 Life in New York it's Ask an Engineer. Hey everybody and welcome to Ask an Engineer. It's me Lady Aida, the engineer with me Mr. Lady Aida on camera control. One of us is a replicant but which one? I don't know changes from day to day but we got an exciting show for you tonight. Lots of products and videos and news and it's not out yet and IMPIs and more Mr. Lady Aida. Good luck going on. Let's tell them what's on Tideshow. On Tideshow it's Portal Power 10% off and native restore all the way up to 11.59 p.m. Eastern time at tonight to use it to save 10% off also get some free stuff. On check out. A little bit of recap of our live shows including Desk of Lady Aida which was over the weekend and a great search. JP's product pick of the week. Got some New York City effectory footage, some advanced manufacturing speed-up video from Pedro. IMPI. Top secret. New products. We answer your questions. We do that over on Discord. Advert.it slash Discord for your questions up throughout the show and of course at the end we will get to them all. All that and more on Ask an Engineer. Yay. Okay so first up free stuff has changed a little bit but it's because free shipping is going to be weird for the next week or so while we have FedEx as an option and some other shipping options while the UPS strike is looming. The latest update with that is the pilots. UPS said if there's a strike we're going to not fly too. So everyone's kind of just waiting for this to happen. It's going to be another week. We have FedEx. The rates are great but there is free stuff that you can add to your cart in addition to the 10% discount. Lady Aida what's the free stuff to get? Yes we still have $99 or more. The half size promo proto PCB which takes your half size project, half size breadboard projects and makes them permanent. You solder them into this PCB. We still have the $149 or more KB2040 microcontroller with an RP2040 that runs micro python or circuit python. It's got eight megabytes of flash. It's pro micro pinout compatible with stem and QT and buttons and all that good stuff and that comes with Adafruit block and we still have plenty of circuit playground expresses. So $299 or more you get a circuit playground express which is our favorite micro controller board. Okay from Dysk Lady Aida we do that every single Sunday. What is the thing that was on your desk this week Lady Aida? Okay so I showed off a new design that I've got for the ESP32 S3 Metro. I like to make metros. It's a way for me to shove a lot of electronics into a kind of standard shape that lets people use shields and a lot of accessories that are designed for the Arduino mounting hole and configuration. This is an S3 feather with like the most flash and ram so it'll be very handy because we're going to be doing more experiments and it's good to it's good to have lots of space to do that in. As we go through the design and talk about it we also show off its new shield revision. The chip that was used for the touch screen controller that has continued. So we got a new one. In fact it's one of the new products tonight and so I showed off a shield that integrates that new touchscreen controller and we also show off an RTK sample for like tiny little Neo F9P. It's a miniature version of the F9P RTK module from Ublox that we got in. It's not released yet so it's like coming soon but yeah Sunday is when you can get a sneak sneak preview. We try to post up everything real time as we get new samples in and we put stuff across the socials but that's when you're seeing it actually on the desk. It's a very unreleased, very new, you know like just really what I'm working on and not not like finished products but in progress engineering. Yeah uh desk of late it is the show that we want to see out there to be like it'd be cool to know what it's getting worked on what the interesting new chip is out there so there's not many shows out there like that so that's why we're like what's coming down the pipe in a couple months this is a great way yeah um and then we do the great search which for the great search if you have something that you can't find or you're doing a substitution let us know we get most of these via whatever form of social media but every week you look for something that someone says oh like it'd be great if I had this on a board or yeah where do I find it or somebody else so this time somebody posted on social media and said hey um I want a SMT mounted screw terminal block and so I showed off a couple of different terminal blocks including SMT mounted ones that are push type um the waggle blocks which I've used a lot of um and just watch out make sure you're not using them at too high a temperature and then I do show that there are SMD screw terminal blocks they're more expensive than through-hole style but there's a couple times when you really might want um a surface mount version of a terminal block so um there's a couple different uh manufacturers that make them and I go through some of the pros and cons of each one okay okay and then um during the week we do JP's product pick of the week that's where we work that's live from park page discount so automatically here is this week's highlight it is the game pad qt it is a seesaw chip based stemma qt connected game pad has the two axis joysticks that's a analog dual potentiometer right there as well as the four abxy buttons and start select game pad qt plugged in over stemma qt cable to the feather board I want to move my servo arm there that I happen to have connected a neopixel stick to I can just move that analog leds to different colors so I can set those to red or yellow green some steering on one axis and I want to do some speed stuff on another you can see I can set the speed variable speed on the dc motor there using that little thumb stick so it's just a ton of i o all in one place great for robotics projects as you could tell there it is the game pad qt all right gonna move right along she had a lot to cover in this show we're gonna try to keep it on attract this week coding community news and world python on hardware what's going on um special thanks to Paul and catney who thank you um co-hosting guest editing the newsletter and i'll be back next week uh your python's going on right now check it out there's some sessions online they probably see some python news um one trend because we're gonna talk about trends in a moment is um I used to there used to be easier ways to keep track of what hardware projects were going on a kick starter and crowd supply and indigo go and group gets they had like rss v did on none of them do it anymore um but one of the things that would look for is would programming language the hardware projects would say you could do stuff and for a while it was mostly Arduino then it kind of switched now it's micro python circuit