 Life in New York, it's Ask an Engineer. Hey everybody, and welcome to Ask an Engineer. It's me, Lady Aida, the engineer, and with me is Mr. Lady Aida. We're here at the Adafruit Factory in downtown Manhattan. We do all of our manufacturing and testing and kidding and coding and shipping, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But right now, the factory is quiet because we're gonna have one hour of Ask an Engineer thing that's the show you're watching. So let's kick it off, because we've got a lot, I see the show is massive in front of me. Speak show. Let's kick it. What is up on Tonight Show? On Tonight Show, the code is traffic, 10% off in the Adafruit store, all the way up to 11.59 p.m. Eastern time. Use the code and save a buck or two. We'll talk about our Adafruit Live series of shows, including show and tell. We host show and tell. There's a bunch of cool amazing makers. Time travel. We'll look around the world makers, hackers, artists and engineers have a special treat. We went out to a museum and saw some art. Chip shortage, everyone's favorite segment this week. Chip shortage, Texas Instruments. We need stuff from them. Maybe they'll send it to us. Got some retro tech as well. This one's gonna be a little different. We got some stuff going on. We got a cool thing we're gonna show you. From the mail bag. This week is a special from the mail bag because we have a song. Folks like the new, new, new song. And then we added to chip shortage song and now we have a mail bag song. Help Wanted, look at Jobs Board on adafruitjobs.adafruit.com, post your skills. Or if you're a company, wanna hire cool makers, post up the job there. We look at all these to make sure they're not weird or sketchy. We'll do some factory footage from Adafruit, the advanced manufacturing company, Made in New York City. Some cool 3D printing videos and more with Nome Pedro. We've got Ion MPI this week. It's NXP. Got new products, got a little bit top secret. We're gonna answer your questions. We do that on discordadafruit.it slash discord or discord.gg, forward slash adafruit. Join all 34,000 of us. All that and more on, you guessed it. Ask an engineer. Amazing. Yeah. Okay, so in addition to saving 10% off lead data, you can get free stuff. What do they get? That's right, $99 or more. We get a free perma-proto half-sized breadboard. Perfect for taking your soddles, breadboard projects and making them permanent on a lovely six screen board. 149 or more, you get a free STEM and QTE sensor, breakout or controller. We have about a dozen different boards and sensors that we have as an assortment. If you make an account, we'll get you a different one each time because we know which one we've already sent you. And 199 or more, you get free UPS ground shipping in the content of the United States. That is destined to change because everything's expensive. Next up, when you do use adafruit.com, please consider making an account, verifying it and putting two-factor authentication. It's good for security. It's also probably gonna be the only way that you'll be able to get some products because there's a lot of automated tools and bots and people buying stuff and then reselling it because there's a global part shortage and more. So please, please, please do that. And like I said, use the code, get the free stuff, do the authentication, everybody will be happy. We have a live series of shows by Dana and we do live shows almost every day of the week. And we're back on show and tell this week. Yes, we just did it. Yeah, so first up was Jay from Didgeridoo. And then Sherry stopped by to make a music fest. And then we had Jeff, we had Phil B who showed an amazing retro Sony computer. The hit bit? Yeah, we have a black one at home. And he has a red one. So the red ones were only, were only, no, they're all cool, they're all fine. Red's pretty cool though. So like as one Adafruit entity, we have like market share of these now. That's right. A significant number of Sony hit bits are operational. Every quarter Sony says, how are the hit bits doing out in the market? We sold this thing 30 years ago. How are they doing? They're like, these Adafruit companies getting them all. So we have some retro hardware that you can check out. And then Num Pedro showed off a cool project that they're working on. One is this headphone thing they were doing and this lightning bolt. Scott came by with Scott's latest project, a kid. Scott's back from paternity leave. Gonna also take some time off again soon, but you could check out Scott and Kitto on their cute kid. And I was saying how cool it will be to be Scott's kid because Scott teaches and shares quite a bit. And what a cool, fun adventure that's gonna be for Kitto and for Scott and the family. That's right. So welcome aboard to this world, Kitto. We've tried to not mess it up so much, but you might have to fix it. So we also had Liz with the laser harp. And we had Matt Maker. And we had Matt Maker showing off the latest project. So that was show and tell. On Sundays, we do Desk of Lady Aida. What was part one of this week's Desk of Lady Aida, Lady Aida? Part one is I showed off some samples that I got. I got motorized pots. I got some ultra wideband modules. I am working on a tester for the NAU 7802 and I got some stretchy conductive rubber. Okay. And then we do the great search, which is really handy because a lot of folks are like, where and how can I possibly find these parts on digikey.com? Sometimes they need substitution. Sometimes they need other things. What did you do this week on the great search? Okay, so this week, because I've been working on the NAU 7802 breakout, I was thinking, oh, you know, if there's other people, you can't get the chip right now because there's a part shortage. And the parts, the only parts I have are the ones that I ordered like a year ago. But if you want to do wheat stone bridge type measurements, like 24 bit ADC inputs, like very precision, slow but precise ADC measurements, I found two options, I-squared C and SPI for precision adjustable gain amplifiers that have 24 bit ADCs and have I-squared C or SPI out. Okay. On Tuesdays we do JP's product pick of the week and this is a live show where the discount code's automatically applied, you don't need to do anything. And one of the things that might suggest to JP is, so we had a project where you can do a little alert when there's Raspberry Pi's in stock. Maybe we could do one when it's product pick of the week time out. So here is this week's highlight. It is the Lipo Charging BFF. Best friend forever add on for the QT Pi. Take your BFF and you take a QT Pi and you just set them back to back like that. Now you can see this example here, I've got some header pins on there. This gives you a JST plug for adding a Lipo or a Lithium Ion battery. It has a little on off switch there that you can use to turn on and off the battery power to the board. This makes for really great wearable projects. QT Pi M0 plugged right into the BFF and I've soldered those with the cast-alated pads. Got this nice little Neopixel demo running here, battery power can turn that on and off with the power switch. And we can also charge that right off of the USB. My best friend and yours forever. It is the Lipo Charging BFF add on for QT Pi. And then we have JP's workshop, which is tomorrow and every week on JP's workshop, in case you missed it, we have a special section, Circuit Python Parsec, and