 Welcome to Desk of Lady Aida. Hey everybody, welcome to Desk of Lady Aida. It's me, Lady Aida, at my desk covered electronics. Got a couple prototypes I designed this week. Mr. Lady Aida, any news or updates? Things people need to know? No, we'll be celebrating a bunch of redesigns that we did so we'll have some news on the side about that. A bunch of shows this week, tons and tons and tons of videos and more so tune into that. What's going on on your desk? Okay, so let's show some boards that I designed. So it's actually going to be mostly computer time. So give me a moment. So yeah, can you switch to the computer? So one thing I like to do is design metro boards. These are boards that are Arduino Uno classic shaped. And the reason I like that is it there's a lot of shields and accessories that use it. But also it's a nice big format that lets me have like DC power and SD card like feathers are beautiful. I love feather. But feather really meant for like battery powered portable, you know, low power. Whereas a metro is kind of like, okay, we can stuff everything that we want on there. Which is why, you know, I often start with metro boards when I have a new chipset. Although I haven't in the past, I'm starting to kind of get into that more. So this week I designed a metro ESP32 S3 you can see here. It was a couple days ago. So I already have a metro S2 metro. And so I kind of took the S2 design and kind of ripped it up and turned it into the S3. So let's look, let me hide this left side. And then let's turn on the top layer in the silk and the T docu. And we can show this off. So this is unfortunately it's a landscape screen and then portraits like a TikTok style board. But okay, I like to, you know, metros I'd like to have them laid out this way when I might do the work on them. So this is the ESP32 S3. And this is the room layout. And one, another thing that I'm trying to do is whenever I do a metro, I like when I deck it out, like have like the best, the best, I'm going to be a little more expensive. But it's already going to be expensive because we've got these two whole headers and we could have a soldering and this DC jack and all that stuff. So for this board, I picked a N16R8. Now the S3 is interesting. S3 modules come in like a plethora of different configurations. And what this means is 16 megabytes of flash and eight megabytes of PS RAM. So it's like pretty much maxed out, but you still get the benefit of having it in that FCCCE certified ready to go antenna tuned module. And it's not too big either. So it's nice, you know, they've got the chip and then I guess they figure out a way to fit, you know, that much flash and memory inside the module. So I picked that it's a little bit more expensive than what I usually use, which is a four megabyte flash, two megabyte PS RAM, and the mini modules that are used in the feather don't come any bigger than four and two. So to get 16 and eight, you have to go to these Wuru modules, but you don't have to go to the Wuruver. And then give it USB type C into the native USB reset button, reset button, a static UT port on the side here. JTAG connector. One thing I try to do is metros, like always have the debug connector, even if they don't necessarily have a debug chip on it, like they don't have a FT232H or whatever. They at least have your standard SWD or whatever is relevant socket so that you can connect to debugger. We've also got the debug pins here, Rx and Tx, and these are like the native UART. So you can actually connect a separate USB serial cable if you wanted to get like the low level ROM debug messages. Got some Neopixel here or standard Neopixel and also it's powered by a pin. So you can go into like a low power mode. You don't have to use that like one milliamp or whatever quiescent. LLED, that's like a pin 13 LED on LED. Over here we've got a DC jack, six to 12 volts in with an on-off switch that goes, that you know, lets you power it on and off. It goes to the past transistor to enable or disable. The DC jack goes into a AMS117 5 volt regulator and also a 3.3 volt regulator here, APRT9080. You've got the boot button, so you can go into the boot loader mode if you're like, I really need to get to like a hardware like ROM boot loader. And then down here, I thought this would be kind of, you know, I don't usually put a microSD card on something that has this much stuff going on, but I kind of was thinking that this could be useful for some of the IoT data logging things that we might be doing with whipper snappers. So there's a microSD socket and then a LiPo battery so we can like practice making this a portable project with a LiPo charger over here, charging status, LED and battery monitor, the Mac 17 048. Although I could probably, you know, we just don't have a lot of pins for you. So this is a nice battery monitor that gives you percentages and stuff and is low power friendly. So yeah, this is, you know, get USB-C. So the thing is, is that all the edges got taken, like the DC jack, the antenna, USB-C reset button, which like you really do need access to, on-off switch, I squared C, battery and microSD, which means that normally I like to have the boot button exposed. So even with the shield, you can give the boot button, but like that just didn't make it through this. But you don't usually need the boot button because we have the teeny USB boot loader and also within our dweenode automatically resets into the boot loader mode for you when you like open up the, yes, you'll port it at 1200. So you do need the reset button. So I think it's going to be okay. We'll see. So I'm ordering PCBs. I'll get here, stuff them and try it out, but this is going to be good. And one thing that I did do that was different. For the Metro ESP32S2, it was a very early design and I thought that maybe Espressif would add pin relabeling or renumbering to the board support package. So relabeling is something that happens in many Arduino cores, like not the RP2040 ironically, but the SAMD21, SAMD51 at Mega32, 4 and other chipsets and NR52840, which is the board support