 Welcome to Desk of Lady Aida. Hey everybody and welcome to a desk of Lady Aida. It's spring time and we're springing into engineering. Yes, that's, I guess a saying. It's me, Lady Aida. Here I am at my desk with me, Mr. Lady Aida on camera control who will make witty commentary and funny jokes while I talk about some engineering I've been doing. So we can get right into it. Do you have any news or updates you want to kick to people before I get into the electronics? No. Full speed ahead with all of our shows. Tune in, lots of stuff going on. We're on a roll for new products and more. So all the socials from TikTok to Facebook to Instagram to YouTube to LinkedIn to you name it, Twitter for there and just subscribe to all of them so you can get an idea of what we're doing cause there's a lot of live open design. So you can watch and participate. Speaking of, what did you work on? Well, this weekend, you know, some weekends are like layout weekends and some weekends are like prototype weekends and some are tester weekends. So this was actually a tester weekend and a bunch of testers I had to fix and improve on. It was also kind of nice out. So I went outside a few times. And, but we were chatting last week, Mr. Lady Aida and I about keyboard stuff cause we've been doing a couple of keyboard things. So let's go to the overhead real fast and I'll just show the keyboard stuff we already designed on the show. So I already designed the NeoKey and this was like a breadboard friendly, you know, it's breadboard spacing friendly little mechanical keyboard part. You can use a MX or MX compatible key. This is a nice clicky Kalebox white. And this is, you know, it's chainable and it's got like a diode and a socket and reverse mount NeoPixel. So this is really great for making NeoPixel backlit mechanical key projects that only have like one or two keys. So, you know, very, very simply. You could line these up on a breadboard or a perf board. So it's really great for like, I just need one or two keys and either like a bucket piece or something very cheap. And there's, you know, as like, as you've seen their, their sockets, they're easy to switch out whatever key you want. Love these Kale sockets. We also made the featherwing version which has, you know, two keys and you have a NeoPixel behind them as well. Then this plugs into any and all feathers. Really easy to make, you know, a simple two button macro pad. In this case, it was kind of making a joke on the April Fools project from Stack Overflow that a copy paste keyboard as part of their premium service. So we had these keys. Okay, so can we go to back to me? Okay, so we had these key switches and, you know, then we're, I was thinking like, okay, well we want to make a larger project like a macro pad now that the footprint is settled. You know, I really like to get my footprints down before I build bigger projects. And, you know, Phil and I were chatting and I was like, okay, we could have like an RP2040 at one end and then like a three by five matrix, you know, like JP made or four by six or like we kind of argued, argued, discussed various different sizes. You know, do we want to have like long and thin? Do we want to have it like square-ish, you know? Timer only has like four by four. Do we want more or less? And like we couldn't really come up with a good idea. And so we're like, well, maybe we should make it so like you could snap it apart. So you could, you know, remove it, you know, if necessary. And so we chatted about that but I didn't actually get to lay it out. So I thought before we added a micro controller or just try to make a snap apart grid. And this was really inspired by the ProtoSnap boards that Sparkfund made. So let's go look at those because there's a cool. So the ProtoSnap, I thought was really a cool idea. So if you look- I remember when these came out we're like, well, if it comes popular and there's like lots of things to do and we see some people using them, we'll, you know, we'll stock it or we'll make something like it or better. And I think they discontinued it. So I think- They did, but they have other, they have ProtoSnap. Yeah, so I think- I like this idea. I think in this form factor where you're not gonna be snapping things apart as much, it might not make sense, but for other things, wearables or maybe even keyboards, which you're talking about, I think that's a better fit for that type of thing. Like a couple of companies do stuff like this snap apart. But if you look carefully, there's traces and the traces go between these little holes. And so, you know, you get it as one kind of credit card shaped thing and you can see the traces kind of on top here. They go between the holes and then when you snap it apart, you're breaking the trace. Like the holes make a perforation that makes it easy to snap apart. And so I was like, okay, I wanna do something like that. And I googled around and I even found something really similar. And this is actually a really great design. This is from Keycaps. It's named the company Keycaps. And they made a little grid of