 Live from New York it's Ask an Engineer. Hey everybody and welcome to yet another Wednesday. We wrapped around the week. Time for Wednesday again. Humphay. But again exciting show for you tonight. It's me Lady Aida the engineer. We're broadcasting live from our downtown Manhattan factory where we do all manufacturing, our testing, our kitting, our coding, our shipping, our videoing and more. With me Mr. Lady Aida on camera control and we've got like a jam packed show but one plus hours of all the latest videos, news, content and more in the world of makers, hackers, engineers, etc. Why don't we kick it off, tell them the code, tell them what's on time at the show. We've got a big show tonight. Tonight the code is Time of Flight. I put the little different caps so you can see like the capital O, capital T, capital F. You don't need to do any of that but the code is Time of Flight, 10% off of native restore all the way up until probably midnight because we're going to watch the last What If and then go to bed but is it the code will be up until midnight? Yeah. Talk about some of our Aidaford live shows including Show and Tell, JP hosted it, Time Travel, Look Around the World Makers, Hackers, Artists and Engineers. Yep. Help Wanted. Nothing on the jobs board tonight but I have a little job announcement that we have. Oh yeah. Yeah. We're looking to hire. Yeah. Main York City Factory footage, 3D printing, IMPI, new products, top secret. We're going to answer your questions. We do that over in Discord throughout the show. Aidaford.at slash Discord. Save the good ones to the end. All 31,000 people, thank you for being part of the community over there. All that and more on, you guessed it, Ask an Engineer. Yay. Okay. So let's go to the code, remember Time of Flight, that's code. And Lady Aida, when people shop on our site, they can get free stuff. They do. What is the free stuff? $99 or more, you get a free perma-proto, half size PCB. It's great for taking your project of a breadboard and making them permanent, nice and solid. I love boards like this when I was in school. I used them constantly. And so that's why we give them away. $149 or more, you'll get a free STEMI QT board. We actually moved a couple around. There were a few that were out of stock and we're not sure when we're going to get them. So we swapped them out for ones that we do have in stock. Every time you order, you'll get a different one if you have an account. Otherwise, you'll kind of get a random one. So make an account. So it's worth it that way we can track which ones we've sent you. $199 or more, you get free UPS ground shipping in the continental United States. We do not have the Circuit Playground Express freebie right now because we actually ran out, which is pretty cool. But we have more coming in the next month or so. I don't know if you heard, but there is a shipping and silicon shortage. So there's that. Yeah, not only that. I guess a little bit of news. We heard from some of our factory partners in China that they can only operate three days a week and then four days a week they're closed because they ran out of electricity. Yeah, there's electricity. Electricity shortage. Yeah, it's unclear. It's not a shortage. It's rashing. Yeah, there's there's electricity. It's just not, it's not for that. It's a little unclear all the details yet, but the price of coal went up. So also a lot of things going around in the world where we just don't have a lot of transparency into there was some shipping things around the world that we just ran into. So basically, it's like get your bingo cards out because there's going to be another crazy per week, per day, per month for a little bit longer. So we'll see how it goes. Anywho, our live shows that we do every single week, this week JP was kind enough to host show and tell. Thank you JP. And we were, I was looking at it while we're getting set up for the show and it looks like they had like maker all-stars. So there was Jay, Todd Bot. I think it's who else? Well, we had some of our team. Of course. And then there was also, I'm just trying to, I think Darian was there. There was a lot of good projects. Yeah, there's Audrey, there's Darian, there's Todd Bot, there was, should live clock was there. You know, Pedro, Scott, Michael. Yeah, lots of people. Yeah, there was a lot of people. So anywho, check that out. We also do a show on Sundays called Desk of Lady Aida. And we do two parts. The first part is what you're working on. Yeah. What we're working on this week. Oh, this week I showed off my final Finnish AT Tiny 817 new PDI tester. So this tester would took way too long. When I have a new chip, it always takes a really long time for me to get the chip up and running because every chip is a little bit different and weird. And it was one of those things where it was like getting like the first 90% was really easy, but then that last 10% actually took like 200 times more