we have that as a special feature that we do here on Ask an Engineer. So I'm gonna play it. The Circuit Python. For the Circuit Python Parsec today, I wanted to show you how simple it is to use a mouse cursor in Circuit Python, particularly on the Pi Gamer or Pi Badge. This can be generalized for other boards, but it's really, really, almost plug and play with these two boards to use the Adafruit Cursor Control Library. So you can see here, I have a Pi Gamer and I'm gonna move the joystick around and you'll see I get this nice, smooth cursor action. There's a little bit of streaking, I think, on the video playback, but in real life, it's really smooth, really nice. And you can see here just, this is probably slowing it down a little bit, but just so I can have some output that could be useful, I am printing in my serial output here the cursor position on X, Y. If I go ahead and resave that with that commented out now, it's probably gonna run even a little smoother. You can also see here, I'm doing things like click. When I click a button, I get a little update about clicking. And the way this is set up is really easy. First thing I'm gonna do is import the cursor control and the cursor control cursor manager. Set up the board, put the mouse cursor onto the display using display IO, and then during the main loop, all I do is cursor update. So internally, the library checks to see if it's a Pi Gamer or Pi Badge and it automatically hooks up the XY of the joystick or of the D-pad buttons to the XY of the mouse. Now you can do things like change the speed of it, change the size of it with additional controls, but the most basic usage of it is this really nice easy cursor that you can then use to build other applications on top of. And we have some great examples of both this simple setup as well as clicking some buttons and having things change as you click the buttons. And so that is how simple it is to set up a cursor on a Pi Gamer or a Pi Badge inside of CircuitPython using the cursor control library. That is your CircuitPython Parsec. Wow, wow, wow. Okay, and as we mentioned before, probably this week, it'll still be Tim from a guy who's been filling in for Scott, Friday is a 2 p.m. Pacific. So tune in this week, there might be, especially guess Scott next week after this, there might be something. So deep dive we'll have other, I guess passengers in the, in the subs. It's a big submarine. We all live in a purple submarine. Okay, time travel. Time travel does not have a theme song yet, but I'm working on it with Tom. I got some ideas. Probably something like Uy Lewis in the news of parking time. That's the idea. A little bit of a reminder. Adabox was winter edition. It's spring, waiting for stuff, part shortage. Reminder, adabox.com, sign up. We have a lot of people waiting. We don't charge until we ship. Thanks for your patience. Okay. Look, I gotta do it. Look, I mean, it's fast forward time travel. It's a public service. Look, people can't say we didn't tell them. It's a public service announcement. Okay, now it's time for art. It's time for, yeah. So time travel, we got an email from someone and they said, hey, do you wanna come to my art opening in New York city because I'm coming in and I use your stuff for my art? And I'm like, that sounds great. We'd love to go out and do something like that. So we're getting ready to go. And he said, by the way, I'm not gonna go COVID because everyone's getting COVID. But you should still go. And we're like, okay, we'll go. So first I'm gonna show you a little bit of a preview. This is some of the art. It's made with neopixels and photography. And this is the door to the museum. Folks at home, you can maybe guess where this is. I'll give you a moment. It's MoMath. It's the math museum. This is a real thing in New York city. And here's Lady Aida in front of Steven Orlando's artwork. You can read about this on our website, but you can see how Steven makes this. This is long exposure photography, but uses specifically Aidaford stuff. And... I'll have this photo. This is a great one. And what was cool is the photographer, the artist, Steven had a person there at the gallery with a phone and they were broadcasting to him live. And we happened to walk by and he was saying, find that person with pink hair. And we found each other. And so here's just some of the art from Steven. And it's really cool. That's beautiful art. This was my favorite one. This one. Yeah. So check that out. Okay, it's time for Chip Shortage. This week, Texas Instruments, we need some stuff that you have and we need it and we want to figure out a way to do it. There's a lot of people that want this stuff and we like Texas Instruments and we like stuff, but we can't get it. So Lady Aida, what is this week's Chip Shortage? Okay, so this week's Chip Shortage. I try to alternate Chip's fabrication companies because I want to give all of them. And I will say that they have been responsive and hopefully we'll be able to get some chips in. So thank you to the previous highlights in Chip Shortage. We have a catchy tune because we want to catch them all. So this week's Chip Shortage is the INA 219. Although I'm going to toss in also the INA 260, which we also can't get. Basically a lot of the INA series is very challenging. We use this in our very popular INA 219 breakout. We just used the last of our chips to make some breakouts so we have some stock now, but we are going to run out before the next chip. And by the way, straight up, when you search for this online on the Google, what comes up, our product, images, some of our images, some of our own stuff, and then did you key? So this is in everyone's best interest to get us some, we just need some chips. And I have the order through Digi-Key. We just need some chips. If TI could allocate some, I've learned the thing is now that there are chips, but they're just not allocated. How many of these will be ideal? I think they need a reel of about 3,000. I mean, we have 3,000 or 4,000 on order. So if we could just fulfill our order that we placed I think six months ago, I would love that. These are used for education. Power monitoring, solar projects, all sorts of stuff. We're not using them for bad stuff. There's absolutely no kittens being crushed to death by the INA219 or INA260, or I think the INA280 is the other one. Please, Mr. Texas. I think that's the CEO's name, Mr. Texas. Mr. Texas? Hold on a minute. So a reel of 3,000, is that what you want? I think they come in reels of 3,000. Okay. All right, so that's our plea. Thank you. That's our chip shortage. Yes, INA219, 260 and 280. All right, so these little jingles have become popular. And so it's a lot more. They gotta be catchy, because I got these chips. So now we have one for Mailbag. So this is the debut of the Mailbag song. So that's the Mailbag song. Letters, we get letters, we get emails, we get tweets, we get comments over RSS, they're so great. So we're gonna do the letters. So this one came in, I like this one a lot because it is something we're going through right now which is doing the best job possible with the supply chain constraints, specifically Raspberry Pi. So this one came in from Alan. Just wanted to say thank you for your noble attempts to keep the Raspberry Pi supply going. When someone says noble attempts, by the way, they mean like, oh, you're getting slicing dice out there. I've been attempting to catch stock for weeks and weeks. I've always got to place the point to the order point, only to be met without a stock can't process denial. Nothing to do with Adafruit. You've always been a massive source for all things IoT. You've never let me down, whether it was a technical question, great ideas for great purposes. I managed to get one of the pies that hit the stock this morning and I'll now be able to complete my home assistant node for my workshop. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Have a fantastic weekend. I'll be joining mine deploying that critical second node. Okay, now's a good time to mention that we do have Raspberry Pi's and we do release them every week. There is a shortage, about half the people who are ordering Raspberry Pi's are being naughty with the Raspberry Pi's and we're not gonna really let people be naughty anymore. And so, people who are ordering Pi's, I'm not going to be very specific about what we're doing to detect naughtiness. However, if you have a Raspberry Pi and you're ordering another Raspberry Pi, it doesn't matter what model, within about a week or two, you may not end up getting your order. So please, please wait. Please don't just buy any Raspberry Pi you can if you don't need it. Like if you need a Raspberry Pi 4, 2G, don't try to get a 4 and then a 2 and then a 8. Don't be like, I'm gonna collect them all. This is not Pokemon. We really think that there's enough for everybody if people would not be naughty. Yeah, the biggest issue, just to be straight up, is there's a small group of people that keep buying them from everywhere and then they're immediately putting on eBay and they're selling them for two or $300. And that's not good. Please don't do that. If those folks didn't do that, there would really be enough for everyone right now. Like that's what we're seeing. So we've managed to stop thousands of attempts on this now and we're getting better and better at it and we will continue to do that. So please don't do it. And if you're thinking about doing it, think of something else, I don't know. Yeah, and I will tell people do not try to like, oh, I'm gonna order every single day and I'm just gonna collect. If you only need one, get one. If you need more than one, please wait before you place another order because we can't tell the difference between people, or sorry, we will not tell the difference between people who are like, oh, I need six for my project and people who are like, I need six because I'm reselling them. Yeah, and if you're active on eBay and you see one of the sellers because they put our box in it and they're like, genuine Adafruit Raspberry Pi message them and say, hey, this is really messing things up for other people, please don't do that. If we have enough people that say that maybe. But we're not gonna restrict it to prior orders. Yeah, yeah, so Pimeroni's doing that. We're just fine. Yeah, everyone's trying different things and we're all learning from each other. But one of the things that we know is there's more people who don't have a Raspberry Pi. There's more beginners out there so we don't want to restrict it to people that ordered from Adafruit last year. We still want people to get Raspberry Pi. So we're just working on lots of different things and our success rate of stopping people is pretty good, but it's a never-ending project. It'll be never, it's never over because there's very motivated people because if they can get these and put them on eBay and they add $200 or $300 per Raspberry Pi, they get 10 Raspberry Pies over the course of the month, that's a bunch of money. And if you didn't get your Raspberry Pi, your cancel's ordered way to week and order again. You can do that. Okay, some retro stuff. This one's a little different this week. Isaac posted up a very cool post. It's on our blog right now. We showed all the different ways, not all the different ways, but many of the ways. And you can post up the way you've been doing it to scan in books and more. So we scanned in the school book how computers work, computers, their history and how they work from 1969. There was like only a few computers. So this was a really neat book to test this out on. And so we looked at all the different apps that you can use from physical scanners to phones to software that helps do this. Some is free, some is paid for. And we looked around. There wasn't a resource at all for this. And also there was a bunch of, the web is kind of littered with a lot of dead ends. And so there's traps. You download something and now it's like a virus or somewhere in malware who knows. And so we tried to put together the best resource for all the different ways you can scan in. And then we showed how we scan that particular book. Okay, next. Some help on it. This is from the jobs board jobs.aidafruit.com. You should go there now. This is three from the same company. They just posted it up. It's kind of cool. This week on the jobs board, let me just skip this bigger here. Custom module for RP2040 circuit Python software module, the UR module for the RP2040 circuit Python software module and ADC analog to digital control RP2040 circuit Python software module. This is the perfect place to post this job because the makers out there could just do this. So it's a contract remote job. If you want to make a buck or two, you could probably do it. And you can probably just use our guides and do this project. Python hardware time. Okay, this week, we're gonna focus a lot on MicroPython, but first, a little bit of a note. There's this programming language index that comes out all the time. And it shows the usage of all the different languages and Python kind of went up to the top probably because of machine learning and data sciences and all that. But also- This is for embedded use. Microcontrollers. It's for a little bit of everything. So Python's up there. So sometimes folks are like, well, where do I know? What language should I think about? And this is ones that are used the most and probably will continue to be like this for a while. So if you learn Python, not only do you probably have a marketable skill, but you're also able to do things like hardware now. So consider it. I'm gonna get into some of the MicroPython news soon. We have a roundup of what happened over at PyCon. A lot of hardware projects. We're still wrapping up some stuff from May the 4th be with you. May 4th. Yeah, and then just a lot of interesting stuff. While the iPod is now retired, you can kind of make things like, this is a password keeper, but you can still make interfaces if you like the look and feel of something like and the old school iPod you can. And then congratulations to SouterParty. They released some new hardware. This runs Circuit Python. And then I just wanted to mention, with MicroPython, there's new cool stuff going on all the time. There's a RISC-5 build that's going on. We celebrated MicroPython's birthday last week, happy nine years old. And this was one of the cool things that you can do with the code, the visualization. We did a chip shortage about the ST chips for last week. But I have some bad news though. Here's the bad news. So we're like, hey, Adafruit's a sponsor. Organizations can sponsor. Did we sponsor them? We sponsored. And we wanted to sponsor just to get it almost over to the edge. So we're doing like 500 bucks or so a month. And we also have donated directly. And we're also gonna do other sponsorships with MicroPython. But I