five by five and you can see it doesn't use holes, but it's got such a thin little neck on the connector. And I also really like the circles in the corner. Like they have these circle spots for mounting. And so I really like that idea. And it's actually kind of close to what I want, except this doesn't have a neopixel and this is also not assembled. It's also non-stock. But I like the idea, you know, it's got the kale socket, it's got the diode and it's a snap apart piece. Shoo, ah, shoo, that's allergy season. Okay, so, and this is a little bit less than, it's basically 75 mil, 750 mil. So it's designed for basic keyboards and then there's these holes and then you can, you know, they're connected through and then you step apart wherever you don't need. So I liked this and I was like, okay, I wanna do something like this. I mean, eventually I'm going to have a microcontroller on one end. So I'll have like a Pico or an RP2040 and then I'll have this grid so you can like, you know, you have this driver and then you can snap off to make whatever configuration you want. So this was, this was kind of good. This was inspiration. When I saw this I was like, okay, this is the thing that I'm going to use. Seed has a snap apart kit, did they? Seed has one too. They have an Arduino one, I think with Grove stuff too, yeah. They do that. It's not that uncommon. So what I did, and this isn't weird. So I was like, okay, I wanna, you know, I basically, this is the finished ones. I'm like, we're going backwards in time. This is what it looks like finished-ish almost. But I really didn't want to lay out like six, this is six by five. I didn't want to lay out 30 copies of the same board. So what I did is I actually made an Eagle CAD one object. So this is like one CAD footprint and I like literally copy and pasted like the footprint for a diode and the footprint for the NeoPixel. So this looks like one object to Eagle CAD. I still have to do the routing, but at least I don't have to put all the, put all the silk screen in the right location for each one and have it like all, cause it's so easy to make a little mistake. You thought you grabbed a part, you didn't. And now like it's all shifted a little bit and it's like shifted by like five nail and you'll never find it, but it'll drive you crazy later. So, I added two little holes here. These are the part of the snap apart. And then in the T-document layer, I put in where the route would go. So this is the route. It's not the actual route. And the reason is that I want, for the top and bottom of the board, I want railing. I was like, I'm gonna have to draw the routing, but that's not so bad, right? I can do that with just some big lines. What I really don't want to do again is lay out all of these little components. So these are all in one. And I even add a little capacitor for the NeoPixel right next to the power pan. So that's great. And even showing the direction. And so what I did is I made a matrix of these, so you've got the rows. And then this object, this is the graphical object. It actually has the diode built into it. Oh yeah, it's a question. Is this the Eagle version of Couldn't Paste? It's not, it's more like the Eagle version of Group, which doesn't exist. You know how like in Gravexburg, I usually can group? Yeah, you group, then you copy. And then you can, well, it's not copy and paste, like you can duplicate and array. That doesn't exist as far as I could tell in Eagle Cat. I couldn't group things. So the best I can do is just make a footprint. And then the footprint is in the object. This is kind of advanced. I've actually never really done that. Maybe I did this for the Neotralis as the only time otherwise that I've done this, where again, there was 16 of something and I really wanted it to be exactly the same for all 16. So I called this a tile socket. And so the socket has, everything's inverted, I don't know why. But it has the switch and the diode, right? Because those are built in together. And then to trick it, I had to put a connection here because that way I could actually tie the pieces together. And then this is interesting. So this is a Neopixel, right? This is the reverse not Neopixel. And here's this resistor. And the resistor was like my ah-ha moment in the shower where I was like, the problem that I couldn't figure out when I was working on this was, okay, so you've got this grid, right? And so let's say you've got Neopixel data coming out here. Maybe I'll, okay, so let me screenshot so I can draw on this. So you've got Neopixel data coming in here, right? And then it goes, it chains down, down, down, down. I can chain it through and then it comes out here. And then this row, right? Is it, am I gonna have to have multiple Neopixel lines? Like what I really want, ideally, is the Neopixels all act like a chain, right? You have a zigzag chain and they go back and forth and then I have the rows of the columns. So I have like one pin for each row, one pin for each column. I got my key matrix with diodes, so it's like there's no ghosting. And the Neopixels do an