 and welcome to Lady Aida. Hey everybody, and welcome to the desk of Lady Aida. Lots of stuff, hardware hacking going on at my desk. Also, we're right in the middle of the holidays for those celebrating Yom Kippur. I hope you have an easy fast. Okay, let's go to my computer and we'll do a couple of things and we'll get into some hardware chat. So, sorry, late ground, flyables. Wanted to let people know that we've released a bunch of guides, sorry, pages into circuit. Pardon me, it's been a day. We released pages for Adafruit-Playground, which is our site, which is kind of like the learning system that folks are so aware of. You know, all the guides that we published, we've published, I don't even know how many guides at this point, a couple of thousand guides. Let's see, all guides. I don't know, we used to have a good number at the bottom. It is, oh, almost 3,000 guides, Phil. We're gonna get to 3,000 soon. And for guides that we publish, these are from Adafruit people in-house, folks that we have budget to give them to write guides for their projects, tutorials on products, and other fun stuff. But we have often customers and people saying, hey, I wanna write a guide and use your learning system because it's like a trustworthy place to teach people to have curriculum. And we don't have a separate way for people to run their own learning system site. And there are other sites like Instructables and Hackster and Elmond 14 and Hackaday IO. But if you want to have something on the learning system, make your account on Adafruit and then you can publish your own pages here. And one of the promises we're gonna have is we're not going to ever have ads or pop-ups or interstitials or require people to log in to see guides. So I published a guide on making bilingual books with chat GPT, so it's kind of like techie. It's like a crafty project. I didn't really feel like it was good content for learn because it doesn't have like a lot of electronics at this time. But it'd be a good content for Adafruit-playground. So anyways, anyone can make an account on Adafruit.com and publish their own guides in each of our learning system. Okay, so now onto some hardware. So let's go to the overhead. Okay, whoa, I'm just gonna look at my feet. Okay, so we got the new latest version of the Kualia ESP32 S3 board for the RGB666 displays. That's what we're calling like round bar. This is like a square display. And a few small changes to this. We're moving the NeoPixel, shuffling a couple pins around, making the backlight controllable over the expander, et cetera. So this is an Arduino demo using Arduino GFX. I'm going to clean up all those examples, see if maybe we can get them published into the Arduino repo for Moon On Our Nation. They're doing a great job of maintaining that library. I don't feel like I need to rewrite Arduino underscore GFX when they did such a great job for these parallel TFT displays using the S3's built-in peripheral. This is all cleaned up and ready to go. And we'll do tutorials on how people can play CinePak videos and MP3s and stuff, but so far, so good. This is just a little mini demo showing that it's working. And then if you go back to the computer, we're also adding support into Circuit Python. I did show one demo once, I think, this all working with Circuit Python. And it was very hacky and pasted together with bubblegum and sticks and tape. But we're now becoming more formalized in how it's being supported. So it's coming, it's coming soon. It's like we were testing it, cool concept, now it's time to kind of finish up the API. And Jebler's been working on that. Jebler's going on a well-deserved holiday soon, but hopefully in the next week, we'll do all the little teeny cleanups that I'm noticing as I'm using this. And the board is actually in the Adafruit shop for signup. We've got photos of it. I have to make the tester, so it's like not gonna be in the shop for like another day or two at least. But if you wanna sign up for this board, you can put your email in and we don't email you unless the product comes into the shop. So that's great. I've been working on the people who watch me work on the quality for like the last two months, a lot of exploring, experimenting, but I'm so glad Mr. Leida bought or suggested I'd buy these square and round displays for the last three years. And I've been sitting in a box for years and years waiting for a good project to use them with, having them work with CircuitPython or Arduino with ESP32 is gonna be like super fun. So people can do cool projects. So that's coming soon too. And then speaking of displays, another thing, well, I do wanna mention just because folks are like, when are you gonna get all your SAMD51 stuff in back stock? I mentioned the SAMD51 is one of the last chip sets that is just still really affected by the chip shortage, but thankfully they're coming back into stock. DigiKey has the J20, which we used in like PyPortals, the G18, which we don't use as much, and also some G19s, which we use in the Itsy Bitsy, and we use it in the Itsy Bitsy, we use it in the Monster Mask and we use it in the Neo Trellis. And you'll note that those are some of the ones that are out of stock. We also got some SAMD51s in. So, we did get a shipment of some chips, which means that you're gonna see some of these SAMD51 and four boards come back into stock, some of whom have been out of stock for like over a year and it's been like a downer. Like we've prioritized the Feather M4 and we did have, the Feather M4 we did have in stock for quite a bit, and then we just recently ran out and we have a couple Itsy Bitsies in stock and the Metro