time. So the thing that was driving me a little baddie with this one was erasing. Whenever I set a few, first of all, I couldn't set multiple fuses and I was trying to figure out how I could do that and I can't. And then every time you set a few, you have to do an unlock and erase cycle, which I thought was kind of weird. I can understand why. It's probably security thing, but no other chip I know has ever had to do that. Yes, if you change the lock bit or byte you have to or the protection bytes, yes, you have to erase, but I'd never seen it on unlike the oscillator byte. So that was a little annoying, but I did get it working and we published the library. So if you want to make your own standalone UPDI program, we now have standalone SWD programming, standalone AVR ISP programming, and now we have UPDI. So we've kind of covered like the three most common. We just don't, we don't really do PIC kit, although I think the PICC board that we have is programmed with the PICC and I think that the creator of the PICC did publish a library on how to do in circuit ICSP PIC, my controller programming. Okay, we also do the great search for what you're by Digikey and Anifrit, and this is where lady user, users are powers of finding things on Digikey and serves them up for you. So what did you find this week? This was a customer request. It was not a replacement for an out of stock part. They were actually asking us, hey, where do you get the phone that you use to ship your feathers that have headers pre-installed because they stick out and you have to put them in something protective and it's best if it's anti-static. And so it turns out there is anti-static foam available on Digikey, but you have to kind of know where to look because there's only really like one supplier. They have plenty in stock. And of course, if you want custom cut ones, you can do as well. But I just buy the big sheets, you know, put the boards in a big array and then just slice them up with a pair of scissors. And I find that that's quite fast. That's what we do here in house. Okay. And then if you stick around to the end of the show, we have some top secret. I'm going to show some of our new graphics for Desk of Laneyda. Oh, yes. It's happening. Okay. Every single Tuesday we do JP's product pick and JP's product pick is when JP broadcasts live from inside of a product page and you get discounts without having to put any coupon codes or anything. Here is this week's highlight from JP's product pick. It is the product pick of the week. It is the pie ruler. Oh wait, the pie ruler. It essentially has a trinket M zero built right into it or run Arduino or run circuit Python. And beyond just being a regular trinket, it actually has four of the pins that are normally not broken out on the trinket running to these four capacitive touch pads, as well as four bonus LEDs. You can see here on these capacitive touch pads, we have some suggested uses. This is a way to set up a little special keyboard that's really purpose built for your engineering writing needs. Ohm character, the Omega. We have the Mu there for micro thingies and we have pie. And then also this DigiKey logo here on the end. We'll actually type in the URL for DigiKey's circuit Python site and go there. That's the product pick of the week. It is the pie ruler. Okay. And don't forget to tune into JP's show on Thursday's JP's workshop. And during JP's workshop, we have a segment called circuit Python Parsec. Here is the latest in tune in for the new one tomorrow. What I wanted to talk about for the circuit Python Parsec today is easing the motion of your servo motor. So you're used to servos going really fast from position to position when you tell them, hey, get to an angle, it just gets there as quick as it can. Well, this is a technique developed by Todd Bot for easing or almost adding a low pass filter to that motion. The way this looks, watch this motion. First it's going to jump. That's a regular hard stop. Hard stop. Now we're going to ease. You can see that little easing motion as it gets to its position. It starts quick and then slowly gets there. And if I recall, I'm only playing those hard, fast ones right at the beginning. So from now on out, it should just be, yeah, these nice easing motions. The way this is done, you can see I've got some libraries I'm importing to be able to use the board and PWM IO and a different servo. Then I am setting two positions and how long I want to take to get there. So zero and 180. I'm going the full extent of the servo. I set up my servo. And then we have this thing here. This is a variable called ease speed. This is the amount of the motion that's going to be spent on the easing and the number of slices to subdivide the motion tail into, in this case, 50 subdivisions. Watch the numbers as they go by. So these are these diminishing numbers that are the smaller and smaller sub angles that we are traversing at the end there. And