elegant little swish-a-roo and so I have like one Neopixel chain for all my pins. So what I did was like, okay, well, you know, if you look, I actually flipped the key direction here. The Neopixels actually go the other direction on this side. So these go like here and these go like here. So you've got the zigzag process kind of started here. But then I'm like, well, are they going to have to like jump for a pin? And again, the goal was kind of to avoid as much soldering as possible. I mean, yes, they absolutely have to, but like would it be possible for me to not have them have to solder in a wire to make it do the swirl? And especially if I had the Pico or something on one side, and again, I really, you know, you could theoretically do it all without any soldering at all. It would be a purely mechanical break apart kit. And so the extra resistor that you see is, so this is the input, right? So you see this is the input of the Neopixel chain, goes into data input. This goes to the data output. So the data output also goes down here and it goes through a 10K, 4.7K resistor, very weak resistor, but enough to pass data through, right, it's not power, but it's for data. And this goes into the input of the pin. Actually, well, you know, this is the end. So let's go to the end, sorry. So this is the output. So the output goes through a resistor down here into the input of the next level down of Neopixel. And so what happens is that if a Neopixel has a Neopixel driving it, like from here to here to here, like these are directly driven, it'll take the data from the previous one. But if there is no previous one, it'll take the data from the one above it. So that means that for all of these five here, they all take data from the previous one. This one doesn't have a, sorry. This Neopixel doesn't have a previous, so it takes data from the top. So this will actually end up doing a serpentine zigzag in theory. I'll need a resistor on each one, but resistors are like a penny or half a penny. So who cares? Okay, it's a question. All right, so will they be connected until you snap them apart? Yeah, so they'll be like pre-connected. And if you look, I mean, they have headers, but if you look, there's a little mini neck. See this like, it's like, ooh, very skinny, seven mil, right? Going through this routed part, the white routed out part, and these two little holes that will give it the snap apart ability. So that's the idea. And then I just have to, so I did the tiling of them, so you had to tiled them up and then I connected them together into six columns, five rows, and then one zigzag Neopixel. And you will have to provide power and ground on each, the power and ground come with the rows and columns, but I think that's fine. I think it's fair, just, you know, yes, you have to provide the power and ground on each row and each column because otherwise there's just too many pins. And what's nice is that you can see here in the corner, there's plenty of room here. So what I can do is, I keep losing the drill. So if on the drill, I can, oh, sorry, I have a, I can put like a, you know, M3 hole here or even larger on each corner. And then this will be the met mechanical, you can put a screw into mechanically hold it against whatever mechanical substrate you want to keep it from flexing or if you want to keep it steady and then you solder to the input and output pins. Two questions for confirmation. So it prefers a stronger signal than the weaker one via resistor one? Yeah, it's actually similar to the trick I showed with the boot pin on the RP2040, right? It's like a NeoPixel has a pretty good drive strength. So as long as there is a NeoPixel directly driving it, you're going to always listen to that signal because it's a direct push-pull drive. But if there isn't that 4K or whatever resistor will leak the signal through from the top, it won't get in the way of a NeoPixel, but it will let you pass the data on the edges. So even if you snap, no matter from which edge you snap, as long as you end up with a rectilinear shape, you're always going to get a serpentine of NeoPixel data. All right. Does the last one at the bottom right loop back to the upper left? No, that would be weird. No, you want it to end. You have snake as a head? Snake as a tail, okay, yeah. I mean in toroidal space, but we're not in toroidal space. So I'm not nearly done with this. I have to do the routing and I have to do the mounting holes. So there's still quite a bit to do here, but I did just finish this layout, which just like took away, it still took a long time. Just, you know, it's like every time I was like, okay, like I learned something, or like I had to go back and change the footprint and I changed the layouts, and then I would copy and paste it in Eagle CAD to make the, I actually used import, which allows you to get both the layout and the schematic. You can import yourself and so I would exponentially increase the number of pads, but it wasn't too bad. And once I got the layout for each one done, it's not so bad. So you can actually see, if I turn off all these