 live from Mars, it's Ask an Engineer. Okay, everybody, and welcome to Ask Engineer. It's me, Lady Aida, the engineer with me, Mr. Lady Aida, who is controlling the Ornithopters, who is this dune planet that we live. That's right. You guys are saying show for you tonight. Lots of stuff going on. We're going to break on through the Hangouts, but still lots of new products, tutorials, tutorials. Let's talk about some current news and more. The API, some cool pictures. It's actually in yellow, is it, seems. What is yellow as it was before? Well, we have some pictures from today here in New York City. Yeah, where we do all the news is the number one, this toxic air today. Yay. Number one, take that, Delhi, India. In New York City, where we do all of our engineering and tutorial writing and viewing. We do our manufacturing here. We love this place, even when sometimes it's trying to kill us. So let's go straight into the show. What's on tonight's videos? On tonight's show, the code is audio BFF. It'll make sense soon, but you can probably guess it's going to be one of our products. 10% off the native store all the way up to 11.59. Tonight, talk about some of our live shows, including show and tell. Thank you, Liz, for doing show and tell. We have a finite from JP's product pick of the week. We have some eight fruit factory footage, very cool, IonMPI, some live demos with top secret stuff from our lady, Ada. New products. To re-answer your questions, we do that over on Discord, aderford.it, slash disco. We've heard a lot of your questions. Probably the best time is towards the end, but if I open there at that time, it's cool. That's cool. All that and more on, do you guessed it? Ask an engineer. Okay, so let's first pay some bills. Code is audio BFF. We have our freebies have been re-stocked. That's right. $99 or more, you get the half size Promo Proto breadboard. We've had that for quite a while. 149, we still have KB2040s and RP2040 microcontroller. That's ProMicro pinout. It's got cast lead pads, STEMIQT, USB-C. Great for building all sorts of projects with a powerful chip that can do Arduino or circuit Python or micropython. And back, you guessed it, the Circuit Playground Express makes its triumphant return. We have more in stock. We are slowly but surely getting those SAMD21 chips in, which lets us make the Circuit Playground Expresses. You know it, you love it. It's available if you order $299 or more in the shop and then $199 or more, you get for UPS ground shipping in the Continental United States. Yeah. JP's product pick of the week, that is when we broadcast live from the product page where the discount's automatically applied. Here is this week's highlight tick away JP. The ADS-1X15 ADC. This is the 16-bit one. This is the 1115. We also have the 1015, which is a 12-bit. This will give you up to four channels of high quality, high resolution analog to digital conversion. Perfect for knobs and sliders and soft potentiometers or other analog sensor reading needs. I'm gonna be reading those knobs and turning those values into the frequency here on a pair of sawtooth waveform oscillators. So here I wanted to tune a nice interval and I can really fine tune that thanks to that high resolution of those ADCs. The ADS-1X15 16-bit and 12-bit ADC breakouts with Stem-a-Q-T. And different JP's workshop is tomorrow. Tune into that. There is deep dive with Tim on Friday's Happy Pride Month, everyone. You'll notice just like we do every single year, we have the flags going. The flags evolve each year and so have we. So you can check out the progress flag that we have across the different pages on Adafruit. And as usual, we have some editorial. You can go to the blog right now and check out post-celebrating people in the community, historic figures, folks that have made a dent in this universe here. I thought this was kind of neat. Here's Usenet and Internet Pioneer, Marianne. Pardon? If you've ever used Usenet, you probably know. That's cool. Work. So check this out all month long as we celebrate and more. And you'll see some surprises and cool stuff. Across the blog, social media properties. Because we were asked throughout the day today, we're like, hey, how's it in New York? So this is just straight off my iPhone. Didn't do any filters or anything. This is normally where you can see the Empire State Building. So this is Lower Manhattan looking north. Right in the center is where Empire State Building is. Can't see that. Here he is from the video in the beginning that you saw. This is just us on our way to the office or back as one of the two. And the sun was pretty covered up by the clouds. Looks like we're on one o'clock or so is when it was orangey. And this is just going across the crosswalk. So we're wearing masks. All of our team members have KN95s. We've had those since Co-Pesh. And we have high quality air filters at stations. Folks are- It's all those nice heap of filters. Yeah. Folks are free to use their pay time off but they have any health issues. They've ran out of pay time off. We've said, hey, let us know. We'll juice you up so you can get out of here for any health reasons. So we're watching the situation. Looks like it's improved. This is what all of our lives have been in the last, you know, day. It's like, watch out. So the red sections is unhealthy. People in California are kind of used to this with wildfires. This is somewhat new to New York. I think they're saying that air quality in New York hasn't been like this since they've been measuring it. So this is where it peaked earlier today. And then as a public service, we reposted and posted up our guide. So this is from Brent. And Brent put together pretty good- He's in Rhode Island in New York. So he's definitely stood in. So you put together a pretty good list of resources. We want to get the word out. So I put this on the social media places in our blog, this is where Brent put it. What's in the air information sensors and guides are building a DIY air quality sensor. So it's not too late. You might want to consider building one of these because this is gonna happen, yeah. You can look at what AQI is. How does it correlate with the particulate matter in the air? Can you measure it yourself? Yeah, matter of fact, you can. What if you wanted to build something? What if you wanted to make it open source? And what if you wanted to log it somewhere? So these are all the things that you can do pretty much right now. You probably already have the components in your house. Use