was like, hey, 84 of us are now sponsoring. Surely because of nine years. If we get like 16 people to donate a couple of bucks. We just need a couple people. So the bad news is nothing's changed in a week. No one else has sponsored. So you need to go to github.com.com slash MicroPython. Don't buy stuff from Adafruit tonight. Just do that. Yeah, remember. I am once again asking for your financial support. That's Damian. No, it's not. So the reason for this is if you're an open source maintainer, contributor, creator, and you have a goal and you don't hit it, you might decide not to do that again. Or other people might see that and they say, I'm not gonna do it because I couldn't even get a small number of people together. So please, please, please, please, please. I think we're the biggest sponsor right now. But maybe we can just get a bunch of small sponsors out there. And just let's get to 100%. So github.com slash MicroPython. If you work at a company and you're using MicroPython and you probably are, you know, I don't think we have competitors. We call them like whatever they are. Like there are other companies that are in our exact business who, you know, they'll base their designs off our hardware, which we like, it's open source hardware. They also do a lot around MicroPython, CircuitPython. Please, please, please, consider. Support them. You have your repas on github. You can sponsor as an organization now. Please, please, please. Especially because there's just chip shortage and so there are no pie boards available right now because the ST chip isn't available. They're trying to get more, but it's harder for them to get income, sponsor them. I'll say this. Even if you just do like a dollar a month, just like, let's just get it more than 84 because it's a little, it's a bit of a bummer that we did this push last week and we were the last one to do it. So anyways, I got to use this graph. I don't mind, yeah. There's 84 people dancing on the dance floor. Don't you wanna join us for having a time? Yeah, that's Python 100 News this week. That's some good gilding. Yeah, all right. Open source hardware news, Lady Aida. We have 2,671 guides. Lots of guides today. What's on the big board this week? Okay, can you make a big, because I can't, I can't read a little text. Okay, first off, we've got the amazing midi laser harp. I have a video from Liz. I've always wanted to have a laser harp build on Adafruit and having the inexpensive time of flight sensors with circuit Python drivers has made this possible. The laser harp I can do midi out. It actually generates the audio using the midi feather wing. Or of course it can plug into your computer and send USB midi messages very easily. It's a fun build. It's one of the easiest laser harp builds I've ever seen. A lot of them have to use sensors. You have to calibrate them, total pain in the ass. We fake it by using time of flight sensors. The lasers are for show, but they're a very cool show. So that's great. We've also got a big upgrade update to the RP2040 PIO with circuit Python guide. Jepler has added in circuit Python 7.3, the ability to do background tasks in PIO, which means that you can stream data continuously without having to wait for the PIO to return. Like it returns immediately and it can go in the background. So stuff like having servos or a seven segment displays or Charlie Plex Matrice type stuff. That can all be done. He has a lot of demos that he wrote up and explaining all of them. So I think PIO is in a really good spot now. You can do quite advanced projects, including like background DMA, Neopixels, all with circuit Python dynamic PIOs. So you don't have to write any C code or compile anything in. You change the PIO, it immediately starts running. Okay. We're gonna play the harp video after this. Of course. If we also got the ARP Raspberry Pi stock alert alarm from JP, of course it doesn't use a Raspberry Pi because that would be cruel. Instead it uses an ESP32 S2 TFT board, which is great because it'll TFT to show you the output and also driving the alarm. It's also a really good example of how to use a tip 120 power transistor to drive loads like this alarm, which uses, you know, up to six, 12 volts. Melissa did a really quick demo with Runestone which allows you to edit and write code on an external drive where a circuit Python looks like an external drive. One of the really cool things about circuit Python. And so you can actually edit and write code on Runestone, plug in your board, and she gives some tips on how to do that. Liz also has been writing some guides as she's getting spun up on Adafruitisms. She wrote up a guide on the DVI Breakup Board and then JP jumped in and showed how you can customize the HDMI bouncing head demo with your own favorite graphics, not just the Raspberry Pi logo and Ebony's head. Maybe you want different heads, maybe you want different logos. And then Non-Pedro did a fun project this week as Cutie Pie, Neopixel, flexible neon signs. Without any cutting or splicing, we just have exactly one meter long strips with various cool colors and then using the Animations Library to display cool stuff. By the way, Phil, did anyone sponsor Michael? I've got breaking news. Breaking news, breaking news, breaking news. Guess what, everybody? What? We're up to 87. Sweet. So we're at 84 now, we're at 87. Thank you. Yeah. This is gonna, you know, we should give out mugs and like tote bags. This is like, what was it? It was like the old, the old public television. We know, if you've seen it, that all is still happening. No, no, the fundraisers and stuff like that used to be like, and you get a tote bag. You get a tote bag. I love that people in the background would be pretending like they're in the film. Yeah, ring, ring. I like the dystopian version that RoboCop had where they were trying to save the city and the mayor was like singing and like doing stuff. Yeah, or is that UHF? No, I think it was both. Well, both. Okay, sorry. So let's play some laser harp. Thank you everybody, he's sponsored. Keep sponsoring. I want to say it was RoboCop too. And there was a guy playing a fiddle and he was doing a split and he was doing, he was playing like born to be wild on a fiddle. That sounds like a RoboCop too, isn't it? RoboCop one was a little more serious. I mean it wasn't serious, but it didn't have that kind of thing. I'll pay a dollar for that. Okay, let's do some factory footage. And it would be a Manure City factory footage unless you saw this cute little forklift. Wow, look at how cute that is. In the Disney building, it's building it from the inside. Oh, it is up and down, up and down. All right, some 3D printing. All right, we got two videos. We're gonna do these back to back. One is the light up neon like stuff. And the other one is a 3D print of this cool pen holder, pencil holder. May I have snakes? Snakes. Hey, what's up, folks? In this project, we're making color changing neon like signs with 3D printing and Neopixel LEDs. These strips feature flexible silicone diffusion for a neon look with the individual addressable capabilities of Neopixels. Powered by the Adafruit QT Pi RP2040, this powerful but small and low cost board is perfect for these type of projects. We design and 3D printed some signs that allow you to use the full meter long strip of Neopixels. It's a simple, easy press fit installation so there's no need for cutting or splicing. The four designs use a