 Welcome to my desk full of beautiful electronics. I've got some fun stuff to show you this week We have a new tool that we're releasing called penguin and It's part of my as you may know, I've been doing a lot of board redesigns parts are out of stock packages of different whatever so for me as I've been Redoing a lot of boards. I also had this like kind of urge to like maybe clean up some of the silk screens as well And some of you know that we have some boards with really nice silk screens and some that have kind of like plain silk screens Let's go to the overhead okay, so You know we have You know our plane breakouts which tend to have This kind of you know, vectory font. This is the default vector font from Eagle CAD You know, it's a very legible font. There's nothing wrong with it or typeface whatever Here's a demo of it and then You can see it on this break out that I happen to have here as well, you know, just um It's a you know, monospace font You know, I'll have like the logo which you know gets imported as a bitmap But all the text in the labeling is again using that default Font and here's like the B&O zero five five and then Likewise, you know the text vector text vector and then let's know while we have like a really nice board like this Circuit playground and you'll see like the font is nice and serif And you know it's curved around the text and on the back, you know, we have this very nice legible serif text You know the Gemma M zero Even nicer. It's got a little bit of a golden highlight here going on here, but the text here and here and here is all Very nicely rendered and the way we do this is I Finished the board design You know, you get all the parts the right location and I use the this generic font and then what I do is I go to Phil B paint your dragon and I apply him with Arizona iced tea and pizza No, it's getting I you know, he works for us and he does amazing silk screens He spends a few days and he like comes back with a gorgeous silk screen That's how you got like the macro pad or the monster mask that these amazing beautiful pieces of art And I still want to do that You know when we have a really amazing product like the macro pad or the monster mask the circuit playground Yes, we'll spend a few days and do all the custom silk screens thing is though I designed a breakout every single week and I don't want to have Phil B. Just churn out these very basic silk screens that don't need You know graphics treatment. They just I just want to have slightly nicer text And what's funny is like, you know as I was kind of like you know pitching this project to Phil B And I was like well You know, I really want something that's not just the playing vectors to vector fonts of the classic and the new vector font And I wanted to go with it You know nice proportional font maybe and he's like well, there's a proportional font in vector. Yeah, sorry There's a proportional font in eco-cat. Why don't you just use that and I'm like it's a lie You know anyone who's actually tried to use it Knows if you use the proportional font when you render out the Eat the Gerber file from Eagle cat it gets converted into a vector font The portion of font is not actually rastered out It's also that kind of like a hell that I could knock off and we kind of were like What if we wanted to use different fonts and So I saw me, you know, call you a week or two ago. I was like sort of sent pay your dragon off and I said Go figure this out. You know, you're you're smart And you know, what's nice is Eagle cat files are XML So it's like maybe you can figure out a way to like extract the text and maybe Auto-generate or something, you know, you know, go go figure it out Because I just don't want to you know I'd rather we spend like a couple weeks making a really good tool Than me sending you a break out every single week and you're just like you're sitting there, you know Converting fonts and another thing is the way we do these nice silk screens. It's It gets converted, you know, it the Gerber files are exported to I think DXS important until like it, you know illustrator or some other vector editor Philby does the silk screen and then gets exported back from SVG into BMP It's basically unedible. Like this is like one object in Eagle cat. It's like one bitmap object And again, it's awesome when we do like a complicated board But not awesome when it's just a little break out or if I have to like move the Labels around like you can't do that. I'd have to go and edit the SVG and then re-export the whole thing so the tool that Philby finally came up with and I finally got to test out yesterday we went back and forth and Neaten it up. It's called Penguin Because it's kind of a related to It's inspired by the buzzer tool that spark fun uses for their labels But we want to do something that was like in situ. It doesn't create libraries. It actually changes the board file itself. So let's go It's a computer So this is the guy which I just published so check it out and It's a Python script and basically what it does is it opens up, you know, you point it at the board file It reads the XML finds text and then replaces it with the font of your choosing. So You know in this case You know, you can see the original font was like the vector font and then on the other side, you know I picked my favorite which was future a medium or future a heavy Or or bold. I like future. I think it's very visible. It's kind of like my favorite fonts But what's nice is that, you know, when you do this So this is the original and you can see, you know, this is the the vector font Once it's converted second to here and There's this a jaggy-ness, but like ignore that's eagle cats rendering it. It's not actually jaggy It's like the eagle cat. It doesn't it gets a little bit weirded out when you import like 1200 DPI bitmaps, but each one is it's a unique little object that you can move around And so, you know, as I do the font conversion if I want to move labels