this is how it's done in my main loop. We set the new angle and the number of seconds. So that's from our list. We print that position. And then this is the easing slices. For I in range number of ease slices, the servo goes to an angle plus the new angle minus servo A angle times the ease speed. And then we repeat that until we've gone through 50 of those little sub slices, which is what gives us that nice smooth motion at the end. Then we sleep a couple seconds and repeat the process on the next angle in the list. And so that is how you can set up a nice easing motion very simply on a servo motor inside of Circuit Python. And that is your Circuit Python Parsec. Okay, on Fridays we have Deep Dive with Scott, Scott's back this week. So tune in Friday at 2 p.m. Pacific time. Low level Raspberry Pi hacking and making a Raspberry Pi into a very, very, very fast microcontroller. That's right. All right, time travel. Let's get to some news, videos, retro stuff. You name it. Kind of all fits in time travel because time is what we're all in. There was a video that I wanted to get to this week that was from Phil B that I got to play. That was one of the ones. So I'm one week behind. Okay, that's fine. But we're catching up. But this is part time travel. That's right. I showed some needle calculators last week. Let's focus on this one, the TI programmer calculator from 1980. Notice it's a programmer calculator, not a programmable calculator. It's a calculator for programmers. It has some bitwise operations and then conversions between decimal, hexadecimal and octal numbers. But if you have a whole computer, what does a programmer need with a calculator? Well, 1980 was a different world. Any computer you could afford for yourself would be single tasking. You couldn't just whip up a prompt in the middle of something else to check your math. Or you might be on some hulking beast where the time is so valuable they're not going to let you just poke around on keys until it works. So a lot of code was planned ahead of time on paper and perhaps a calculator. Graphics too. I love to see the classic video game sketchbooks. So I'm excited for this modern reversal that you can now get a calculator with the whole circuit python language built in. How cool is that? Oh, Kidoki, more time travel. So it is Halloween season here. Please check our blog. All the stuff we're doing. Yeah, we changed our logo on the side. So you know when it's Halloween season here, it's pumpkin spice latte season as well. And then here's just some of the desedata fruit. So a lot of us here are kind of in Halloween mode all year around. And then you know we have to pretend not to be in Halloween other months of the year. But this is one of our workstations right now. And I'll take some more photos. We have some fun things in store. And then I think I'm going to play the other fill video back to back because then I'm all caught up. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm going to do that. Oh, right, right, right. Yeah, because I put these all in one spot. And I should have put them one after the other. But anyway, I wanted to show the Halloween stuff. Okay, so here's one more video from Phil that's continuation of that series. Showing this old programmer calculator recently, I explained it could convert between decimal, hexadecimal, and octal numbers. It's something that all programmer calculators, even new ones, do. Get into programming and pretty soon you encounter hexadecimal or base 16 notation, a compact way of expressing groups of four bits using one of 16 characters. Octal, though, is groups of three bits with eight characters. You may have encountered octal when setting Unix file permissions, but three bits doesn't even fit nicely into a byte or a 32 bit word. Well, get this, bytes weren't always eight bits. 32 bit systems really started to congeal in the mid 1960s. At the time this competed with 12 bit and 36 bit architectures. It actually makes sense. Like a clock face, there's more ways to divide this up. The big draw, though, was compatibility with mechanical calculators that banks used. 10 decimal digits needs 35 bits and round up to an even 36. It all lives on in that octal button. Okay, next up. I learned a lot from that video. Yeah, some Eight-A-Box news, maybe. So there's only like 10 more openings for Eight-A-Box and heads up this Eight-A-Box and the next Eight-A-Box. As you know, it is worldwide shipping meltdown, part shortage, no power, squids falling from the sky. There's a bunch of stuff going on. So as soon as we know, for sure, if any Eight-A-Box is going to be late, it won't be because we didn't do everything. It'll be because of stuff can't ship around. We were actually early on this one. That turns out that didn't really matter. So we'll let everyone know. And one of the things I'm going to tell folks is like, look, if this is the worst thing that's ever happened to your life, just, you