 Life from New York, it's Ask an Engineer. Seasons greetings, everybody. Welcome to Ask Engineer. It's me, Lady Aida, the engineer, and with me, Mr. Lady Aida, broadcasting from downtown Manhattan. That's where the Aida Food Factory is. We do our manufacturing and videoing and kidding and blogging and coding and Christmas tree decorating. Well, we don't have all sorts of stuff. Okay, well, we've got an exciting show for you tonight. One hour's worth of products and videos, double up, because the last week was Thanksgiving. Yeah, last week, we had Show and Tell, JP hosted it, and then we couldn't do Ask an Engineer, but we said we'd be back this week. So we are back this week with a bunch of stuff to show and show. Double the goodies. It's like a double stuff Oreo. Delicious. Tell them the code and then tell them what's on the side of the channel. All right. Show. The code is captoe. It's for a cap touch product that we have. It works on anything that's in stock, except for, of course, gift certificates or things that aren't in stock. So use the code before 11.59 p.m. Eastern tonight. We'll talk about some of our live shows, including Show and Tell, which we just did, to a little bit of a recap from the desk of Lydia, including the great search. We have JP's product pick of the week highlight. We probably just saw JP's little video that we have from some Lego light up stuff. We have some advanced manufacturing, the New York City factory footage. We have double the 3D protein videos and speed ups this week. We have INMPI, or two by DigiTube this week. It's Analog Devices. We got some top secret. We got some new products. We're gonna answer your questions. We do that on Discord, www.discord.com where you can put your questions in throughout the show. We answer them real time. We also storm up, get to them at the end as well. We're gonna have some more about our discounts, some news, all sorts of fun stuff, all that and more on, you guessed it, Ask an Engineer. Yay. Okay, first up, don't forget to code as Kepto, Lydia, there's free stuff, what do people get? Okay, we still have our freebies going on when you order from the Adafruit shop. If you order $99 or more, you'll get this beautiful coaster made from two millimeter thick PCB material with gold edging and Adafruit logo and some bumpers to keep it from sliding. These things we put on our logo on that swag. That's right. We like to keep the logo on PCBs primarily, so this is a hack to do that. Yes, it's true, it's like it's on something we made, so there you go. We're also giving away the KB2040 still, a lovely pro micro pinout compatible microcontroller with the RP2040 chip on there. It's got 200 plus K of RAM, it's got eight megabytes of flash, it's got two buttons, STEMI QT port. It's designed for use with keyboard projects, but you can use it with just about anything. You can run CircuitPython and Arduino and MicroPython wonderfully. $199 or more, you get free UPS ground shipping in the Continental United States. It's brown, it's chured, it's unionized, it's UPS ground, we love it. It's a great way to ship stuff that's trustworthy. And then $299 or more, we are still giving away our Circuit Playground Express on one dev board based on the RP20, sorry, on the SAMD21. It can run CircuitPython, Arduino, code.org, CSDiscoveries, MicroPython, code, make code, it's got buttons and sensors and LEDs and pads that you can use alligator clips with so you don't even need to solder, you can learn how to code and make electronics immediately. All right, and because we just finished up our sales, if you're looking for GIFs and you're gonna run out of time soon, don't forget, we always have 804 GIF certificates, you can check that out on 804.com slash GIF certificates or you can just search on the search bar. Let's kick it off with some news about our live shows. So we are back this week, last week with GP. We did the show until this week. This week on the show until Keystop by with this really cool project that he made for his young engineer. It was a DIY music player using Raspberry Pi. With a QT Pi and had buttons and LEDs. It was like kind of cool. Yeah, one of the neat things that you can do. Yeah, and one of the things we like to see folks do with our electronics and code is all open sources kind of build up to things like, oh, here's like something that lights up. And then here's something that's a keyboard. And then here's something that's a music player. And then here's something that's a touchscreen. And then here's something that's kind of like your own computer that you built. So you can kind of go along and use for through your electronics journey as you acquire more skills and do this. Music players are particularly nice to make because it's not like it used to be. So if you like music, it's almost impossible just to put 10 songs in a folder and drag them over and then listen to them. It's all connected to a cloud or it's like Spotify. It's all, it's Apple music. It's like all these different things and you're using your phone or whatever. But what if you just want a music player? And this is kind of neat. So this is, and it was the name of the project is Red Girl. The Jet Player, a couple DIY P3 player projects. Yeah. So if you're interested in making your own music player also if you think about it like, how do you train the next generation of engineers who's going to do like product design? Like, okay, like everything plays music. Everything is a screen, everything has a battery. So how do you, how do you do all this stuff? You can't just say, we'll put an iPad in there. So that's kind of neat. So you can kind of work your way up and there's like Raspberry Pi stuff you can do. If you learn Python, you can do it all just about anything. Coastal works everywhere. And speaking of music, Liz stopped by with all these synth stuff. So if you want to see Liz's handiwork with the latest synth, the latest, what would you call this? Someodular. Yeah. So there's an entire world of that. Yeah, I don't have time for that. Yeah. So if you want to check that out use the circuit Python more. Linky. Yeah. Now he made a really nice clock that is, I think it's one of the nicest like 3D printed enclosures. We're going to show this video later on in the show. The clock has Earth time, has Mars time and then we were talking about like you could do something like interstellar time where it's like, here's what it is on. It's just as beautiful. Yeah, it's a ground. It's