the code. Audio BFF to get 10% off to make some of these things on your own. So that's something we felt we would try to get out there and this is gonna happen again. And just the way things are going, we have air quality sensors and data for CO2 sensors because we want to see how many people in there. We have AQI sensors to see what the index is around the building and more. And then of course, everyone's hyper interested in this today probably tomorrow and over the weekend because the fighters in Canada are causing smoke to fill the air. Yeah, the air here, but turns out we're all connected. So, you know, this is how it works out. So there's something on fire somewhere else eventually it impacts you. So I don't know a good segue into the next topic but what I wanted to do is make sure we had something to link to because folks are gonna ask us. So let me just start off with the following because I think this is the easiest way to do it. We're an open source hardware company. We do open source hardware. We'll always publish our files in whatever format we use to make open source hardware. It doesn't matter. Doesn't matter what tool you use. Doesn't matter. You can use KeyCad. You could use Eagle. You can use Fusion. You can use Altium. Doesn't matter. What doesn't matter is you're publishing the files with the tool that you made them with. Most of the tools have XML, import, export, blah, blah, but there's changes ahead. It looks like Eagle, no surprise by the way, is gonna be ending in 2026. So I need to, we're gonna get asked a lot. What is it if we're gonna do? So- KeyCad. Yeah. So I need to, what are we gonna do? One thing to be clear. It's not like it's being deleted. The code is getting wrapped into Fusion 360. So right now I use a standalone application called Eagle 9. I double click Eagle 9. It opens up. I have my files. I do my routing. I try to make sure everything's correct and I order, export Gerbers and I send them off. It seems like in the next three years, what will happen is Fusion 360, which is their kind of electromechanical all-in-one mechanical, electrical like fusion system, which works with fusion because you can design enclosures. You can design PCBs and you put them together and it like renders and everything and it's beautiful and you don't make mistakes. Eagle is going to be merged into that, which makes sense. I got a desk was probably like, we don't wanna run, write our own electronics. Routing and management software is extremely hard to do. So instead we're gonna write Eagle and then we'll integrate it. So the idea of having a standalone double clickable Eagle app will end. You will have to use Fusion 360. That's actually not so bad. It's just like, okay, you have to just open another app and then within that app, you could still have access to all of the Eagle access. And I don't know what the pricing is, but I'm assuming the pricing is equally as annoying, which it's like a monthly or yearly subscription and isn't like a buy once. Yeah. There's gonna be conversations about that. Yeah. About, okay, now you're stuck paying a monthly fee because that's where everything went to. I pay a monthly fee now anyways. The question, and I think someone just mentioned in the chat that I had was, what's she gonna do for folks on Linux? I don't know. Somebody has to ask Autodesk. And another thing is, is that, you know, does... You run Windows on your... I do run Windows because the vast majority of electronic software is written for Windows, whether you like it or not. I used to run Linux as a kid. It's okay to run Windows. We have Linux-y stuff everywhere. We do stuff for Linux. It's okay. You don't have to run Linux to run open source hardware to make open source hardware, sorry. But if you're using tools like Eagle and you're like, well, fine. I'll continue to stick with whatever it's gonna be. Who knows? The good news is that it's a couple of years away. So you have time to transition. You know, if I want to move to KeyCad from Eagle now would be a good time. I might check out Fusion 360. On one hand, it's annoying that they don't have it available for all platforms and maybe the software isn't as fast or whatever. On the other hand, I'm the only person I differ in doing electronics design right now so it doesn't really matter. You know, if I'm the only person using it, I should use whatever makes it easiest for me to design hardware because that's what's most important to me. It's like it's open source, it's an XML format and it can be important to KeyCad if people desire. I could learn KeyCad but it's one of those things where all CAD software is equally bad. So use the one that you know best. I know this one best and so I'm most comfortable with it. But like I said, it's an excellent file format. You could always import it into something. So I'll just try to ask like questions from like audience point of view because I think that's gonna be a thing. Okay, so Ada for you publish Eagle files and I've been able to open them up with like the free version of Eagle CAD or like I've been able to look at them. I've been able to import them. What's gonna happen in 2026? What type of file are you gonna publish? Well, it's probably gonna be called a Fusion 360 file. Yeah. If I continue to use Eagle CAD, sorry, the electronics workflow within Fusion 360. Looking at the fact, it appears that there is a free viewer for Eagle 360 much like there's a free viewer for Eagle CAD now. So you think that there's gonna be Fusion 360 file format and then like when people wanna do stuff, they'll just get whatever free version of Fusion 360 is available or trial and they'll be able to get these files. I mean, Or an importer or exporter. It's not like when people distribute CAD CAD files, that's any easier to open and read if you haven't used CAD CAD before. Like all CAD files, you know, people send me CAD CAD files and I've opened them in CAD CAD. And I'm just like, I don't really know how to use the software. So it's not that different. You know, I've opened LZM files. If you remember, we've had some experiences where verifying that LZM files really do contain all the open source hardware definition, you know, the definition compliant hardware. It's kind of life. I mean, it's not my company, so I don't get to choose what Autodesk does. I'm glad that at least they're giving us plenty of lead time. Well, okay. I'll ask another one of these questions. Okay. I'm just like you, lady. I use Eagle CAD 9. What happens when I double