python python and very often that's that's it um out of the box because they want to have the most people using it and also the most support and also there's a big community um you don't see as much see or do we know anymore and so this calculator project is a kick starter um is another example so uh micro python out of the box uh compatible with circuit python I think what you're going to see is hardware that's released in a crowdfunding format um what they want is the most people to use them and the big community and where the trend is uh who want to have something like this and we want to do a calculator so that's kind of cool um maybe we'll contact them later and see if we can stop it uh so that's good news um projects please check them out the newsletter is chock full of stuff um the two highlights that I wanted to share this week one is going to just be uh from a scientist professor researcher person who was published in nature magazine big deal um they did lung elast it's an open source flexible low cost micro processor controlled mouth lung lastometer um basically new therapies ahead um first it's my sentence people um for all sorts of different things and they're using somatophrid stuff and they're using uh python and so this is you know one of the many things that we're starting to see out there which is doing hardware it needs to be open source um this particular uh paper that's published goes into some of the reasons why you might want to do this or like all this stuff is really expensive it's all closed source we would prefer to have researchers be able to do this and not have um you know proprietary sensors and proprietary everything it'd be cool if this was available uh low cost that's another thing um so check it out means more people can do research yeah so i'll just quote these ventilator systems are closed source and expensive and not available to use by investigators with limited budgets so um this is the open source micro processor controlled lung elastomer lung elast and it is meant to use a stepper motor to syringe piston thing and um you know all together 200 bucks compared to something that's into the thousands um so you know this is where things have been going for a while and um my uh pick of the week for things that are going on in python hardware is uh from an article that haxter did and the title of the article is arduino extends its micro python support launching new id installer and curated package index so you know this is kind of a big deal um if you search the web i have an article from a million years ago that says why arduino one and why it's here to stay and i closed the article this was over a decade is if anything's replaced but that replaces arduino it's going to look a lot like arduino and i think this is the next chapter in arduino i just wrote an article about the changing face of open source um but over the last few years when arduino has had arduino day and when we talked to the teams we're like hey python support would be great a quick semiconductor would be great um having uf2 boot loader so it shows up as a disk drive would be great so these things we've wanted for really a long time we wanted we're like hey here's a small form factor we're calling it feather do you want to use it there's all these things that we thought would be good but this is kind of a big deal and i thought lady could talk about why that's a big deal that like full on like you can now like the ide that you're used to with arduino is going to have micro python yeah well that it's a new ide but it's very interesting because you know i think arduino the company has dabbled in having micro python support for their boards the nr52840 i mean the nr52840 was already kind of supported by micro python so it was like you know they're like okay we just made a board definition um and then the portenta series or the stm and i think they were using the fork from um uh open camera for a camera that the visual the ai camera um folks sorry totally space uh the name that uh the group um but now what open cv open cv i think sorry i it doesn't matter uh you there are cultures in there um but what's interesting now is you know they released a new board and it's esp32 s3 based and you know it's s3 of course has well from expressive has great arduino support um it's also the first time that they're doing a board that has the esp32 family as the main that was another one yeah usually it's a coprocessor but now they're finally like oh okay this is actually like a really yeah full chip that this wi-fi it's inexpensive it's dual core in the like financial world and like the entire other world that we're not in and everything if i was like an analyst i would be like what's going on a micro chip like the people that make all the decisions that kind of have the the developers from i guess you'd say bottom up but whatever bringing the new technologies in the companies and what chip you're going to use eventually to hundreds of thousands to millions of deploys in some way yeah now this is microchip well what's interesting is that you know you you had the article last week about um investment in arduino because they took it yeah investment and they got investment from arm and onisos and they have a new you know the new metro yeah the new uno r4 that features the whenisos ra 4m one series and that's an arm cortex chip this is like the first time that's like you know a tensilica chip is the is the main core very interesting but i think like the market wants this like people want to use the expressive chipset but now micro python has moved from just being okay you can run it it's not like the main story but it's like a thing you can do um to now it's becoming you know there's now tutorials they've written there's an installer that's really easy i think you know i'm sure they were inspired by our um online web installer that we found for a year we don't have any insights um with the arduino team anymore and i put this in my article and like basically there was a point where like we were doing lots of stuff with arduino and then like we're essentially considered competition i don't think so but i get it that's what that's how that's what i was told um i think there's plenty of room we should all work together but i i know what's probably happening this is my guess arduino is still doing stuff in education and education moved to python a long time ago if you're learning computer science if you're learning a pure programming in some way you're using python so it's a really hard sell i think to say okay all the kids are learning python all the way through college and everything's data science AI blah blah python python python um here uh learn is completely separate other thing see an arduino and everything like you to end that so you know learn this and this when