layers that we don't want to see, you can see this has the neopixel arrow going from right to left, because this is inverted, it's inverted. And then it goes left to right, and then right to left, and then left to right. So it's doing this exactly. So this is the neo key snap, whatever it's gonna call it. Yeah. Okay, request and then some more. Be cool if you build an array that could only take key switches, but also pots and encoders. You can't do that with the socket kales, but I might be able to do it if I make ones that you solder in. So the thing is I could probably do, you know, yes, but no, if it was rotary encoders, you couldn't key matrix them. So I'm starting with this, which is an ortho linear layout, which is, wait, this is my hip hop radio. All right, I have another. So this is ortho linear, right? So I'm looking at keys like this, and this is kind of what it's gonna look like. And you probably wouldn't make a full keyboard on this. It would be good for macro pads. However, afterwards I'll try doing a staggered one. So you could do like staggered, maybe split keys. And then I think if I was going to do a version that could do rotary encoders, I'll probably have like the microcontroller board up top, and then maybe like two rotary encoders, and then snap a part grid. Because with rotary encoders, you can't do, it's not like keys where you can just, you can always matrix more into the column than rows, with rotary encoders, like it's dedicated pins. So there'd be dedicated rotary encoders, and then you could have more keys. Okay, zigzag path down one row, back the next row, the opposite way is called a bustrafe hydra, and I said that wrong, or Greek for as the ox plows. It's a way that each and Greeks wrote lines at one time. They wrote their characters backwards every other line. A little bit of history. The question is, do you know why? Well, that's a good question for the chat. Yeah. All right, so let's get going. I think I know why, but I'll wait for them to, I'll wait to see if there's somebody else knows. Let's keep going. Okay, great. So next up, so we were, so okay, this is cool. So we're gonna do ortholinia or snap a parts. So next up, Phil and I were chatting also, and we were like, we really want to get into NFTs, because everyone's really into NFTs, and I was like, I know exactly what you mean, not forever trinkies. Yeah, so we have some not forever trinkies, and these are some of the trinkies that are coming out, and then we'll have some limited edition things that go with it. Don't worry, we're not gonna burn down the rainforest to do this, these are physical electronics. Yeah, the rainforest, trinkie. All right, so let's show the first one. So, I got these like weird old, like JP suggested these weird old Panasonic rotary encoder. Things are from the camp quarters in the 80s. I mean, they kind of look, that's exactly what they look like, that's exactly what they are. So I got like a bag of these. I don't know, these are obviously no longer made. So I was thinking of making a trinkie with them, so it's like, you know, this is your trinkie, and then it would like be mounted like this maybe, and then you'd have like a little, like a scroll wheel. This is the way you wanted it, right Phil? That was up and down? Yeah. Yeah, so it'd be like this, and you'd plug it into USB, and it would be a trinkie, but it would be not forever, because these are no longer made. So whenever they went out, that's it. So it would be an NF trinkie. NFT. So that's my NFT idea. I don't know, I'm gonna patent that. And then next up, you're gonna see some cool camera stuff. Is it not trinkie related? This is just camera stuff. So the Sanmene 51, we added Arduino support for cameras, these parallel capture cameras where they have hsync, vsync, eight data lines, and then, you know, a pixel clock or whatever, and they send data out, and you really need a peripheral to read the data. They're not, you can't, it's not SPI or I2C, it's like, wah, TTL, like scan line data is coming out. You gotta read it. And so the Sanmene 51 has a peripheral for one of these cameras, and the RP24, it doesn't have a peripheral, but you can do it with PIOs, like all the PIOs, but like you can do it where you set it up, and you can read the data into memory, which is a good thing to do on the RP2040 because it has enough RAM to actually buffer a 640 by 40 image, I think, in 8-bit YUV, or it's, no, sorry, 320 by 240, it can store in 16-bit color because I think it's like 256K of RAM or something like that, or 192. Anyway, it has enough RAM, it can actually buffer images from these cameras. So it would be good for machine learning projects with vision, like simple ones, or we wanted to do like a pupil tracking project a long time ago. This would be really good for that because you need the raw data, and then you wanna do a little bit of basic filtering on it to locate with the iPhone. It's computing not connected to the internet, not doing and storing facial recognition. So these technologies are powerful, but you have a choice on how you wanna use