click it in 2027? Will it just stop working? It will, you'll be able to probably view things, but it will ping the server to get your certification because you know, it checks every two weeks to verify the server. They're going to turn those servers off? That will turn off. And so I don't know if Eagle will just not open or if it will open, but you will be able to edit, which would be ideal because it should be cool if it ran, but just didn't let you edit. That said, you know, at this time, you can still download Eagle 7.7, which was the last CADsoft release. And that... Did that phone home? That does not phone home because it's the pre Autodesk integration. And I haven't checked whether 7.7 can open nine files. Again, it's for viewing now for editing because if you want to edit, you would probably export it to CADCAM anyways. I don't know. Okay. Next question. Would we, like, tick off? Would we do a conversion of all our files? I would not convert any old files because I haven't. I still have stuff that's published as Eagle 5. Yeah. If it's old enough, like the Minty Boost files, it's Eagle 5. It doesn't probably always be importable into whatever, right? Yes. I mean, again, they're XML. They're always going to be readable. And you can always download this. You know, hopefully you will always be able to download this Eagle 7.7 viewer. Viewing is not the issue. It's editing that might be annoying. Probably you'll have to install Fusion 360 and that won't be not so fun. But on the other hand, no, I am paid to use Fusion 360 all the time for the 3D stuff. Yeah. And so I guess someone, if they wanted to be safe and they're in this industry, we just went through a whole reverse engineering project with Teddy Ruckspin stuff from, like, 2017. Yeah. It's kind of when it, you know, we needed a Nexus 7. Might be a good idea. Two Nexus 7. Might be a good idea to squirrel away this copies of Eagle CAD 7.7 and just have it somewhere just in case. You know. Yeah. I mean, I have to go through and actually check all these things because now there's actually a reason we need to do so. I mean, we'll see. I mean, when the deadline comes and if I absolutely like can't stand Fusion 360, I'll just switch over to KeyCad. It'll be annoying, but like, it'll take a couple months. I'll get better at it. And then I'll eventually be able to crank out the same number of designs. It's just a couple of what I've got. Well, thanks for entertaining my questions, Lady. Because I think we're gonna get asked the same questions over and over and over again, especially on like Twitter and social media where there's no like history. It's like, it's a new day. I'm gonna, someone else is gonna ask the same question. Oh, which is fine. But what I can do is I can send a link to this. Yeah. And, you know, one of the things as a community that we could ask for is like, hey, you know, totally get it out of this. You know, you're, you're, it's your circus. You can do whatever you want. But what would be nice is something like, hey, like, we're not, we're not gonna turn off the activation servers or we're gonna do something. So like, if you have this thing that you bought, there's no updates, but it just, it just works. Yeah. Essentially forever. That would be nice. I think Eagle 7 was the last one where you did not, it did not phone home. I mean, I don't know if it's on my head. I'm not from my computer, but, you know, ideally for, for software preservation reasons, to be able to read these old files, it'd be, it's good to always have the free viewer available. Definitely, you know, I would suggest everybody grab a copy and cap and keep it on the off chance that they remove it. I don't think that Autodesk is at all malicious, right? I don't, I think that they're, this makes sense for them. They're like, why maintain two pieces of software? Yeah. It's not like it's a person or there's a thing. It's investors and publicly held companies. And how many people do we have that use this other thing? Okay, great. Can we get them into this thing so we can show a quarterly profit? Like, you know, one of the, one of the things that's nice about being a company like Adafrit is we don't answer to shareholders. You know, we do weird stuff. We hack teddy bears, publish the files and stuff like that. So, you know, they're kind of stuck. I get it. Don't like it. Get it though. And maybe like, you know, one of the good things about Fusion 360 is I haven't done a lot of enclosure design and maybe like having it integrated and rendered would make it easy for me to do 3D models and enclosures. That would be pretty cool. Yeah. And then lastly, I'll say this. Autodesk, here's a huge opportunity to show how great it could be. And people could say, wow, I can't believe this is so inexpensive, this subscription thing. I get so much value. My designs are great. I can do so many more things with this tool because they decided to do this. Said no one ever. But, you know, it's an opportunity. I mean, I subscribed to Eagle now and it's like, it's not, it isn't really a subscription, but it's worth it. Like I get the value. Yeah. But they have a chance to migrate all these people over into something they have multiple years. Yeah. And people could say, wow, out of all the companies. I also have to see if there's been more development on the electronics design on the side of Eagle. I think, you know, Eagle, they stopped adding some functionality, but I think in Fusion 360, maybe they added more and that would be cool. I mean, they did a huge amount of work up to the integration of Fusion 360. I mean, I'll be honest, like, you know, I'm in my cave, I'm running Xemax and Eagle 9 and, you know, Adam, which also discontinued. Like I love using discontinued software. Yeah. You know what I meant? You went to see my parents and my dad has this copy of LaTeX that, you know, renderer that he's been using for the last, like, 15 years. And I'm like, hey, you know, the new LaTeX renderers, he's like, but this one, I really like this renderer. I think that there's a, and we'll move on to the, you know, we have a lot ahead, but I think there is a couple of different philosophies on how companies can do things with software. And it does seem like companies do have a choice. Like, yeah, we're not supporting that anymore. And we're not gonna, you know, maliciously turn it off. So you're forced to do something. Like if you have it and it's old, cool, whatever, we're not gonna support it. It's not gonna probably run on different