 live from New York it's Ask an Engineer. Hey everybody and welcome to Ask an Engineer. It's me Lady Aida with me, Mr. Lady Aida. I'm camera control. We're here at the Aida Fruit Factory in downtown Manhattan. Do all the kidding and testing and manufacturing and shipping and videoing and photoing and everything that we do to make the electronics the open source hardware electronics that you know and love. More about that soon because we've got some new products. We got a jam-packed show for you with IIMPIs, top secrets, videos, Python newsletters and more. We're here for the next hour. Mr. Lady Aida, why don't you tell them what's on tonight's show and give them the code. On tonight's show the code is New Pixel BFF. Pretty obvious why but you can use the code now. 10% off in the Aida Fruit store all the way up to 11.59 p.m. Eastern time tonight. Get 10% off in the Aida Fruit store. Here's our lizard. We have the Aida Fruit live series shows including show and tell. We'll talk about some of the cool things that were shown and share on the show and tell tonight. Time travel. We'll look around the world of makers, hackers, artists, engineers and more and get some news and cool stuff to talk about. From the mail bag we'll read some of your letters to us. We've got some fun factory footage this week from inside of Aida Fruit. Some 3D printing, some videos from known Pedro. We have IonMPI this week is from Nordic. We have some new products. We have some top secret. We're going to answer your questions. We do that over in Discord, Aida Fruit dot it slash discord where you can join all 35,000 of us. All that and more on you guessed it. Ask an engineer. Okay, Lady Aida, let's pay some bills first up. Yeah, don't forget code's New Pixel BFF and when they put stuff in the cart they'll notice that there's free things. What did they get? There are freebies. We're still doing them when you order from AidaFruit.com, $99 or more. We still have the Permaproto half size breadboard PCB. Great for making your solderless breadboard project permanent. $149 or more. We still have pink circuit boards, PCBs, KB2040s, which somebody on the show and tell even said it was an amazing board that they loved. It's an RP2040, my controller board with STEMIQT. It's got eight megabytes of flash. It's got cast-related pads, USB-C and it's pink and it's not going to be pink forever. So if you want the pink one, pick it up or order $149 or more in the shop. Great for getting your circuit python projects or keyboard projects going. $199 or more free UPS ground shipping in the continental United States and $299 or more. We've got Circuit Playground Blue Fruit. This is a all-in-one development board that has the NRF 52840 Bluetooth microcontroller, Cortex-M4. It's got capacitive touch and buzzer and buttons and switches and sensors and of course it can do BLE. We've got Arduino and Circuit Python support for it as well as a little bit of the make code support. Okay, we have a bunch of live shows and we just finished up a show and tell. Next week Liz will be the co-host so check that out. This week on the show and tell, we had a bunch of projects. I try not to pick favorites however. I did really like Dan W and an engineer that was with him who did a Circuit Python based trombone champ project but they used these little like a Nerf gun and little toy things that they got. It's cool and they didn't Circuit Python. Yeah and then Mouse had a cool light up synth mod where they used the LED nudes that light up but the sound can also go through it and then BCG had a really cool keyboard and if you're into keyboards check out the Bizarro keyboard that we found and Jeff is working on it. It's a Atari keyboard with one button in the middle that's also like tilted 30 degrees and not centered. It says help. It's just the weirdest ass thing. Yeah and then JP showed the partnership that Microsoft did with the new Black Panther movie and you can use make code to make your own Wakanda game. He's gonna have some hardware to it. Yeah on Sundays we do desk of Lady Aida. We have it in two parts. Part one this week would you show off. Okay so I showed an update to the RP 2040 tester which I did some hardware bring up on and it's kind of going. Again I have to you know this is the tester brains that does a lot of the programming of chips behind the scenes because we can't get teensy three sixes which is what I usually love to use. I also showed up a couple revisions. I revised the ADT 7410 temperature sensor that's going to get STEMI QT eyes and also one of the older designs we've ever done the iSquared C SPI backpack. It's like product number 292. It's like from the first few years of Adafruit. It does have iSquared C support and so why not revise it to add STEMI QT and then while I was doing that I was like well let's improve the design because it's been like 10 plus year or so. I've learned a couple tips and tricks since then to improve manufacturability and usability not just the STEMI QT but also make it work with three-volt logic. So it's a little boost converter and I wanted to improve the trim pot the contrast trim pot on there which is what we did for the great search. That's right every week on the great search we do user powers of engineering and smarts to search digikey.com find the things that you're looking for and that's what you found. Yes so I was you know I used the TC 33X trim pot which is a very common born's trim pot. It's great but it's a little bit annoying if you don't have the exact right potentiometer sorry a flat head screwdriver. It looks like you used to Phillips you actually used a flat head. It has to be exactly the right size and it's a little bit like tough to tell. I also think like if you tweak them too hard you could break them. So I found a really good you know slightly larger but similarly SMT friendly trim pot that's got a little bit of a larger plastic body and it's really clear what size and type of screwdriver you use to adjust it. So I swapped that out and so when I get the prototypes I'm going to test out this other trim pot so I just showed off a couple options and what to look for in a trim pot digikey. All right and then every Tuesday we do a JP's Prada pic that's where we broadcast live from the side of Prada page here is this week's highlight. The mini analog thumbstick and the breakout they have a ground power and the analog per axis slot neatly into the board there where the two sets of three there are and then all of those are broken out to the plus, y, x and minus. I've taken a QDPI RP2040 and I'm essentially running power and ground and two analog pins to each joystick for ADC pins which we have on the QDPI and then I've also run a little I squared C OLED there and you can see as I move these little thumbsticks I get some values that I've written there as well as a little moving dot and I have this sending out MIDI I'm not going to demo that part of it but it's essentially sending out some MIDI CC values on four axes two per and so this is really straightforward to use in both Arduino and Circuit Python. The mini analog thumbstick and breakout. And don't forget tomorrow JP's workshop Friday deep dive with Tim let's check out some time travel. We will have some updates to our show times and more we'll talk about at the end of the show but you can always check our discord and we'll probably have a post that has some updated times and more time travel a little bit of a reminder so yesterday Adafruit does a paid day off for voting all day all day and some of our team does volunteer work some of our team is doing things each year we wanted this to be contagious as in like maybe we can convince other companies to do it some companies do a paid day off for voting a lot of places you're