M4s were also pretty popular, but the Halloween M4 like just totally was not, has not been manufactured since like the last Halloween, but I really wanna get the Halloweens in the Monster Mask in the store for this Halloween because I think it'll make for a great Halloween project and it'll make for a lot of sales. So, that's happening. So, people I know were like, oh, I wanna do SAMD51 stuff. I feel like you'll be able to do that soon. Pardon me? Okay. And then lastly, okay, let's go to the overhead again. I'll show you the last little bit of hardware. I didn't do any like new stuff really this week. A lot of it was just like getting all this existing stuff kind of ready for sale and demo and stuff. So this is, I showed this off. This is the revision of the 2.4 inch TFT feather wing, very popular board that has like been out of stock for like two years because TFT prices were ridiculous and it didn't make sense for me to stock something when the price of a single display was like $20. They're back down to reasonable prices now. And then the STMPE 610-811 got discontinued. So it was one of those like one, two punch things where it's like, I couldn't get one thing and then I couldn't get the other thing. And then I was sort of like, you know what? I'm just gonna not work on this for a bit. But now everything's back in stock. And so I, you know, if you're gonna do a redesign, redesign the whole thing. So I made this button right angle so you can reset it from the side. The switch is still this way because I thought that would be easier for people to work with. Add a STEMI QT port here. And then because I'm now using the TSC 2007, which is an I squared C expander, the chip select line, this actually was backlight, but you'll see I cut it and I actually ended up making this pin IRQ. So when the final version of WebD, which is what I ordered, this will be an IRQ pin. So you can cut it if you don't wanna use it as an IRQ input and you can use it for something else. But that'll make performance a lot better, especially if you're using something like LVGL where it can use interrupts for the type of screen management. So what I do when I have feathers, especially, you know, one that uses a lot of pans is uses SPI and it uses, you know, chip select and DC and the SD select and there's backlight control and the touch and you know, so much stuff going in the SD. For feathers that are more than just, if it's just I squared C, I don't usually do a lot of testing, but for something like this, what I do is I actually get one of every feather. So I've got ESP8266 and 32U4 and M0 and NRF2840 and ESP32 and the V2 and then the RTLTNC feather M4 and 328. I also do now S2 and S3, if it makes sense. I might do that as well, but especially ones that are weird like the ESP32 and 8266 and, you know, the TNC, just because there can be little bugs that pop up. So what I do is I actually program each one. So let's take, for example, the ESP32. I program each one and I have one example sketch that handles all the pin differences and then this is a touch screen demo, which you can kind of see. I do a little, you know, touch screen check and then the image of the flowers comes from the SD card. So this demo tests SPI, you know, full four pins plus a SD card because it reads the image, tests the display obviously, and then touches the touchscreen, I squared C and the IRQ. So this kind of like covers all the hardware attached and then, you know, I just test the reset button and I press the reset button and like, does it reset? I test the on off, you know, if I flip it, does it turn off and turn back on? And so far, so good. So this is, you know, after I did the shield, that was the first one I did. I was like, okay, the updates to this are very similar to that. So this will finally be in stock soon and then I'm also gonna get the 3.5 inch version of this feather wing in stock. But I tested all of these, including RP2040, if you head over to the side, and all's good. And while I was doing that, I found, you know, not like bugs, but like changes in board support packages. So for example, the ESP8266, which a lot of people use to be honest anymore, a lot of people have moved to the ESP32, S2 and S3 and C3 family. The 82, even expressive, it's like, please stop using this chip. It had changes in whether it needed, it used to be you could call yield every once in a while to kick the watchdog timer. And now you have to call delay. So I made some changes to GFX and the image loading library to fix those. And then finally, how are we doing on time? What are we doing? Okay. Finally, I got the VCNL, folks remember, this is another one of those libraries that I use chat GPT for to write a tester library. So I think, sorry, the Arduino library for, this is now, you know, ready to go and have a little test programmed. Sometimes the IRQ doesn't go off, but there you go. Oh, and it's kind of, you can actually see it. You can see the LED blinking. No, maybe not. Okay. I thought you could see the IR, the infrared proximity LED blinking, whatnot. So this is going to be in the shop soon. And then I've got the prototype for the big sister VCNL 4200 on the way as well. All right. So that's everything on my desk. It's a lot, but we can now check out the great search. All righty. The great search brought you by DigiKey and Adafrit. Thank you, DigiKey. I just think a weekly gladiator is a power of engineering. I hope you guess you find the things you want on digikey.com. Ladyada, what are you looking for this week? Good question. So I just covered on the desk of Ladyada that I am revising many display things that were, did not really