perfect for clocks. It's very appealing to like look at and you can do like a moon face clock. It's really neat. JP showed some lights for Legos. He had this razor crest, you know, Lego propped from Star Wars. But also I noticed that you can use little LED Neopixel lights like we were showing in the beginning for your Lego models but also the ILM people actually use Adafruit stuff. They use Neopixel rings. Yeah. It's kind of cool. And then print stop five and showed the Whipper snapper no code, low code solution that uses this cool IKEA air sensor. Is it also a guide? It's also a guide. Yeah. It showed off soon. But it really showcased like, you know, one of the hard things about showing Whipper snapper is it's so easy. It's like, okay, you plug it in and now it's online and now it's on stuff. In the end. But if you also want to, you know, really dig into the code, this project's a remix that Brent showed that Liz did. So you'd be able to do that as well. But it's really neat. It's like, it's only a few seconds. And like my joke is, because we got this feedback. It's like, oh, you guys are making it too easy for IOT projects. As if there's enough IOT projects and there's enough out there that people can do. Because a lot of folks just want to, kind of put this stuff together like, I just want to get an alert when my basement is flooding. That's it. That's all I want. Or I just want to know when the air quality is going to change. I don't want to like, commit my next four years into learning computer science yet. Yeah. So it's just a way to get you going. So anyways, we'll be doing show and tell next week. What's again, thank you, GP, for showing up and sharing last week. Okay, we do just completed it. We do that every single Sunday. It's in two parts. What was the part one this week? Just a bunch of prototypes. I got this, you know, this grow feather wing. I got some samples of LED strip. I got a capacitive touch feather wing. So I just showed a couple of demos. These cool square switches, square switches, square switches. And then we do the great search where ladies were probably engineering to help you find the things on digikey.com. You know, what was funny this week, we had an alert when Adafruit saw different comment sites when it was hacker news and someone was talking about their first like electronics and PCB project. And they're like, I couldn't use the digikey site until I started watching the great search with Lamar. Because I just didn't know how to use all the pieces of the website because it's like, it's searched for millions of parts. So this week, what did you help people find? Somebody was showing off genuine versus not so genuine hacko tips. And it's a great tip to use official tips. Even if you're using a soldering iron that is using compatible, you know, that it's like, oh, it'll use compatible tips. It's best to get genuine ones because the build quality really will differ. And if you cheap out, the soldering tips will oxidize and get crispy and they won't work. They won't be able to conduct heat. And you will be so sad because you won't be able to be like, why is my solder not melting? Even though it's heated up, it's because it's oxidized and you're not able to get through the crusty carbon layer. So I showed off some different tip styles that you might want to check out. Different, you know, what, whether you want wide bar, hoof screwdriver or pointy tip and pros and cons of using all those different sizes and then stop the digickey. So definitely like pick up one of each, you know, before you need it because having the right tool makes a big difference. And, you know, great searches powered by a lot of requests that are out there. That one was on X for many known as Twitter. You can tag us on just about any social media platform. You can email me at datafridge.com. You can put it in YouTube comment, whatever you want to do. If you're looking to use digickey search in the best way possible. This person spends a lot of time in there. I do. That's what we do. We should have used it. Okay, JP's product pick of the week is our weekly discount automatically applied segment that JP goes over and you put it in your cart and you don't even have to type your discount code. Here's this week's highlight. It is the HUSB 238 USB-C power delivery breakout. When I plug in the HUSB 238, it is now giving me 20 volts. 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 so this one here has the nine volt jumper set there. Now is going to provide us with nine to my power input for the little flying faders here. You can see they are now moving around under the power of this power brick that's supplying nine volts. It is the HUSB 238 power delivery breakout. And of good JP's workshop is tomorrow and then Friday there is deep dive with Tim where you can get into all the innards of Circuit Python on more. If you're interested in quality, look at the latest deep dive. Tim did an excellent job talking about all the things that you can do with our quality displays in Circuit Python. So do check it out. Speaking of, it's Python on hardware time. What's the song? Okay, two weeks worth. Yeah, well, two weeks sort of. I mean, you can get our newsletter. We have, I think the most popular, whatever, there's a way to do that. I want to say it's the most popular. What's wrong? Yeah, so there's thousands and thousands of people who subscribe to data for daily Python on hardware newsletter. We don't track, we don't do metrics. We don't do anything. You can subscribe, unsubscribe in time. It's on a separate website, datafordaily.com because we don't even want it to be associated with your shopping experience at all. It's not substacked. Because we all know what happens when you go to a website and you buy something, they spam you forever. We don't, but we do want to do newsletters and more. So we've made a separate website called datafordaily. And that's where we have multitudes of newsletters, including this one. So first up, we have some stories, some news in the world. This is kind of good news for everybody who's been paying attention to this. The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4s are coming back into the retail channels if you've been waiting. They're, oh, they're happening. It's slowly but surely just like all of this. Pi 4s are all completely in stock. If you want to do Pi 4, you can get one right now. Yeah, we changed the limit too. So you can get more than just one Pi 4 right