package we maintain. Pin 2, for example here, isn't necessarily GPIO number two. Arduino like two could be any pin, which means that you don't have to worry about routing the pins as long, you know, you can make any pin zero through 13 here and they'll always number the same in Arduino. And that was actually kind of one of the powerful things, but Arduino is that like, you know, logical pin two is not necessarily physical pin two. However, Espressif did not add that capability. You have to like add that layer of abstraction into the board support package and they never did it. So, you know, we thought that they might, we also thought the RP2040 might also, but it turns out that that didn't end up happening. And so, that's why our Feather RP2040 has like kind of weird non-standard pinouts. And then the ESP32-S2 also did account on my lesson, which is basically like, nobody's going to do logical pin remapping. You should always assume that the pins are not going to be remapped unless you, you know, manage the board support package yourself. So these are literally, you know, other than RX and TX. And the reason is that boot zero, you don't want to expose this pin because, you know, if you hold this pin low while resetting, you go to the boot loader mode and even if you're like, watch dog reset, you might end up getting into boot loader mode. And so this port pin zero cannot be exposed here. So these two pans are, you know, logical pans, I think they're, I don't remember GPIO like 40, 40 and 41, not zero and one. But then these two through 13 are GPIO two through 13. So thankfully, those are all available. And then the analog pins are logically remapped. But what's handy about having these in order is that we can then use them for connecting RGB TTL displays. I think you probably want to have them be consecutive pins. I think they have to be consecutive pins. And so you can use, you know, this 11. So yeah, we can use these 11 pins and then maybe these pins for data and control, maybe you can have like a eight bit color. And then you need like DEP clock, hsync, vsync, whatever. But you can at least kind of get something wired up. Anyways, and then, you know, SD card and SPI as well and I scored C. So, you know, we shall see how that goes. Okay, so that's one design I did. Okay. And then, oh, next time let's go to the overhead and I'll show the prototype that I got in. So I'm slowly, slowly, slowly redesigning like hundreds of boards and some of them are boards that need a fair bit of redesign. This is the 2.2 inch touchscreen shield for Arduino and old design. And originally used an STMP, STMPE 610 or 811, which got discontinued over, you know, the chip shortage. And then I found another place with chip, but it just took, it was a lot of effort for me to go through and redo these designs. So I'm finally getting to them. And this is using the TSC 2007. And I, you know, made this reset button right angle and added a QT port. But, you know, I got these. So today I'm just kind of testing out the graphics test. So this is just a iLine 9341 screen. And that works great. So next, I just have to get the touchscreen part working. And this is the iSports C touch. So it's kind of nice because there's one less pin you need to have that's like dedicated for chip select. Okay, so next up, let's go. Yeah, one second. Let me, let me open up the board. I'm going to find out where, I'm going to find out where it put stuff. I put it in that place with that thing one time. Okay. So go to, yeah, go to the computer. So next up, we, you know, Carter and I are kind of trying to figure out how we can make piezo distance sensors like we have in the Adafruit shop. These ultrasonic sonar, you know, these are very common. These are like, you know, a couple of dollars sonar sensors. And they use one transducer and one to send and want to receive. But one of the things that, you know, we thought was like, instead of having this chip on the back that requires this like trigger echo annoyance, it would be cool if we could just do it all on a microcontroller. And then you could have an iSports C or UR or whatever protocol you want without dealing with this kind of like freaky, you know, whatever it's like the base 001 chipset, which is not a bad chipset. It works great. But like, what if you want to have something a little more custom. So he's been playing around with that and turns out like to drive these discs, you know, that whatever 38 kilohertz, you know, you can drive it from microcontroller pin, but you just don't get enough voltage peak to peak. You want to have a high drive voltage in order to really blast audio that sonar high frequency audio off a thing and place it. If you think about it, like, if you were an animal and you wanted to sonar, you have to yell really loudly to get the echo back. If you don't yell loud enough, the weakened echo won't reach you will be able to detect it. Which, you know, it's like remember a couple of weeks ago, people were talking about underwater sonar and how like if you happen to like be in the way of a submarine sonar, you'd actually like explode because it's like 50 billion decibels. Anyways, it has to be much louder than you think, but you don't hear it obviously. So to drive these discs, microcontroller pin against you get three volt peak to peak max. If you do differential drive where you have one, you know, compared complimentary outputs back and forth, I think you get six volt peak to peak. Or maybe you're a five volt microcontroller, maybe you get 10 peak to peak. But what I thought was neat is Carter found this chip, the PEM 8904, and this has two switch cap converters in it. This is like a max 232, but for like piezos. And then you can set the game with the two enable pins and it will triple the voltage output and then give you a differential drive. So the output can be up to, you know, even if you're running as low as three volts, he can get up to like 12 volt peak to peak output, which will actually, can you only need it for like a little burst, right? You just send it a frequency in the