them. So ours will be open source, hardware and software, and they won't be internet connected. So before the keyboard warriors say, I thought you're, I didn't really worry about it. No, the whole, the RP24 doesn't even have internet. It doesn't even have Wi-Fi if you wanna do. You have to work it instead of Wi-Fi. So we can also look out for some of the folks in the electronics community that need to understand that not every company is making close source, cloud sending things. There are a few companies, I'm gonna slate it for you, that do open source and publish everything. So let's support the ones that you wanna see instead of just complaining. Okay, great. All right, so let's go to the overhead. Because I'm trying to stop like a bunch of things in the comments anytime we have video. You're the one who wanted to close the NFT. These are called not forever trinkets. I can't help that there's something else out there called NFT. It's not forever trinkets. And that's just what it is. My initials are PMT. Can't change it. Okay, what do you wanna do? Go to the computer. Yeah, all right. So we wanted to, the only thing is that these modules, they're great, but they have like three things that just look slightly annoying me. One is that they have this two by nine header and it's not breadboard friendly. So if you ever do wanna do breadboard stuff or that you have to like connect wires. So I laid out a version that has a second line out here. So if you solder in this row and this row, it's 0.3 inches apart, which means you can plug it into a solderless breadboard or a perfboard for like easier prototyping than testing. Second, it really drives me a little baddie that you need to supply these cameras with a 24 megahertz clock, you know, on top of everything else that you're doing. So, you know, the same 51, you end up having to set up like a separate like timer with a PWM and it's like, you know, you should really just have its own clock generator. It's not expensive. And it just like takes one less thing off of our plate. So this is an oscillator. We covered oscillators earlier. This is not a crystal. And actually it has, you know, the nor gate and the capacitors and everything built in, you just give it three volts and ground and it gives you 24 megahertz, you know, beautiful square wave or sine wave outside. And so you'll, you'll pipe that into here. And then last but not least mounting holes. I really wanted mounting holes on these cameras so I could attach it to something. So this has mounting holes. So I'm going to make this breakout for this OB2640 module is very common. These are seen on the ESP32 cam and like RG cam. These are very, very common. And then I want to make an all in one RP2040 plus camera friend that I could do some cool stuff. We think that there's a cool learning experience for beginner programmers, advanced programmers, young folks. So from start to finish, they build an open source camera and then at the end they can make an animated gift camera. They can make their own camera. And now they've understood how to write software. It'll be Python and build a little hardware camera on their own because cameras are in everything but do you really know how they work? Do you know how to make your own? Do you know how to see what's really happening? Coming soon. OK. All right, so next up, let's get into the great search because this is related to this camera. Every single week, the great search is brought to you by Digikey. Thank you. And Adafruit. We use all of Lady Aida's power of engineering and searching for components, millions of parts, on digikey.com. This week, we saw a question on Twitter. And this is from Geekmon projects who has a living Adafruit museum of like Neopixel stuff and does really good videos and content tutorials and more. Start to do some research from PCV connectors last night. And I'm not sure I'll ever climb out of this rabbit hole. So we said, hey, we're doing our weekly great search. Did you get on Sunday night? Put up any search requests before that. And we'll do up a vid. And she's like, oh, interesting. I'm a little hesitant because it's not a really well-defined thing right now. And a bunch of people said, no, that's actually a good place to consider. Star Trek's Lady Aida, what are you showing in the great search this week? OK, so this will be first. And then we'll go to Digikey. So I was thinking about, what am I going to cover on the great search in this tweet popped up? And she said, well, I don't really know what I want, but I want a board-to-board connector that can be used for LEDs. And it can pass out of current. And I was thinking, I really like just plain headers. Sometimes we have special connectors sometimes. And we've done various connector searches here on the great search. And people have custom connectors that they want to specify waterproof wands or wands. They're very high of current capability. But headers, they kind of work. They work really well. We use them a lot. And then I realized we hadn't done a great search on headers. I couldn't find any proof that we