now. So we do have those. You can check out the benchmarks for the Raspberry Pi 5 talking to an oscilloscope with Python. This is interesting, you know, while we were on break for one week, open AI collapsed and then came back to an article interview with IEEE Spectrum. And it was kind of interesting because there's a lot of stuff going on right now with open AI and how these models are trained and everything. But just to summarize, Chatchi P.T. style, Chatchi P.T. appears that was trained on the Morse code so much that it's a very good coding companion for her. So when she's writing Arduino libraries or certain bits of code, the code that's outputting for that type of stuff looks like her code because it was probably trained on her code. And we're actually fine with that. When we use Chatchi P.T., we'll put it in either the read me, we'll put it everywhere that we say, hey, we use this, and then we put the link to the actual Chatchi P.T. session so you can see that. No one else is doing that, that's fine. We think that's good because this is changing. Every day people are using these tools for more. We think this is a good use because it's the Morse code and then it's popping out code. More of her code companion. And if you're wondering, hey, what do we think about you doing this? Yeah, do it, because Lady Aida is not gonna be able to be a one-on-one code coach for you. But with this, maybe she can in some way. So anyways, there's an interview with her and you can see, there may be a nice graphic too. It's a nice graphic. Yeah, they did a good job. I tripled you. That's the deal. So anyways, and that being said, I wanted to go to Playgrounds and have you talked about this project. So Playground is our new. Can you scroll down? Oh yeah. It's in the newsletter. We highlight it. We highlight projects in newsletters, by the way. So if you want your newsletter highlighted, put it on Playground, it's a great way to do it. One last thing I should mention, Hackspace Magazine is out. There's a bunch of Python projects, Python hardware projects, obviously. And then if you want, you can go to Playground.adaver.com and check out, or just go to our Learn System Learn.adaver.com and check out Playground because on Playground, there's all these guides that you and the community can do. And then we put it in our newsletter. So it's a full circle of things. Yes. So Ecology. Yeah, so you want to talk about this one? Yeah, DJ Delty did a project. He showed it off on Show and Tell a couple of weeks ago. And I was like, that's a cool idea. So there's a lot of people who play truck simulators. And you want to use a microphone. Well, so they use a headset but they're playing with other people to pretend they're on a CB radio. But he's like, wouldn't it be cool but actually you could use a CB radio. And so this is a project showing how to turn a CB radio into like a, you click it to mute and unmute and then you can use the microphone inside as a mic. And so it's a bit of a build but I guess he really likes playing this game. And so this is a really neat hack showing how to take existing hardware. Like I don't even know. I mean, I'm assuming it must be very easy to get CB radios are probably not super popular anymore since everyone's got telegram and WhatsApp and phones. But you can make cool props for your video games. So I just thought this was neat and a great use of Circuit Python because it's really easy and it's accessible and you shove some wires into the CB radio thing and you put it in a nice case and it works great. And there's been a lot of Circuit Python projects published on Playground. So check out the featured projects. You have this wifi matrix. Oh, wait, can you go buy some Playground? Yeah, lots of lots of lots of projects. So check out lots of Circuit Python in particular. It's a good place to post up your Python hardware. And you know, in the past, one of the things that we were asked is, hey, I have a cool Circuit Python project. Can I publish it on Learn? And now we have Playground, which is exactly that same authoring tool and you can put it there. Then we see it, we feature it on the blog, we feature it on the newsletter. More people contribute to your project and we're keeping this ad free, tracking free. It's just for you to use and no strings attached. It's just to help you document your project somewhere. There's lots of places you can do it online, but you need accounts to view like the whole thing. Sites kind of hide the content behind a signup. I get that that's a, that's our model. We don't have the model. We just, we make hardware, open source hardware. And then we do this as a community service for everyone. So do check it out. And, uh... Yeah. Put a guide up. Okay. We do this every single week. It's delivered to your inbox. It is aetherforddaily.com. Okay. Let's go to some, let's take a little bit of a break. Let's go to some factory footage and then we'll bounce back to some guides. And that's a factory footage. Okay. Let's go do some open source hardware news. I have not checked recently, but I believe right now we are up to 712 published open hardware designs. According to the OSHA certification. Yeah. At over 700 for sure. It is. Out of 2600 of the certified designs, we have 712 actions. Speak louder than words. When someone says open or a company says open, they can say it, but this is one way to do it for sure. So we're pretty proud of that. We have thousands of guides. This is where we put them up at learn.etherford.com. What are the guides on the big board this week? Glad you asked. Okay. Kicking it. We started with an update. Oh, do you want to like me behind me so we can see the? Oh, yeah. Okay. We've got a top left quality guide, got updated now handles, backlight management and another Arduino example. JP did this beautiful Lego set lighting using our wired LEDs. A lot of people build Lego kits for the holidays or they get Lego kits and you want to light them up. And you can buy expensive light up kits or you can DIY it. Just grab the wildly these from us and then solder them to an AW9523 PWM driver for constant current PWM lighting or you can swire them directly to a coin cell if you just want just solid light. And so JP has a couple of different examples on how to do that. We've got this excellent Kualya S3 space clock. So we've got those gigantic four inch diagonal displays that you can now control from circuit Python. So Liz and Noyan Pedro collaborated on making a desktop