required to have your plays if they want time to give them time that rarely works out so we wanted to make it like a national holiday to be kind of good looks like lots of young folks turned out and decided to go vote and more this happens you know every year so if you work at a company just check out our website if you want to see how we do it it's worked out really well it doesn't have an impact in productivity or anything like that a lot of times when we're asked are like well what if someone takes a whole day off great what if they come to work and just go and vote and they save that as a float great it's a really good thing to do and other companies have done it so thank you to everyone out there and speaking of on friday it's a holiday it's veterans day so Adafruit will be open but there's some things that won't be going out like some orders we have a blog post on our website we'll have a little announcement this is from the us gov did a poster contest and this was one of the yeah it's one of the winners so and don't forget we do free shipping to apos we still have that that's right i remember i implemented that uh in zen kart like 15 years ago yeah um there's a funny joke in the some companies gave their plays the rest of the year off to vote there's a lot of there's a lot of tech layoffs it sucks um but that's that's that is true sorry i shouldn't i shouldn't laugh at it no i'm not laughing either it's just like tiz this season for you know tech companies that overhired and more um oof but yeah i think they'll be able to get jobs that's that's happening there's there's jobs available hopefully a lot of employment right now oof um okay so now i have um i'll just uh mention aida box for the folks who didn't hear the announcement last week or get an email if they're subscriber thousands if you did but i'm gonna do it anyways that's right aida box is returning in 2023 we sent out emails if you didn't get it probably went to spam or who knows we sent out send out thousands of emails um and we don't send out emails to people so this was just a one time thing and we said basically is exactly what's on the blog post you can go to our website right now you can go to aida box dot com all this information's there we'll be shipping the first quarter of 2023 we've been able to get enough parts to resume aida box finally it's been a full year of waiting waiting waiting watching watching watching and redesigning redesigning redesigning so i'm stunned so many redesigns i can't take it anymore yeah so um that's what we're up to and we're excited because we thought that maybe folks would unsubscribe turns out no um so if you do want to unsubscribe you can just word of warning or words of warning there's so many people signed up so if you leave they'll immediately get a notification that they can sign up so you might have to wait until people drop or we add more looks like we'll be able to add more but it's all just been parts related and we'll be able to probably get everything we need looks like we are that's why we were um we didn't want to do one and then oh sorry we can only do one this year we wanted to make sure when we could do aida box we could do it again looks like we'll be able to do it all four right away next up no what you got something no i just take a big okay this week we get letters we get letters aida for team i've had a lot of esp 82 66 stuff connected to aida for a while and i recently tried out whippersnapper with your qt pie esp 32 and ht 20 wow that was scary easy to get up and running congratulations to the team who developed a whole ecosystem this is an easy win for home data logging for the future for me scary easy is our tag well it was it was halloween scary 8666 actually does also work with whippersnapper however it's not recommended because uh i do want to it's a good time to the psa um you know ss cell certificates you can't get five-year certificates anymore they're just like not available instead people are using encrypt this encrypt me and whatever we encrypt where you get a new certificate you know every 90 days or a year and everything and so you would have to upload new code every year to the esp 8266 to reset the certificate whereas with the esp 32 series you can do a certificate chain verification so i do recommend if you have 82 66 is connected to aida fruit i o um it's a great time to update those to esp 32 you're going to be a lot happier it's only like a couple dollars more okay that's on one more time okay this week in the python on hardware newsletter and by the way if you haven't please subscribe aida fruit daily completely separate website if you don't spam you know do anything there's no ads yes we don't there's no ads it's just really good content so you anything um the theme is python on hardware and one of the things that we like to use this for is for our own use which is where do the trends where are things more things going what's happening and one of the things that we were noticing is conferences are coming back and people are now able to safely go to events um share code share projects do things and there's conference badges so there was a couple events uh hackaday super con was last week and um there's other conference coming back i notice you're a python yeah is uh well the videos just got posted um and if if you look at what's in the newsletter we're starting to see more and more badges now it's probably because they're easier to do you can make a badge and a kind of e-ink display and there's code that works on it now um micro python circuit python all the python flavors are out and that just means you might be able to program it on site you don't have to download software it could just show like a usb drive so um this week uh i wanted to show you a cool badge that we saw this is from pie maroney and this is for github universe which is going on right now and this is neat because i'm gonna zoom in on the the badge here if i can let's say i like this design because it has the cut out of mona the the octo cat yes and then it has the person's name and there's the ink yeah and then there's also a qr code so i was gonna ask you lady because we get asked to solve the time and now i would like to just send a link if someone's thinking of doing a conference badge what are the right now in the current state of chip shortages software that's available um you know should they do it or you know should they do it in circuit python should you do micro python what are what would you suggest to someone well um i'm glad you're asked well i think you know this i think this badge particularly runs micro python but i think circuit python is is also an excellent excellent use for badges and there you know before the pandemic stopped there were a couple of very cool circuit python based badges that were you know for def con and for python and stuff um and the reason is is that you know having having taught and you do workshops or attended a lot of conferences um most people don't have like they're not going to install ides the internet is going to be really weird everyone's got their own little computer if you want to have an electronic badge that is customizable um having it so that you could just plug into a usb cable and then the files are easily editable you don't have to install any special software it works on chromebooks um you know you can you get you can even use it phones on ipads if you have the adapter cable um i think is really powerful and in here you know if what i think it doesn't even have a battery if someone has to do like a thousand badges right now what chip would you suggest they look at because that that's the thing that really burnt a lot of folks is they they were about to do a conference and they couldn't get the parts