operating systems, but if you wanna have that old piece of software that works forever, that's on you. Yeah. I don't like it when they reach in and they, they're like, we're turning this off. Don't like that. Anyways. Okay. So let's keep them moving. So remember when I was talking about how we're an open source hardware company, lady? Yes. And we are. So let's, let's do some guides. You ready? People are bad math with me about using Xemax in your chat. Okay. All right. But who has the most library code written? Me. So who cares if you're using the Xemax? I'm like, I'll tell you a thing about Xemax. It opens files very, very quickly. Very big files. Very fast. And you can search very fast about guides. So we tried to get GitHub to tell us it's like, hey, who does Lamor have the most open source libraries? And they're like, oh, we don't really want to tell you. It's like, cause what she doesn't say. I heard the dumbest editing, like software editing setup. But you know what? It works for me. I've seen this trend prolific creators. They have their own way of doing things. And that's why they're prolific creators and everyone who criticizes, they never, I've never seen anyone who has more of the quantity of the thing you're talking about. They're like, why are you doing this? I have, I think that's big times when Phil, I love him dearly, but he has looked at me at using my computer and he's like, you're using your computer wrong. Yeah. He's like, what are you doing? Yeah, it's a little horny. Okay, so we have some guides. Yeah, we got some good guides. And published her second in a series of three or four on how to make a wearable badge PCB art. You know, the first one was a very simple, floppy disk earring, very cute. And she stepped it up this time, adding battery switch and LEDs to make a light up NASA badge. I think the meatball logo is a perfect PCB badge to experiment with. So check it out. She's learning a lot and publishing everything. And I've never seen any guy that has this much information about how to actually create like your very own first PCB badge with like really cool silk screen and solder mask and everything. Liz did a new synth. Liz is like the one person allowed to make synthesizers here. Her and JP are the synth, wasn't synth heads. We got these cool ANO rotary encoders with like navigation switches, rotary encoder and a button, like old iPod classics. And we finally had the I squared C version of the shop. And she was like, I want to do like a weird sequencer. And I was like, go to town. You got this really weird interface. Make the weirdest synthesizer. She made a circle of fifth Euclidean synth. What does that even mean? I don't know. But like, look at it. It's got red, orange, teal, green, blue, white, alpha numeric. You've got five of those like cool rotary encoders. You got something like my color matrix bleeping over here, play, whatever. Check it out. It's cool and funky. And I bet the video is very good. Liz also published the Ida Fruit Neo Driver, which is our I squared C in NeoPixel converter board. Very handy when you have a lip potato board, apparently those that exists, stuff that uses all winner or rock chip or XA6 or whatever. Doesn't use the Raspberry Pi chip set. You want it to control NeoPixels. It's very hard to do that with from a single board latest computer. But if you add this suddenly, you know, I squared C in NeoPixels, it makes it very easy. Liz has chosen to pick this guy. I guess you wrote a book about the ASUS Tinker board, which is, you know, a Raspberry Pi killer that didn't quite kill the Raspberry Pi. But it did its best. So she had a lot of experience with that. Liz had a job at Ida Fruit. And that it did. Yeah. A lot of things. It's the Xemax of her lifetime. From Eva, we've got her guide for a clue shot timer. Eva does sports shooting and you want to see how fast you can shoot targets in sports shooting. And so this timer uses a microphone. Very cool project. Actually, I did a lot. I think all of these are ones that we went over. No, with the Feather DBI guide. Did you guys know? I did see it. Yeah. Stephanie was on holiday, came back and finished the DBI guide. It's massive. You can use the Feather DBI with Arduino or Circuit Python. Yeah, if you scroll, it'll just keep, it'll scroll forever, forever. Yeah. You'll never end. Keep going. And then Patriot Ark actually just did an update too to the DBI, the Pico DBI library in Arduino to make it so you can start and stop, which is important because we need that for Jepler's upcoming CPM tutorial guide. And then JP finished his Computer Perfection Synthesizer guide as well. It reuses this old computer perfection game. And people are probably like, how could JP destroy this historic monument to technology? First off, he actually did a really good job showing how you can reuse the circuit board without damaging anything. It can totally be turned back. Into a 1970s weird simple sign. Most if not all of the things that we get off eBay and yard sales. It's already broken. It's heading towards the landfill. So something, of course, is like main condition pristine. That should go in like an old tech museum or something. But this is like old broken toys that you want to put a new life on. All of them smell like cigarette smoke too. Like it's just, they're stinky. But he turned into a very cool synthesizer. All this and Liz's guide are both using Jepler's new synth IO library in Circuit Python, which is extremely cool. Unless you make really funky synthesizers using like native LFOs and filters and plugging little pieces together. And it's neat because I don't do anything with synthesizers. Neither does Jepler. And that's why it's perfect for us to work on this project because we cannot be seduced by the seductive power of synthesizers forever. Instead, Liz and JP do them. So we have a video from Liz and then I'm going to go right into some factory footage and then we'll do some line up. So here we go. Did you know that you can build synths with Circuit Python now? In this project, you'll build synthesizers that celebrates all things circular. The circle of fifths, Euclidean rhythms and rotary encoders. Four synth voices play random notes in a triad to the beat of a determined Euclidean rhythm animated on an eight by eight matrix. Euclidean rhythms are derived from an algorithm that determines how to spread the number of steps over a number of beats as equally as possible. You can build some complex poly rhythms this way that sound really