 Welcome to the show, it's me, John Park, and it's time for JP's product pick of the week. We are here, and I am so excited about today's product pick, particularly because it has something to do with cereal, and I love cereal. What? Not that kind of cereal? Well, let's try to get excited about it anyway, shall we? So let's see. First thing I wanna do is tell you where to go if you wanna watch the show inside of the product page and get yourself a big, enormous, crunchalicious discount on this week's product pick. It's right here, Adafruit Product ID 5335, and you can also use the URL shortener for things like that, adafruit.it slash 5335. We'll take you right there as well. You can also use this QR code if you want, if you wanna point a camera at that, that'll get you what you need. And if you head over there, you should see that if you refresh the page, the price has been cut in half. It's 50% off just during this show. So we're gonna talk about the product, do a little bit of a demo, and you will have a chance to order up to 10 of them, depending on your needs. You could potentially need 10 of these. But before I get ahead of myself, what I'm gonna do, actually, I think, I have an issue here, which is, I don't think I have that proper movie cued up to show you, so I'm gonna do a little shenanigans here. So just read a book for a moment while I fix this video, because I'm gonna click on one, and it's gonna be the wrong one. I'm gonna try to pause it and bring in the proper one. So sorry about that. I just saw that it got screwy. Hold on one second. I have a new STEMAQT board. This is an arcade, LED arcade STEMAQT breakout, which lets you... No, it's not. It's not that one at all. So hang on. We've got this here. Where'd you go? Media files. This is how you know that this show is live. Is that it? That is it. Okay, here we go. Get ready. We're so close. I'm gonna scale that up. Tell it not to loop. All right. Take it away, Lady Aida. CP 2102 friend. This is an update basically for our CP 2104 friend, which was an update of our FTDI friend. Basically, it's a USB serial converter chip on a breakout with all the pins on the side broken out. And then the end is like an FTDI cable end. It's basically this power ground data RTS and CTS combo like six pin connector that's often used in dev boards that need a USB serial converter and maybe have a couple of control lines but don't have that built in. So the CP 2102N is the next generation after CP 2104. And we love the CP 2104. It's a wonderful two megabit per second USB serial converter from side labs. We use it in dozens of boards. However, I know you're about to hear is we can't really get any more CP 2104s. They're proving very difficult to find in the shortage. But we haven't able to get CP 2102s. And so they're almost but not quite pin compatible. And for that reason, we want to start with making a breakout because this is USB-C. One thing that's different is that it does have up to three megabit per second, not two megabit per second. So it can't go a little bit faster than the CP 2104. The onboard E-Prom can be reprogrammed whereas on the CP 2104, it's a one-time programmable. So there is a purpose for having two different breakouts for this board, but basically we're kind of trying to get this out to have an option for people who can't get the CP 2104. And also to experiment with this chip before we do a swap out of all of our other breakout boards from the four to the two. That said, it's a perfectly fine FTDI replacement and it's got USB-C, RX and TX LEDs. It's got all the pins broken out. If you need all those weirdo modem controlled lines like ring or DTR or let's see what else, DCD. You need those pins, this breakout has them. So it comes with the assembled board and then you get some right angle header and some male header. For, if you want it to act like an FTDI friend and this is like the old style FTDI friend, you can solder the header into it and now you're like, hey, it's like little sister and big sister has a micro USB connector and it's otherwise about the same size, a little bit smaller because the chip is so much smaller compared to this one. It has the RX and TX LEDs down here instead of on the side but the pinout is the same. You can interchangeably use them. So this is it plugged into a protricket. So yeah, we've tested this with, we actually use the CP 2104 on a bunch of boards. So it's like, it is like a rock solid chip. And so we'll be slowly moving away from FTDI and replacing those chips with silabs because it allows us to drop the price on stuff. From one friend to another friend. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, okay. We still like FTDI. We just want to try another friend for a little bit. It's not you, it's us. Yeah, okay. Hey, there we go. So yes, that is it. Now what I'm going to do, and I hope you realize that I had to cut in a second demo there which was from the previous board, but they work identically for all intents and purposes. You can use this the same way the 2104 worked, but we didn't have a demo of Lady Aida using that one, but I will do a live demo for you. But first thing I've got to do is I got to grab one from my mystery bowl. So as you can see here, I have my mystery bowl for the USB serial converter. Check it out. There it is. Oh yeah, that's the product pick of the week right there. It is the CP 2102N Friend. It's a USB to serial breakout conversion board. It's got USB-C on it. It has, it comes with in fact, the right angle header. So you can use it just like an FTDI cable. This one can be soldered onto the end of it and you can plug it right in. And you can also plug it into a breadboard or a perf board if you want to use the broken out pins on the sides. So I'm gonna show you two demos of how that works. And I will also give a bonus point to anyone who can identify that serial hint. This is a little bit old. I don't think you can get a fresh box of this right now. Does anyone know? We had to get a bunch of those for a holiday thing. So let's grab a little demo here. So I had a couple of demo choices for this and I decided to go with both of them. Why not? So Lady Aida said, hey, if you're feeling ambitious, why don't you build a breadboard Arduino? And this is the first time I've ever done this. This was a popular thing to do back in some of the earlier Arduino days around the era of the Duimila Nova and the Diecimile. And what this is, is an AVR chip. It's the, in this case, it's the Atmel 328P. You could also do this with the 168. Those were both pretty typical. And then you build a circuit for power to get the, I think what do we want? Five volts on here. It'll bring in anywhere from, I think, seven to 12, but we get a clean five out of there. Or it might be 3.3, I can't remember. And then we have a crystal for the oscillator, crystal oscillator for timing. Couple