or they were they they committed to something and then the price changed or availability changed what what processor would you pick right now well the rp20 40 which i think is what this badge is running is is very easy to get it's a very available um it's low cost you can also use the pico or the pico w would just solder it onto the back so it's like a little bit easier to manufacture maybe if you have if you don't want to solder in the very small point for millimeter pitch headers in a puppet or you know you can have a surface mount on you know and then and then because that's cascaded pads um i also really strongly recommend the esp32 s2 or the s3 but the s2 is a little cheaper actually the s2 is cheaper than the original esp32 and you don't have a to have an external usb serial converter so it's actually like a really good deal um and the esp32 s2 is is available in modules that are like fcc certified uh they're really easy to pick and place on um you can hand solder them they're available through like quick turn pcb assembly houses so i would say you know esp32 s2 i personally i think wi-fi is really great you know it's it's fun if you can have some like internet connectivity on the badge and circuit python has great support for the esp32 s2 if not the s2 then the s3 that's secondary because it also has native usb and also has like bluetooth but it's a little bit um it's not as stable as because it's a little newer than the esp32 s2 um and then those have native usb you know we of course support esp32 without native usb but and if you want to use that use that too and then you can try out the wi-fi workflow but i think with usb it's just easier to do the deployment you know it's like you can type in the ssid you know over usb and then the rp20 40 if you don't need wi-fi connectivity and you want um you know such a chip that's easily available okay now a tough question and this isn't a dunk or anything what chips would you avoid if someone has an event coming up in the next three to six months um well you're definitely i i mean i think you might be able to get some low cost esp32s but i think it's a little risky and there's definitely no samd's like you can't get to samd's really at all so you're not going to be able to do those um there i think i think esp32s might be okay but i have to look because it depends on what flavor but none of the ones that are circuit python um friendly like the f the esp32 f4 series which is what we want circuit python and best on uh those are either very expensive or they're very unavailable so i think i think to be honest the esps okay displays have you seen that they've been available if someone says well which display should i have on it like is ink okay yanks good i've actually you know the only thing about yanks is i'll i'll warn you is it just like every this has always been true about yanks they're constantly changing the chipsets it's very you know the vendors that i'm using to get yanks displays it's like it's like every six months they're like this chip is discontinued as a new chip so you're gonna have to kind of be very flexible with like the the display chipset they're all very similar but the commands do vary like our drive we have like 17 drivers for eating displays tfts the prices have come down quite a bit so i recommend tft displays those are very good any displays to avoid um you know one thing that i do warn people on is is neopixels are very very fun but they are very tough to pick in place because you know if one led is bad you can't have to throw the whole thing away and and they they crack very easily if you don't have like perfect humidity um we've definitely had that so have even though it's fun to have an led matrix display i'd actually not recommend it um on a badge i mean if you're going to do that i would use the um 2020 sized leds the ones that are not like 50 50 or 35 35 because those don't crack they don't have the the lensing the epoxy lens they're just like fully epoxy those are more likely to survive uh reworking although of course they're smaller um but i don't i don't the one thing i've i'll just say like neopixels they love to crack off they love to break and you know with one breaks all the ones downstream break so um you know eating displays tft displays people love OLEDs like the low you can even get OLEDs with the headers already soldered in and i see that all the time people just they put four holes and you solder in the OLED um and OLED drivers are are of course a dime a dozen they're very very popular okay so this is our like public service that we wanted to do because it's conference season again folks are asking us uh to make custom badges we really don't want to do custom badges um there are companies that do that but there's also a lot of questions and i think i can just point to this video and be like well here's stuff to consider because it's usually what's available um what display should i use you know pricing like how do i how do i coordinate all this stuff the first time i've ever done this you know and there's all the complexity of a event and then you add never lease a product at the same time so hopefully this will help someone and that is this week's python oh one thing i will say sorry i'm not done yet one more thing another great reason to use circuit python is we have full font support for every kind of font and the qr code generator so if you do want to have people have custom fonts for their custom font images we spent a lot of time on getting unicode unit code support so foreign character sets work so if you have you know we showed a badge demo where if you have your name is in japanese or your name is in urdu that'll display just fine if you're looking just to have something that works you can also just use as a clue as is and there is a project that we have that just turns it into a badge yeah he's supposed to okay now i'm done that's python hardware okay we're an open source hardware company we have two thousand seven hundred sixty five guides lady anna what's on the big board this week we had a lot of guides this week actually uh so we got an updated guide um and updated this guy by uh gen ghoulsby um for a like amg 8833 thermal camera that uses circuit python it was based on like circuit python five and a couple things got deprecated uh some folks asked us to please update the code and did it and the thermal camera is now better than ever we also had an update to the si 53 51 clock generator breakout y'all remember last week we showed off um the new or maybe it was the week before the new product is a qt if I'd si 53 51 so now I have two versions one that's them a qt plug-and-play one that has three you know sma ports but it's not semi qt the guide has been updated thanks to lis to have photos and pinouts for both uh okay so the new guides um none page we did an awesome no-code iot pool monitor using whipper snapper and ds 18b 20 so folks who know the ds 18b 20 you know it's you know there's no plug-and-play no-code iot system that supports the ds 18b 120 like not one that's simple um we've been adding you know everyone supports you know digital in digital out and log in um and maybe a couple neopixels but we now support stuff you know we just i scored c support for many sensors and we're also trying to add you know unusual stuff like the ds 18b 20 which is of course really great for remote temperature monitoring so you uh check it out um they they have a guide so you know this pool monitor you know because the ds 18b 120 comes in a waterproof sensor they can dunk it in the pool and they can see what temperature the pool is so they can um monitor it see how long it takes uh make sure everything's working with the heater you know make sure it's being efficient turning off