you can transfer that knowledge from one to the other you know python you can be doing hardware so i think they were getting a lot of uh requests definitely that i think education wants python but i also think there is you know like as as someone who's you know we publish and support board support packages for arduino that is like a lot of work right mainly a board support package for micro python or arduino um or something python a new chip not like oh i'm making a new shape with an existing chip that's easy but it's like okay we're going to add support for the renaissance chipset um you know t usb helps with that for sure if we use you know if you get the usb courting tarot which is in those arduino embed was supposed to work with it but and and bed was supposed to do this but embed didn't get you know ended like they're over it's no longer supported um by arm which is a bummer because it's like just like when people start to use it what's interesting with um this is arduino might be saying look you you know historically they would do a board support package for the you know at mega 324 or the samdy 21 and you you know you would um people would make boards that use that chip but you wouldn't be able to be in the ide and then they opened it up so that you can have anybody you know so you just have the url for a board support package and so espresso took advantage of that and said look you're installing ide but then you install the expressive board support package and i think you know at first it's probably like whoa like you know arduino's kind of losing they're probably like whoa we're losing control of the board support packages but the expressive bsp got very good and they might like if you know they had they might have had like a good realization of like the really hard work which is maintaining boards for packages other people should do yeah so micro python the boards for packages managed by micro python expressive manages their own boards for package like yeah they should do like you know renaissance and other you know on on demand but like arduino will never be able to add every chipset to micro python or to arduino they have to get other companies as well yeah if you're going to continue to add more it's just limited it's a human limitation and this latest update like generally speaking more different programming languages that work on the board you have is better so a great example is there is a new world of embedded computing now that you can use make code you can use arduino micro python circuit python rust javascript and this might all be on the same board we have a board you know we have a lot of boards that can do all those different things yeah and so and you buy the hardware once so this is like kind of the one of the best times to be doing hardware but arduino kind of saying like okay here it is python on hardware is that the arc of that story i do think you're gonna start to see some other bigger projects probably like rust or something like that be you know yet another option because you're gonna have to like see you're gonna have python they're probably gonna be something else like i think i mean i think c is is great and it's powerful but there it's it look particularly as you're getting to like these p32 su is actually perfect for micro python because you want iot and wi-fi which means like you're dealing with states and managing the states and iot is a lot of like getting buffers and you're parsing the buffers and you're getting data and you're patching the data and arduino is not c is not good it's trying buffers it just isn't it's like it's exactly how every security problem is caused by like not being able to deal with your buffers and memory management that's handled for you and python um and state machines and stuff is also easier to deal with than python and in c um and you get exceptions which is really great and um compilation time for these you know this west of chipset is like it's long it takes a really long time to compile code for the esp and upload it like the flash is big you know you have the tls stack the wi-fi you know any of your accessory stacks if you're running micro python or circuit python you can do this really fast iteration yeah and if you're if you're flash memory it's for like it's getting to four megabytes it's starting to fill up more than a meg that's it no no matter how you're uploading your code it takes a long time yeah i think like the ripple for debugging is just like another faster way to do things for a lot of people so anyways um that's the python hardware news you know there this was my here's my rant section ready uh minor rant section so i really really like make magazine and hack space and i even like e times and like i get information from all those but the all of the publications out there they're not they're not covering stuff like this anymore they're not like my article about open source like that's not gonna that's it's a totally different world now um the company what's going on like it's deep like languages it's just not covered in the same way so hopefully the newsletter is helpful for people and everything but there is it there is an article out there that someone could write or a series of articles or a micro controller programming language index i just don't have time to do it and if i did it people would say oh you're just coming in for stuff but there is like the programming language chart that it there's that everyone kind of agrees like oh this is this is these are the most used programming languages and here's the trend lines it would be nice for someone to start to do something like that to me that's a very like make or hack space or like e times or elster covers the stuff right but so elster is in works for raspberry pi so of course it's one of those things where it's nice to have outsiders that aren't working at the companies um since we you know kicked off with a blade runner uh reference uh with jp's project it's like oh it's just business it's i am the business like you know it's hard when i write an article now because i'm not at make i'm not doing hackaday um when i write an article it's like oh it must be about eight for it's like well there's going to be some eight for it in it whether like it or not but it would be nice to have that like index a monthly index of like here's all the projects that are out there and here's the programming language from micro controllers and it's just it's just not the type of article i don't think hackaday is gonna do it that that would be like a kind of cool service maybe supply frame which they're part of um that's an interesting index that's my rant that's my that's my rant that it's like that's an opening for something out there that'd be really useful yeah but i think it's hard to do it when you're working for a