signal and it will send out that frequency at a boosted voltage rate. So hopefully we'll get much better distances because he did kind of get a microcontroller to like send the signal and maybe see the analog response back, but he needs a higher voltage. So I don't know if anyone out there is driving piezo discs and you want them to be much louder, like the little tiny disc, check these out. Okay, so that's, and then we should one last thing before we go to, I am happy to go to the overhead real fast. I'll just show up some fun samples I got. From you blocks, they sent me a GNSS slash RTK real time kinematic dev board that has like cellular, I think this is Bluetooth, RTK and then a separate GPS, I guess. I mean, this is like an old, like it's like SIM card, sorry, microSD, SIM card, buttons, SMA, battery, USB-C, I mean, this is like a beast. Another, yes, this is, this is maybe the cellular antenna, this is the cellular antenna, this is another LTE, so two cellular antennas and one L band GNSS antenna. So this is the standard you blocks RTK, but they're like, oh, by the way, you know, we're making a version that's much smaller. So this is a tiny RTK chip. These are like 200 bucks a piece. So they're kind of expensive. So that's why I only got two, but very kind of send them in. It's kind of got this cool like 3D construction where like that there's a PCB and then there's another PCB like bonded on or I don't know how the heck this is done. This is kind of cool, routed out. And then on the, you know, inside is on the top here is another, so it's a double sided module but with cast-related pads. So this is used with, you know, you need a base station, but what this can do is give you not only your location on earth, but then centimeter precision on top of that using local timing differences that it can detect on a centimeter accuracy level. You won't get centimeter accuracy from GPS. That's not possible. The system just doesn't give you better than like 10 meters. But once you've gotten that 10 meters, now you can use this local base station to give you that you have a known location. You can get better precision. So, but you have to be within 100 meters of it to be able to get that best signal. Anyways, very, very cool stuff. So coming soon, this is unreleased. This is the Neo F9P. So I think this is like very, you know, not, not even available in stores yet. But we got a sample. So it could be a cool feather or something would use this because it would fit much nicer. Okay, cool. All right. So let's go to anything else you want me to do or go to there. Great search, son. Great search. Go, great search. The great search brought to you by Digikey and Adafruit. Every single week, lady who's a part of engineering help you, yes, you find the things that you need on digikey.com. And I didn't get you that screenshot, but this is, this is from a request. Okay. Yes. As a request, you saw on social media, Jeremy Cook asked, is there such a thing as an SMT, screw terminal block, and got some responses, some of which were not screw terminal blocks. So let's, let's show what a terminal block normally is because we've covered lots of terminal blocks. So terminal block normally looks like this. Oh yeah, good. My computer. It goes, looks like this. And it's a through hole soldering thing. And then on the top, there are the screws, Phillips or flathead, and you screw it to lift up the, there's like pinching piece that then attaches the wire. She's a very, very, very, very common. They're great when you just have raw wires, stranded, solid, they can easily handle multiple amps of current, very high voltages, classic wire to board connector. But the one thing is that you do need to have to through hole solder them. And so let's go to the overhead and I'll show an example. So this is a relay board. And this is a prototype, an earlier prototype. And you can see that it's got these terminals here, soldered, and you can see like a hand soldered them in, in order to connect to the relay. And that, you know, there's a couple of reasons why you might not want to have through hole terminal blocks. One, if this is high voltage, now you have a high voltage exposed, that somebody could touch or if they're on a metal table, it can get shorted out, you don't want that. But also manufacturing wise, if you're not handling very high torque, like if you're not people are really twisting it, then, and they're fairly gentle. This is an extra step that might require hand soldering or selective or wave soldering, or there might be components on the other side that you want to not interfere with. So having SMT terminal blocks could be very handy. So a good question. So I thought let's go to Digikey and let's see. You're like, it's just such a thing exist. Well, if it existed, Digikey would stop it, right? So let's go to the computer and we'll see. So we're going to look for terminal blocks. That's what these are called. And there's a couple of different ones. There's like the headers, planks and sockets, and then there's the wire to board. But this is the same group. So we're just going to click on terminal blocks. It looks similar to what we're looking for. So yeah, these are the standard two-hole terminal blocks. Oh, no, there's like ones that have a little push button that sort of screws. So even though like they're often called screw terminal blocks, they may have pushy, pushy in parts. Okay, so first up, let's look only at active ones. We don't want to find something and then be disappointed. You can't actually get it. Next, let's go to stack so you can see. I got the screens up. Oh, you want to go to it real faster? Oh, there you go. This is the question. Hopefully they exist. We're going to find out. 30,000 views, but not the same as a video, custom made for you. Okay, so back to the computer. Okay, so under mounting type, this is where the action comes. So you notice that there's a couple of variations here and a few of them look promising. This one and then you option click and get the other one to surface mount. We're going to ignore