at night when they're not using it um so it can be energy efficient uh it's all with whipper snappers so there's no coding at all it's just completely plug-and-play uh automatically detected by the iot system okay and then we have the oh right cow server and then sorry and the other i was like we're done uh eva did a guide this is a project that we saw a couple years ago was it's like a a website or maybe it was an ink display that would use quotes from literature to display the time because you know there's there's like famous quotes about like you know it's 10 to midnight or whatever and so um there's someone who like co collab collated all of the quotes for different times and then even at a really good job with the mag tag uh ink display to every few minutes update the time to display it and um show it in bold so there's a little bit of actually kind of funky files talking about that font work which is what reminded me because uh she had to show just that one section in bold text and um so there's actually two text chunks you know one that's the plane and then it goes into bold and then it goes back into uh you know maybe plain text afterwards but you did a really good job with that and so it's it's a fun project one of the one of the popular ink projects but tough to do if you don't have really good font support like circuit python does um liz actually sorry i'll go to the wedgie guide so uh jp uh for next halloween uh this is a project he made for halloween but didn't get to finish publishing beforehand um you can use wedgie board all year they use wedgie board all year this is a this is another project where he basically went to the halloween store picked up a prop and then showed hey let's you know add electronics to make it automatic it plays audio clips um and it controls the um whatever pointer thing there's a name for it spirit channeler spirit channeler i'm not doing good with words today but that's okay um and with i have it controlled with that wirelessly over bluetooth uh so we haven't done a couple any blue fruit projects lately but it's a good one and then um this project is really great liz made a through i don't the 3d printed cow was not necessary but uh she made a pico w a pie cow htp server with circuit python so this is a you know we've been adding wi-fi support for the pico w the circuit python and you know we did a request project we've done a for dioprojects this one where the pico w itself is a web server so you can connect to it it can show the ip address on uh on oled to make it easy to connect to and then when you connect to that ip address on a web browser you can control stuff or read a temperature sensor so it could be it's all a micro server that might be useful for people they want to have a little um private uh data reading and reporting service um this is a htp server that does it nothing we do um actually have ssl htp server support but it's incredibly slow so if you do want to have a tls support you can do it it just takes like a long time to connect and get data okay and we have a video of the cow i'm gonna show that we'll play a couple seconds of uh gp's video and then then yeah you can build an htp server using a pico w running circuit python the web page is coded in html which is included as an f string in the circuit python code the pico w is connected to a pie cowbell breakout board it has a prototyping area and stem a qt port a ds18 b20 temperature sensor is soldered to the prototyping area and an oled screen is plugged into the stem of port the oled shows your ssid static ip address and the temperature reading from the ds18 b20 the temperature data is also logged to the html web page the html page also sends data to the pico w with htp post requests these requests are sent when you click the buttons you can turn the onboard led on and off or change the oled to show the less useful but more entertaining party paired animation since the pico w is often affectionately referred to as the pie cow a bovine themed 3d printed case is available for the to see how you can build your own http server check out the learn guide at learn.adafruit.com and here's some advanced manufacturing made here in new york city and it's 3d printing time all right we're going to play these videos back to back this week from knowing paedra this is the iot pool monitoring project using whippersnapper no code and then we got cool speed up a tree you can build a diy pool monitor with electronics from adafruit and whippersnapper adafruit's no code solution to iot projects this uses the ds18 b20 waterproof digital temperature sensor that's great for measuring wet conditions the adafruit esp32 s2 features an onboard lipo monitor and semicut that makes it perfect for portable iot projects everything is housed in a waterproof case with a nice long cable for the temperature sensor to be submerged in a body of water with adafruit iot you can easily build a dashboard to visualize the temperature in celcius or fahrenheit and the battery percentage using whippersnapper you can quickly set up your feather esp with the built-in components as well as any supported sensors you can control how often to log data and see a line graph to better visualize how your data is changing over time you can get the parts to build this project links are in the description this 3d printed mount houses the adafruit feather and it's designed to be secured in the waterproof case a 4.7 k resistor is included with the temperature sensor and it's required as a pull-up from the data pin to the bcc line the wires from the cable are color-coded and started to the pins on the bottom of the feather pcb use a quarter inch drill bit to make a hole in the enclosure for the temperature sensor to pass through be sure to check out the guide for a full step by step tutorial on building this project the feather snap fits onto the 3d printed mount the ds18 b20 sensor is inserted through the drilled hole in the 3d printed mount is secured with screws this 4400 milliamp lipo battery fits nicely in the enclosure and plugs directly into the feathers battery port these thumb screws are included with the waterproof case and the top cover is transparent so you can keep track of everything inside hot glue is great for insulating the drill hole and helps keep out any moisture from getting into the case we've been using this project to keep track of how long it takes for our pool to reach a desired temperature it was easy to put together and we think it's a great iot project that could be adapted for lots of other use cases we hope this inspires you to try out adafruit i o whip or snapper and the feather esp 32 for your next iot project and don't forget you can learn how to make all this stuff and more on 3d hangouts with no paid every single Wednesday okay before we go to ion mpi reminder is the code is new pixel bff use it in the store get 10% off get free stuff all those good things lady adal let's kick off ion mpi all right this week's ion mpi brought to you by did you key and adafruit is nordic what is this week's ion mpi i love nordic semiconductor i love their chips and so it's always great to be able to highlight their stuff they don't have a lot of product releases but when what they do release is of course really excellent quality this one honestly it's not really new it's everywhere once but it's available and that's also another important thing i will i also like to do ion mpi is where you can get the thing so this week's ion mpi is the nrf um 91 60 uh comes in three versions this is their cellular module so you know they're famous for um you know they started with uh you'll go to the next page you can read it while i chit chat or chatter um you know they started with um you know uh the nrf 24 oh one you