interesting. With the ANO rotary encoders, you can scroll through the circle of fifths on each synth voice to change the triad chord for easy modulation between keys. The code is written in Circuit Python with the synth IO module and runs on a feather RP2040. The synth has multiple modes that are accessed and controlled with the ANO rotary encoders. Alphanumeric displays let you see various parameters depending on the mode, such as BPM and filter values. See how you can build your own synthesizer by checking out the Learn Guide at learn.adofruit.com. For factory footage. So before we get going over to, I don't forget the code is audio BFF. It will pay for an air purifier for our apartment. And an air purifier is for the staff. We have plenty of them. Maybe we should pick up more. Or filters. Well, the filters are going to have to change out. Yeah. There too. All right. So it's just my MPI. Hi, I'm an MPI. Hi, an MPI brought to you by Digikey and Adafruit. Thank you. Digikey, this week it is from? Vibronics. We never used, we never featured Vibronics on an MPI. It's a cool logo. They did have a cool logo. It's a company they make vibrating motors. ERMs or LRAs. And you're like, what are those? We're going to tell you all about this. So this is the featured product. This is a rectangular LRA. But they have the whole line of PIs because they have a whole series of LRAs available at Digikey. And I've never really known the difference between LRAs and ERMs with their four. The specific part number we're covering is the VLV152564. Those numbers are like, probably just the sizing of the bore. You see it's like 6.4 millimeters at 64. And then 25 is 25 millimeters by 15 millimeters. So 15 by 25 by 6.4 millimeters. It's actually batteries are also labeled the same way. So these are LRAs. They're linear resonant actuators. That's what it stands for. And these are vibrating motors that are enclosed into like a little rectangular case. That can be put into your product and design to add tactile feedback. Looks like it also can be used as a bone conduction transducer if desired. But what it's really good for is adding little clicks and tacks and ticks to your product for haptic feedback. This particular one is just having some stats here. The resonant frequency, when you use your driver, just make sure you can drive an eight ohm impedance. So it's quite low, you'll need quite a bit of current. And the resonant frequency is about 80 hertz. So set up your driving frequency to set the AC voltage at about 80 hertz and that will get you the best reaction. Okay, so what is haptic feedback? So it's actually kind of researching what is haptics and when was it used? So this is like a very early haptics patent that I found off of, you lived off of Wikipedia. And basically it was often used for when you have an electronic interface to something that's mechanical. It used to be mechanical and you want to give feedback to the user to let them know when they've hit a limit or there's something that would give them negative feedback towards their position movement. What it's often used for was aviation. So historically, if you look at old videos of airplanes, you'd have a yoke, right? This is the control interface for the plane and the yoke would be mechanically connected to, I think they're called aerolions or flaps, I think is what we call them when we don't know what we're talking about. The flaps on the wings and the flaps on the tail and the rudder to help steer which way you want the plane to go. This is what, you know, an old plane that the rudder cables look like. And those would literally be like strung from the flaps to the cockpit and then you'd control the yoke. And what was really nice about this is that you could feel the vibrations and movement of the air through those cables. It was both directions. Like as you pulled and pushed and twisted the yoke, you could feel how the cables and the rudder would fight against you. That was your forced feedback. So you kind of knew what your air speed was. You know, turbulence obviously shakes the whole thing but you get a sense of how your plane is moving and how it's reacting to the air which can help you become a better pilot and avoid issues like accidentally crashing to the ground. However, the problem with having direct connections to the rudder cables is that you need to be very strong. Like if you have a lot of force in the air fighting against you, you have to really like push against the yoke or pull it or twist it in order to fight the air that's, you know, on the other side of the rudder that's pushing against you. You have to be very strong. And like if you're in trouble, like if you're in a storm, you might be running out of strength and then you can get in trouble because you can't fight against that air pressure anymore. So to simplify and also allow things like autopilot, we have the creation of fly-by-wire. This is like an early, this is actually from like NASA, this photo, it's kind of cool. You can tell that they- Anything digital had to use the check, check font. Yeah, this is the font I use for hacking. Actually, you worked with digital equipment corporation or there's just digital. It was like just the check for you. But this is the NASA fly-by-wire. Also, again, as you're getting to more and more complicated airplanes, people like one yoke in the buns was not enough. You had to have everything automated as people actually had the shadow of being able to control it. But, you know, in addition, this is from Ready Player One. I thought this was from the Apple keynote from like yesterday. Oh, sorry. It's only $3,500. So in addition to, you know, okay. So, you know, aeronautics, also automobiles are also drive-by-wire. And so you'll have forced feedback in those. But a second use case is for entertainment. So, you know, this is this famous haptic suit from the Ready Player One movie and book. And it's covered all over with haptic feedback, interfaces, maybe LRIs from Vibranics. So that when you, you know, fight or run or chase or, you know, whatever play games in the metaverse, you would feel it on your body. And so it gives you a strong connection to this virtual world you're in. So, you know, that's of course a movie recreation. You know, the first commercial haptics vest was this thing called like the Aura Interactor, which I thought was neat. It was kind of like a wearable subwoofer. And you can see it's like feel, punches, explosion kicks, uppercut, slam, dugs, crashes and more. So