the panel mount and through-hole. It's actually like 500 options, which is great. I don't know the pitch that they wanted, but I'm going to assume it doesn't really matter. So the most popular one, and some people did mention it, and the least expensive is going to be a WAGO SMD terminal block. So these are like 50 cents in quantity. It's not a screw terminal block. It's like a push type. Let's see if we can get the... Okay, they look like this and then let's see if we can get the bottom. Oh, there's no photo of the bottom. There's two pads here that you solder in. So it's got like two very long pads for mechanical strength because there isn't any mounting bosses. And then wires go in the holes here, and then these are the little push buttons that you use to release wire. So if you go to the overhead, I'll actually do an example. So we've used these in this motor MOSFET driver. This is what I've got here. These are WAGO blocks. You can see they are mechanically very strong. They do take wires of various sizes, including even wires with ends on them. You can push them in. And now this is fairly solid, and then you would have to press this to release. So you can push a wire in, although you can also press, and that opens up the slot. And then if you want to remove it, you can press. Ideally, you press with something like a pen. I'm sure there's an official tool, but I like to use a pen. The only thing is, and I'll tell you that it hasn't happened to me as long as you're using official WAGO blocks, is that if you do overheat these, if you put them in a lend-free process and you overheat them, they can become a little brittle. And we've had early when we used these, we overheated the oven to get, you know, we wanted to make sure that our board got a good reflow. These got a little brittle, and then this piece broke off. Hasn't happened to us once we've tweaked the oven profile, but it is something to watch for. Okay, so back to the computer. So you can get these WAGO blocks in a variety of sizes. They have like one, two, and three. They're fairly inexpensive. You know, you're not going to get anything as inexpensive as a, oh, and then these are actually these Mets connectors. Never seen these before. They're not cool. They come in different pitches. I think it's a 508 millimeter. Sorry, this is eight millimeter. This is three millimeter. So they do come, you know, they don't come in like 2.5, but they come in like your standard pitches. And they usually, they also have individuals. I'll say they don't come in like very wide numbers. You'll have to, you put them next to each other if you need a long run. However, this is not what the person asked for. They asked for screw type, not push button type. And I'm assuming that they actually care. So if you go over here under wire termination, you'll see that there's actually screw and screw lists. So we actually want screw type. So let's look at those. And let's look also at normally stocking. Make sure that they're available. And then we'll look at, you know, at lowest to highest pricing. So there are, you know, SMT mount terminal blocks. And there's two that I found and one, they're both good. This one, you can see, you know, the nice long wires instead of going down, these got bent over. And then to prevent you from torquing and twisting the terminal block off the PCB, they have these bosses on the side. So this comes in three. This is an Amphenol family. And they look pretty good. Phoenix also has a version, but Amphenol has looks like a two, three and four size, which, you know, makes sense. And you just as many as you need, you just tell them together. Oh, actually looks like they have a couple more. They're five, maybe, maybe more sizes. This one's kind of funky. And then Worth also has something similar. We did cover, and it looks like, oh, interesting, when we get to six, they actually, I wonder if they don't have the bosses anymore. A picture of the bottom. One second. Let me see if we got the data sheet here. Maybe not. Looks like they probably have the bosses coming from the bottom. But if you want a version that, you know, what I'm used to is you get two and three size terminal blocks and then you stack them side by side. If you want those, you have to go because these have, again, these have the bosses on the side. You can go with TEs. So hold on. Let me look for TE. And we've covered these on IMPI. And they're actually quite nice too. The terminal block series. So what's nice about these is that they have the boss underneath, not to the side. So you can have as many as you want side to side. And if you want, like if you need a really long run, you know, you can just pick and place multiple next to each other. So these are, you know, these are pretty. You still need, of course, really chunky pads. And don't forget the mounting boss holes. You definitely need them. And don't make them too big. You want them to be a nice tight fit to get that mechanical strength. But I like the terminal block series, but they're very good. So actually quite a few options. The only thing is to note, you know, you're going to pay more than through a whole version. Yeah, so only use this if cost isn't a big deal because even though you're saving yourself the process of soldering the terminal blocks, they're going to be more expensive than probably the labor that it costs to solder them in. So good when you have, you don't want to have exposed pins. Definitely these are going to work great. Or you have something on the other side and you don't want the terminal block to like go through and interfere with those other components. So check out TE's board mount reflow terminal blocks. They do exist. And they're available on Digikey. That's a great church. And thanks for joining us today, everybody. Good luck. See everybody during the week. That was informative, fun and more. Thank you so much, lady. And thank you everybody for joining us in the live studio audience. Other words online. We will see everybody during the week full week of shows and more. Night, everybody. Good night.