know famous uh 2.4 gigahertz uh mesh meshable network chips wireless chips that were so easy to use and then they did the nrf 8001 bluetooth low energy and then they did the nrf 51 which had the integrated mic control and that's where i think things started to really um turn around i'm not turned around but i think become very interesting because instead of just being a peripheral wireless module the microcontroller is embedded inside of it and so you know the nrf 51 um started this idea of having a soft device where you have the the microcontroller and the radio bonded together in a module or in a chip and you know you you don't have to have a separate microcontroller and it's designed for low power it's designed for uh being very inexpensive very small because you don't have two things uh communicating so that same idea the nrf 51 52 and nrf 53 series now they took that same idea of let's not have a separate radio let's have the radio microcontroller together and they did the nrf 91 60 so this is a ltm or nbiot so two cellular networks uh 5g and gns gns s so gps you know or uh glonass or baby or whatever uh satellite systems they support all integrated together with as you can see on the right um a 64 megahertz cortex arm arm cortex m33 so it's a nice fast processor one megabytes of flash 256 k of ram plus trust zone so this means you can run you know your zephyr or toss or what have you on the board and do cellular and it's all very very thin and very very compact um so yes it was mentioned like they they've also by the way i'm added wi-fi and hopefully that wi-fi chipset will make it into uh digike's featured product soon when it's released when it's hardware release we'll talk about it but you know basically it's like the the strength the the strength that they brought to bluetooth or energy and the usability i think is very interesting that they're like we're going to now bring this to cellular as well okay so inside um is you know it is it is a sip it's a system in package it's not chip but it's like a it's a very thin module that's chip like but inside you've got that standard cortex m33 arm chip and then you've also got the modem um and the modem is what connects to the lte gps network you of course need an external sim um but what's nice is everything's integrated together including either even the the temperature compensated crystal and the pm ic um which means that you don't need a lot of external components and you get all the stuff with that cortex m33 that you would expect analog digital inputs uh i2s support pdm support pwm like 20 plus gpio so you know if you you don't have to have like two separate chips if you want to like get some sensor data in process it and then send it over cellular or receive cellular commands control some motors you can do that all in one um so the the modem is communicated to you with at commands although you know it's nice that you don't have to port the at command parser on your own it's you know they they give you software support for it but you know like any cellular module you do communicate it with with at command sets um to tell it what to do and you know i didn't go through the entire at command set but he has got all the things that you expect connecting disconnecting there's a socket data interface um that's separate than the command interface which is kind of nice um it's only for data nbiot and ltm so it's not for making phone calls it's for sending machine to machine uh data back and forth you know mqtt or htp or htps uh data um but it is a is a data system uh for cellular that said you know a lot of things nowadays we were talking about like every scooter has a gps plus cellular module in it so it works anywhere in the world um you get the e sim or the sim attached to it uh you've got you know global or at least nationwide coverage um that i've been worrying about wi-fi connectivity um the powerful thing that nordic provides kids are like well wait a minute i can get cellular modules anywhere you know we've covered cellular modules and i'm in pi um and there are a lot of makers but what i think is really powerful is is nordic always has really really good sdks and really really good support so you know people tend to use when they use the nrf 52 they do like to use the ate a fruit stack for it for aduino but that said the nrf cact sdk has a lot of great examples and they have um uh the info center will show you and they also have a really good support uh forum where you can talk to engineers and you talk to them in private you know like a you know on public area um if you need to get help with your design in or your for your firmware and they're very responsive um and then just do i kind of think there's needs like they have a whole system for how they do uh their sdk support and updates and and they're they really keep it up to dates like it's first class um believe me i've used other billion dollar company sdks and they've been very painful um we've always really really liked the nordic sdk uh the info center is also really good um i've you know not used it for the nrf 91 but i did use it a ton with the nrf 52 and uh they have a lot of questions they have errata and again use this with their forums and their um engineer support to to get your project going and and you know your you pay a little bit more maybe for really good quality products but the support makes it worth it i've never heard anyone say anything other than how good the nordic sdk support is um and there's some videos of course uh so check that out and we'll show a fun video at the end of this chat so there's three variants for it um there's the sika which is what we're highlighting and that's the version that has ltm nbiot and gnss it's going to be the more expensive of them i think it's like 20 ish 24 but if you're willing to go to the you know ltm or nbiot only versions and you don't need gps support um you can save a couple bucks these are very inexpensive i mean it's basically the cost of what you would normally spend with you know a module but you really get everything built in with it and again very few other external components are required the modules also what i thought was neat is they all have um you know 700 megahertz to something three gigahertz two two point something gigahertz uh bandwidth which means that there is no you know one thing i've noticed with cellular modules is there's like the north america version and the europe version and this is like africa and this is south america and australia and like it's it's it's very zoned based on the frequency but um because these are all wideband you can use any of them in any um zone that has the frequency support and they have certifications like various certifications regulatory certifications like ptcrb um fcc se etc so you can kind of get kick started with um your design to check out you know they have a certifications page where you can like look at it make sure of course that the country that you're using it in um it's pre-certified for the band you want to use but of course you can use any band um to just just be aware of what it is so that when you go for your final product certification you can kind of skip a couple steps because you'll be like it's pre-certified uh there are some great dev kits for this this is the i mean this is the massive nrf 91 60 dev kit um dk sensor dev kit and digikey this one has you know the arduino compatible headers it's got everything in it right it's got like the built-in antennas it's got um battery monitoring it's got the looks like the ft 223 2h j tag whatever sim slot it's massive but it's got like everything everything everything so it's good if you're like i need to have a dev kit for my um original product design and i need to have everything