it was for gaming. Gaming, you know, often has new technology. Like there was these VR haptics suits, but they were very, very expensive. But gaming is actually kind of where this haptic technology. Fun side story, if you go through a really deep rabbit hole, I made a version of Operation on the Pocket PC that would send sound to a vest I was wearing. So if you messed up taking me apart in operation, I would get, you know, jolted in the vest. This was 20 years ago. This is a long time ago. This was like 1995 and then 97. Also gaming included, since this is like a screenshot from, for people who remember from the Nintendo 64, they introduced the Rumble Pack, which would have forced feedback on the controller when you played Nintendo games. And this is an, I fix a tear down of the DualShock. And the DualShock is another controller. So I'm kind of making my way through the history of tactile feedback and what it was really commonly used for. And you can see on the bottom there, to the bottom left in the like, the palm holding section of the controller, there are these two circular motors and they have this kind of half disc cut and attached onto the motor. The motor's around and then the half disc is kind of half moon shaped. And these are called ERMs. So eccentric rotating motors. And here's an eccentric rotating motor from Vibranics. They can be any size. You take any DC motor and you put an eccentric weight on it, it's not symmetric. And so as it rotates and vibrates and that gives you that force feedback. And eccentric rotating motors are very popular for use with say, your phone will vibrate when you have a call. They're very good for like big vibrations. So like that interactor vest or your Rumble Pack. It is a Rumble feeling. What they're not really good for is click feelings. So a lot of people these days, you probably have a mobile phone and you maybe you use the on-screen keyboard and you may notice that as you're typing on the on-screen keyboard, you get this tactile feedback, this click tech sound and feeling into your fingers and it helps make the clear glass surface feel more like, okay, I'm actually pressing a button. You feel you're not course technically pressing a button. I remember the Kindle wasn't also an early use of tactile feedback when you clicked the next page that the Kindle would kind of vibrate a little bit to let you know that you've switched the page. So a good way as more surfaces are becoming capacitive touch, clear glass, you want to have some tactile feedback. You'll want to use something like an ERM, sorry, an LRA. ERMs are good for vibrations. LRAs are great, are better for tactiles because they're faster. You're not, you know, for the motor, if you're spinning up the motor to move this eccentric weight, you have to kind of get the motor going and you have to slowly ramp it up. And they can be fairly fast but they're not going to be as fast as an LRA. And here's an LRA cross-section from Vibranics. You can see it's a lot more complicated to build. So they're going to be a little bit more expensive. But inside there's a spring and there's the weight and there's a magnet. And then when you put the AC voltage across it, and that's another thing you need to use an AC voltage on DC voltage, the magnet will vibrate up and down. So the magnet will vibrate up and down, making the weight vibrate up and down. The spring will push back on it. And you've got this very quick tactile feeling that, as you remember from the data sheet, can activate within 80 Hertz. And I'll show the video because it's kind of cool. There's an X-ray on the Digi-Key website from Vibranics showing this product. And you can see inside the spring and then the weight and the magnet. The springs are also used for passing the current through. And that's what causes the LRA to vibrate. So Vibranics shows a bunch of products it's used for. So you can see this is like the Samsung phones. They also had it in like one of the Nexus tablets. Put a coincidence, Nexus is everywhere. Usually you don't solder to the tabs or there are some solder tabuans. It looks like it's common to have spring contacts. And that lets the motor vibrate from within like the cavity in your product. And it gives the case, it makes the case kind of a larger resin cavity for the vibration of the LRA. You will need something to drive it. Again, you can't use it with DC voltages like you can with the ARMs. ARMs are much simpler. LRAs you need AC voltage. There's a couple that are recommended. The one that I've used is the TIDRV 2605 which is in stock at Digi-Key. It's very easy to use and it has iSquared C input. And then we have a breakout as well. You can connect your LRA or ERM on the output. And particularly neat about the DRV 2605, you do pay a little bit more, but it has this cool collection of waveforms that are built in and they're licensed waveforms that you get a free license for when you purchase the chip. So the motions like the clicking and the bumping and the transitioning. So it's like, you know, click, click all that stuff with different strengths. Already pre-programmed into the DRV 2605. So it's really, really easy. I mean, yes, you can DIY this yourself. With an H bridge and a little bit of work, but instead you can just use the DRV 2605 and get started very quickly. And it will work with any of the Vibranics LRAs. Available on Digi-Key. They're in stock. And there's a bunch of different ones. This is just the one that we, you know, this is the featured one, but check out they have like a huge range of different sizes and shapes. There's round ones, there's square ones, there's rectangular ones. And then we've got a cool video. Yeah, this is what you wanted to show us. Which maybe you can hide us. It shows an x-ray as they inspect the vibration. You can see how quickly it's activates. I mean, it's like basically instantaneous as you can get sharp clicking effects that are harder to get with an ERM. Okay. This is, this week's, on MPI. On MPI. Oh, Gidoki, we're gonna jump right in in your products before we do that. The code is audio. BFF, video to kick it. 