 This week's IMPI brought you by, did you get it? It is in play lady, and what is the IMPI this week? I'm glad you asked. This week's IMPI, and like I said, it's from in play. We have not featured them before. I'm really excited. I always like to have a new company. I feel like we do a lot of, you know, the ST, NXP microchip, since you're on in play. They make Bluetooth chips. And their latest product is the N100. The N100 nano beacon is a Bluetooth chip. And it's kind of a totally different take on Bluetooth development. You know, we've covered and we stock a lot of Bluetooth chips here at Adafruit, NRF series, there's also the TI series. Dialogue also has Bluetooth chip sets. What's interesting about this nano beacon is it's a device that's only meant to do advertisement. So it doesn't connect to as a client or peripheral to your smartphone or your computer. All it does is bleep out information, like a little beacon, it sort of sends like data out. So it's a lot cheaper because it only has to transmit. It's also a lot less power because it doesn't do any receiving, it only does transmission. But what's really neat about it is it has no firmware, no onboard flash, the three programmed. Instead, it has like these capabilities that you can program using the built-in e-prom that's one time programmable. And they've got, you know, it's Bluetooth five, it's 2.4 gigahertz. There's no coding, no programming. It's a powerful chip. It's got like, I think, plus eight or plus four DB. It can run on, you know, coin cell batteries up to from 1.5 to three volts. It does have SRAM and it does have this, again, this OTP memory. You can get it into packages. It seems like it's exclusively only available at Digi-Key which is great because, what do I know if you have a Digi-Key? You can get it as a DFN or a QFN, the DFN, same core, same memory just has fewer pins and it's like a teeny bit less expensive. So inside, there's that the finite state machine that kind of runs the thing. There is, you know, a firmware that does Bluetooth. It's just not accessible really to the user. Instead, there's peripherals. There's the sensor ADC, UART, OneWire and I2C input. There's a GPIO, of course. There's the EFUSE that controls like what it does and then there's some memory and you know, there's timers and stuff. And then output, it just sends Bluetooth based on what the OTP memory has to program to do like what ADCs or I2C commands it should be running every in milliseconds and then what data to send out. There's a lot of specs, I'm not gonna go into the, but basically it's peripherals connected to a Bluetooth output. The two versions, there's a, sorry, the QFN version has two crystal options, 26 megahertz which you absolutely need for the Bluetooth signal but for low power like intermediate data logging there's also a 32 kilohertz RTC crystal. The ADC is one of the peripherals. There's four channels. It also has the ability to read half of the VBAT which is handy so you can, against a reference you can tell with the VCC voltages and there's also a built-in temperature sensor. I2C is kind of neat. We'll show later, you can actually have it be I2C controller, it can connect to a peripheral. So there's an example of connecting to an SHT40 temperature humidity sensor. So if you're doing a product where it's just like read data from an I2C sensor and then bleep it out over Bluetooth to like a sensor collection central device. This will work great. And again, you don't have to learn on the SDK. There's also plus PWM detection and pulse train. Again, because there's no reception, there's no output. You can't use this to turn on or off an LED. It can only read data, I2C, whatever digital IO in and then send it out to Bluetooth. So it seems like there's a couple of trigger options. Like if the data is above or below something or the battery is low, send a report. If there is a GPIO toggle, send a report. So there's a couple simple, simple triggers that you can do actions based on the inputs. I wanted to note that there's on-chip matching. So what's really nice is you would literally just like stick an antenna on the end, very low cost. Maybe you know, you use one capacitor as a blocking cap, but otherwise it's very simple, low cost bill of materials. Here is the reference schematic for the QFN-18, which has a bunch of pins. You can see there's the crystal. There is the, sorry, there's the twice expectors crystal on the top left. If you want to use a more precision 32 kilohertz RTC crystal, there you can attach that, your build material goes up, but it's more precise. Just a character antenna, there's a couple of passes, but really like nothing else. If you see this, it's like, you can pretty much connect the battery, right? It's built in LDO. You don't even need a power regulator separately. The DFNA is even simpler. Because you don't have the RTC crystal just as like two GPIO, and you can use it to program it and then use it for I squared C and analog. And here's the good news. Because it's so simple, right? You're wondering like, wow, like it has no flash. It has no outputs. It can't receive data. What's like, what's the goal here? It's like, well, it's really, really, really cheap. Like 40 cents cheap, which is ridiculously cheap for a configurable Bluetooth transmission device that's