exposed um so great for like hardware hacking and of course uh and then it comes with the seca so then if you decide later you don't need nbiot you can then the the three versions are pin compatible so you just use the version that has only ltm my favorite um dev kit just because of the name is the thingy 91 you can tell that there's just marketing was like okay we're going to call the thingy um and it's also an nrf 91 60 you can see there's a sim card holder um i think it also has an nrf 228 40 on there as a coprocessor it's got sensors and stuff built in um but it's compact battery powered so designed for like you want to design a low power user experience that maybe if your hardware has overlap with the built-in hardware on the thingy um again you can uh you know prototype with it but it's much smaller it comes in like a little rubber uh case with it with a hole so you can attach to something so the video the the pizza project you use a thingy because it has the accelerometer um you know humidity temperature sensor and the cellular all built in and then of course if you like feathers there's also uh and and nordic nrf 91 60 seek a feather right so this is uh lets you use the you can see how few components you need to get this running i mean you basically just attach it and turn it to the outside for a gps and cellular and then you you know maybe you have a couple components on the beginning for battery charging and ldo but you're pretty much ready to go out of the box um this is from iktonis and uh it's available from uh from also from digikey you can get they get the feather speaking of um this is something you actually get thingy that's right they have a lot in stock 25 000 last i checked yeah they also have this sick this is a seek up there's also the sick ba and a seek a um but they have all three versions which i thought was amazing they don't have the dev kits in right now but i think they're gonna get some more soon um but if you want to get a cellular module this is one of the few cellular modules especially one of the mic control that's inexpensive and available and uh we have a cool video that nordic put together we're gonna play just a little bit of it have you heard about this new startup the nrf pizza delivery guys no what are they doing cellular iot pizza delivery they're running a prototype rounds now with the nordic thingy 91 oh that's cool but what are they doing differently from other pizza delivery services so they're taking a pizza delivery to a whole new level every pizza box has a nordic thingy 91 inside and this has sensors on it capable of measuring temperature pressure and acceleration and much more and this is transferred over to the nordic nf 91 60 s ip which also has gps then all of this data is transferred up to the nrf connect for cloud using the new low power cellular technologies ltm and mbao t that sounds cool but what are they actually using the sensor data for oh they they also have this app called nrf pizza and after you've ordered your pizza you can see exactly where it is on the map and when it will arrive but also show you the temperature of the pizza and if it has been flipped or not the app extracts all this data through the nrf connect for cloud device api so that the app can get access to the gps and sensor data directly nice yeah and the best part is if if the temperature gets too low or the pizza has flipped you get it for free oh sweet that sounds like something that will really disrupt the pizza delivery market my pizza's here gotta go yeah see you okay before we get to new products let's do the code it's neopixel bff don't forget to use it on checkout lady let's do some new products it's time all right here is a new this is a revised but it's a very significant revised so tft prices finally came back down to earth after you know many chip and tft shortages and so we've actually updated our tft supplier and while we were doing that i was like well you know if i'm gonna update the tfts why not update the designs as well and so if you look on the back of this 2.2 inch tft breakout and that has an i spy connector also has the lovely new penguin font that you have been showing off on desk of lady aida where the font is is rendered nicely using this python script that paint your dragon wrote we now have an i spy connector it's otherwise the same shape same pinout everything else is in the same location um but i want to show on the overhead actually we can just skip ahead yeah you're gonna show some images of it yeah yeah going on so on the overhead the i spy connector is sort of like people like oh can you have like you know the stem of qt that people really love right you plug in i squared c sensors with a cable and it's just plug and play you know could you do that for displays um so this cable you know you can't just use two or three pins you actually need like you know 12 pins to do spi especially if you want the sd card if there's a touchscreen um so this is a uh 18 pin cable and it's a flex cable and there's a connector on here and it's a pretty easy to remove it's a flip top connector so i really like that style because uh they're a lot less likely to break you slot the connector in which of course is hard to do on the overhead and uh you can control all these gpio the power reset sd card backlight plug it out whatever whatever comes through here and then for example we have this little breakout board that labels all of the uh gpio for you for easy wiring and then you know this cable can be significantly longer than breadboard wires but also makes it a lot easier to connect and disconnect and test so um here i'm just running like you know the the standard graphics test but what's nice is it's no longer tied to the breadboard i can yeah you want like accidentally hit one wire and then spend a bunch of time trying to figure out which wire yeah and we're going to have like a uh you know a feather and a stem of qt breakout for this connector that like plugs in directly but i do like showing it on a breadboard to say like hey it's nice as everything's labeled um and i'm using the 100 millimeter cable but of course these cables come in significant lengths uh availability okay next up okay next up we have two more sizes of the spi flash we again have the q-spy flash version that is just like you know eight pins of all the the q-spy connectors but if you're using something with five volt logic like in arduino uno or you know for some reason you just want to have it you know maybe data protected uh there's a level shifter on there in an ldo also good if you are uh you know there's some chips that used to spi flash chips used to come with five volt compatibility if you need to wire this up to something that needs that five volt compatibility um this is a you know windbond 25 q64 series which is again one of the most popular spi flash chips available um and we just wired up for spi usage so the hold and wp the extra two pins are not used uh set high and you just get the spi pins with chip select um for arduino we have a um spi flash library that you can use you can format it as fat or a little fs or use it as a flat file so this is 64 kilobits which is eight kilobytes and this is the 128 yeah there's two the 128 kilobits which is 16 kilobytes they're labeled kilobits not kilobytes um you can see it matches the printing on the chip that's why we say that so uh you know 16 16 kilobytes you know that's not so bad you can use it with a you know a variety of microcontrollers to store um you know audio clips or files um and then reference them later uh you know if you're using a lot of storage i always recommend an sd card but these are mechanically stabler and of course they're less expensive you know and a lot simpler for some basic