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, no, no, no, no, no. Okay, a little reminder, we have circle playgrounds back in stock. I just wanted to mention that before we jump into you. We've got some cool rotary encoders. Rotary encoders, usually they come in small sizes, but someone pointed out these awesome, large CNC rotary encoders. These are 60 millimeters in diameter. They've got 100 clicks per rotation, which actually makes sense for using it for CNC because you'll wanna get, you know, 100th of an inch or 100th of a centimeter or 100th of a meter. They have a nice clicky feel. On the bottom, you have terminal blocks. They're really easy to wire to and you get your standard rotary encoder kind of grade code out. The VCC can be like any voltage, I think, basically. Just is the other side of the positive connection. And the ground is, you know, your reference ground and then A and B tick up and down. So use any rotary, two wire rotary encoder library. There's also on the bottom, if you look really quickly. Yeah, there's A and B is duplicate. The bottom, there's negative A and negative B. Sometimes you want like the opposite polarity. They're also available. And we have them in silver and in black. You can, I believe you can remove that little knob. If you want it to be just like something you grab with your fingers. It's cool. But yeah, originally used for CNC machine. So let me show a quick demo, but these are very satisfying to you. Clicky, clicky, clicky, clicky, clicky. Okay, so let me autofocus. Okay, so this is the rotary encoder and I just, you know, quickly wired this up to a feather. There's some mounting holes here. I believe the day she had the mounting orientation. It has a really nice, heavy feel. It's like, it's really hefty. And the clicks, you can really feel the clicks. They're very strong. So this is good for a precision work, but you can also rotate it very quickly. And then let me just plug in my demo for a moment. USB-C goes here. Is the big knob removable or is it permanent? The big knob is not. Just the little, the little knobule. Okay, so this is my little demo written in Circuit Python. I'm using the rotary encoder library. It sounds just like the sound that I have for Top Secret. Yeah, it is. It's like, it sounds like... I should put a mic on that. It's reminiscent of like a safe. It has that same clicky feel, or no, MasterLux didn't have the clicky feeling, but like a, yeah, it definitely vibrates as you move it. And it's nice, it's easy to get precision. And of course you can... What's nice about the wheel is that you can... Yeah, it makes it so it'd be good for an escape room. Yeah, you can like rotate this. That's what this knob is for. So its precision is this way and speed is this way. So two colors, silver and black. Very good. I love this stuff. Okay, yeah, next up. Next up we've got from Monk Makes. Monk Makes has written many a guide and a tutorial for Adafruit and is very skilled at making really high quality hardware. And I really like this very simple four-way MOSFET switch. It's a big PCB, but it kind of does everything you want with controlling solenoids or motors. This is for, I think he designed it originally for people doing model train stuff where you have to turn on and off 12 volts, switches constantly and they might be inductive or they might be LEDs, two amp MOSFETs. Each one has protection flyback diode. It also has a really cool feedback LED and it has a terminal block input, terminal block outputs. So I'll show you on the overhead. Hold on, I got to zoom this out because this is a big demo. Yeah. So what I've got here, hold on. There's so much on here. Thank you. Thank you, my fine assistant. So I have my Metro menu, which is an Arduino compatible and it's just sending the PWM signals and the PWM signals go into the header here. So I'm only using three. That's why there's like one hole missing. Two have here red, green, blue and brown, that's ground. So that goes in, that's the signal. So PWM signal goes in. Then you need the power. So the high voltage power up to 16 volts comes into the terminal block. I've got to hear through a DC jack and then when I plug this in and unplug it, this little yellow LED, which is the light bulb, lets me know that the power's good. And I think it's nice, this is extra little detail here. You see the PWM outputs are also visible as these little LEDs to let me know that that terminal block is activated. So this is connected to an RGB LED strip which requires 12 volts and an amp of power. The 12 volts comes into here and is switched by these MOSFETs so that this signal is three volt logic or five volt logic, whatever, safely goes in and turns on and off. This is PWM at high speed, the high voltage 12 volt power coming into the terminal block. So I'm using it for a high power LED driving but also really good for solenoids, relays, pumps, unidirectional motor control, kind of anything that you need to do up to 16 volts and two amps. Okay, sir the ship says you laid it out. Oh no, wait, there's one more. One more, we've also got as a partnership with Tomorrow Lab, we have this cool hack box. It's meant to be used with PiLEAPE, our application allows you to do no code programming with the Adafruit Clue Board. And we've got a bunch of projects that you can do tomorrow lab will be releasing. We've got the Clue. We've got RGB LED with neopixels that clip on so you can do addressable LED projects, clip on servo and servo driver so you can do robotics projects, portable battery pack and enclosure batteries. Looks like some fun stickers from Tomorrow Labs, USB cable and a lanyard for making portable projects. We've linked from the product page to the PiLEAPE guides that you can follow along and also Digikey will be doing some work through these. Okay, now, this time I mean it, the story shows we're such an idiot, our team, our customers and everybody makes the things go and the community is. The I2S AMP BFF. I love these BFFs. We have our QT Pi boards and SEED has their shell boards and maybe you want to be making very small projects. Well, we've had a bunch of BFFs that add neopixel level shifting that add battery support. We have one that's coming out with the iSpy and one of the things that I thought would be really useful to be able to have high quality audio come out because a lot of the QT Pi's that we have don't have analog outputs and maybe you want to make a little music player or a prop or some toy that makes audio sounds. So the I2S amplifier is a great three watt amp. It uses three pins and on the ESP32 and RP2040 and NRF52840 QT Pi and Chadboard you can use any pins. I will say this doesn't work in this configuration with the SAMD21. It could work, but you'd have to cut the traces and rewire it. And let me see if I've got my demo. So let's go to the overhead again. I don't know if this will work, but we'll try. If not, I can just