clock that can go between Earth mode or Mars mode. So if you want to track your time in Mars souls, not soul as in like the soul of your feet or like the spiritual essence of humanity but SOL like the sun. So check that out. It's a really beautiful print. And we've also published the S3 Flight Proximity Tracker by Trevor. This guide is neat because it will geolocate where you are based on IP address and then you tell it which way you're facing and it will tell you when flights come by where are they from and to and I'll show you the logo. So you can be like, oh, there's like a Delta flight flying into New York city or if it's flying over you it's going to some other city. So if you look up in the sky and you're like, hey, there's a plane and where is it coming going to now? One of the examples that people are probably familiar with from the viral social media meme or video that they've seen somewhere is the sphere in Vegas. It'll look up at the planes as it's going by and it's the same thing. So it's getting, it's not actually looking at the planes it's getting the data and the eyeballs and like, you know, the cool, you know, like emoji character like thing that's there will look up and see the planes go by. So that's kind of cool. So you can make one of those on your app. Yeah. So we'll have some more guides during the week. Don't forget playground is one of the things that you can use right now. You can go to playground right from Adafruit and you can see all the guides yourself. The chat was asking, is there a search for it? We're adding a search but it's now we love Google to index and all the search engines. So you- That's like this week. Yeah. So you could just use whatever search engine probably just put the, you know, there's the little trick that you use to put there because they do a really good job. But of course this will be all slipped up into the search system as well. But do take a look at and look at the featured notes and more. And that is our source hardware news and more for the week stuff by next week. Okay. Let's do some 3D printing videos. Okay. So we're going to play these back to back to back to back. So we will be doing the quality display, the space clock, the speed ups and more. We'll see you on the other side. You can power RGB TFT displays with the Adafruit Qualia ESP32 S3. Featuring a built-in RGB display peripheral, this ESP32 dev board comes with 16 megabytes of flash for buffering large images, animations, or even video. It can power a big four inch 720 by 720 round display for making projects with a unique shape. Included are pins for a capacitive touch overlay so you can have touch control with supported displays. Two built-in side buttons can be used for user input, such as interfacing with the display's brightness or cycling between modes. Circuit Python support makes it easy to write software using the display IO library. Democode is available for initializing various display sizes so you can quickly get up and running. The product guide features documentation for getting started with both Arduino and Circuit Python. You can set constant current for the backlight control circuit using the onboard jumpers. You'll want to reference your display's datasheet for getting the correct voltage. We designed and 3D printed a case for this four inch display in an all-in-one snap fit enclosure. Translucent PLA lets you see the Qualia ESP32 S3 dev board reminiscent of gadgets from the 1990s. We also designed a snap fit case for this four inch 480 by 480 square display. This features 3D printed buttons using flexible TPU filament for easy button actuation. A built-in recess section allows for easy access to the buttons and the USB-C port. We think the Adafruit Qualia ESP32 S3 is the best IoT dev board for exploring these RGB displays and hope they inspire you to create new projects. You can build a retro inspired clock using Adafruit's Qualia S3 and a four inch round display. This project lets you switch between your local Earth time and Mars time displayed as a classic analog clock. A four inch 720 by 720 round display makes for a space age themed clock housed in a snap fit 3D printed enclosure. Powered by the Adafruit Qualia ESP32 S3, this dev board features an RGB TTL interface for TFT displays. It's got the ESP32 S3 with 16 megabytes of flash, 8 megabytes of PS RAM, stem of ports, two user buttons, and backlight control. An arcade button is mounted to the back of the spherical orb and it lets you switch between local time and Mars time. The display is nestled inside the orb and it swivels back and forth allowing for the best viewing angle. The latest version of Circuit Python adds support for the Qualia S3 and display IO library for the four inch round display. The code uses bitmap images of Mars and Earth while the numbers, hour, and minute hands are drawn using vector IO shapes. The images, fonts, and graphics are all customizable so you can stylize it to match your preference. The enclosure is designed to be 3D printed and snap fits together. A 40 pin FBC extension board and ribbon cable connect the four inch round display to the Qualia S3 that's secured to the cover on the bottom of the base. We hope this inspires you to check out these four inch round displays in Adafix Qualia ESP32 S3 for your next IoT project. That is 3D printing for the week. Don't forget, CAPTO is a code. We're going to jump right in to some Ion API. Ion API. Ion API brought to you by DigiKey and Adafrit, thank you DigiKey. This week is Amelon Devices. Lady Ado, what is the new exciting thing coming out of Amelon Devices this week? Okay, this week from ADI, which bought Max and which bought Trinamic, is the new Trinamic TMC 5240. This is yet another in the family of Trinamic stepper motor drivers, kind of famous for their silent steppers that use very high quality motor control to enable very fast and but very quiet motor control. And this one is kind of neat because it does even more. In fact, I was looking at this and I was like, wow, this actually kind of replaces almost all the stepper motor control code I've ever had to write or have used in my life. So it's up to 36, it's like, you know, five to 36 volt, up to two amp, you know, per leg, bipolar stepper motor controller. But it also has a lot of built-in capabilities such as, you know, motion control. Of course, you can do stepper control. It has encoder reading capability. It's got, you know, motion planning. You can have UART or SPI control