around You're like, oh, I want to move the sda around if I swap two pens or like the interrupt You know left or right or if I'm looking at the back silkscreen Which looks like this, you know, and I'm like, oh, I want to avoid the The vias or something, you know, I can kind of shift it around To to make sure that the text doesn't get, you know, there's no vias that punch through But it's really nice, you know, like even though the little, you know, LED label text gets converted so you can find it on Get hub and it's called Penguin So that has information and basically there's like, you know, you can do different scaling different DPI and I thought I would show it Live so hold on let me Let me quit everything else. Oh, yeah, the font jokes are about to arrive Just like jokes if you have a good version to certain fonts like okay, put the kids in the other room Yeah, this is gonna get gross. Okay, so you got like the ink display, right? And so, you know, I mean, you're gonna be able to see it in the text, but You know the first one we did and so you you run it It can show you run the tool Python penguin and then you set the font so you can have any any two type font you you want and that's the one of the things I really like is You know, I like Futura, but other people might like different fonts But also I can have you can have up to three fonts because you can change the proportional vector Or fixed there's three fonts So you can you can you know change them around and it doesn't It doesn't change the board you're working on it actually creates a new board called, you know underscore out And then if you're like, oh, you know, I want like papyrus My PCB. Yeah, we did it. This is what the people want. You want you want papyrus So of course you can't edit the text it, you know, it's rastered But you know, this is great like I've always wanted, you know, maybe you know If you want to like make this a little bit easier to read out great This is the electronics they use on planet avatar. That's right This is beautiful. This is cinema. Okay, so then I don't say this We also downloaded The blade on our font Yeah, and this looks really cool too actually So, yeah, if you find this board in the desert flipped over, what do you do? Yeah, so it's kind of nice so you could you know, do you could do it's almost like quite a nice visible font It's also almost Star Trek next generation. Yeah, very similar very like futuristic and Then you want to meet it to Oops, this is papyrus and then We also had speaking of next generation. Yeah, all right We get the Klingon fonts. Yeah, you got Klingon for it's for your for your Klingon electronics. So Carplock So this is really cool and I've already started to redo a bunch of boards with my favorite font but I think this is gonna be really really useful because You can do any font you can like dynamically change it You know, you can it you know makes a new board So I've actually had to you know, especially because you know fonts don't have the same spacing and so you might want To tweak it. But what's cool is The code that Phil B wrote actually tries to it picks the font size that will Most closely match the size of the text that you had so you don't you know You'll notice like this is bigger than this and then this is it's small So you see it actually tries to do a pretty good job of being like, okay Well, how how big is that text box it calculates the text box size and then finds the font that kind of fits best in it so I think this is really neat. I've already ordered some boards and like so far the Gerber renders look Really good and you know, of course the text also in the right location as well. So People should try this out. Like I said the guide is on learn You just you just run the Python code on your On your file pick the fonts you want and and like poof I do a little bit of cleanup just to make the labels all centered and everything All right, and then what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to say a couple things So maybe I can send a time-coded link later. Yeah So there is people online mostly Twitter that will try to gate keep you and move your goalposts about which design tool You use if you're making open-source hardware, it doesn't matter keycads great Eagle Cads great Just publish your files and whatever use them in for the people who pretend that They're better than you or you have to use a certain tool Don't listen to them because they just want you to feel bad and not share your stuff because they have their own issues They have to deal with So we know when we release this someone's gonna say what about keycat or they're gonna say how come lady? It uses windows or how come the elevator that she takes To a to fruit when she gets there has closed-source firmware. We've actually got emails about this Yeah, so don't worry about that stuff The good news publish your files. That's that's the requirement for open-source hardware and it's open-source this thing that we just did So other people can watch with a computer. We can show them the license you can help out Would you like to port this to kikad or kikad or idea? Yeah, Altium. You could go to town That's the whole point and what happens is and I it's not the a to fruit community. It's kind of I hate to say it everybody else It's very easy to separate one another. We're not separate. We're doing stuff together But when you hear someone say something ask yourself are they trying to make it us and versus them Are they trying to separate one another? So it doesn't bother us that you know, this is the way it is now But it does bother a lot of other people so come together Sweet we've got two stars already already got two stars. So Um Check it out. This is great. This is like gonna totally change all I mean like I'm going to redo all of our boards It's gonna make all of all of our designs look so much better Some people use emacs. It's okay. I use XC max see and that's the point and I think especially as we Barrel