show it off. Oh yeah. Okay, so I've got music coming out of here. So you can hear the audio. So this is actually streaming using the ESP32 and it's connected to an MP3 server that's streaming our frequency record that Tom White did, he was here at Adafruit. So it's streaming the audio out and it's sending the data over I2S which is digital which then is connected to this Molex PicoBlade connector. So to keep it nice and small, we're using Molex PicoBlade. You can, you know, I just grabbed one in the shop. We have the little pigtails and I soldered it to this 403 watt speaker which is the max you can drive with this. By default, it's set up to be stereo. So you see this R and L, you leave them empty and it means it's mixing the left and right channel to make the stereo output, which will sound great for 99% of use cases. If you ever just want the left or right channel, you would solder one of those bridges closed. It's also connected to A0, A1 and A2 for the data pins. So in the back, I think, yeah, the default is D and is A0, left, right, word select A1 and bit clock is A2. But you can cut these traces and then there's these little pads you can solder to and you can like solder all the wires if desired to connect to other pins. Again, for the SAMB 21, you'd have to do that. What's nice is the RP2040 ESP32 series and the NR52840 can use any pins for I2S. So, you know, you can use those defaults or you can change them as desired and it gets you nice high quality digital audio. So if you want to make music players, I mean, again, this one is streaming but what you could do is, especially on the RP2040, which has eight megabytes of onboard storage with the Q-Spy Flash in Circuit Python, you can easily play fairly long audio clips. It even supports MP3 through I2S. Arduino also has some I2S support but it's not as good, honestly, as Circuit Python, which kind of, we really tried to make it have first class support for streaming MP3 or WAV files. This ESP32 demo is in Arduino. It's just one of the demos that I found published for I2S MP3 streaming and that works fine too. You can also use eight-ohm speakers but four-ohm, three-watt will get you the most audio. So, for like five bucks, you've got digital quality audio coming out with a Class D amplifier. I really love the Max 98357 chip on here. It's a very good quality audio amplifier and it makes for a lovely little board to add to your 7QT or Sheryl. Yes, new products. New, new, new, new, new, new, new. Okay, well, don't forget code is audio BFF. You can get one of those. That's such a cute little BFF. We're gonna do some top secret. Yeah, I'd set a couple of boards that show up. I thought you could show them off. One I lost already. Okay, so this week's top secret, Lady Aida, while you're looking for these and you're looking to them and get it done. Yeah, go ahead. I think I showed this one. So, people are probably gonna ask, okay, for the audio board, what if you added a MicroSD card slot? I do have a prototype that has the MicroSD and I2S amplifier. We were out on holiday last weekend so I didn't get to test this but there will be a version. It's very compact. It's not as configurable. You can't cut the traces because first of all, you use almost all the pins and second, there's just like no space for anything else where you can put in a MicroSD card and then play stuff over I2S. And then I got some other boards. I got this SGP41. This is kind of cool. This is a gas sensor that also does NO2 or NOX sensing, not just volatile granite compounds. And then, I've fallen behind a little bit on catching up on all the time of flight sensors available from ST. This is the VL53L5CX. This is the one that does an 8x8 grid. So it'll be cool. Arduino support, I know, exists from ST. I'll see if we can get circuit Python support going as well. Okay. I need a someone noted to get a top-secret logo is... It's well needed. Yeah, we have this kind of stuff. And that's a top-secret logo. Okay, I had a couple of questions lined up. You can put them in the chat. We get to all of that. We were answering some a long way, but we'll do the thing. Drop them in the Discord. Yeah, you can put them in there. Okay. For the next few minutes. So first, Lady, can you adjust the spring strength of the... The detance? No, I mean, I'll be honest, I did not open this up. You might be able to. You might be able to remove the detance. I don't know if you can change the strength. Are there enough BFFs now to make a little Qtipy BFF board of Q? You could. Yeah, I think we have six total BFFs, right? At least you may have the microSD, the battery, the Neopixel, the I2S amp, which one of the world's we know? I got a couple on a Qtipy. Yeah. What's the three-volt Neopixel board that we were talking about as of the... There's a Qtipy BFF Neopixel. And so that's for going on the back of the Qtipy, and it gives you a five-volt boost to the output. And we also put in the NeoDriver, which is an I2C to Neopixel converter. Okay. If you had to guess, this was a question for you, if you had to guess how many files, EGLE CAD files do you think you published online? Well, I know we have about 550 designs, because I keep track of that. Yeah, we also, we have, at least that, we have 600-plus certifications on Oshawa. Yeah, because I think every work, sometimes if I make a big enough revision, it's maybe 600 different designs. Yeah, that's 600, probably. Yeah, okay. Any issues putting the Qtipy BFF close to the speaker magnet? I would keep it away in case the EMF is affected. I mean, the Class T amp is designed to not have EMF issues, and we put a filter on it. I wouldn't put it right next to the speaker, especially near antenna, just in case it has an effect on it. But you can, you know, have no fire going away. Okay. Lots of notes. I was going to call it. Yeah, we need to get out of here at nine this weekend. We're doing some questions. Okay, that's a good one. Don't forget the code is, how do you be a BFF? That'll get you one of these, it's a pretty soft, fun, and cool, especially when it's a- Make it a tiny little audio project soon. Especially when I think behind the scenes in our Adafruit Slack helping out, and more, all of our customers, all of the community, everyone on the Adafruit team, friends, people online, happy Pride Month, stay safe, keep those masks in your room. When you'll need them again, like we are in New York, this has been an Adafruit production. Here is your moment of zener. Thank you, everybody. Thanks, everybody.