really well designed. It has all these peripherals built in, especially like an ADC and I squared C controller, which would make it really great for something like these like sensor beacons, right? These sensor tiles, little things that they just send a beep with a random number or their identifier or the temperature every end seconds. And they might get destroyed. They might be disposable. They just need to be very low cost. Your whole bill of materials can easily be a dollar. I would recommend getting the dev kit, which is what I got. So the dev board comes with a little programmer. Good news, the programmer is just a CH340. It's just your FTDI type of programming thing. So you can really use any, if you have one handy, you could use that for boot loading. The board above, you just need a 2.4 gigahertz antenna. For your final design, of course, you can use a trace antenna or a chip antenna, but just for development, they have an SMA connector. There's a CR 12 millimeter coin cell battery on the back. There's a reset button, and then you can kind of use this just for development. There's a little jumper for current measurement and for the enable pin. So it's like a missile dev board and you get three of them because again, it's one time programmable. Once you've decided what it's gonna do, you burn it into flash and you can't change it. The firmware can be configured, the firmware that EEPROM can be configured with the nano beacon tool. It's available for Windows, Linux, and Mac, which is nice. It's written in PyQT. You can even see the source code in the download because they just kind of give you the entire package. This is the tool. It's pretty simple. You just select the UART, you connect. So I just did this in like 30 seconds. And then FL religious tutorials to set the advertising data to send the VCC, which is like based with the battery voltage and the temperature. And then while you're doing your development, you obviously want to like experiment and try different things. So you run it out of RAMs. You click run and RAM, it'll upload the code and it doesn't burn it into the EEPROM. You want it to ram until you get your thing working. Because it's gonna take a lot of iterations, especially if you're working with like ISOC. That's very clever. And then once you're done, then you burn it into EEPROM and then it's like permanent. The nice thing about EEPROM is it's not gonna get like erased by accident, but again, you can't fix it after the fact. And then I just used the NRF Connect on Android phone, connected and you can see the raw data has, I mean, it's not decoded here, but the raw data was changing as the temperature was changing. You can also set what you want. It's like random numbers or different analog voltages or digital voltages. So you can look through the app and see like all the different things that you can change with it. You can also change. I don't think you can change the manufacturing name, but you can change the payload that's advertised. And it's like 20 bytes or so. And then another cool thing I noticed is there's a lot of great tutorials that Mohamed Affine wrote. And I believe they also have a Bluetooth newsletter that I subscribed to, which is really good. So this is like novel bits. And so they wrote a bunch of great tutorials on using this. There's also an excellent collection of YouTube videos, including one that features the native SHD 40, but like all the things like how to use it with a single wire, use it with GPIO, capacitive touch, et cetera, all the different inputs that you might want to connect to use to control this little beacon device. What the what? I'm not used to seeing five digit in stock numbers. 54,000 of them? Well, they're 46 piece. It's not used to seeing any stock number of greater than zero. You can buy them off like 20K. You can drive them around. So yeah, they have the, this is the QFN version was also, the DFN version also has like about 50K in stock. This is a cool tip. You were talking about this today, and you're like, this is really interesting to me. It's quite interesting to me. Because at first I was like, oh my God, it's EEPROM. But because you can run out of RAM, I was like, oh, okay, it's not so bad. Like I thought, I thought like, wow, you really just had to guess. I like the little rims like scratch for like, get ready. Get ready, try it out. So I think this is neat. You know, if you don't want to learn SDK, you don't want to muck around with Zephyr or Matter or whatever. You just want to send like, you know, if you just have a temperature humidity sensor and you're sending that data, you don't need a display. You don't need LEDs. It just runs on a coin cell. Yeah, I still can show off the dev kit. So yeah, this is just the dev board. It's very simple, but you know, I think it's a very interesting idea, especially since you've seen, you know, air tags, which basically, I mean, other than the beeping part of the air tag, this is just, you know, it just sends out the signal. Normally these sort of tiles are a couple bucks a piece, but a chip like this would reduce the cost significantly. And because it's only transmitting and it's minimal, there's no core that's really running. It's just this like finite state machine, basically. The power is very, very low. And that's an MPI. MPI on MPI.