capacitors to help that smooth that out. And then I've put on here a status LED for power, as well as a LED that's plugged into pin 13. It's not pin 13 on that chip, but it's essentially what Arduino would call pin 13. And in order to program this, I can use my little CP 2102N friend. And this is plugged in, as you can see here over USB-C. And then I'm using the pins broken out for transmit and receive TXRX and ground. That's all I have to connect to the Arduino. And then I also have a little reset pin on here. So what I'm gonna do to demo this is bring up a Arduino session here. And what you can see is I've got a basic blink sketch here. And if I turn on power, which is just a battery pack going to that breadboard Arduino, you can see it's blinking this red LED at a certain rate. Here it's a quarter second on, half a second off. If I wanna change that, let's make this just a typical one second and one second. When I go to upload this, I have Arduino configured to essentially think it's sending out to a due milanove, but it's actually sending USB to my little friend here, my little CP 2102N friend, which is then sending over serial to the chip here to program it. So I'll hit upload in Arduino and then I'll hit reset once it starts to upload that helps it. And you'll see it very quickly flashes the board. It's already done. And now my LED is blinking at that sort of one second rate. And here you can see it's got some verbose output here to let you know. It programs it really fast and programs it really reliably. One of the nice things when you are programming boards that had built in USB to FTDI conversion chips like some of the some of the Arduinos is they could be a little flaky to get them to upload, particularly I had, I remember a lot of difficulties programming the Pro Trinket, the Pro Trinket. I can't remember if you could even do it over USB. I think you could, but it was way more reliable to do over what they called at the time the FTDI. So in fact, if I wanna use this board to program a Pro Trinket, I'll show you how you do that. This is a pretty typical thing to run into. So here you can see I have a Pro Trinket and I have soldered a little right angle header set onto it for interfacing with an FTDI cable. And really it's the transmit, receive, power and ground that we care about on here. There's also reset that's on there that helps it. You don't have to press reset on this board. So if I take my FTDI friend here and I'm gonna carefully pry that up off of this breadboard Arduino. There we go. A challenge sometimes to not bend pins when you do that. Now we can plug in and I think I've got those right. Ground is like that. Okay, I had it wrong. So what I'm gonna do is give power to the Trinket and that's actually using a micro USB. Here I don't know if that's a blink pattern that's running or a pulse it might think that it's being programmed. So now plug in my friend, CP 2102 friend. And then in Arduino what I have to do real quick is tell it that I'm not programming and do a Milanova anymore. So I'm gonna pick from a list that you cannot see but I'll pick from Adafruit boards and there's an option for Pro Trinket, five volts FTDI rather than USB. And then I'll pick my serial port and now I'm gonna just hit upload. It's recompiling and that's it. It finished uploading. So now we have a little one second blink going on there. If I just undo those changes now it'll be a fast blink. So let's re-upload. You can see it's doing the automatic reset. I'm not having a time any little clicks on there which is great and did it finish? Did I get it? I might have to reselect the serial out. Done uploading, okay. There we go. Now there's the fast blink. So there are also other chips that you might want to program with this ESP32 and ESP8266 boards often can be most easily programmed with the serial, the USB to serial like this board, as well as there are some things like router hacking. There are the WRT, open WRT routers that you can program over serial and upload open firmwares like open WRT. And there's probably a lot of other uses that you can find out there. So I'm just checking the comments and someone said that YouTube is having an issue, huh? Oh, now it's back, huh? Well, thank you in the comments for mentioning that Twitch was working. I don't know what happened there. Yeah, I'm checking our Discord if you're wondering where I'm checking. Thank you, yeah, thanks Cedar Grove popped into the YouTube chat to let people know that things are working over on Twitch. Sorry about that. Did I disappear? Oh, I'm so sad. The, hopefully, there'll be a version of this. I didn't record it locally. Hopefully there'll be a version of this that I can use to re-edit my little one minute version of this later. So we'll have to check. Otherwise I'll make a special short version of it. Let's see, any questions in the chat? Let me know. Again, if I head over to, let me, I'll fix one more thing here and go to the Chrome tab one second. Technical difficulties. Stand by. So if you check it out here, here is our CP 2102 end friend. I'll hit refresh on that. We should see the price drop on there when it refreshes. Ooh, that's not wanting to refresh. Are we just having general internet difficulties? There it goes. Yeah, so $2.98 on sale. You can get a maximum of 10 per customer if you head over there to check that out. If you look here, there's a bunch of information about it right here on the product page. And if you scroll down, we have some technical details, spec sheets. And then you can also head to the Learn Guides. And if you, I think if you look under CP 2104, you should see a Learn Guide. Let's check that out. I'm gonna verify where that is. Works basically the same as that and pretty similar to the FTDI friend as well. CP 2104. Yeah, it shows up in a bunch of guides. I don't know if it has its own guide, but in any of our guides where we're programming over FTDI, you can swap in. It's pin compatible, so it's not a lot to it. Cedar Grove says as soon as I mentioned Twitch, YouTube started working. Yay, thanks YouTube. All right, so that is gonna do it. Thanks for stopping by. Remember if you wanna go ahead and pick one of those up at a discount, do it right now during the show. There's no coupon code, it's just at that slashed 50% off price until the show ends. You have a little bit of a grace period, but not much of one. So if you've filled up your cart with these converters and you're ready to go, go ahead and do it. I'll go ahead and unplug this and let's put a little hanger on there before we finish up, so I can put that up on the board. There we are. All right, so that's gonna do it for today. The product pick of the week is the CP 2102 and friend, USB to serial converter. For Adafruit Industries, I'm John Park. This has been JP's product pick of the week and I will see you next time. Bye-bye.