, can you go back? So fast. Is this? Yes, you can see how tiny it is. It's 240 by 130 pixels. I love it. It's very high density. It's IPS. It's being revised because the screen got discontinued. So we have a new version. We also did a silk screen update. And so in the back, so here's what got updated. First up, the screen's the same size. It's the same orientation, same commands and everything, except instead of the screen being soldered in, it now plugs into the little socket there and then on the board. But to make a space for that cutout, we had to shrink the micro SD card. So it used to be a push-push type, and that's a push-pull type. So basically to remove the SD card, just yank it out. You don't push it back in and have it pop out. Other than that, it's just the breakout board is the same size, pin out, mounting holes, everything. Just new silk screen and slightly updated component layout. Okay, a bunch of unexpected maker stuff came in. Yes, unexpected maker made UFL versions of older boards and we love older boards. So we're stocking them. It's the Tini S3 with UFL. The Pro S3 with UFL. I think it's the MQT, we got all the photos. We've got the Feather S3. And then this is the, I don't know the back. The Pro S3 and the other one was, oh, I don't remember. Feather S3 and then that was the Tini S3. So yeah, okay. All right, there's one more. And there's one more. And this is like the Tini Pico, I think. Yeah. Yes, Tini Pico, we saw. So all these now have UFL. So they do not come with an antenna. You will have to get another antenna. We do in the store stock both UFL Wi-Fi antennas and UFL to RP-SMA adapters. They're linked from each product. You will want to, if you're connecting a Wi-Fi antenna, use an RP-SMA, UFL adapter, you need the RP-SMA type, not the plain SMA type. Or the antenna won't make contact but this is the polarity is different. Wi-Fi antennas are different than every other antenna for reasons. So if you want to put these in a box or you just need more antenna gain, you wanna have it be like weatherproof. You want to have the board be far away. All sorts of reasons. Check out these UFL versions. They're basically the same price but they just don't have an onboard antenna. Right, next up, keys. Last week, I think we put in the Neo-Key which is not to be confused with the delicious Mio-Key. Breakout boards, these are ultra-slim. Yeah, she gets slim. She has slim there, oh my goodness, so slim. So this week, we're putting in keycaps. The clear keycaps, unfortunately, were discontinued. So we got the white keycaps instead. They're a new product. They're kind of that pale computer white. They are not translucent. They're opaque. However, GP noticed that you can scratch them to kind of scrape away the top coating which is opaque and you can get a shine through design. So just FYI, Chalk Switches don't have as many keycap options compared to MX. People really like the low profile but there's a lot of trade-offs. There's not as much flexibility in keycap availability but these at least are whites. They're like a milky-white color. You can paint them, you can scratch them, you can decal them very easily. So a good option, we also have black. Next up. Next up, we have a UV Neo-Pixel strip. So this is addressable LEDs. So each LED can be turned on and off except it has UV LEDs, not RGB LEDs. And so you've got there some fluorescent dust. We have like this fluorescent paste dust stuff. So these, you can see the chips. Those are WS2811 chips. Each one is wired up to a UV LED. So the thing is that it's UV but like the chip in the libraries don't know that. So what you would just do is say, if you want the LED to be on, you just set RGB to like 255, 255, 255 and now turn the LED on full brightness. There's three like individual UV LEDs for the R, G and V channel. But there's people who want to do like UV LED stuff and they want to like light it up very easily and control whether it's on or off or they want to dim it. This definitely is just gonna make it really easy to do so because you can just use any standard Neo-Pixel setup for it. We also have a 32 meters, sorry, 32 LEDs per meters. This is the 60 is a little bit more expensive but it's got double LEDs. So. Okay. Next up, just a very simple breakout board. I needed a breakout board for this connector because I started to use it. It's a TRRS connector. So it's tip ring, ring sleeve. If you go back to the headphones. I bought this one. So you can see on the headphone jacket has four contacts. There's the tip, which is left. The first ring, which is right. The third ring, which is going to be microphone usually on headsets. And the fourth ring, which is ground. That's for like headsets. But you know, I actually think that these audio jacks can be used for whatever you want to have low cost cabling to connect for data lines, say I squared C or maybe your power ground, RXTX, whatever over a headphone cable. You can use a TRRS jack for that. And these photo cables are really, really cheap and they come in like every length. So, you know, could you use it for that? Maybe I don't know. Or you could just use it for connecting the audio. This breakout board has this connector. Sorry, the jack has, in addition to the sleeve, right and left has two switches. The R switch and the left switch. The R switch is when the jack is not inserted, goes to the right. And the left switch is connected to the left. When you insert the jack, the R switch and left switch pins float. And this is basically, you know, on old stereo systems where you plugged in the headphone jack and automatically turn off the speaker. That's because the audio would no longer be routed through the switches. You can also use it to detect when a jack is plugged in by having a very light pull up. And you can detect whether it's like grounded or not. There's tutorials that we've linked to. Or you can use Google for jack detection to determine how to do that. But basically came free with the connector. So sure, we added onto the breakout. Okay, this is our shoot tonight. Besides Uli data, our team, our customers, our community is. This little gamepad QT, otherwise known as the QT gamepad code. This is something I just really wanted because we were always making little projects or robots where I was like, oh man, I just need like kind of gamepad controller. And I don't want to wire up all the pins. I just want to be plug and play and ready to go. So this is a STEM at QT board that has a two axis joystick, a thumb stick. And it's kind of reminiscent of the Vita. If you've ever used the PS Vita, a portable game system. It's got two little middle buttons and it's got four larger buttons. And there is a little AT tiny chip that converts the buttons and the two analog inputs into I squared C data. So you can read it over I squared C, which means you can use it with chips