company that does something i think like we could get away with it because we're like super transparent open sourcey but even that it's like i kind of don't want to deal with um well you know you're covering more python stuff because you do more python stuff like well we also do the mustard we know libraries and now what okay so that's our python on hard languages for the week that was my little mini rant i think it's an interesting pinpoint in the in in the history and story uh newsletter gets get all these news things and more uh ediforddaily.com yeah all right so speaking of open source hardware lady we have a ton of guides how many guys do we have glad you asked um is it still published at the bottom it is still published at the bottom um let me um but the only thing though is i have to open up another tab so um hold on i'm gonna find out what's going on let's scroll the bottom 2899 guides accounting okay so it's going to be like 2900 guides there's like well i'm actually another guide got submitted and i didn't put it in yet yeah okay this is guides gonna be number 20 all right what's on the big board this week um yeah guide for the no no scroll ups yeah uh those are the only four okay projects okay so we got the iobff guide from lis thanks lis for writing up uh you have a micro sd card you have an i2s amplifier make some tunes um she ported example code to arduino so you can use um i think you can use rp2040 cutie pie in arduino or you can use uh esp32 or rp2040 on um circuit python to play audio files off of the sd card and output them to the um i2s amp and then um from the earlier the video um of this tyrell desktop synthesizer i think jp i think he like made he was gonna make something with the capacitive touch and i was and it was like this drone audio and i was like well why don't you just make it like a blade runner artifact and i don't know i think he went with it it's cool uh phil b finished this project he actually started this a couple months ago but there was like it was really complicated but he finally um hammered those last nails dotted those last t's and crossed those last eyes or something and uh got the nes emulator on rp2040 dvi feather output so it's got dvi output natively from the rp2040 and it's emulating a nintendo and it's handling button presses um and possibly even you can plug in um a controller and uh i think it even i don't know if it does audio i think it doesn't do audio but i could be wrong about that um and you can play games off of the sd card and it's awesome so uh check it out from phil b it's super fun it has like three different ways so you can build the project and then uh Robert smith um has been hacking toys for us um we give him the technology and he runs with it so this week he did the fisher price um kiki piano this is a classic uh toy that a lot of kids get aged two to four months usually is when they get it and they like to kick it and maybe eventually they get tired of it but that's cool you can have it uh into a foot pedal and it's actually like really durable so if you need something that has five buttons and it has like good clicky responses and and lights so you can control he shows how to convert the brains into i think a kb2040 and then you can run keyboard software on it so it can be like your vi or emacs foot pedal control approaching 3000 guides and barreling towards the future right now right here is some factory footage let's do some 3d print this week we have a speed up take away you know patria before we go over to ian mpi port power is the 10% off native restore and you also get a bunch of free stuff too let's kick it and a bri about you bri did you key and eight fruit every week we find the latest and greatest new things this week is texas and seren's lady eight out what is this week's new product introduction i'm glad you asked this week's ian mpi is on the ti tps 61022 it is a new all-in-one synchronous boost converter from ti it looks like this it's so small it's a sought uh 5x3 i think is the package it's like a little tiny eight pin chip but it's extremely powerful this thing features a 5.5 amp integrated pass control fit on the inside and can give you 1.8 volts to 5.5 input and 2.2 to 5.5 output it is adjustable but pretty much it's a 5 volt boost converter they can give you up to two amps from a lithium ion or lithium polymer battery um it's small it's inexpensive it's powerful and it's a kind of all-in-one because it's synchronous um and it has uh the uh internal the the past transistor the power transistor um internal to the chip also has a couple settings like pfm versus pwm mode and has a power good output um you might be familiar with this family this is a similar chip this is a six pin version this is the tps 61023 which we have used and this one's great this gives you about one amp at five volts output um and uh this baby uh we have in the stores our mini boost which you know we expect you put in the lipo in get five volt out one amp but a lot of people want more current so that's where the tps 61022 uh sorry 033 comes in pardon me uh so you can see it's super easy to get wired up you need basically only an input capacitor an output bulk capacitor and a uh inductor you know half a micro henry or one micro henry inductor um the size the chip is about uh two by one and a half millimeters and the inductor you'll see is about four by four millimeters um there is a feedback that you can use to connect if you want to have an adjustable output voltage but if you just want five volts turns out you can just tie the um fb pin to i think v in it'll automatically detect it and give you five volts out um we're familiar with the ti tps series because we've used them a lot in our power boost chips um it's a power boost 500 and 1000 um our boost converters that we've used to get from one cell lithium ion or lithium power to 500 milliamps or 1000 milliamps one amp um these are fairly old products we've had these for like you know probably almost a decade now it's probably been like six seven years um we eventually have originally made this because there were a lot of people who wanted to make a diy cell phone charger or you wanted to run something like an arduino of a lithium ion battery and this is kind of an all in one board um that doesn't have some of the downsides of um usb power packs because you can you know of course get it off the shelf lipstick power pack but uh those often don't deal with low current draw well um and also they're not as easy to embed because they're kind of all in one you can't change the battery size so these boards are kind of designed for for makers and creators who need five volts out and charge the battery in uh so this one uses um the power boost one 500 uses the tps uh one tps 61090 and then the power boost 1000 uses the tps 61030 those are two and