rather than most of these stepper drivers before you used GPIO, this one uses SPI or UART. Up to 256 microsteps per step, a reconfigurable stepper, micro-stepping, sine wave table, if you want to change it from being default sine, try to think what else is in there. And, well, we'll go through it all, but very powerful kind of does it all, stepper motor controller. So this is the kind of thing it's going to step, sorry, it's going to control. Chunky stepper motors, they can go up to two amps, 36 volts, this happens to be like, I think you had 200 milliamps, 12 volts. So this is a smaller stepper motor, but, you know, basically, you know, any motion control that has an XY gantry, you know, normally you would use, you could use like a full H-bridge like we do on our, you know, here is our motor feather wing. And what we do with the motor feather wing is we actually PWM the individual ABCD pins, all four pins to create smooth motion. So you can do single stepping where you can go like one step at a time, chunk, chunk, that's definitely the easiest. It's the fastest to implement, but you don't get really good resolution. And it's kind of loud because the stepper motor doesn't move smoothly between each step. It kind of like, you know, rockets to the step and then kind of oscillates a little bit. So if you want smooth control, you want like slowly microstep up and down from the two points that you want to travel between. A lot of people who are in the maker community or even engineers, they'll have, you know, a 3D printer and 3D printers are really popular. Home example of something that has an XY gantry. So there's going to be a stepper motor that controls the head and that goes back and forth. This is just, you know, a random 3D printer that we've sold. The XY goes back and forth and you want to move, you want it to move quickly, but also smoothly because you don't want a loud and jittery print and you also want a fast print. And the faster you can move the head, the faster your 3D printer will complete. Okay, so like I said, you know, when you, this is from ADI's tutorials on stepping and microstepping. You can, you know, most stepper motors are about 200 steps per rotation and you could just step one per, you know, you toggle the A and B and C and D pins and with a motor controller and then you can just step one, two, three, four, five, 200 times per rotation. But you're not going to get very good resolution of course going to be very loud. So the best thing to do is to use microstepping where you slowly PWM the motor driver to smoothly move between the steps rather than just going like chunk, chunk, chunk between each step. The bad news is anyone who's ever used microstepping knows is that the frequency you microstepping at is going to resonate through the motor and through the coils and you're going to get like a really annoying squeaking, squealing sound. And what Trinamic is kind of famous for is they have learned how to adapt the stepper PWM and like the frequency and I don't know, it's like the magic called silence, you know, step silent or whatever that basically makes it like super quiet but you still get all of that power and smooth motion. So if you do want to have a finished product that has stepper motor control but you don't want it to be squeaky you're probably using a Trinamic stepper motor controller already. This is kind of the overall block diagram for it. So the microstep sequencer is again something that they've had in previous motor controllers. The thing that's new here I think is the motion controller with wamping. So when you're not only are you having to microstep between each step but you also want to slowly speed up the motor and then move very quickly and then slowly slow it down or you decelerate because you want to go between two points accurately so you don't want to like go over the distance you can't go backwards. You want to like slowly speed up so you don't jerk the motor which will cause noise and vibration. And then when you're getting close to where you're about to end up you want to put the brakes down and slowly end up exactly at the spot you want to end at and normally you would have to do that with a very complicated motion controller that would be programmed in your microcontroller or microcomputer and especially if you have more than one stepper this becomes very complicated to program because you're having to like constantly track multiple linear algorithms and the X and Y and Z are not initially going to the same speed and the same distance. It's a lot of work. So what's nice about this motor is it does that all for you. You tell it how many steps you want to go to and you set up the ramp up, you know, attack, decay, release, whatever and it will do the whole motion for you and let you know when it's done. You can communicate it with U-Order SPI and we'll go through it so you get a multiple motors. There's also encoder unit I mentioned, interrupts and there's also some neat stall detection as well. A lot of, yes, I'm sorry. This is the stuff I was talking about with the eight point motion controller. So stealth chop is what makes it quiet, spread cycle I think is just kind of what makes it reduce current and be precise as it goes from the beginning of the step to the end of the step. Stall guard is what lets it detect the back EMF so you know when it's stalled which is really valuable because you might have end switches on your XY gantry but for stuff those can fail or maybe you want to have some, you know there could be something in the way of your motors that's stopping it from moving. You haven't forbid it bumps into a person or bumps into something it's machining. You can detect that and immediately stop it and then cool step keeps your motors nice and cool because they do overheat. Okay, so this is the diagram. It only does one motor of course but you can connect multiple motors. There's two pin configurations, the TSOP and the QFN. QFN is smaller but if you go to the next page the TSOP has better thermal resistance and of course it's gonna be a little bigger. You know, you'd want to have the center pad go to your, through a four layer board maybe have two ounce copper and then behind it or above it you're going to have a heat sink that might be necessary. SPI, so I think the previous step on motor drivers that I've seen from them they had UART or individual pin control. These now have SPI interface which is kinda nice because it means you can control