that don't have analog digital converters or you don't want to wire up, you know, the 20 pins necessary, the 10 pins necessary to get all these IOs. It's designed to be used with a STEM at QT cable. So I can show that overhead, which I think turned off. Ooh. Yeah. Oh, wait, there you go. Well, it's booting. Let's see what happens while it's booting. Let's see if it, no signal. No signal. Well, it's not working. That's cool. Okay. Now it's sparkling. It's sparkling. Okay. It's kind of weird. Anyways, you've got code in Arduino and okay, now it's working. Kind of. Now it's working. We're back. Yay, we're back. Okay. So it's got a STEM at QT port. So you can plug it into, we have boards that have the STEM at QT on them. But also you'll have boards that go from this connector to jumper headers. It's tiny, it's small. It's like a, you know, one inch by two inches or so. But, and it comes with the joystick soldering. So we do the soldering for you. So you've got this like analog thumb stick to select star buttons and then X, Y, A, B. So, you know, it's kind of in the standard game pad setup. There's a power LED and an IRQ pin and LED. You can set it up to have the IRQ pin pulse whenever you get button presses if you don't want to spam the I squared C port. And there's two address selects. So if you want to connect up to four of these on one I squared C port, you're good to go. Only thing I didn't do on this is cause we didn't have space. There's only one STEM at QT connection. So if you want to chain it, we have a little I squared C hubs that you can use to, to connect multiple one of these cables to one I squared C port. And as I mentioned, we've got Arduino code and circuit Python code. So easy to use with any Blinka microcontroller or computer. Okay. And that is our new products of the week this weekly data. Okay. We're going to roll right into top secret. And we just have one quick thing for in the show. This is bored. Yeah. And then while we're doing that go ahead and post it for questions in Discord. I have a couple stored up, but here we go. Lady, what is this? This is a new, well, it's not new. It's just chips quite old. It's a time of flight sensor. I forgot to get around to making a breakup for this. We've got all the other like VL 53 LX blah blah blah series chips. This one's like an eight by eight grid. It's like four meters distance. So I think it'll be cool. So I sent out the prototype PCBs. Okay. I don't have it. This isn't really a top secret, but we're taking photos. So here's one thing. Since we're the overhead, it's working again. I'll show this. I'm collecting non-baseball baseball cards. So this is a person who makes these. This is a hackers card. And so you can, this is zero cool. And yeah, it has, you know, it's from hackers. It's number 3599 print run. Pretty new USA. So I'll have the photo set up soon. We have some Steve Jobs. Did you know he was married to Angelina Jolie? That's interesting. Like for like six months. Oh yeah? Yeah. They met on this set of hackers and they got married. Oh wow. But then obviously divorced. I guess when you work on a movie and you're a love interest in a movie, maybe that stuff, like you're acting like that. Maybe it's like, you know, so it's, It probably messes you up a little bit. You know, maybe if you want to be happy, you just act happy. Yeah. Sometimes. Okay. Well, that's, that's our top secret. Okay. We're going to do questions. I have a couple of stored up now. I'm answering some of them. So we might be calling for you. For the IPS display, is it daylight readable for aircraft and dash instruments where glare is usually probably colors place? It's IPS. I wouldn't call it daylight readable just because that's a specific thing that some trans-flective screens are. So, you know, if it's shaded, you know, it's quite bright. It's also very small. I don't know. You'll have to try your situation. JP is going to be trying acetone on these P-Caps and also using a laser. So hang tight. JP is on the way and you'll be able to find out what you can do and not do or you can go and try yourself is an option. Next. As boards are getting smaller, do you see a need for stack connectors such as quick connector that's above a battery and GST and the pins carefully routed? I like to use standard connectors so I wouldn't make a new connector. But I think you can always get creative or of course use smaller connectors. Any food safe peach sensors? I don't know any peach sensors. Sorry. We don't know either. But they all have, they're all, I know they have to stay wet. I don't think in. I don't know if any of that food safe. I mean, yeah. Okay. Well, we'll wrap it up here and let me see if there's any other questions. Oh, we got one here. What was the DIY two-way pager in a box ship? Actually, you know, it's funny is we did a pager decompile thing. There's a really old video of us doing it online. Yeah, no one told me I was gonna go to jail for it. And we met the person who was running the pager network a few blocks from later for it. And he's like, yeah, this is super cool. And in fact, right now, I think if you web search for pagers, modern pagers or people using pagers, there's a pager network that's still in business. And apparently there is a lot of different professions that are like, all I want is the notification that's all that matters. So I think they don't want to be on the cell network because they're like the cell network can go down, the pager network will stay up. So I think there was like 2 million customers and now they're down to like 800,000 customers. Interesting article. I don't know if it was payable. A lot of medical professionals still use pagers. No. Two-way pagers. And then the update on the DWM1000 UWB RP2040 goodness you showed last month from Disco Lydia. It's in the pile of prototypes but I haven't tested that yet. Okay. Let's our show for tonight, everybody. We will see you all next week. Thank you so much, Zay, running behind the scenes. Yay. Also a special thanks to our customers, our community. We very much appreciate all the orders that keeps us going. We're still trying to recover from COVID and chip shortage. So all your orders really help. We still remain a 100% independent, no venture capital, no loans company. It's a bunch of hard work, but we're doing it and we'll continue to do it and we'll continue to remain open source. Maybe next week on Rant about that. People saying open source, not open source. Just take the word open source off. We'll be doing the rest of our shows throughout the week. We have videos and then Disco Lydia this weekend. It's three day weekend. So we'll have some fun and we're working on a interesting, cool kid toy hack. Maybe we'll post up a video but we probably have to eat and sleep at some point. We'll see everybody later. Here is your Mona Viziner. Bye everybody. Bye bye.