 Okay, so top secret and you know we have a little bit of a theme this week so you know because we do clips on the show and everything I just talked about this but this is for the top secret segment I'm going to make things a little bit awkward so if you go to our flicker set you saw a series of photos that we did so this is me I'm wearing the men's picture to your men's small shirt I've been trying to be healthy so I've fit in the men's small right now and on the back of my shirt it says bootleg hacker Johnny Depp and that is exactly what it paid for it is yeah this is what LeMore wanted this is what LeMore got and so the reason for this though it's not a fun story and I'm gonna hopefully send this to some of the people that are being pretty crummy so we have this statement that we don't endorse NFTs we don't have ETH we haven't done anything we've been asked to do NFTs we don't in the past our team was writing about like here's something that's happening in the industry these things called like NFTs so we don't even have those as blog posts in fact we remove them we had an author that did a blog post people said oh I can't tell what this is so we edited it and we said okay we don't endorse NFTs this isn't like a paid thing still wasn't good enough we removed it completely and then we have an editorial policy that says we're not gonna even have those things up still wasn't good enough so what had happened was someone took my photo from my like I guess somewhere online or something like that and I'm not a public figure because Twitter won't verify me and Wikipedia says I'm not deleted my page yeah you're not notable and so they took my photo and they said oh who's this like you know bootleg hacker joined up and I so you know we get we have a high surface area and people have Photoshopped you people have registered our names our names is and made like you know little hate sites and stuff they took photo they took some photos from our about page of our team and they said oh look these are just paid actors they said oh no one no one look at all these people here there's no way that all these people work together and then you know when we have our product pages people say oh there's no way people have nails like that oh there's no way that people have every hand that is in an Adafruit photo belongs to an Adafruit employee yeah and they have a manicure budget too by the way in case you're wondering we've done that before so anyways you know and it's always good enough so I'm trying to make light out of it but I do want to send this to someone you know I'm a person too I feelings like and I'm trying to take this in stride but I'm also tired of it because it's really hard when people are attacking the team these are people that are just trying to do their job and we sign our names to things so like our customer support team they have their name on something and someone is really crummy and they're and they decide to weaponize and they they put things up on Twitter and they Photoshop us and stuff like that it's not nice and so while this is funny and I'm doing this is with the back of my shirt says that's the reason I'm doing it because I want them to kind of stop so anyhow we'll see we have some other top secret so let's play a video video and then let's talk about the floppy project you're doing and then this very cool board and then we're gonna do the questions and then we're gonna get out of here okay so we use this USB to serial converter chip the CP 2104 it's a great USB serial converter chip it's very fast it does a little control lines it's wonderful it's a QFN package but with the chip shortage it's really hard to get this one however I can get the upgrade which is the CP 2102 yeah the two is the upgrade to the 04 and it's the end version and one of the things that I really like about these chips is they have like LED drivers so this is just showing if I transmit data the LED lights up but you have to enable the LEDs they're not enabled by default and if you're like me and you just spent like three days trying to figure out how to enable it and you're like it's not working because the end version isn't supported by all the SDKs and the DLL is not updated and you have the one that is living this week hey by the way I check out this nice person CR1T bit they made a fork of this program called CP 210x config that compiles on Linux and enables the RX and CX LEDs thank you CR1T bit you're the best. All right lady what is this? Hey I'm testing out some prototypes I just put together this is an MCP 23017 breakout and people have actually even emailing us asking to make a breakout for this chip for quite a while and I've always been like well just use the dip chip but I can see why some people would want a version that's like plug-and-play and STEMI QT so it's got the MCP 23017 16-bit IO expander and then we have eight ground pads on either side address jumpers on the back STEMI QT plug and play connector and here I'm just testing it out with this simple blank using an LED and it works great over I squared C it is a nice GPIO expander it has like pull-ups and interrupts and all that so just looks like it's working fine I'm gonna order these and get them into the shop soon. Okay and then we