pretty much any number of motors you want and each one will just have a unique chip select and of course SPI is very, very fast. So you can write and read from the register map there's a huge number of registers you can access I won't go through all of them. There's also UART single wire which is kinda interesting, I guess this is for back compatibility. With this you would have all the motors share a single UART but you can set the node address and the node address is set, I think if you go to the next page, you can set the node address with a couple different pins or three pins that you can, yeah configure and then you have like node zero through seven and then if you need more, apparently there's a way to configure it so you can use like up to 255 motors but this way they all, I guess they chain one wire and they share one wire. So I guess if you wanna use UART maybe some existing motor controllers that are set up to do UART mode for back compatibility. Honestly, I would use SPI, it's gonna be a lot faster but you do need more wires. What Trinamic is known for again, silent stealth chopping. So they say absolutely no noise whatsoever with these motors, the only motor, the only noise you're gonna hear is from the ball bearings and the ramp generator, again, I think this is kind of the most interesting thing because instead of you having to manually deal with, okay, slowly speed up the motor through like the A1 phase then then interrupt goes off, okay, remember to change the controllers to drive the stepper motor in faster, okay, next interrupt, go to a max, next interrupt, it handles it everything for you it will automatically decelerate if you're using too much current or it will track the number of steps. So you will get to the final location even if you have power dips or if you stall out. There is a support for reference switches, so mechanical stops built in so it'll automatically stop and hit some mechanical stop you will end up like bashing the motor into the side of the gantry. Also again, in addition to having mechanical stops you want to detect a motor stall to emergency stop or to reduce the amount of current you're using it can detect the motor stall there's a couple of configurations I noticed on how to do this but using the back EMF basically will say, hey, we're not actually moving we're getting a lot of back EMF while I'm trying to step it'll let you know you can automatically deactivate the motor and encoder support as well so if you're using a stepper motor home to a reference switch, a stop switch on the left and right side is very common but if you're doing precision servo like motion control you might want to have an encoder as well there is encoder support it will keep track of the encoder count for you and use that when you're telling it in the motion planner like, hey, I want you to go to this location it will use the encoder instead of trusting what it thinks is the steps and so if you end up slipping the encoder will detect that and you'll automatically make up any lost steps it's available as a breakout board this is a tiny breakout board which is not the same size as like many stepper motor driver shields they use like a kind of like a like a Pololu pinout maybe I don't know who invented it first this is similar but it's not exactly but remember you can't use the GPIO control for this this is SPI or UART only so it's not back compatible with those like step forwards, direction, enable, microstep, GPIO control you have to send the commands over SPI so it's a little bit more advanced you would need to redesign your PCB if you wanted to like upgrade your 3D printer design with this they are in stock and there's also I do have oh they're in stock they just got in so I think like the one that's missing like I bought it from 250 and then on the overhead I did pick up also one of their eval boards although I didn't realize when I first picked this up that it didn't have GPIO control and I haven't finished writing any driver code for it but this is a nice eval board and I like is it's open hardware so you can get the design files these are the control pins motor output, motor power some nice capacitors and then this just shows you hey this is the size of the motor driver on a four layer board so a nice eval board if you wanna get started with this I think if you're making a very nice stepper motor control robotic gantry system this is gonna definitely save you a lot of time with motion planning cause it doesn't all for you alright, you get a one minute video where I play it Hi my name is Thomas Ernst I'm with Dynamics since almost 10 years now and now we are part of the big analog devices family and I've got our all-time classic demo with me and it showcases our benefits the benefits of our stepper drivers really well for example we can detect the loads of the motor shaft from the information the motor gives us and if we increase the load the load angle opens up and we can use this information to reduce the current that we drive into the motor and this keeps the motor cool and saves up to 75% energy our drivers are optimized for high resolution micro-stepping and this enables a really reliable and smooth motor run and on top of that we have our step shop shopper which makes the stepper motor absolutely silent alright, we're going to roll right in the new products don't forget, code is CAPTO let's go okay, we finally have some of these bar displays and long thin TFT displays these are like 320 ish by 900 ish pixels they are really nice bar displays that you can control with one of our qualia boards they just came in like at 4 p.m. today so I'll have a demo maybe next time I'll set up a demo to show you guys but they are RGB TTL so you can't control them with any Arduino you need something that's designed for RGB 666 display control but they've got lots of pixels and they're like nice long and thin it's rare to see like such thin displays they're thinner than a phone like I think they would be used for like a heads up display some fun demos yeah, well some fun demos sushi conveyor belts and such but they're finally in stock so if you've been waiting for these, pick them up next we've got an update for our 8x16 LED backpacks we've been solely redesigning all of our LED backpack boards to have STEMI QT for connectors on the back and this one has two of them so you can easily chain together multiple backpack boards or connect other sensors and devices so this is the latest round