meter long strip to make simple shapes designed to fit on the bed of our 3D printer. Pair it with Circuit Python for easy to program LED animations. With the LED animation library, you can string together several animations to make a sequence of custom colors and speeds. Circuit Python's ability to easily make changes without compiling or installing an IDE means you can get projects quickly up and glowing. The strip features pre-wired cables that we can use to connect to the QT Pi. Cut the end off of the strip and solder the wires to the pins on the dev board. Then load up our example code. Be sure to check out the guide on the Adafruit learning system for a full step-by-step tutorial on building this project. Now we can easily connect the Neopixel strip to the QT Pi and power it off of 5V USB battery or power supply. The Neopixel strip fits into the channel and stays in place thanks to the grip with the silicone. And that's it. We hope this inspires you to check out QT Pi and use Circuit Python for your next LED project. Thanks for watching and be sure to subscribe for more projects from Adafruit. And don't forget, you can learn how to make all this stuff and more on 3D Hangouts. No, I'm Pedro every Wednesday, the longest run of 3D printing show on Planet Earth. They did it a little reminder. Travis Code, you get the free stuff. You could two-factor your account while you're at it so you can get a Pi when you have it in stock. Make an account, get all your addresses set up now. So when there's a Pi, add it to your cart, log out. Sorry, log in, add it to your cart, check out. All right, it's IonMPI time. IonMPI, I brought to you by DigiKey and Adafruit. This is when we take a look at something new over on DigiKey. Lady Aida, what is it this week? Okay, this week it's from NXP. Now I wanna get the part number correct. This is the P3S0200 GMX. This is an I3C bi-directional switch. And you might be like, hey, you just said, and it comes in this package, the XQFN10. And I'd be like, hey, you just made a mistake when you said I3C, you meant I2C, right? Because what is I3C? Well, this is IonMPI and we have an extra I. This is, you know, we're gonna talk about I3C because I thought it was kind of interesting. The differences between I3C and I2C, and there's, yeah, there's an extra I. This is the next generation of what I call I squared C. I guess this is I cubed C. I don't know, we have to come up with a name. I have started to see more sensors and devices with I3C, sometimes called MIPI I3C interfaces. And so I took a little bit of a deep dive and I thought I'd tell you all about it and then you'll know why you need this I3C switch. So first up, this is what it is. It's actually, you know, this is still very useful. Don't forget, this is also compatible with I squared C devices. You have your mic controller on the left. You can connect the A and B or SCL and SDA. And you also have a select and output enable. Output enable is like, you know, is the whole thing active. And select lets you connect either to A1B1 or A2B2. So, you know, we've got an eight-way switch for I squared C, but this is like, you know, you're not changing some like sub-address and you just, when S is high, you connect to one of the targets, when S is low, you connect to the other. So it's an easy way to connect two devices of the same I squared C address without having to do any funky muxing. So this is a useful switch just for like, you have two devices of the same address or maybe for some reason they conflict or whatever, you wanna keep them separated. Of course, you can turn off the output enable to save power. This is what it looks like on the inside. It's, you know, there's like this charge pump because you have to be able to control up to five-volt logic levels. And the control logic is, port isn't there as well. So it's pretty simple. It's not a very complicated design. And also if you're familiar, it looks a lot like the I squared C logic level shifting that we use all the time for converting between three and five-volt logic level. So if you didn't know, which is fine, now you know, today's the day you've learned that the I squared C bus specification was written and designed by NXP Phillips. Phillips, which is, you know, owned by NXP now. They wrote the original I squared C bus specification, which is written here. And they, I think this was published in like the 80s. And then 1.0 was released in 1992. It's been updated. And this is what the original I squared C description was kind of intended to be. You'd have I squared, you know, the SDA line and the SCL line. And look, you can connect, you know, you're my controller driver and then you've got some RAM and you've got an ADC and you've got LCD and a gate array. Look at us, we're having so much fun. Everything is just sharing these two pins. Isn't it wonderful and perfect? Well, that's not actually what ended up happening. So what we wanted was to have all these devices share two pins. But as I'm sure anyone out there who's actually implemented I squared C devices, it's never quite that. There's D-readies, there's IRQs, there's select pins. There's like always more stuff because I squared C is, you know, a polling interface and you need interrupts or you need to have like data-readies or selects or there's other, you know, things that you have to connect to or address changes. And so, you know, intermixing with SPI devices because you need higher speeds and then like now you have a chip select for every line. So what I3C is intended to do is replace all of that with a high speed, again, two pin interface. Well, really, what we intended is what we got. So like for real this time, right? So, you know, MIPI, which you may be familiar because they also published a display and camera specifications and other specifications. They do publish the I3C spec. They do have this annoying ass thing where you have to log in to download, although you can find it on like Scribd and stuff. And then like if you want the official version, if you remember, I don't completely understand it. I think it's kind of silly. I think if you have a spec, just publish the spec. But this isn't about them. This is about this I3C switch. So just going to move along, you can get the full specification from the MIPI website. They also have a great fact. And this is basically, you know, comparing contrast. So in the middle, I squared C and you see there's SDA and SCL but then there's like interrupt pins. On the right, there is SPI and, you know, they share clock data and data out, but then the chip select lines are separate and also there's interrupt pins. And then the left, amazing I3C. No, I, you know, no chip select lines and no interrupt lines. Why? And we'll talk about that in a moment. So here's the like the first I3C spec that was published and some of the things that they're going for. So some of the things that are interesting, I mean, there's a lot. There's like a, first off, it's back compatible with I2C, which I think is really cool. There's standard data rates and high data rates. So you can, you can basically get to SPI type speeds, you know, 12.5 megabits per second, megahertz clock rate. There is again, you know, backwards compatibility. There's hot join capability. There's in band interrupt capabilities. There's low power and, you know, basically getting rid of like the passive pull up capabilities, trying to standardize on the command codes. And there's