four amp internal switch a piece so two amp one will give you five million amps out because remember that the this switch has to handle the input current peak not just the output current and if you're boosting to five volts and you know you have 90 percent efficiency and your battery gets as low as 2.5 volts blah blah blah you can do the math basically uh you know you can get 500 milliamps out of the tps 61090 or um one amp out of the tps 61030 but people are always asking me well why don't you have the power boost 2000 right so you have a 500 milliamp 1000 milliamp but we want two amps why because you're getting something like raspberry pi single board computer or you've got really big screens or you've got a lot of you know motors or whatever accessories you need two amps of power um well this chip will do it and it will do it at pretty good efficiency as well if your v in is around 3.3 to 3.6 volts which is uh kind of what you'll get out of a lithium ion battery in the prime of its life 90 percent efficiency um you'll get two amps out at pwm mode and then you know you could always go if you're you're dealing with uh low current so on on the right hand side there's a um a graph of the efficiency with pfm mode um that's good for low current draw so you see if you're dealing with uh 10 or less um yeah basically like if you're under 200 milliamps you might want 100 milliamps you might want to change to pfm mode you'll get better efficiency it's not good at high current it's good at low current so there's a gpio pin you know or iopin that you can connect to switch between the two of course whatever you're using with this power boost uh this sorry the tps chip you'll need to know what the current is and adjust it so it does require a little bit of finessing it's not automatic um but there is a pin that you can use to easily control uh which mode it's in um it's a fully synchronous integrated boost converter which is nice you can see that um one of the benefits of that is of course the bill materials is less you don't have to purchase a separate transistor or um low forward voltage shock diode instead it does it all for you with internal transistors that are very low rds on i think it's like 20 and 40 milli ohm rds on um transistors and it has a gate driver as well for you um which is super nice it also means that the input and output are completely disconnected when disabled the enable pin is off which is really handy so you don't have to worry about backpowering um the body diodes um aren't something you have to be concerned about and there's no leakage through some shocky diode um there that mode pin on the left that's the pfm versus pwm there is a pg power good output you can use that to indicate led or to connect to some other circuitry um it will tell you when um the input power is sufficient to drive the output uh ground again feedback you can use a wizard provider or just type to v in and then the enable pin um which can be used for total low power disconnection of everything um it's a very small chip like i said it's an 8 pin saw 5x3 i think is the part number and um you know the layout they designed you know they they made the pin so in order to make it very easy for you to do the layout with very big chunky copper pores and you'll need those copper pores because you remember you're you're pulling about five and a half amps through these traces so the v in v out uh inductor trace and the ground pads you're going to want them to be very big you know of course it's always better to do a four layer but i think you get away with two layer um especially if you have two ounce copper on the outer two layers uh just make sure you have a nice big ground plane um and a nice v out and v in plane and you'll need the bulk capacitance as well uh they do have some suggestions for um you know whether you want to use electrolytic or tantalum or ceramic and then don't forget the thing that is going to provide power to your battery if you're using lithium ion battery um you can use a single you know 18650 cell or this is three parallelized and uh goes through a protection circuit but you need this to be able to supply five amps also which is non trivial right so just make sure whatever pack you use or whatever battery or power source um that that you know you want to have a protection cell but that protection circuitry can't trip before you hit the amount of current that you want to draw out of it so uh something to be uh to consider um you know when i first put together a chip uh a boost converter with this kind of chip i was like why am i not able to get you know two amps out of it because my battery was current limiting it um because that input has to be again much higher by the proportion of the input to the output voltage available it's in stock lots of them and about a dollar less in quantity the tps 61033 sorry i said 022 i got my numbers mixed they um there is a 61022 and it's also very good chip i think that was the eight amp version um but it's not a new new chip it's a little bit bigger too but this one um would be great and the data sheet even says yes absolutely you can get two amps out of this from uh lithium battery uh five volts so um this one is a perfect power boost two thousand chip all right and that's this week's great search sorry i'm an api which is a great search sort of it gets my great searches and my i'm api's can well we're doing because ones we're both on digikey and we're also kind of trying to find the thing so this is the reverse way this is the thing i found and needs it what is it used for the other time it's i need something out of it so together together works out yeah i guess there's been i guess there's been a time where there's probably been a great search and then an ian api yeah later it's like oh one day that'll be out when it comes out okay um port power is the code let's uh jump right into new products new new new okay jump right in coming soon okay coming soon we've got this uh raspberry beret uh kind you put on your single board computer this is something i designed for myself actually because i was so tired of wiring and unwiring um displays and stem and qt connectors and i had wanted to test uh functionality with some buttons or a switch um so i decided oh i'll put this in the shop other people might find it handy it's a very slim hat a very tiny little hat that goes on your two by 20 raspberry pi you get uh two tactile buttons on pins five and six one switch on pin 13 and an i spy connector which you can use to connect to our various olads and tfts and the ink displays it's got the spi dc chip select um busy pin irq pan uh touchscreen selector pin whatever all those um so you can you know many of our um displays now have it automatically so you can uh you definitely make your uh like any ink display here you