had. So if an alternate universe I did, congratulations. This is the second one. But it's also used in this camera. This is a camera with a 2 by 9 header connector. So I thought I would show a couple headers off. And then when we go through Digikey, when I refer to them, you'll know what I talk about. Let's go to the overhead real fast. OK. So this is the camera I was referring to. So this has header connectors for it. This is actually a very standard camera connector. So the camera has an FPC. And then there's a little bit of supporting circuitry on the back, voltage regulators, and whatnot. And then you've got your 2 by 9 headers. So when you're looking for headers, there's various names for these, like Bergstix or Milmaxes or whatever. I just call them socket header and pin header. Pin header is sometimes called male header. Socket header is sometimes called female header. If you're looking on some sites that use either terminology, they're equivalent. So usually they're soldered in like this. You can even see I've got some. I use header often in feathers. They have the male header, pin header, female header, socket header. And then they plug in and they make a nice connection. It's mechanically solid, which I really like. And it's electrically solid as well. And of course, you can see these headers in breadboards. So great for prototyping goodies like that. So this is kind of your standard pin header. And there's a couple of things to note about it. And I'll get my calipers. I have to do a great search on how to get calipers to the people who keep asking me. No. I need the calipers to. So first thing to note is all of these are just right up here. These are all, I mean, it's very hard for me to get this perfect. But they're basically 0.1 inch spacing, otherwise known as 2.54 millimeter. Each box is about 25 mil. And there are different platings for these. So this one, you can actually really see the difference. Normally, people get this. They're like, ah, that's silver plate. That's not gold plate. It's not that golden. This one's way more golden or something. But when you see what tin plate versus or hassle plate versus any gold plate looks like, you really can tell. So this is silver plate. And this is gold. The reason why this side is not silver. Sorry, it's tin. I say silver because it's colored silver. It's obviously not real silver. It's tin plate. The reason they do this is because this is the contact size. This is what's actually going to have a connection with the socket header. They want this to be good for multiple insertion removal cycles. And so it's going to get more risk of oxidation. If you recall your Nintendo cartridge and how it would oxidize and become flaky and then you wouldn't recognize cartridges, they weren't gold plated. They were tin plated, and that was the problem. They would eventually oxidize. However, this side is soldered in. It doesn't matter if it oxidizes because the solder is underneath the oxidation. So it doesn't make a difference on this. The soldering is good. So that's why you'll have split tin gold. But usually you have only one or the other. This is Swiss pin. So you'll notice these are rounded pins compared to these, which are square pins. It's hard to tell really, but believe me, these are square and they're, again, 25 mil each. These are much smaller. They're less than 20 mil. These are not compatible, really. I mean, you can plug these into breadboards, but it's really not a good idea to mix and match the different kinds. Swiss pin goes into Swiss pin sockets. Square pin goes into square pin sockets. Otherwise, you're going to have loose pins. You get your shrouded IDCs. These are the same thing, but they just have a shroud around them. We'll see that. And then finally, you get the shorty style. So when you see them side by side, you can tell. So this one, you solder to the short side always, and then the longer side is the contacts. This one is about 8, sorry. It's about almost a quarter inch. This one is 6 millimeter. Actually, this is a little bit short. OK, hold on. Is it? No. So this is about 6 millimeter contact length. And then this one is about 4.5. And here's the question. Yeah. Headers with a frame around them, like the ones on the back of LCD, matrices still called headers. And does it make a difference if they're keyed? Yes, we did cover IDC headers and cables. So they're keyed for the cable connector. They're a slightly higher quality, but of course, the bulkier. You know, it depends. If you want keyed, these are most useful only with when you have a cable. These are usually cable to board because the cable, it can go either way. And so this is keyed for the cable. These are still headers. I consider these IDC header or shrouded headers. That's what they're usually called. OK, so now that we know the terminology we're talking about, let's go to DigiKey. It's going to be a great search. OK, so searching for headers. Luckily, there's actually many options for headers, but there are a couple of things to watch out for when you're searching. So first off, I like to