like some more advanced stuff like the Q support, which I'll be honest, I didn't quite read into that. There's also CRC that you can do, but basically you can put, you know, you use I2C with I2C and I3C devices and then you can like pop into I3C mode by doing special addressing. You write to the address 7E to kind of tell I3C devices, hey, we're gonna put into, we're gonna put you into I3C mode and then you can go into this high speed support. So as you can see, it's meant to be back compatible. Hey, you know clock stretching is a total pain? Well, they took it out. You can no longer clock stretch an I3C. So that's the one thing that is not supported. And also pull up resistors are done differently. Instead of having these passive pull ups, which draw current and slow down the bus because you have to charge the capacitance of the line and the gates, the SDA and SCL lines, you can have, you know, they have these pull ups built in, but they switch into active push pull mode. And so that's how you can get those high speeds. Also, they didn't, they no longer support 10 bit addresses because basically nothing ever supported the 10 bit addresses. I've never even seen it. And so they just, they just said, hey, nobody used this, so we're tossing it out. But I really like that they got rid of clock stretching. But instead they added some things that will help with clock stretching. Oh, this is the address. You're wondering like how do you send I3C commands? They go to address OX7E because OX7E is not a valid. It's a reserved I2C address. In case you didn't know, anything I think above 7H is unavailable. Anything below 10 is unavailable. And then of course, zero zero is the all call. I do recommend in the text version of this, INMPI, I'm gonna link to a really good presentation from NXP about I3C, which goes into low level details of this. One of the things I forgot to, oh, can you go back, sorry to hear. I forgot there was one thing I wanted to mention because I had the detail in the text but I couldn't find a good, I do have an image but it's not described well. So you'll notice in the middle image, there's I squared C and there's the SDA and SCL lines and there's the interrupts. And then you'll see on the left, there is no interrupt. So when they got rid of clock stretching, right? Clock stretching is often used for, you want to read data from a sensor. So you say I'm reading from this address or you're writing like starter command. And then you want to know when it's time to read the data because it has to do a humidity sensor check or take the fusion of some accelerometer data. Clock stretching is what a lot of sensors use to tell the controller, hey, hold on, I'm going to get that data for you just like give me a couple milliseconds to do so. But clock stretching just became a pain because not all hardware supports it and the timeouts variable and it can hang the bus and some devices don't like it. And so the right thing to do is to have an interrupt line so you can write to the I squared C peripheral and say look, I'm asking you for humidity data and then the interrupt pin toggles to tell you, okay, it's time for you to pull to read that sensor data. That way you're not pulling constantly using up a lot of power and computation time because you have to be awake to constantly pull when it's ready. And that's because I squared C is, you know, controller run only, you can only, only data can be requested by the controller. The peripherals can't push data back. It's not asynchronous like you are. But what's neat about I3C is they have this thing called, oh wait, this is the wrong side, but it's still, this is a good presentation. So they use in-band signaling where this shows the high speed stuff where it goes from push-pull into active push, sorry, open drain to push-pull mode and that's how you get into higher speeds. But the other thing you can do is in-band signaling where the controller can release the bus and say, hey, when the peripheral's ready, it can signal on the bus that it's ready to be read and then you don't need those interrupt lines anymore. And I think that's quite interesting because one of the things that drives me a little nuts about I squared C is like, you've got this dream of only using two pins, but then before you know it, you need like two other pins just to manage interrupts and data ready and wakes and all that good stuff. Well, all that is gonna be built into I3C. You're gonna start seeing, you know, I'm starting to see sensors with I3C, especially ST and NXP devices. I haven't yet seen any low cost mic controllers with I3C, but I think you're gonna see it soon and of course you could implement this in PIL. So if you're, you know, given that I3C is back in parallel with I2C, a chip like this switch, getting back to the INMPI, the P3S0200 is really nice because if you do use this switch in your design, it can run at the low frequencies 100, 400 kilohertz of I squared C and then when we all upgrade to I3C over the next decade or so, you know, you won't have to respect the design. It'll be ready to use I3C as your sensors, you know, like I've seen ST sensors, their magnetometer will, the old version is I2C and then the next version is I2C or I3C, you'll be able to upgrade all your devices and you won't have to switch out the switch part because it'll all be ready for that high speed and these funky capabilities of I3C. It's available on I2C. So that was your lesson. Now you know, because I was like, there's a switch, it's handy, but why do you want the switch? Now you know, you'll be ready. And there's like almost 5,000 in stock. Ready for the future. Well, I got five of them. I mean, this just came into stock like yesterday, so I picked some up. Do you want to show anything on the overhead? No, there wasn't any videos. I will say, you know, the only thing is check out, you know, when I post the text, we post the text tomorrow the next day, check out the presentation of NXP because it's very nice high level and trace level details between I2C and I3C. And it'll be, it'll be very helpful as you implement I3C so you know what are the constraints. All right. Good explanation, Lady Eda. I know. And that's this week's Eye on MPI. Eye on MPI. All right, we're gonna roll right into new products but first, don't forget the code is traffic. Lady Eda, are you ready to sing your song? I am ready. Yeah. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. All right, first up, don't forget, these are back in stock, Circle Playground Expresses, they are going fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, fast. We got a shipment. So next up. We have a WFL Wi-Fi slash Bluetooth antenna. It's a 2.4 gigahertz antenna with a WFL connector, perfect for, we recently put in the Feather V2 with a WFL connector. So this is a nice long, I think it's like 20 centimeter long cable. It's got a little PCB trace antenna on the end. Here it is, it's got like a tuned antenna. It's, I think, two DBI gain, nice long wire with a little coax here. So this is a WFL and what I just mentioned that this is a UFL and this is a W, hold on, this is so small that I gotta twist it. So on the right is a UFL and on the left is a WFL and you can see the WFL is smaller. The UFL looks like it'll fit, but you're like, uh-oh, it's significantly tinier. So this is also called an MHF3 or an IPEX3. This is definitely gonna fit on the little connector that's on these ESP32, whereas the UFL will not. So just don't mix them up. If you have UFL, get this product 2308. If you have WFL or MHF3, get the one here. Okay, next up. Next up, we have a iSpy cable that's really short. We're gonna be doing more iSpy stuff. We're waiting for some connectors and displays to come in, but we've already got it in the longer cables. Maybe you want a shorter cable. We have that now. Next up. Speaking of cable length, we also have long-stem IQT cables. People have been asking, they want long and they want them with cable covers so that they are not kind of splayed around. A couple of times. So we've got these cables. You can see that they are stem IQT. They work wonderfully. They are 300 and 400 millimeters. You'll see we interleaved the data between the ground and power. Yeah, if you look here, you see how there's like a little bit of a twist there. We do that on purpose because, you know, it seems to reduce crosstalk a little bit. I think it's worth a shot. Why not? So you get ground data power clock. And so you have two DC signals between AC because, of course, I squared C is not differential. You can't just twist the wires. If your signals aren't differential, don't twist them. It doesn't do anything. And in fact, it can make things worse. So less crosstalk and long cables. Great for your stem IQT and also they're nice and covered almost completely. And if these are good, we'll get even longer cables. We will get a full leader. Next up, oh, this one, skip this. Skip it? Yeah, sorry, that's the wrong, no, just that one image. Oh, okay. This is a USB to magnetic four pin cable connector. So we have these really cool cable connectors, which were in the previous video, but it's a little confusing because it's like, that's not the product. Oh, that's why I got it. We don't want to confuse anyone. So pretend you didn't see this, but this is how these things work. Yeah, so there's magnets, there's four Pogo pins and then north and south magnets. Oh, they're real, they're real. Yeah, we can just show the real thing. So before we just showed this and another pin connector cable, this one has a USB on the end. So you have power ground, data plus, data minus. And these, you can't, like I'm trying to plug it in and it's like not plugging in because it's not the right way. But when I flip it over, it connects very nicely. And so you can get a waterproof, weatherproof connector. If you seal this on your contacts, you don't have an exposed port. And then when it's time to upload code or debug or connect to USB, you just plug this on. So this cable is only the cable, it doesn't come with the matching contact. We'll try to get it with a single contact in the future, but for now, you'll have to pick up the other kit set that has the two sides. And this connects to the flat side. Okay, and then next up. Next up, this was because I was putting together a computer and I kept losing little screws and stuff. And so I was like, I want to have a little kit in the store that has all of the different chassis fan, motherboard, M.2, O-ring, hard drive, SSD, floppy disk, optical disk, whatever connector, so you could possibly want. So you get like 10 to 20 of each, pardon me. No, I got the sneezies. And you also get a screwdriver and some silicone heat paste. So if you're attaching a heat sink, that's very handy as well. Cause that stuff dries out if you don't have the fresh stuff, but it has a little bit of everything. Cause I think, you know, if you've ever put together a computer, it's like you lose these screws or you forget which one. And some of them are like unusual. Some of them are like M.2s or M.3s, but some of them are like these weird sheet metal screws that are like, if you don't have it, you're never going to find it at the hardware store. So I like having a combo kit and also has those large thumb screws that are always used for the enclosures. Okay, and the stars show tonight besides U-Leade, our community, our customers, our staff, and everyone who makes this happen. This little traffic light. The cutest, tiniest traffic light ever. Yes, so this traffic light, it's used for model makers, but I just thought like anything with LEDs in it is always so great. So it's basically a common anode setup with three LEDs, red, yellow, green. As you expect, I think there's a resistor inside. So you can just power it directly from three to five volts, but here I've just got it cooked up to three volts. I'll maybe I'll zoom in to get nice and close and then auto focus, hold on, this is, okay. Bam. So I've got the yellow and then over here I've just got wires connected. So it's common anode, so you'll want to keep the red wire connected. Then you can touch the yellow, red, or green wires to ground. Red or green wires to ground to power them. So I'm just touching them to the alligator clip. Turn on the red or turn on the yellow or turn on the green, just connect this. So, or you can turn on the green. So red, yellow, green. What would it be good for? I don't know, but it's like small and tiny, maybe jewelry or wearables or a little, you know, we have tower lights, but what if they're too big? What if you want like a very tiny tower light? Well, one of the projects is like, what if you have a conference badge and you want to have a indicator, red, you know, I don't, I'm not going to really talk right now. Yellow, maybe, you know, and green, yeah, talk to me all you want. So we thought that would be kind of a fun little thing. Yeah, it's actually got that molded plastic cover. So you, it actually looks like a traffic light. And then it's got a metal pole, which again, it was intended for model making or maybe you're making a, you know, we went and saw that model railroad or model chain set or you're making a dollhouse and you want to have a safe crossing for your dolls. This traffic light will do it. And that's new product. Okay, cool. Don't forget to code traffic. We're going to do a top secret, but while we do that, please put your questions in Discord, Adafruit.it slash Discord. We're going to start to answer them. Let's do some top secret while you load them up over there. Okay, so this week, Lady Aday, you were making sure all of our circuit Python stuff works with Azure because we're going to be doing a bunch of Azure projects. That's right. So take it away past us. Lady Aday, what is this? Hey, this is a Feather TFT ESP32. And as you can see here, sending data Azure, this is running an Azure IoT demo where I'm sending data from this barometric pressure temperature and humidity sensors, as well as the battery level to Azure. So I'm kind of experimenting. I've never made an Azure account, but this is a really popular IoT service. And I'm probably going to do some guides on this. And here's an example of some of the telemetry data I'm sending. And you can see all the data, actually the battery died this morning because I ran it all night. So you can see the battery charging and it's connected. It's really powerful. I mean, you can do a lot. You can create models and displays and gauges. So I'm going to do that next. But for right now, I'm just experimenting with creating a model. And you can see how you create a model for a device and then connecting it to the device so it can instantiating a new version of the sensor model. And that's top secret. Okay, we're going to answer some questions. Just some breaking news though, MicroPython is now 96% towards their goal. They have 92 