just plug it in and you can use a fairly long cable and you don't have wires sticking out all over the place and also a stem and qt ports very handy this is coming soon it's not yet next up um this one is kind of house so it's coming soon but it's it's going to be in the store so quickly and might as well just uh cover it now um it's the tsc 2046 it's an spi or is this a touchscreen controller we have in the shop a very similar sounding tsc 2007 that's the i-squared c version this one is spi it's a really common this is like supporting the linux kernels arduino library we wrote um you can use it with any four wire resistive touchscreen it's three to five volt compatible which is very nice so you can use it with just about any microcontroller or microcomputer um we have a one millimeter um bidirectional like top and bottom contact connector on there but also there's breakouts it is spi so you know there's more pins than i-squared c but you get um an irq so tells you when the touchscreen's been touched um busy pan you let me know it you you can tell when it's doing attach and it's also uh two uh vbat and auxiliary are two adc inputs so you know it's actually gonna be handy if you're on like a single board computer or something where you want to measure a battery voltage and you don't want to like wire up an adc just for that um this has a um input that is two times it there's a resistor divider already in it so it can measure two times um whatever your power is so like two point five volts i think is the a ref you give you up to five volts input it's a nice little assistive touchscreen controller we'll be using it in some future breakouts next up next up more swirly grids scott loves these um he's designed some more for me uh this is a two by ten this is a five by five and then we have the biggest ten by ten size um sizes you know it's basically uh each block is point six inches so it's either six inch by six inch three inch by three inch or one point two by six inch we'll hold them up so we're going to show them on the overhead different sides yeah which do you want to do you want to do you want to do overhead let's do overhead because i think the other one's right okay so this is one second let's focus it's too out of focus see you know that's still in the plastic yeah but okay so this is the ten by ten and somebody asked i think like last week why are these aluminum and not pcb i think the p that you know like fr4 uh first up these are a lot easier to machine you could drill and cut them and you shouldn't be doing that with fr4 because you're going to get front of a glass desk where this is just aluminum so it's there's a lot of tools that can handle cutting drilling filing bending aluminum um also it's not too bad to have it be conductive you know you might want um a gigantic ground plane say but uh definitely easier to machine and and work with so i think for roboticists this will be handy you can also bend these um which i can feel you know if you have a break um you could use this to um make uh cuts and bends and to turn these into different shapes um so this is the five by five grid so this is um three inches by three inches um we also already have the five by ten which is three by six inches and then this one there is six by six of course you can take this and you can cut this and you know you have a hacksaw cut it down but uh probably more convenient just to get the size that you need and then finally i kind of like this ruler ish size and what's nice is you know you've got the um mounting holes and mounting slots every point two inches and the slots go um point three inches and so you know as long as you you don't mind not having all four points connected you can pretty much connect anything that you want onto this grid i mean i think like it's got enough uh motion in each direction and then we've got some demo images maybe you could show so you know i expect people will probably use this with stuff like stem iqt and feather boards you just do the opposite corners um and then you can mount them easily uh for a nice semi-permanent yeah use nylon standoffs negative semi-permanent setup nice and durable but configurable okay and then the star of the show tonight besides you lady at our community our customers our entire team who makes this thing go called itford is done that the matrix portal s3 so we have matrix portal where we actually did just have matrix portal m4 is back in stock but here's the thing i'm not going to get more samd51 still 2024 you don't want to wait that long so what we did is we designed a board that's basically drop in compatible functionality to the samd51 based matrix portal but it's five bucks less features the esp32 s3 uh has great rg matrix support and i improved a couple things as well there's now mounting holes and now you can either plug it in the bottom or you can connect from the tops if you look at the first video graphic you see there's a cable that connects so you no longer have to have it attached to the back um you know we're we're poking at the port because somebody's going to ask me how big can you drive you can drive up to 128 by 128 pixel grid which is i think hold on let me get a calculator calculator so so 128 times 128 uh so 16.4 that kilo pixels but of course it doesn't have to be 120 by 128 square it's just like the total number of pixels is that many so if you're using like 16 by 32 panels um that would mean you can uh let's see divide by 16 by 32 you could do 32 panels if you're doing 64 by 64 you can do four panels if you're doing 64 by 32 you can do eight panels whatever however the math works out um that definitely works but we're going to try to poke it and make it be able to drive even bigger displays of course it's got wi-fi built in in our dweena there's even bluetooth the energy support it still has the accelerometer usb type c for power um you know uh stomach ut port buttons neopixel for indication um it's a really easy solderless way to get started with rg matrix displays and thanks to maker melissa the circuit python matrix portal library it automatically detects which version you have this one of the previous and she tested every example that we have and they all work um all of our demos so you can pick this up if you don't want to wait till um next year to get a matrix portal and for and i think this is also going to have much better um wi-fi speed support so as we do more cool wireless projects um the s3 you know is gonna you know because there isn't a secondary chip it's all in one it's going to do a great job okay don't forget to code is port power that stuff is available to purchase save a buck or two and also get the free stuff um we have some questions lined up but we're going to do top secret and then we'll bounce to the questions if we can put your questions up and