into the future. I think we can all do a really good job of Telling people to come on in it's okay Come in with whatever you're doing the whole point is sharing There's also like a Star Wars font too. We're just gonna there's so many I mean, here's a huge any font you want like wingdings Chicago, Helvetica area Pirates, I mean it works. Yeah, I do think that just basically just does a text the papyrus would just to burn this into all of Our heads and then we'll go to the well I've got the I've got the um which one you got the cling on but I can redo the papyrus. Okay. Yeah It's fun to show it live. It's so easy it cranks out a new thing and then yeah And then you just you know say once you're once you're good once you know, it's good. You just save it as yeah Look at that look terrifying art so So anyways, I just wanted to mention that because I'll probably have to you know deal with someone snarkin on on Us or someone else and just have to like hey If you use Windows, it's okay if you use the Mac, it's okay if you use Linux, okay If you use papyrus key cat, it's okay if you use don't get keep if you pronounce it solder Versus solder it's okay. It is okay. It's okay. Don't fall for the trap of separating all of us It's a trap Okay, so any question for we move on to folks like this. Of course they do everyone loves papyrus Yeah, it's number one font Okay, so do you want to do picked it? Do you want to do a great search? Yeah? The great search brought to you by did you key data for it? Thank you did you key lady it is user powers of engineering every single week to show you how to find things on digikey.com Lady to what are you trying to find this week? Okay? So I had to like pull it up because I was like what part am I looking for what do you work? Okay, you know how like last week I was saying how like well You know the silicon shortage is like not so bad anymore. I'm able to get some parts Like remember when I couldn't get like transistors and diodes well my favorite diode was unavailable this week And it's got like a 73 week lead time. And so I thought I would show How I found an alternative and there was again It's like it's a little bit sneaky because the first thing I did was the wrong thing So let me find the the part Better than the last thing you did with the wrong thing better to get better to get that out of the way That's true like I think okay, all right, so let's go to the computer. I'll show off this my favorite diode. So I really like using the nbr 120 for my Shot key diodes. I use it a lot of times in power supplies, you know if you have USB power battery power you have O-ring diodes and then whichever one is higher Automatically switches over Chucky guys are just like they're great for so many things, you know that they're used for switching regulators They're using power supply. Sometimes I use them when I just I need like a you know one directional switch You know for like a button, you know use them on my RP 2040 boards and not that NBR 120 maybe a smaller one, but still love this love this diode None stock none in stock we do have some but we're gonna run out really soon. And so Seeing that there wasn't any available and that the manufacturer lead time is is a stunning 73 weeks There you go a stunning 73 weeks I mean like that's now we're talking like 2024 to get this diode And I was a little bit like scared because I use this in so many designs again like boost converters buck converters You know almost every feather uses it as part of the power regulator system, so The thing about this is When there was a little sneaky is you know, I was like, you know, it's not he doesn't shock you died. No, not really there's actually It's sometimes the simpler the part the tougher it is to find an alternative spec because It's deceptive. I found that diodes are very deceptive people are like, oh I mean, yes, if it's a one and four and you know 4148 you're pretty much good to go But once you get into these like power diodes or shocky diodes, there's there's specifications that you really You may care about so the thing I particularly and another thing is I expect this part like a decade ago, right? Like I've used this one part in so many boards But when I first picked it as part of like my power supply, you know family You know, I kind of I didn't make a note of what it was that I liked about it The party was also figuring out what what was it about this diet that I really liked but the thing that then I realized first off You know 20 volts So it can be used for almost all you know 12 volt, you know boost supplies or you know buck converters USB basically your 20 volt is one of the lowest voltages you can get One amp why they pick one amp well because almost everything that we make is USB power And use be pretty much only gives you about an amp of current So I don't really need to go above that for constant current usage The thing that was really nice about this is the ultra ultra low forward voltage. So 340 millivolts forward voltage at one amp, which is which is very low again most non-shocky diodes your foreign 4001 etc. You're looking about 700 to 900 millivolts easily at a volt and you know when you're dealing with electronics running at 3 volts or 5 volts You know that half ball well is going to be the difference between how long you can run on a lipo battery Especially if you have you know, you have your lipo battery and then you have a shocky diode and then a 3.3 volt regulator you know, you want to make sure that that You know that drop is 0.1 volts or 0.2 volts for most of the use case So you're not losing all of that power through the diode before it gets to the regulator and then the regulator You don't need a little bit of headroom as well So the mistake I made was like well One in 4148 what you know one in 4001 the family, you know, I want the NBR 120 family So let's just look at that and see what's available. And you know, yes Looks like there's a couple different forward voltages. I