posted this up this is a Sony Mavica floppy disk camera and then you're holding a floppy drive so what is this floppy project that you're working okay it all comes down to Apple Talk so we had that Prince floppy that I know came over with and we got the TIF data off of it and posted it to the Internet Archive and also it's on the Internet and what we really want to do is take an image of that disk because you kind of want to get the original like ISO or whatever like the disk image the problem is that if we take an image of that disk we have no way of getting that image off the disk because we have like no other way of transferring the file off I mean like we could probably figure something out but I was like oh you know I should just dump the data off the disk take an image and I realized like it's actually not that easy with HFS and I wanted to also try to get like a flux level copy because apparently like that's kind of what archivists like to do and that sounds kind of cool so I was looking at it and I was like well I'm only have to do one disk and I didn't want to pick up an applesauce if you're doing a lot of these to absolutely pick up an applesauce board but actually looked at the floppy disk the way floppy disks are read we just like absolutely amazing that we got this to work it's kind of like magical but it's it's something that I think I could RP2040 and PIO would do really well with and so I kind of wanted to just experiment with like you know we have these PIO examples for like NeoPixels and like Ethernet and you know like HDMI and DVI and like that's that's all wonderful and modern but like could there be a PIO interface for direct sorry a PIO program for the RP2040 for direct interfacing with floppy disks the RP2040 has enough RAM that maybe it could store you know a full sector's worth of flux data and then decode it all at once to like look for bit errors and stuff anyways that's just how it became interesting. Okay and you know one thing I've noticed in the archivist community there's a bunch of people in it and 99.99% of them are fantastic there's a couple vocal folks that don't like new people in it's gatekeeping and one of the things I'm hoping when you do this project is gonna bring more people into doing retro tech and more because I feel like some folks they go into some of these archiving communities and they get chased out because they don't know the terminology they don't know things I'm hoping that this will help up plus maybe we'll have some source stuff for people. I also want to make it open source I mean like again applesauce is like the de facto standard and it's an amazing piece of hardware and it's not open source and they say it's for a good reason and I believe them but that's just like whenever somebody says that I'm like like I don't want to try that you know high standard and whatever we do we'll try to always do open source so next up speaking of this is a new board they're working on. Yes so so you have PIO if you have an RP2040 one of the first demos for the PIO peripheral you know IO manager inside the RP2040 is controlling a Neopixel and it's kind of like perfect for that because Neopixels are like a really weird Manchester-y bit-bang protocol and we have Neopixel 8 which is the library we wrote for the SAMD51 that uses like DMA and massive buffers to write Neopixels but what's cool is the RP2040 can do that without as much RAM because it doesn't need to like do weird stuff with like buffering one bit as a byte or whatever like weird games so I took the RP2040 feather it took off the SWD connector and shoved everything kind of the left and then turned a bunch of the caps into O402s to make an 8 buffered output feather and this actually is like the same size as normal feather it looks longer but it's because I didn't put the mounting holes on the end so this could be good for driving 8 Neopixel strands from an RP2040 which is a lot of RAM and again has PIO and they also have like STEM and QT on it and like 5-0 buffered outputs and you can still use all the feather pins those eight consecutive PIO pins are not exposed on the header so it's like if you wanted to do like an Ethernet or Wi-Fi feather wing you can have internet-controlled multiple LEDs so not gonna come out for this year's like Christmas decorations but maybe like you're like us some of the cool behind-the-scenes things you're gonna like it yeah and that is this week's top secret oh wait I have one more oh yeah breaking news breaking well we're back we're back we're back at the top secret I forgot that I want to do well I just have the two boards all right I did show these on the desk later but I thought maybe folks would like this so this is the the ESP32 S2 QT PI so you can see here the antenna two buttons STEM a QT port on the bottom and ESP32 S2 and there's even battery pads you can connect a battery to it with diode protection and then this is the feather a logger which has a SD card on the back a feather and for I added a little button here I don't know why I just felt like it data logging I kind of feel like having one input is good idea and stomach QT over here and I upgraded the flash to be eight megabytes it's kind of like a feather and four plus really for reals this time