 Alright, the Great Search brought to you by Digikey and AIDFORD every single week. Lady Aida, what is the Great Search this week? Okay, this week's Great Search is due to a part discontinuation. I have to find a replacement for our resistive touchscreen controllers. So we have lots of screens, AIDFORD is kind of known for all the TFT screens that we stock. And when we have ones with resistive touchscreens, we like to put a resistive touchscreen controller driver on the back. Some chips have, you know, multiple analog digital converters. You can kind of do the resistive touchscreen handling on chip. But you know, a resistive driver is not too expensive, and for boards like the Raspberry Pi, when we can connect a touchscreen to a Raspberry Pi, we add an I2C or SPI converter to read those analog values of the resistive touchscreen and convert them to, like, X, Y coordinates. So for many, many, many years, we have used the STMPE series. We started with the STMPE 610, and then we updated it to the STMPE 811, and we were using that for many years. And then it got discontinued, but we were still able to purchase a bunch of parts. But as of this week, like, we cannot get any more parts, like, they were really gone. We went through, like, every back stock, every broker, everything. So the STMPE 811 is no more. We have to find a replacement. And looking for a replacement, one thing I really liked about the STMPE series is it was both I2C and SPI. So it would be cool if I could find one of those. That said, if not, I'm willing to go with, you know, one part for I2C, one part for SPI. I'm looking for something easy to use, and most importantly, I'm looking for something that already has Linux kernel drivers, because I don't want to have to write a driver for the resistive touchscreen. I really like it if it just, like, magically worked when I connected up the chip and gave it a device tree overlay. So let's go to DigiKey and let's, first off, let's show the part that is sadly no more. It happens, you know, you have to be ready for it. That's why you would buy, you know, if you need product to last 10 years, you have to buy 10 years worth of stock, or you have to just be ready and willing to re-engineer it. Don't ever count on a part being forever. Even from large companies, they eventually stop. So this is the STMPE 811. So sad. A four-wire resistive controller, it had this really nice thing. It was both I2C and SPI. So just for fun, let's see if there's any that are I2C and SPI within the touchscreen category. I don't care who it's by. I don't really care what package it is. Obviously, I'm not going to pick obsolete. I want it to be active. Voltage supply doesn't matter because it's going to be different. But as long as it covers 3.3, oh, I do want surface mount. And the package doesn't matter. I'm not expecting to get something that's the same package. It's that's a lot to ask because there's not that many resistive touchscreen controllers. So there is, there's a couple. So there's the, well, this one's not active. So let's, let's only look at active ones. So it looks like there's this BU2121021. Nice symmetric name. This one looks pretty good, but it's in like a BGA format, which I really, really don't want to deal with. So unfortunately, that one, I'm going to say no. So let's look at the BU2124. So it's not, you know, too bad. The pricing is a little expensive. It's $2 for 1000. Considering usually I can get a touchscreen controller for under a buck. This is where it's like, you know, how much do I want a chip that does both versus the price? In this case, I tend not to need both I squared C and SPI at the same time. Again, for Raspberry Pi displays, I'm using SPI or I use one or the other. And I'm not, I'm not switching between the two. Same with shields and stuff. I have a touchscreen shield. I'm using only one or the other. I don't switch between the two. So do you wonder how do I know if there's a Linux kernel driver? Well, I actually opened up if you go to github.com and then go to Torvalds, Linux, Blob, Master, whatever, Input, Touchscreen. This tells you all of the available touchscreen drivers. Are they any good? That's for me to find out later, but I can at least find out if there is some support in the Linux kernel for them. So in this case, I'm going to search for this part number and see if anything comes up. Unfortunately, nothing has come up. So I start deleting some characters. So it looks like the 21029 is supported. This is the 21024. So it might work, but you know, it's not it's not guaranteed. And let's see. There's the oh, here it is, the 21024. OK, so this one is supported. So that's cool. So this is this is an option for me to look at. Just just nice and positive. Again, you have to be careful about your search because it was the is a dash 24. So you just delete characters off of the end when you do the search until you find one that's close. And then sometimes it also supports the variance. So yeah, that's what you got. The 21029, 02324. So it's cool. So this is supported. The price is a little bit high, but I know that it's available. It's also only eight bit, which I feel like I could get more bits for two bucks. But maybe, you know, they're just like, hey, you know, if you're desperate for something that does I squirt seen as this is the only option you got that's not BGA and it still exists. All right, so let's go back and keep looking. So let's get rid of interface. And let's so we still have active only. And now remember, I really, I really don't want to do with BGA. It's always, I mean, I'm not against it, but like, let's not. Right. That's my preference. So let's, um, let's look through all these