in our big redesign push we've got many, many redesigned so all of them will eventually have STEMI QT ports right now only the red one does but we'll do the rest of the colors so, next up also had a redesign for this RTD HDMI driver that's for a five inch display if you go back, I'll show you what changed what changed is that you used to have a separate cable for USB now it has a micro USB port right on there it's a little bit more compact and it comes like pre-programmed now it doesn't have the various select for source it just does HDMI in automatically so you don't have to worry about accidentally selecting a separate source but the biggest changes that it now has the micro USB instead of a separate USB cable that looks great, work with anything that is HDMI next up also have an update to the ultimate GPS breakout same one of our most popular boards we're still selling this extremely popular GPS that can use the internal antenna or an external antenna works great with Arduino, circuit python, python anything that gives you, wants you are GPS data I think this one is the one that also can be used for high altitude, can do 10 hertz updates I love that you can just use the internal antenna so the new thing is it now comes with the battery attached on the back so if you want to have the real time clock keep track of time even when it's depowered you no longer have to solder the battery on it comes soldered on for you, very handy all right, and then the start of the show besides ULAYdata, our team, our community everyone who purchases things from Adafritx to support an open source hardware company manufacturing in the USA is yay, this 3.5 inch capacitive multi-touch display that you can be used in SPI or 8-bit mode these are some displays that I bought like almost 10 years ago and I forgot about them and then we were cleaning up and I found a bin of 800 displays and I was like, oh my goodness I should really get these into the shop so I designed a breakout board but it's good timing because I've been doing so many redesigns that I've learned a lot and made this board even better so we go to the overhead so one nice thing is it has a iSpy connector so instead of having to have a gigantic wired up demo look at how elegant this is I just have this QDPI board with a iSpy QDPI BFF on the back and it just plugs and plays and I have full backlight and touch support all connected up so it makes it, I can move it around easier so this is a multi-touch display so you can actually have it can detect multiple fingers so here I've got four it can do five but I don't have I guess it's about to do five fingers at a time I don't know, you can't really tell but it can do five multi-touch it's 320 by 480 you can use SPI and it can do pretty fast SPI to the onboard display although I'll say if you want really fast updates use the 8-bit input so you'll need a lot more pins and of course a microcontroller that can handle 8-bit display updates but you're already 8 bits at a time instead of 1 bit at a time so it's like at least twice as fast maybe four times as fast it's got capacitive multi-touch over I squared C there's also an IRQ pin so you can detect when a touch is detected on the SPI port there's the microSD card so you can store images if you want to display them on here I've got some mounting pads, level shifting you can use this with I squared C or SPI because it has built-in memory buffer even though it's got 320 by 480 pixels two bytes per pixel you can use it with any microcontroller pretty much because the memory the image is buffered on here you just tell it, hey, draw red at this location and we'll draw red at that location so it's great for use with microcontrollers microcomputers Raspberry Pi has support for this display as well and now with capacitive touch so we have a resistive touch one and a beautiful capacitive touch one with nice shiny display and multi-touch support and that's new products okay, we're like right on time yeah, we're gonna do some top-secret you can put your questions in Discord we have a couple of them lined up already don't worry about those but let's do some top-secret and then we'll bounce over to some questions okay, this week in top-secret we're gonna play two videos and then I'm gonna show one image all right, Lady DeWiz okay, this is a cool switch so we've carried those 808 step switches and then somebody emailed us hey, that company also makes these cool illuminated square switches which square switches Squelish switches and what's neat is you can see that they got the 12 millimeter pins but then they also have two more LED pins on the side this is, see, because it's marked negative and this one's more positive this is the TS series and so I have it wired up here and when I press it it has a kind of a nice glow it's kind of a cool white and I have it wired so the switch obviously turns it on but you can turn on the switch independent, the LED independently I just have a little resistor here to current limit it and it's a kind of nice little switch I like the feel of it so we'll be selling these in a pack and then I think the plastic piece can come off so if you want you can even put something underneath or draw if you wanna have a labeled button so it can make for like a low-cost macopad use a little color printer print it off, it'll be cool nice Lady DeWiz, what's this? this is the 3.5 inch HX and FT 480 by 320 TFT screen with capacitive touch this is one of those funny stories where I actually bought these screens like almost 10 years ago and I forgot about them but it's a nice capacitive touch 3.5 inch display and this is just the breakout so you can use iSpy you can use pins for 8-bit or SPI mode and I was like, oh, well let's make a feather wing version of this too so this time I've got the feather plugged in I've got a little issue here where this doesn't sit quite flat so I'm gonna fix it in the next revision but the touch part and the LED display part works great and what's cool is you saw that this is a multi-touch so it can detect multiple fingers at the same time using the iSquared-C interface for the capacitive touch so all I gotta do is I gotta fix this see this little part is bumping into the chip gonna move this down and then hopefully this will be ready to put in the store all right and then I have one more and then I'm gonna try to pull into the line so it's dangerous to do this okay, what is this? this is an update to the 2.7 inch e-ink shield so we had to