make it through the chip shortage and have to have serious revisions done to them because so many parts changed. Backlight drivers and connectors and TFTs and touchscreen controllers and more and more. So this 2.4, I agree. This 2.4 TFT feather wing has been revised. And since I revised the feather wing version, like you can plug in various feathers, I wanted to also update the Raspberry Pi version of like the same thing. So this, let's go to the computer. I'll show off this. Hat. So hats are hardware attached to top for Raspberry Pi's. And I did also put off a lot of these because the Raspberry Pi's were not available for like a year or ish. I mean, you could get them, but it was like very challenging. And so, you know, in my gigantic parallel revisions, I hit 450 revisions last night out of 600 ish boards that we manufacture right now. The Raspberry Pi once kind of got put on the kind of the end of the list. So I was like, well, I'm gonna wait till Raspberry Pi's are available again anyways. So this also needs to be revised. A lot of different pieces and parts are not available. The, you know, the resistive touch controller and the TFT were hard to get, but now that they're back to getting it back to manufacture, another part that actually got discontinued as a specific EEPROM vendor that I use for these EEPROMs is unavailable. So I thought I would also do a quick change over to use a different vendor for these, I would say, you know, jelly bean components. This is the EEPROM. So Raspberry Pi, you know, and more Raspberry Pi's are available now so people can start making Raspberry Pi accessories. And one of the standards for hats is not only the shape, but okay. So this Raspberry Pi official article, which is like nine years old by the way from 2014, talks about the standards of hats and not only does it dictate, you know, the pinouts and the physical shape with all the slots, but down here, sorry, skip it. Okay, they talk about this EEPROM that is on board. So there's two special I squared C pins on the hat pinout that are not used for like user, I squared C there for hat identification. And if you attach a generic I squared C EEPROM to it and there's a little tool that helps you format the data that goes into the EEPROM so that the Raspberry Pi software can identify it. The idea is that you would be able to put a hat on like a display or like the sense hats or like activity hat or whatever or like the Lego hat that they made. And it would automatically know like, Oh, I saw that you attached display hat. Let me load up the device tree kernel overlay and any other software and install it and get it ready. So it's like almost as plug as play as USB on like a Mac or Windows computer where you plug in your mouse and it just magically works or you plug in your monitor and it just magically works. The idea would be the same thing, but with hardware. So let's go back here. So this EEPROM here, and I think, you know, yeah, it's a 3G. You can barely see bits as 24 C 32. These are generic I squared C EEPROMs and 99% of the time they come in this eight SOIC format. The 24 LC or C series is what they usually start with or sometimes it's cut cap 32. There's 24 in there and then 32 for 32 kilobit, which is eight kilobytes somewhere in the name, but there's sometimes like a C or an L or a cat or an ST. And I'll show you that when we search for it. They're all basically generic and identical. Sometimes they have extra capabilities, but you can pretty much use anyone you want and they all respond to I squared C address 50 and then they have three address pins so they can go from 50 to OXF57, right? It's because of three addresses. So let's go to DigiKey and I'll show you, search you for these. So in a previous great search tool for 25 Q series chips, so you're like, oh, why can't they just use like the 25, GD25Q or W25Q. The 25 is the SPI version of the Nor Flash. It's different than EEPROM. So watch out and there's a little 23 series, 23 LC. And I believe 23 LC is SRAM. Yeah. So let me just verify. Yeah, it's SRAM. SRAM does not, it's volatile. When you write data, it doesn't stick around after reboot. So it's great for when we need like a big memory buffer for, say, E-ink displays. We use it as like a back buffer for the E-ink because we don't care how fast it is. E-ink is very slow, but we do need a lot of memory to buffer the entire display and we might want to do it off the microcontroller if you don't have PSRAM. 25 series is not EEPROM, it's Flash. You need to erase and basically write a whole page at the same time. So it's good for large storage. It's not good for small amounts of storage. EEPROM, which is the 24 series, is great for small amounts of data. I don't think you can store more than a couple kilobytes. The SPI Nor Flash gets easily up to like 16 megabytes. I think they probably even make more, but it's good for like the megabyte range. EEPROM, good for the kilobyte range and non-volatile and you can erase and write one byte at a time, which is quite nice. Actually, it's also I squared C. And these are used often. There's used for like FPGA configurations, MAC address, data for Laura and Ethernet devices, non-secure configuration. Remember, you can read and write from them clearly. They're in clear text. Not good for security key storage, OK? That's not what they're good for. They're good for calibration data, serial numbers, where you don't care if they get changed, but it's good for identification. And again, like MAC addresses and stuff, or if you want to identify the board. It's common. Common EDIDs for monitors are stored on the EEPROM. So let's look at memory. So