uses um you know you still there's still flash you have to erase them before you write to the pages but again our library takes care of that for you all right the stars show tonight besides you lady at our staff our team all the folks who work aterford the community our customers is the neopixel driver bff uh so it's actually i designed this after erin did that project with um the she was she's doing the uh jelly fishes and she's like well i wanted to have a cutie pie and cut the neopixel and i was like oh you know there should be a little board that kind of does all the the tough work of that for you so um looking on the the back here um in the middle is uh that little chip in the middle is a um 74 hct 125 1g a single gate level shifter that will take the three volt logic level and shift it up to five volts which i thought was a nice little add-on and it uses the usb five volts to do that um it's by default using pin a3 and there's jumpers you can cut inside of the jumpers so you can use like mosey or rx or tx there's no like you know dedicated neopixel pin instructions are on the back you solder it back to back uh you can use sockets or of course you can solder it directly if you like i i perhaps like sockets and then the connector that's on most neopixels is not um this is jst sh does not come in a surface mount version so we put in a jst ph connector um and i'll show it and then i'll show you how you would connect to a neopixel strip that's not uh so hold on let me find my right here's my ammo thank you for your patience okay so let's go to the overhead um so here i've got it rp 2040 qt pi which is a great neopixel driver it has pio support um and then you can see on the back here i've just we've soldered a little socketed uh version so i can remove it but you don't have to you can solder it directly if you want and um for short strips you can power it directly from the um this cable like this is a uh this is we stock these neopixel strips that have the jst ph on them you get five volts from usb ground from usb and that level shifted data so here's the neopixel demo a lot of neopixel strips like you know they don't they even come with raw wires or they come with um jst sh and again there's no adapter there's no uh surface mount version of that connector however you can use um jst to socket cables and then you just plug these in to the wires just plug the wires in uh and they're they're color coded so red is power green is black is ground and white is signal um we also have a version with um plug male headers so you know those you plug it in and then now you have a removable plug version if you're powering a ton of neopixels like more than 30 honestly i wouldn't power it from the usb port i would have a separate five volt power supply in which case you would just connect the ground and signal and then you could cut the red wire off or just you know tie it around here and ignore it and then you would power the strip separately uh but have the signal and ground still come from this board you know we have wi-fi versions of the um cutie pies if you want to make a w led project this would be a great plug-and-play way to do that um it also works with the shower boards from seed so you want to use their bluetooth board um make a bluetooth neopixel project it's just you know it's a very inexpensive little add-on but it should just make neopixel projects a lot easier okay and that is new products okay um you can go ahead and start posting up some questions i have some loaded but we're gonna do a little bit of top-secret if you want to put your questions up in discord adafrit.it slash discord um we'll get to the questions of it lady it has a couple of things we're going to show in top secret top secret which i have fun i'm always constantly looking for the usb cable this is like my uh hold on where is it i just had it here it is okay every cable is black okay that's right that's our thing okay so what uh what is not out yet don't ask so okay so you know i can't get samd 51's if i mentioned that before can't get samd 51's uh but we like the matrix portal so i thought like well you know at the time when we we designed the matrix portal board there wasn't um a usb native esp32 board and we didn't have the wi-fi workflow but now there is this is an esp32 s2 um and it's got the level shifters and it's got the same exact layout so you've got two buttons uh you know stomach ut port uh one analog output and it does the plug-in uh thing and this is the power you can connect power here but i didn't i just connected power to the uh of a separate power plug but you could power it through usb um and you know it's running uh protomatter um and we have circuit python support for the s2 as well i do want to revise this i was like you know just after i finished it i was like you know i should really use the s3 not the s2 because um you get the secondary core and then vle support so i'm going to redo that but otherwise you know it's kind of nice to um you know just there's just no samd 51 so i don't have to worry about getting that chip for the next two years so um coming soon so that's one thing yeah and then um you know people really liked our tft esp32 boards um and so i thought you know that those versions have the tft on the top so you plug them in and then there's this module on the bottom the tft on the top but i thought we could do the other way around as well this could be that kind of panel mount uh friendly so the only thing is is that i think uh this this one's not programmed one second one of these is programmed maybe or not yeah well it just has the the boot loader on it uh but you got the tft it's got three i o buttons here so you do like very simple little users or face things and reset button um you know neopixel stem iqt uh battery monitor of change to the max 17 048 because i can't get the lc 709 anymore and then this one has an s2 and this one has an s3 because there's still there's still reasons to use one or the other but luckily the modules are like pin compatible um so this will be you know it's just kind of nice because it's like maybe you want a very clean look you know with a little user interface uh tft and then you can plug feather wings onto the back and they don't they're not in the way of the display or the user interface so maybe like you put a lora feathering on the back of this and now it's like okay you got a little wi-fi lora gateway with the tft that you can panel mount uh very easily it's got formatting calls okay them's the top secrets this is our secrets okay we're going to jump right to questions and then we have a fun announcement we'll do at the very end here we go i have the questions loaded up later we can get through them okay um first one it's a good question we get us asked a lot um what do you recommend for small batches of pcbs to get assembled there's lots of uh bits to the question yeah um but basically you've seen this question before someone wants to get something assembled any recommendations of where because they're not going to do it on their own that's right and you know traditionally i've been like yeah it is is quite expensive you'd have to go to contract manufacturer and you should there's there's ones in the u.s like cyber city circuits that will do uh small batch manufacturing um i'm starting to actually see a lot of really good results out of um uh asian uh quick turn what i call i call them quick turn contract manufacturers it's it's semi automated you have to do a lot more work at the beginning to get everything set up but companies like um jlc they do assembly pcb way pcb way lc pcb and then there's a couple there's i think more than that but those are the two that i see people use the most um the quality is quite good and very