discord atiford.it slash discord let's do a couple videos for top secret and then we'll do some uh a little bit of lady to what we're working on and then we'll bounce over to questions okay cool uh first step is we got these u-block samples a little lady will talk about that and we're going to play a video at the end and we got some new designs so here we go lady what is this this is another sample that i just got from u-blocks uh thanks michael for sending these to me so this is a u-blocks neo uh f9p so this is a new tiny tiny version because this is kind of cool 3d construction the u-blocks chip and crystal all that in there um and this is an rtk module so you can do a centimeter precision location using a base station this is uh how big the previous version was so it's like half the size um small amount for you you could fit it on like a feather board or like even like a stomach a cutie pie board kind of nice um so just got these in so i'm going to try uh designing a break up board also like that the pads are on the edge here so they're more reworkable than having all the center pads um but we're going to be working on some rtk stuff now they can actually get these modules um thanks u-blocks and thanks michael for sending these all right so uh you're working on this yes well these these samples came in so they're not available for purchase so i'm still going to continue working on the f9p with like the standard size module um this is good to know that there is this tiny one yeah and uh you know we have ideas there's feathers to you bye i'll post this up just a little bit of preview yeah this is a piezo driver i know these things exist but it makes sense it's a little switch cap boost converter that can triple an input voltage and use that to drive a piezo disk um and carter and i are kind of slowly poking at this idea of maybe having um native distance measuring capability in a microcontroller and to do that you need to really drive a piezo the the sonar resonator you want to drive very hard uh because needs to be loud in order to hear the reflected bounce off an object um so um yeah we we got a breakout made for the pam 8904 it's an interesting chip i just didn't know they existed yeah we'll do this monster this is a beast this is uh a metro with a esp32 s3 it's got 16 megabytes of internal flash eight megabytes of ps ram so um you know especially with that matrix portal library you know working on the s3 if you wanted really like huge huge huge displays and you needed a lot of ram for it um or you want to do ttl display output which i think we want to experiment with you definitely want to have that eight megabytes of ps ram so this could be kind of interesting i just kind of shoved all sorts of stuff here like a micro sd card and dc sorry micro sd micro sd over here and then um battery power uh this is the room module dc jack usb c uh j tag um static gt connector reset button uh all right and then we got uh front and back here this is another monster yeah so i can't get sammy 51's but i do have a real leftover of the j20s um and so i thought you know oh i could since i'm not getting the j19s for till next year or more um maybe i could do a feather ate a logger with the j20 um because it's it's not the same amount of flash and ram um yeah i don't know but you know it's a really interesting idea i think you know if you get through this reel and then maybe we'll get more chips in 2024 maybe earlier than that um so this one is an ate a logger it has a micro sd a card in the back okay and then the next one erin is working on a tutorial so you know you can get these wi-fi usb teddy rexman bears probably like a couple hundred dollars worth of animatronics in here off ebay for like 10 bucks but um maybe you don't want a teddy bear so we're going to show you how to uh skin them and uh put a different body on them so this is a figment which a lot of people know disney character um check it out and that's top secret um i love that guy too all right rolling right into questions lady data we have the lineup here okay here we go okay first up um is there any weight for kids by a large lcd light bulb i've been looking for solutions for electronics and defilters for cinema cameras and i think it'd be a great solution you know i don't know um that valve is kind of the biggest one they're usually used for um um welding helmets so maybe go and get one of those full face welding helmets and you could take the um the filter off of that and then you just give it like 12 12 volts dc to turn on and off okay um person is fairly new to the world of ediford and feathers um do all the wings work with all the feathers can they be mixed and matched 99 of all feathers and feather wings work together there's a few weird exceptions um like there's rg matrix feather that says like this is for the nr 52 840 if it doesn't say specifically um then they're generic and it will work with all of them so like the gps feather is one that doesn't work on the esp 8266 but we say that clearly this is like it doesn't work with the 8266 but it works with everything else but pretty much all the feathers can work with any of the wings you can't always stack multiple wings because yet the pins have to not collide with each other but yeah you can you can't have multiple wings with the feather but you can't stack feathers on top of feathers people do that sometimes they're like why didn't this work and about you're not supposed to do that don't take two microcontroller boards and connect them on top that's very weird yeah um you're supposed to put multiple wings on a feather the idea was you could have two wings per feather um but some people can go to three uh house bed upper the video is the pick and play since like the sawger machine so how fast are these things actually move so the selective sawger machine you'll be able to tell when it's sped up this pick and place looks like it's better places it looks like it's that fast yeah but um you know we have probably six seven years worth of um manufacturing videos the ones to look at where you want to see if it's sped up because usually there's human involved when the human is like you know moving super fast that's obviously sped up um but maybe next one that I cut I'll do um like regular speed and then sped up and I'll try to mention it in the chat um you know what what section is which but if you see a person go by um and it's the selective sawder that one um it does move slow um so you'll see that but pick in place even if it's just doing its thing it looks so we sped up next uh um so you were talking about the power boost before do you think there'd be a power boost 2000 works well I think what I want to do is is like a mini boost a little breakout just to get started but then yeah I probably shouldn't we review we redo the power boost I