people sponsoring. When we started this, it was at 83, well 84. It's okay, but isn't it better? That's great. We're doing this. This is what a community does. Let's get more. Thank you everybody. That's very much appreciated. Yes. So let's do the questions. You ready? Yeah. And then we'll get out here. We don't have a question tune yet. We will. Just straight up over the last couple of years with everything being really tough. It was, so the creative process and what you end up doing sometimes, at least for me, so the music stopped playing in my head. So there's a lot of stuff that we do at Adafruit where it was like, I had to focus on so many specific things and working with our team who does music and everything. It was just really hard and there wasn't the tunes, there wasn't the music, there wasn't the lyrics, but it came back. And not because COVID's gone, it's just like you kind of get used to anything which is not good all the time because you don't want to get used to bad things, but you also want to adapt and that's what we did and then the music started to come back. So anyways. That's the new song we have this week for the Mailbag. Yeah. I like to imagine packets singing that song. You ready? Yeah. Question. I'm going to go back in time here. Okay, question. The Arduino collector version of Uno is very small. What size is the female pin header blocks trying to find jumpers to wire to fit that? I think those are two millimeter and we have two millimeter jumper cables that go to point one inch, but that's why I think it's, or maybe they're even smaller point five, but I think they're two millimeter. Okay. Arduino preferred, but Raspberry Pi is also an option. What would you recommend for an offline voice recognition for a dozen keywords and have high accuracy? Second part of the question, with limited Pi thoughts on ESPXX with built-in I squared C. ESP will never be able to do as good as a Linux computer. You really need to have very high computation. So I wouldn't even really mess around with an ESP because if you don't have 95 or better percent accuracy, it's going to be miserable to use. Any suggestions for an offline voice recognition? Yeah, I'll just use a Raspberry Pi or a similar Linux single board computer and there's voice recognition. I don't remember the name of them, but if you Google around, there are offline ones. They're not, you should train them, but you're going to do a much better job. Of course, offline is the best. Nothing's going to be like Amazon Poly. Anyone plugged in NeoPixels into a J-Rainbow header on an MSI motherboard with success from manual? The J-Rainbow connectors allow you to connect the WS2812B individually addressable as RGB LED strips five volt. I haven't done it, but I know that there's NeoPixels support on motherboards because, and I've seen it and I think it's hilarious. Okay, what is the maximum practical length of cable connecting iSCRT-C peripherals? I think for a hundred megahertz, you could probably do like a foot, but it really, really, really depends on the peripheral, the driver and your pull-up resistors. SCRT is 50 feet with a terminator. If you have a terminator, yes, you can go a hundred feet or an active, active terminator. Is it safe to have NeoPixels strips as components that are regularly hotswap to a project attaching them using magnetic connectors? You're having this store any risk of damaging the board pins? I don't know if you would damage the board pins, but I think you could damage the NeoPixels if you don't have ground come connected first. I wouldn't recommend it. I wouldn't really hotswap the NeoPixels. I wouldn't really hotswap almost anything. Okay. I want to make a little project that can send data back and forth with a phone via NFC being powered solely by NFC. Are there any modules that will help with that or would I have to make a custom circuit myself? We have the little NFC eProm that is designed to send data back and forth. However, I don't know if the ST library for it is any good. It's harder than you think. I would really just use Bluetooth. How to question. Oh, sorry. Does Adafruit IO work with Bluetooth or just Wi-Fi? Well... You can use our app and it can transfer one feed over Bluetooth. The answer is yes, but... But not very well. And again, it's only one feed. But it does work when you use your phone using our app at Blue Food Connect as the bridge. You can and that constraint is actually kind of nice because if you're doing something over Bluetooth you're probably only doing one thing anyways. Okay. I had a question in the factory footage. We often see a machine that looks like a solder fountain. Is that some kind of wave solder system? What's it called? It's a selective solder which is basically a wave solder machine but with one point. Wave solders would be much bigger. We don't use it enough to justify having a wave solder machine. Okay. No question today. Product 1400. The push button power switch breakouts. I have my boat with a project today. Simple effect and a great way to mount a button to a handheld case. Thank you. Yay. All right. Question. How easy would it be to port the NRF 52-811 V for Adafruit DAP? I got what I think would work but I'm worried if some of the commands might be out of range. I'm struggling to see programming difference over SWD in the Nordic docs. I've never used the 52-811. I know we support the 52-840 for sure and the 51 whatever, whatever it is, I don't remember the part number. Those are the only two I've used. I don't even know if we've ported the 832. Yeah, if it programs, it programs but really it's, we don't even own that chip so you're on your own. Okay. And let me just do a sweep at the other places. And that's it. Okay. Thank you, everybody. Let me show the question again. Okay. All right. Thanks everybody. That is the show tonight. The code is traffic. I want to say a special thanks to Kihara who's behind the scenes running things in Slack and all of the moderators and everyone in Discord. Special thanks to the entire Adafruit team who not only gets all this stuff done but it's a treat and a joy and a pleasure to look forward to doing something every day with a cool group of people that's looking out for one another. We need more of that in the world. And I know this community also are the type of folks that do that too. Thank you for supporting MicroPython. I know we asked for that and I'll send a note to Damien. 10 people sponsored. They're gonna probably get closer to their goal. Thank you. And this is just a live show, just us together doing this and we'll continue to get the word out but thank you everyone. Especially your family and friends. Well, if you buy a board from another company that does anything with Python on hardware like MicroPython and you don't see them in the sponsor list, encourage them because now organizations can sponsor and that is the mechanism in which MicroPython is asking for help during these times especially because they can't get chips. So if we all just chip in a little bit we can keep all these open source projects going and I think it's not the money it's the thought that counts with this because open source takes a lot of time it's a lot of passion. So we very much appreciate the folks that did that today. That's our show. We'll see everybody next week. Lots of shows ahead. This has been an Adafruit production. Thanks everybody. Here is your moment of zener. Good night everybody. Bye.