let's look only at active. I searched for I squared CEPROM, so we're only going to get what we're looking for there. I think we've covered FRAM on INMPI before. That is more expensive, but it's instantaneous, right? And it doesn't get affected by X-rays or whatever, like particles in space. And so if you're sending stuff up in space, FRAM is a good idea. We're not doing that. Also, SRAM is volatile, so we don't want SRAM. We want EEPROM only. And we want surface mount, because we're going to put this on a surface mount board like this. And there's a lot of options. And then remember, we're going to look for 32 kilobits. Don't forget, a lot of these memories, I even get confused all the time. They are defined in kilobits. And then if you want to know how many kilobytes you've divided by 8, 4 kilobytes, 32 kilobits, let's do it. OK, so that really pairs it down. You will pay more for more kilobits, so just pick the number. One thing to watch for, you can sometimes go up one sizing. So if you're spec'd for one kilobyte, you may be able to swap in a 4 kilobyte version. All the pins are pin-compatible, but the I2C commands to address the memory are not compatible. For the smaller memories, you literally will use only one byte of address if it's under 256 bytes of data. And then up to 64 kilobytes, you would use two address. And then beyond that, you'd use three address bytes. And so it's not necessarily smaller to larger. Just make sure you don't pass over that number of address bits boundary because your code will no longer work. You can't just put in a huge chip and think it'll work in something that's a one or two address byte command to get data or data. OK, so I think this looks good for voltage supply. In this case, for the Raspberry Pi, it's 3.3 volt logic. So I just want to avoid everything that requires 4.5 volts. I don't think it's that many, to be honest. And then 220 options. Again, these are generally being parts. Every chip company pretty much makes an iSQUID CE Prom. Let's just look for in stock and not marketplace. So that gets us one half down. OK, so you'll notice that there's a lot of different packages for this. So these eProms are not that big. And so you can get them in a lot of package sizes. The official standard is SOIC. So, again, sometimes they don't start with just 24. They have CAT. Sometimes it's C. Sometimes it's LC for low power. But you'll always see that 24 in there. And you'll always see for 32 kilobits, 32, 64 kilobits, 64, 8 kilobits, 08, et cetera, et cetera. Did you come in like DFN sizes? One interesting thing is if you are using this in a tightly it's a small package. Sorry, a small layout. You don't want to have this huge Chonkin SOIC chip digging up a lot of room. You can get the chips in SOT 23.5 as well. For SOT 23.5, I will say one thing to just watch out for. It's not a huge deal. But this is a standard SOIC and TSAL package. The SOT 23 drops the address pins. There's three address pins missing. And so you'd think, oh, OK, so it only responds to address OX50. Actually, it will respond to all addresses that it could have been set to if it had address pins. So you will see both OX50, 51, 52, up to 57 on iSquared C because it's meant to like, oh, whatever, configuration. So if you have nothing else on the iSquared C bus that could conflict, like in the version of this hat, totally fine to use the SOT 23 smaller, not less expensive. Usually it's a little bit more expensive. If using the SOIC, you just set the address pins and then you can have a unique address selection. Do note that they do have internal pull-ups sometimes or pull-downs. So just watch out for that. You want to connect them. Don't leave them floating. And then sometimes these have other stuff, like they have serial numbers or white protection areas. But for general purpose stuff, like just saving and reading data, you don't really have to. You're probably not using some of the special things that each manufacturer adds in to spike. It's like, oh, this is my recipe for chocolate chip cookies. Like, I had cumin. They all have something a little bit unique to make it tangy. But for generic purposes, it doesn't really matter. So they even come in if you want tiny packages, you can get it in this like 2 millimeter probably by 2 millimeter size package, 1.4 by 1.7. So tiny little EE prom. But you'll see it still has the 24 and 32 in the C in there. This one has a G for some reason. Anyways, searching by price. Let's actually go specifically say we want SOIC, because I really just do want. And watch out, there's also narrow and wide SOIC. In this case, the part that I'm replacing is narrow. So let me get the narrow or medium with, you also get 74 tiny slot series. Yeah, a lot of good options. So I think, what did I pick at the end? I don't know. They're all good. I think this one is fine. This M24C32 from ST, it's about like 20 cents in quantity. Sounds reasonable. I squared C up to 1 megahertz. Wide voltage supply range. And good everyday 4 kilobyte I squared CE prom. So I'm going to pick some of these up, and I'll get those pie hats back in the manufacturer. That's a great search. We got a lot going on. We're going to get in and out. Keep it about a half an hour. Thanks so much, everybody, for joining us. Probably heard our little kiddo in the background. She is hoping and helping. She was moving some dials and knobs to go guns. She can do some things with knobs now. She's into wirecasts. Yeah, she's learning how to talk, so you probably heard her saying things. That's it for tonight. We'll see everybody during the week. Full week of shows and more. Bye-bye. Bye, everybody.