reliable it's just you have to you know when you send it out you're you know they do what you say not what you want it's kind of like sending a file to a 3d printer yeah it's a little different than it prints what you say to print not what you want to print so you just have to be you know really conscious because it's especially if you have them put components on that are expensive they have rendering you know they have a renderer and you want to make sure that the renderer has the components in the right location and the pads fit up correctly um but that said you know you can you can get boards assembled for me 10 bucks a piece okay do the neopixels on the five by six ortho sneper part work at 3.3 volts they do you're not supposed to but they work fine okay uh is there a name for the add-on board for the qt pie because i think this is the second one for the qt pie that's right they're bff neopixel bf that was their bffs they're their buddies okay uh next is it possible to stack the qt pie qt pie plus lipo battery charger bff plus neopixel driver bff and have the neopixels plus qt pie to powered via battery you can but it's going to get like it's going to be like an inch and a half thick so just you know be aware of that it's like i kind of i sort of designed like you know something the thing about the neopixel bff is it's kind of designed to be um we're like robots that's kind of weird um but hopefully hopefully it's a stream of the quality says it's fine yeah that's odd maybe we're just chunking um but it's designed to power through usb and so i don't know i actually don't think it would power the neo the neopixels through the battery because it's expecting to be powered through five volts but um so like you could make it work with some wiring or external powering of the neopixels but honestly it's they're really meant to be one at a time yeah i guess i'll ask the stream um so on our side it's a little choppy right now it's cool i don't know what's happening with y'all from space well i don't see a lot of complaints so i don't know yeah weird i've never seen this album before all right any other uh it's a little twitchy it's a little twitchy on twitch i don't know okay yeah yeah it's a little choppy weird i've never seen this album before but the audio i think is coming through fine yeah audio is fine but it's choppy all right i wonder what it could be this is a time when we robot dance yeah why would it do this uh you want to do robot dance well i mean why not you know like it looks cool yeah it's weird i've never seen this do this before though hmm well there's nothing really to turn off and back on again restart the router i wonder what it could be yeah weird camera overheating yeah it's not that no let's just see something let's see what happens the overhead see if that's oh the overheads also everything is everything is going oh weird it could be the internet yeah i think there's some broadcast problems at the moment well um do you have questions and we're almost done anyways we're almost done um i am going to yeah i'm going to uh stay right here everybody we'll be back in a second we'll see if there's something we can do oh you want to put on the warning please stand by well yeah but yeah but i'm gonna you're gonna kick it okay yeah let's see all right i think we fixed it you press the help button on the Atari xe keyboard good work all right see what happened okay um let's go back to the other questions um that might have been it uh thanks for sticking with us during that uh that is okay here it is you sell the open mv camera can i convince you to make a hat for that board that would allow you to connect an adafruit board like the sp32 s2 qt buy for some wi-fi connectivity notifications maybe to adafruit io or whatever snapper could be a no-code project for person detection seems like it could be done with routing i2c lines power etc but in an adafruit way with some neopixels well i i think that'd be cool i think the open mv cam is really good and i'm glad we stock it i will say that i'm a little hesitant right now to design anything that works with that board because i know it's going through uh comp revision issues because we've gone back and forth between the 32 h7 and f7 or whatever sorry the the camera module and i think the chips also change and it's using yeah the cortex m7 from stm and those have been really challenging to get um so you know i i think i'm going to wait until those stm's are a little more available and open mv is not you know they're just dealing with that and then we can talk about having add-ons and stuff just because they might end up doing revision and then it's like oh we made a board it doesn't plug in anymore all right um in the chat and discord someone made a fantastic adabot costume thank you so much and uh i think those are the questions all right so some announcements um first of all upcoming programming notes so uh lady aida on sundays will go on pause for a few weeks uh show and tell we'll have some co-hosts for the next few weeks but people you love liz then Pedro that's right that also means um some of the other shows and segments like ion mpi which is on every single week and all the shows that you see on great search all the shows that you see lady aida and i on uh we're taking a bit of a break because we've been working on a project for about nine months it's not out yet and it's ready to make its debut so we're having a kid this is uh a little uh photo thing that they gave us everybody's healthy more healthy kiddos healthy so i'm extremely big yeah and uh i'm excited to not be big anymore you can't tell because we've been doing the show and it generally cuts off yeah you can't really tell but this has been going on for a while so i'm gonna rotate now so uh jp will be doing wednesday night so in the same time period is ask an engineer you'll still be here but we won't be here yeah we'll probably pop on to the show and tell and do things we're gonna have videos but doing live videos will probably be hard for next couple weeks because uh this kid looks hungry um so we'll probably be dealing with that but uh thank you everyone for being part of this news this journey with us um i'm really looking forward to y'all being able to meet this person i think uh we have a lot of fun and a lot of good that we can teach this kiddo and continue to do this thing called ate a fruit with uh another team member soon okay so that someone asked to do date it's next wednesday yeah it's like i'm not doing the show next Wednesday it's like now yeah i have an appointment next wednesday next thursday and uh ate a fruit we do um hug reports instead of bug reports and uh hug report to lady aida who's designed like 200 boards in the last few months i don't think i've ever revised them yeah yeah there's a lot it was really impressive there's actually gonna be a couple more parts right before i leave but uh liz and catney and jp and jeb are gonna help with the guides and so there'll be a couple things that will be released it won't be it won't be completely nothing um but uh we'll see you in 2023 i'm gonna take six six eight weeks off yeah we'll see how um our schedules work out and all that but um thank you everyone for being part of this adventure with us uh special thanks to all the aid fruit team we're um we have everything we need and um all the the teams will be able to take care of everything uh we'll be around but of course we're just gonna make sure kiddo is off to a good start so with that um don't forget uh the code is neopix will be big yeah the actual neopixel bff and uh we will see everybody very soon not sure when we'll probably pop on to a show until soon this has been native fruit production pull me back this is your moment of zener so big