redesign the whole thing pretty much from scratch because the e-ink display like changed the length of the flags and then it comes from a place up to flip it over and then it's just got redesigned I'm doing a lot of redesigned I'm like 90% done so some of the tougher ones are left over and this is one of the ones that's been out of stock for a very long time but hopefully I'll be able to wrap it up and get this e-ink shield back in the store all right, and that's top secret for me get back in that vault okay, just reminding with codes kepto hope you found some things to purchase tonight let's do the questions we've got a bunch lined up first one was a nice comment so I'm gonna pass this along this is on the topic of chat GPT and using your code Lady Aida a person in the chat said reference lady is good all the time it's always clear and we'll lay it out yeah, thanks okay, will the Adafrit matrix portal work as a replacement for the Adafrit matrix portal S3 I'm trying to make LED matrix scoreboard in that project, no you need to use the S3 because you need that extra memory but here's the good news we just got some parts in and we will be able to get the matrix portal in the shop really soon so sign up and like hopefully by the end of this week early next week we'll have the matrix portal S3 and it sells up very fast hopefully we got enough parts this time question for the engineer I'm trying to get a braincraft hat or voice bonnet audio to work with the Pi 5 Bookworm the GitHub repo from LearnGuide doesn't work on the Pi 5 Bookworm nope how or where could I look for an alternative to install to play audio I don't know where to look Pi 5 is new yeah, the Pi 5 and Bookworm is new and so it's not too surprising that it doesn't work yet I think you might want to open up a GitHub issue on the place where we have the script and we're working on it the person who has been doing a lot of Pi 5 updates they just finished the Pi TFT stuff yeah, they can work on and they did the I2S microphone in so the next one is to do I2S amplifier yeah, let's take a little bit when a new Pi comes out and we don't we don't know what's coming out before it comes out by the way like we get a we sell them but we don't get like super advanced notice besides what the resellers get and then we go as fast as we can update things okay next, can the iSpy do EPID parallel or should I use something else from Max Refresh? the iSpy is just SPI EPID parallel you probably wouldn't want such a long cable anyway so for that, you know, you want to have it plug in directly into the board because EPID parallel is going to be not that it isn't fast but you're going to get a little bit more crosstalk from all those pins so I think just direct on a PCB was the best thing to do and this one, someone's answering in the chat you might have other things to add, Lady Aida what is the easiest way to create a GUI on a small display using CircuitPython? So Justin was display IO? Yeah, we have a lot of tools on display IO so check it out Thanks DJ Devin for linking up some Yeah, it's a little different than if you're using Arduino where you're like oh, I just draw everything to screen each time with display IO, you tell it here's an object and it will manage the redrawing for you so it uses a lot less memory and it means you don't get flickering so it's a much more elegant way to do display but you have to learn how to do it we have a lot of guides on how to do so Okay, this one probably has a whole bunch of different answers depending on what people are going to do how did you get into PCB design and what resources are helpful? You know, I just wanted to build a project and I couldn't get all the parts individually and so I had a free copy of Eagle CAD and that's how I learned how to do PCB design I think, yeah, I think that was the first way I did it but I also roommate to do PCB design so I could ask them for help That was a while ago, so now but now, though, if you didn't know what resources, what places would you look for? There are so many CHICAD tutorials online I would just check out like you do videos on CHICAD or, you know, tutorial on Instructables There's tons and tons Fritzing is also a great way to get started It's a little simpler and it's like you do chunks and blocks and we have a couple guides on using Fritzing as well Those are the two things I'd say Fritzing, if you're like really just beginner, you want to get started I know there's a lot of online PCB editing software I've not been successful using those so those are my two recommendations but people have used them The most prolific folks, you know, they they were using Eagle maybe they won't be using Eagle eventually but CHICAD is the one that you see probably the biggest community around as well it's also open source so I would say check out any of the resources for CHICAD and there's lots of videos, tutorials there's social media places where people talk about stuff I mean, it's one of the few tools that probably has a community as big and as you get something out at the end which is a board like, you know you can download open source software and use like GIMP and like, you know things for images there's lots of tools out there but you don't necessarily get something tangible like, when you learn at CHICAD you eventually get something physical in your hands like, it worked or it didn't and like I said, there's so many tutorials like, zero to hero yeah, there's a there's a discord for CHICAD as well so there's a lot of there's a lot of that's what I would say is still with that okay uh select that and all the questions, okay, cool people are sharing some resources thank you yeah, I mean, it's everyone's got PC opinions okay well um those were the questions okay exactly that yeah, do a reminder TOE is the code thank you everyone don't forget there's free stuff you get free free free free and if it's after the holidays you're still looking to do stuff send people and either for gift certificate we very much appreciate your support um, we're doing an open source hardware company no loans of venture capital we don't monetize you we just no banner ads publish our files out there we make physical things you can buy too we very much appreciated if you can help support a US a open source hardware company um, there's not many of us so we do appreciate your orders thank you we'll see everybody next week this has been an eight of fruit production this is your moment of Xenia good night everyone