packages and remove ones that I don't want. So DFN is okay. I don't want BGA or chip scale or WL SCP, which is also chip scale. QFNs are okay. QSOPs are okay. SOPs are okay. I don't want CSP again, chip scale. I don't want QFN, QFN. That's okay. More QFN, SOP, QFN, no BGA, QFN, TSOPs. I'll go up to 32 QTSOP, but 64 QFP is ridiculous. I'm not going to take that. That's too big. All right. So I got rid of the BGAs. So at least I'm not going to get any parts that I'm totally unwilling to use. I'm also going to look at normally stocking. So I'm only looking at ones that are, that are around. Um, so to start, I'm actually going to look at, um, so I'll tell you something just to watch out for. So normally I would search for like interface, but I noticed that there's like I2S here and then some say serial. But when they say serial, they mean SPI. So I think I'm going to, like, I, I will acknowledge that there's this interface selector box, but I don't completely want to use it because I'm not sure what serial means in this case. It's kind of obscure. Is it, you are, is it SPI? You know, who knows? Like why is it I2S in there? So don't leave that be. Um, next up, I'm going to, so there's nothing really else. All of these are within the voltage ranges I can use. I don't really care about the current supply or operating temperature. Again, the packages are okay. Voltage reference, you know, I'll deal with it. Um, I kind of don't want to, but I'm not willing yet to say no tubes. So instead I'm going to just do my classic search by price. And, um, I see immediately like there's some super cheap ones up here. And I kind of like, oh, I've got the, the Rochester. Let me exclude the, the marketplace once. So I look at only because the marketplace are going to get the same thing, but sold under different names. So removing that, I'm only getting lots of TI parts. It looks like TI, SEMTEC, and a lot of devices do a couple, but you know, the prices start getting really high again. It's like, you know, $4 per. Let me look at prices at 1000 so I can, I can honestly compare these. So yeah, basically, you know, there's all the parts that are like under a dollar is going to be TI and then SEMTEC comes in a little bit. Um, all these are 12 bits. So that's kind of good. And then it looks like for my options, these are kind of different packages at the same part. See, it's like TSC 2046 and then IPWR. That's this TSOP and then IPW. This is the non-reald and this is the QFN version, but it looks like the, the, what's definitely popular here is this TSC 2046. It's very promising because again, I, I don't, I want something that is inexpensive, reliable, and will be around for a long time. Right. I want all three. So let's go here and let's search for TSC 2046. So it looks like the TSC 2046 is actually supported under the ADS 7846 driver, which is a, which is a driver even I've heard of. So that's a popular touchscreen controller and it sounds like this is like the next generation and it's registered compatible. So you can use the same driver, which is nice. I like that. So this chip is going to be really good. And this one is SPI. And then down here, you see I squared C serial. This one is the TSC 20 2007. Oops. So this one is also supported. And it looks like there's a couple of different options. Looks like you can do ADC can act. It can act as an IO expander or something. Not weird. So these are two good options. Both are available in 16 TSOP. Kind of wondering if these are a pin compatible. That'd be kind of neat. Let's see. Let's see. It sounds like there's there's a couple of families. This is the there is a BGA version. There's a QFN version. Is there a TSOP version? Oh, weird. Huh. OK. Maybe it's not actually available in TSOP. So it's available in QFN. So it's like a QFN here. And then let's pop back over here. And download the TSC. Oh, sorry. I already did. Sorry. I don't want the wrong one. OK, so this is the TSC 207. This is the I squared C one, which has two address pins. OK, sorry. This is the TSOP. And then let's download the 2046. Looks like this is from for Brown, which they got acquired a bit ago. OK, so look VCC, X plus X minus Y, BDD, and then ground, NCNC, ground, VBAT, OX. So the yeah, this has like some more options. OX, D-CLOCK, SC. OK, so it looks looks like it's a little bit compatible. They're not completely the IRQ change. So they're not pin compatible, but there's the same physical size. So, you know, whatever, that's good for me. So these are the two options. And then, you know, I actually went over to the TI website to check were there any touch screen controllers that had both I squared C and SPI. And the answer is no, there aren't. So I mean, I kind of wanted that couldn't get it. But I am really happy that I can get two touch screens that are kind of from the same family. So hopefully they can share some of that driver code. One I squared C, one SPI, same package. So, you know, I might be able to, like, at least we use the footprint somewhat. You know, it's like the copper traces would be different. But the footprint of the part would be pretty similar. Left hand side is the same. Right hand side would need to be rerouted. But that way I can maybe make breakouts for the same chip that would be I squared C or SPI. And it would allow people to use resistive touch controllers with Linux and then hopefully Arduino. There's probably drivers already existing. And then we'll write something in Python as well. So that's kind of going to be my choice for replacing the STMPE 811. It's going to be this TSC 2046. Sounds cool. So also, like I think the the name of the next Blade Runner movie. All right. What's a great church? That's it.