put in 2.54 millimeter header, not 0.1 inch just because I don't like putting quote marks in search boxes, but go for it if you want. I put 2.54 millimeters header. And thankfully, there are hundreds of thousands of them, but they are in a couple different spots. So you've got the mail pins and the receptacles, the mail sockets. So you want the matching connectors. These are the socket version. However, what we want are the mail pin ones. And so we want to match for our camera connector. So let's look at our camera again. Our camera has 1, 2 by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. So you want 2 by 9 header. So the first thing you want to do is a number of rows. Dual row. I mean, they have make up the quad rule, which is amazing. You can really pack a ton in. We might as well only look for active while we're here. And you want number of positions. Now remember, because you just picked dual row, you don't want the 9. You want the 18, because 2 by 9, 18 total positions. There are some times where you have ones that don't have some pins inserted, but you'll know when you need those. Then we talked about shrouding just a little bit ago. You can have different shrouds around it. So this one, for example, shroud. You can see it's not shrouded all the way around. It's skinnier, because it only has shrouding on two edges. Or like this, whatever this is going on. Oh, what's going on? I don't know. Something's going on there. We don't want shrouded. We want a plain header, because we want just to plug right in and not have anything around it. So let's find the, sorry, I got lost here. So many options. Shrouding, untrouded. Cool. Next up, positions loaded. All bases loaded. We want them all loaded. Next up, through hole or surface mount. If you're picking placing, surface mount. If you're not picking placing, always use through hole. Surface mount is less mechanically strong. It always has a bigger risk of tearing off. And these are mechanically very strong. I mean, they can really rip off a PCB if you're not careful. So I always go with through hole. Now there's through hole and there's through hole right angle. Let's see if I can see a right angle one. We'll cover a right angle on this one, but maybe some future one. We will. So this is the right angle ones. I'll note that the images are often not the exact object they're rendering. So they may not have the exact number of pins. Here's an example, again, of that split gold on the contact tin on the solder point. So a little bit less expensive than full gold. It's kind of like the mullet of headers. All right, so next up, we actually didn't want right angle, so I'm going to go back and I'm just going to do only through hole. OK, so next up, there's six tons of options. But pitch, even though we typed in 2.4 millimeter, sometimes other ones, 2 millimeter comes in because the 2.54 is some other contact length or whatever. So let's pick this one. Breakaway and cuttable. If you look at headers, you'll see they often have little notches. It means you can break them apart very easily. Once you get dual row, it doesn't really matter. Row spacing is how much space between the rows. I also want 2.54 because I want it to be a square. Grid termination, kinked pin, those a little bit. You put them in, they put a little bit more press fit solder, solder, wire wrap. I think I want everything but wire wrap. Wire wrap are usually thicker square pins. They're going to be much more expensive, so I don't think it will show up. And then the question is that the contact finish, which we chatted about, do we want gold or nickel or tin, tin lead, we do want this to be Rojas. So let's pick Rojas compliant just to get rid of the leaded ones. And what's nice is you can see here, these are rated for an amp or two. They're very good. So let's start looking at the options. So again, these are renderings. I picked 2 by 9, but this is a 2 by 2. The image doesn't, it's a rendering. It's evocative of what you're getting, not the physical size. So just don't be weirded out. But you can see there's lots of different lengths. It's like you can get these super long ones. That's what I love about header. You can mix and manage them with super long mating posts and like ones that are like stacked. And it never ends. These super mega long Swiss pin long, Swiss pin gold. Super short. OK, but we want, let's get the standard, right? Standard. So for the standard, the contact length, oh my goodness, there's so many. Actually, let's go for square contacts. We don't want the Swiss pin. There's so many options. And then I think let's just go for gold gold. I know there's like the tin golds. Let's just go for gold gold. So contact, finish, gold for the post. And then the other one must be gold too. OK, so now we've got only the gold ones. So then I think there's the contact materials and thickness of the an egg. Let's do the length of the headers, because again, we want the standard length. So the mating contact length is 6 millimeters. So let's scroll down. Oh my goodness, there's so many here. So let's select