will say that there's a lot of boards that need to be redone um I don't know when I'm going to redo those so don't ETA like I have to do all the high tfts over I have to do the feather tft wings over I have to do what the eating display is over so it's there's a long line of things that didn't really do a great job of making it through the chip shortage and have to be revised and they're pretty big revisions okay uh what's the refresh rate like on these tricolor eating displays nowadays try tricolor eating displays usually 15 seconds okay uh which is a four and if our ford you know we could say there are other grades of fr circuit board but doesn't explain what the four specifically means I don't know only three m knows I bet they came up with a name okay uh this person wants to take their skills to the next level but they're two young good e-schools or any supplementary resources on circuit theory that you can recommend you know it's actually quite um it's quite tough to learn circuit theory um so the question is you know if you want to learn analog or you want to learn digital um there's definitely like open courseware it's intense um but you could take that uh there's the force mim's books that they do cover a little bit of theory um some people want to say uh get art about trunks and they're totally wrong art about trunks does not does not teach circuit theory it's a reference guide which you can read once you know theory um i don't know i'm gonna make a suggestion yeah come up with the project that you want to do and that'll help tune your resource list because this is a really hard thing it's like sort of caring it's like oh i want to learn mechanical gearing it's like for what but one thing you can do when we've seen this um we can give you some success stories there's people that have said i want to go down this path i'm too young they started a project they would pop in on like desk of la dieta or ask an engineer like they want to build a drone and they want to be able to go yeah and they would and they would have a resource our live show each week or our forums or whatever and say oh i'm trying to do this where do i go where i'm trying to do this power electronics yeah build uh like a motorized scooter like everyone i know who does robots and motorized scooters is like so good at power electronics and i'm like i don't know any of that stuff because i never run to power scooters so i'd say you know pick a project and that'll help lead you to because it's hard to say okay circuit theory it's almost like i want to get into theoretical physics which is cool but if you wanted to build a thing um you're going to need a specific application and that's when you did the the work goes into like oh i want to learn this little piece this little dent of knowledge to build the thing versus like i want to circuit theory yeah okay next step um can the u block to centimeter on your altitude you know i don't know because i've actually never looked at the altitude output but i bet it does because it just does you know it does time of flight whatever distance from your known base station and so for it to know where you are it must have full 3d so imagine it does approximately centimeter x y and z and uh as noted in the chat so you were up to 300 um redesigns we're up to 400 and we were gonna finish 400 this weekend yeah a break yeah so we're up to 400 redesigns and we were gonna like we're gonna celebrate somewhere we're gonna make a joke like let's do 420 and have like psychedelic things blah blah but it's probably kind of an easy joke to do uh so we're gonna do something with 400 every if anyone has any ideas it's not like anniversaries or birthdays like what's the anniversary metal of 400 you know people not elves or anything yeah uh we're not all so um we'll see replicants yeah we'll see what skins have a fixed lifestyle to talk lift that lifetime they do what is it like 35 years yeah there was um i think it was one of the it was supposed to be a continuation of the blade runner series where this uh the replicants would go in cryo and that way they could live longer not they could still do the number of days they have left but they could go in cryo and they could last longer because the clock was wouldn't always be uh you know ticking they would they'd be on pause but seven years four years sometimes all depends on the the replicant and what version of the story yeah you uh you read um so anyhow um we have 400 redesigns and we'll see what type of uh celebration that we deal will come up with something fun or whatever um but i was thinking about this when we look back at these shows one day we're gonna sound like um you know depression era like i remember when i was waiting in line for food i remember like it's gonna sound so weird maybe that it's like and it's in stock that's like what do you mean like yeah what do you mean like well there was you know there was a chip shortage of like 2008 but it was nothing compared to this that was like you know we were out of stock for three months or something yeah this we were out of stock for like two years and actually actually think it really is like fucked up a bunch of engineers again you know people were like oh it messed up everybody really like mentally it messes you up it messed up companies people opportunity costs you name it yeah there's so many different this is a very different world you know post post covid chip shortage and everything it's very different from the nature of work how people work to just how investments happen when companies how some people are deciding to do hardware now lots of different decisions and also there's a group of people that for three years there is till they couldn't get something and they were lied to and they're never going to go with that chip vendor again there's a lot of that every every engineer has that company that they're like i will never use or something when i interviewed um prusa for my article he's like s t screwed us over like he's like he's like they need to pay the price they but they screwed me a little bit too not as bad as microchip but they did yeah so there's like it's like huh i wonder why that engineer doesn't use that chip it's like there's gonna be a lot of stories like that yeah it's like the opposite of like oh i use this chip in college until i really like them now it's like this chip they're doing the great shortage this is what happened to me all right so them's the questions okay all right that's our show for the night and i thank you so much everyone for joining us don't forget the code is a little power use it all the way up until live 59 p.m. tonight we're gonna go snack and take care of a baby so thank you so much everybody for joining us this has been an aid for production bye everybody here's your moment of zener have a great night