looked at active and then I Searched by quantity available and there was nothing in stock from you know on semi So that was kind of a downer. There are a couple different, you know slight part variations You know some with 350 450 or 500 millivolts So I was kind of like oh, you know, this is this is not good because I know that I really like this particularly low Dropout type rectifier, but my mistake was I shouldn't have searched for the family name What I should actually do and I also searched for the package case and that was a mistake also because there's actually Quite a few very similar package cases. What you want to do is just look for a you know active shop key diode 20 volts is not so important. I do want one amp and I want like a fast recovery type That reverse current I just want to be you know, that or less and Surface mount and then when I got to the next page Can because actually the reverse voltage is not as important The forward voltage I'll figure that out in a moment. So the supplier package here There's actually quite a few all in the same family remember. It was the Sod 123f, but there's a like a bunch that are all very so I saw the 123w Pfl f a I mean, there's only like different heights. Maybe you're like specific packages I don't care as long as it fits on the footprint. So You know, I selected those and then again, I really want that low forward voltage and so The one I was comparing to was like, you know, three fifty ish I don't go up to four hundred maybe just to see what the what the specs are because again, they go they go quite high but I do want to be a low forward voltage and then I Searched by quantity available and I got actually quite a few, you know, pretty good options. So This one was really nice the NBR X 120 see you gotta be careful because sometimes it's like in the family but the family name is not the exact same name and then Also from the same, you know Family not family similar NBR 1020 Right slightly different named But also very low forward voltage And also it's actually got the same reversal current leakage, which is also important to me I want to reduce that current leakage. So this one this this Panjeet's International actually ended up being the part that I got because they have Plenty in stock, but I do want to also note that in addition to like, you know, the NBR One X 20 there's also the PMEG family of Shockey diodes. So this one the next next period NXP They don't use NBR 1020 or 120. They have a difference named You know the way they named their their low dropout Shockey diodes is PMEG and then the voltage, you know In this case 30 and then 10 the current, you know, 1 amp 30 volts And these were actually about the same price also Very good 360 Millivolts and then the PMEG 2010 You know had pretty excellent reverse leakage and also very low forward voltage. So a couple different really good options But you'll see there's not a ton of options in stock like this is You know marketplace ones and we look at this but the NBR X 120 and the NBR 1020 Are both excellent options to replace For ultra low dropout Shockey diodes that are one amp could continue as current And that's your great church Okay, so I'm gonna ask a question. Yes. Um, I hope it's about papyrus. Well, sort of Or shockey diodes if you wanted to play around with this and get a font. Can it be um an otf What is ttf or what type of what type of font I only use ttf because it's kind of like the most popular It's anything that python pillow because that's the library. We're using will Import I bet otf will work basically if python pillow supports. Yeah, do you want to try and experiment live? Uh, sure. All right go to A U R E B E S H dot org barbash A U R E B E S H dot org this yeah bash. Yeah We'll keep pd. Yeah I'm gonna find like the font. Yeah. No. No. Go to go to the site the dot org. Oh, oh, yeah Yeah, and then scroll down and download the uh Uh, yeah, download the uh, keep going Okay, good. Oh tf. Yeah, don't know tf. Try it out just just for just to see okay Sure, so let's it will drag the Yeah This is like only 720p because yeah, let's just suggest it in the broadcast. Okay already bash Okay, so now I have to uh, I have to go back here I'll go to your computer now. Yeah, let's just see what happens And then I actually have uh, I have this trinky here that I was I was looking at too So let me let's do the trinky. Yeah, I'll see what happens. This is the this is what the trinky looks like beforehand before Okay And then let's bring it into the star wars universe to the bottom silk by the way. Okay, I'm interested Okay, so Python three penguin And it is the proportional font fonts or bash And then Okay, I think it worked Let's look at the output It's that easy Top silk there's this is great. Okay, and then flip it to the other side. Oh boot. Well, they have to change the sizes a little bit Yeah All right, right on. Okay. So this was just a random thing that came up From the the team. You guys need to try and say the rp-24. Yeah, this is cool So, you know what by the way, I'm gonna call it Because I can I can this is on the internet forever Someone is going to make a really cool cosplay Electronics thing using Adafruit open source hardware and when they're finished with it, all of the electronics are gonna have The star wars font in it. It'll be the mode. It'll be like, they'll be like, oh, let me show you how it works Like there'll be lightsabers that use these fonts and stuff like that. Yeah, everyone knows what these this is happening It's happening. This is happening. Okay, cool. Okay. Well, thanks for indulging my curiosity here. All right, any other questions? When we wrap it up for this sunday afternoon. Oh, uh, folks are saying yeah, this is otf is a super type of Ttf. So yeah, yeah, sorry. I mean it basically I think any any vector you do want a vector font, of course Because it's going to resize things as necessary Yeah, okay That's just gladiate everybody. Okay. Thanks everybody Kerplock