maybe 6 to 8. OK, and now I think we should just sort by price, because we have about 500 options, but none of the remaining options are that important to me, like whether they're cuttable or whether they're in a bag or not, or whether the exact, the post length, the contact length is it. If it matters to you, of course, pick that. But let's just view prices at 1,000 pieces. And then sort by price. OK, so the first thing that comes up is we pin. So this is like very inexpensive. This is only a couple of cents. This is a marketplace product, so if you purchase this first off, you can't back order it. And second, it doesn't ship from Digi-Key. They're often a lot less expensive, because they're handled by a third party. Not always, but oftentimes. And they will take longer. They take five days to ship. In this case, there's not more than 18 in stock, which is sad. I definitely want more than that many for my project. So let's look again. And these are, ooh, you know what? I think I selected. OK, so now we actually have more options. So the next set that's available are the Sullins Contact Connector Solutions. So for these, this one has got the 8 millimeter length. So for this one, you'll notice it doesn't say that they're in stock. But if you go here, it does say it's in stock. And then it says, contribute immediately, but it's a value added item. So value added item means they actually, Digi-Key will cut these to size for you. They have some probably hydraulic or pneumatic thing that they will automatically cut all of them to be the exact right size you want. So instead of stocking every size of every header, they'll just stock the really long pieces. And then they'll just sort of like when you go to the Home Depot and you're like, I want a couple two by fours, but I want them cut down to three feet. I don't want the full six foot length or whatever. And they'll cut them for you right there. You're just going to pay for what you end up needing. And they'll do the cutting for you. It's just a lot easier than if you bought the 36 pin long ones and you sliced them yourself. So they have some in stock. And the good news is that you can always order more and they'll be able to make them for you in a day or two. It may not ship immediately, but as a value added item, they always have like the raw materials. I'll just do that extra labor for you. So this one's pretty good. You know, it's 30 cents a piece when I buy 32, which is pretty good for gold plate headers to get them immediately. And I can get them in any length and size. This one I think is a little bit longer. This is eight millimeters, which is in a total length of 13. So it's, you know, one millimeter longer than the headers I have here on my desk. However, that's fine by me. It doesn't, for me, the actual length doesn't matter so much as long as it matches with the socket headers I've got. So, and this is what I'm going to get. This is Sullins PRPC009 D-Fan, RC. So my great search. And that's a great search? That's how you find headers. All right, so. All right, thanks everybody. You had said something about the writing system that the Greeks were using and you said, you were asking why did they do that? You asked the chat. So now you have to tell the answer. Oh, so actually I was thinking of something else, but it's still interesting. So when we had Phoenician script, Phoenician script was left to right, sorry. Phoenician script was right to left. I'm trying to remember which one it is. I think Greek is left to right or right to left. I can't remember which one it is, but it's the opposite. Basically when we were chopping things into stones, we worked from left to right because we had to hammer things and so we would use the dominant hand to hammer and the left hand to hold it or is it the other way around this way? But when they started writing with inks, because you write with your dominant hand, we actually started writing left to right because otherwise your sleeve would get on the ink. So it's why it's like some scripts are top down or left to right if they're ink based compared to like chopping into stone or clay based. So I remember reading that and I was like, that's interesting. It's probably related to why they would write in a circle. Maybe they're waiting for the ink to dry, I don't know. Okay, that is Descaladeata for the week. Stay tuned for shows during the week and also Ask an Engineer will be this Wednesday, show and tell. We also have Tuesdays, Product Pick with JP, Wednesdays we also have Noam Pedro. Collect all the Trinkies. 3D Hangouts and then Thursday we have JP's Workshop and Friday we have Deep Dives with Scott. And yeah, we'll be showing off some of these not forever Trinkies, the cool characters that we're making for them as well as the actual ones that you'll be able to purchase. And they'll be limited edition because there's not a lot of some of these parts that we're gonna use and some of these things right there. They're not forever. They're not forever Trinkies. So we'll see everybody next week. That is your Descaladeata. Thanks everybody.