 This week's on MPI, brought to you by DigiKey, made for you from Omron. That's right. What do they do? What do they make? What is the MPI this week? So Omron does a lot of automation and sensing, so a lot of times when you have sensors for robotics or automation or factories, it's going to be an Omron sensor, like our pick-and-place and board stenciler and board placer, they all use a lot of Omron sensors. That's the Omron siren. Every time we say, Omron, make some noise. I know. They do the party. They tell we're live in New York. It's in New York City, and there's so much. So this week, I saw this pop up on IonMPI, and it's like, sometimes we have IonMPIs that are like really like incredibly complicated, advanced, like single board computer, like machine learning, time of flight cameras. And sometimes it's like, here's a sensor that's just really useful. So this week's sensor is just really useful. This is the B35WDB series, so let's go check it out. This is a break beam sensor. It's a diffuse infrared sensor that's just kind of really well made and has a distance range of, it says 550 millimeters or about half a meter, but you can actually kind of go up to 800 millimeters or about 0.8 meters, depending on the material that you're acting. It doesn't do distance. It just does whether something is in the path of the beam. So it's a diffuse reflective sensor. Right now, there's only one model. It's the NPM input. You see the distance is 550, super miniature. And it's got a nice mounting system, which I'll show in a bit. Using it's really easy. It's got three terminal connections, one power that powers the sensor, the LED, and sensing circuit, then ground, which is the power and signal ground. And then there's a load output. And you can see there's an NPN transistor. So you can sync, I think probably about 100 milliamps or so through it. Not good for inductive loads, but you could use this to say power a relay or a transistor that could control the relay or control the solenoid that you want to power. But for just like an LED indicator, definitely this would be able to power that. So the distance, so in this case, you know, sensing it with white paper, you'll see it's good from zero to close to, but not quite one meter. The reason they'll say 550 millimeters is because of the color and reflectivity. Since the sensor's interesting, apparently it can detect even clear materials, which is kind of neat. Some of our sensors don't work well with glass, but this can handle even transparent or translucent materials. The document is really good. The CAD file has a lot of details. So you'll see here something interesting. You know, it's small. It's like an inch or so wide. And then the mounting holes, they go both ways, both lateral and vertical. So you can kind of mount it any which way you like, which is kind of sweet. And on the bottom, there's a plug and there's a cable that you can get. It's got a JST. I don't know if it's exact. Let me go over there. Yeah. It's the EE-5002 cables. This is a pre-made cable assembly you plug it in. Or, you know, you can just make your own cable. This is the GHR series. It's a little latch plug-in cable. Your choice. Either way, you just plug it to the bottom and you're ready to go. Available on Digi-Key because that's this segment. NPI, all the new things on Digi-Key, you can get this on the website. The short URL is digi-key.com for it slash short for it slash td0dh439 or you can search for it with the product number up at the top there. Yeah. And let's show this off. Yeah. So I'll show this off. So actually I opened this one up. So usually it has a very nice cover, which it's actually a very nice sealed cover. And I wanted to show it. You can see the transmission diode here and then there's the receiving diode and then there's like a little bridge in the between. And these are tuned to be, you know, to not interfere with each other. And then, you know, when I put my hand in front, you can see this indicator LED, which I've wired to the output, turns on. It's really simple. But yeah, what I really liked about this is you see that there's these mounting holes. And then if you turn it, there's another set of mounting holes. This is cool. Like either way, you know, however you want to connect it. Very compact, very easy to use. And a longer distance than most proximity sensors, right? A lot of sensors, they're good for, you know, maybe 200 millimeters or so. So I was impressed that this was for not too much money, you get something that can go up to, you know, half a meter or more. But a very simple, very effective sensor. You really don't want an object sensor that's flaky. Like it has to be very reliable because if you mess up even once, you might, you know, an object might go past your conveyor belt or you might not hit the safety interlock. So even though it's like a very simple sensing element, you really want it to do a very good job in all sorts of light conditions and all sorts of, you know, environmental conditions. You saw that video earlier about how temperature and humidity can affect your sensing elements. But Omron has been really doing this for decades. It's trustworthy. I mean, like, you can use this. It's reliable. It's high quality. It's going to do the job. It's going to do it right every single time. All right. And that is this week's IonMPI. To Jiqui and Adafruit. IonMPI.