know, cancel your subscription. There's a lot of other people want it. I think everyone's going to understand what's happened the last couple years. And for, there hasn't been a definitive, I think, overview of like what's happened. So there's ships that are docked around the world that can't offload the stuff. Once the stuff is offloaded, there's not enough people to drive it around. Between Brexit in Europe and everything that's happened with like regulations and tariffs and you name it. Just everything is taking longer. It's slower when the folks we know in China said, oh yeah, we're only open three days a week and four days closed. And not only that, you know, the stuff we make with you guys, not only will it take longer, but you're going to get half of it. So it is a nightmare. It's always somehow getting on harder and harder mode in doom. Yeah, I don't know. So anyways, we'll let everyone know. But just please know we did everything early. We did everything in advance. We're going to, we'll figure out something. And even if it's late, you know, maybe cut us some slack. Okay, Colin's lab notes comes out every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. I'm picking two of my favorites. This is the flexible ink display and good old 555 timer. Okay, take it right on. Yeah. The basic mechanic of how ink displays work is interesting by itself. But flexible ink displays take things to another level by making the otherwise rigid layer technology pliable enough for mounting on a curved surface. Just like a classic ink panel, this 2.1 inch flexible display can be programmed via the E Ink friend featherwing either connected directly to the board's 24 pin port or from a distance using an FPC cable and extender, therefore allowing us to mount the flexible display on the side of a container or a lamp post on the street or maybe the human forehead. You never know. Why is the 555 timer one of the best known ICs of all time? Well, it's been around a long time and there's a crazy amount of example circuits out there for it. It's also cheap, easy to use, and most of all, versatile. A 555 timer can be used as a timer performing a single action after a specific period of time. An oscillator generating a repeating waveform at a specific frequency, a PWM signal generator outputting a waveform of varying pulse width for controlling servo motors, LEDs, etc. Plus less practical uses like using two of them together to create a stepped tone generator, aka tarry punk console. For a modern update to the 555, consider the TLC 551. Its pin compatible with the original has a wider input voltage and higher accuracy. Okay, help wanted. So one's a little different. I might eventually put this job posting on our jobs board because we have a jobs award. But we have an opening. Well, we do. We're looking for, this is remote anywhere contract position, and we are going to look for someone who wants to help us manage our blog. So check out blog.dataford.com and jobs jobs.dataford.com both WordPress. There's a lot of folks that are really good at WordPress love WordPress. The reason we're doing it because our team does a great job at it, but we just want to do additional things and we want to find someone cool maybe from the community. I started Hackaday. I have like a billion blog posts online. Make was one of the websites I managed. And then I've been running the Adafruit blog as the editorial manager or whatever for all these years. And it is one of the the neatest websites because you don't have to worry about advertising or ads or monetizing anything. All you have to do is worry about updating to the latest WordPress, making sure it looks good in our template that we have. And that's pretty much it. We moderate all comments. It is a chill thing. We just want a little bit of help with that. And for the jobs board, the jobs board is basically WordPress with this plugin thing that kind of works with it. So if anyone's interested, just email me pt.dataford.com, but just make sure you kind of got to love WordPress. Kind of the thing. We self-host, by the way. And we're a very cool team. You got support. You're not going to be alone. We've got people before you've done it. We're just so busy doing so much stuff. Yeah. We don't have time for it. It also means, you know, as you can tell over the last 18 months and in our recent shows, we've been back in the office. We're not wearing masks right now. We're vaccinated. Our team is fully vaccinated. So it is, there is a new chapter that's happening here. The Halloween parade in New York is back. There's a lot of good things to look forward to, but we're also kind of like shell-shocked and nervous at all times that, you know, what's going to be the next crisis. So anyways, pt.dataford.com. I'll put this up later, but this is just for like the true fans that are hanging out that might be in this world. I don't know if you know someone. You can do a time-coded URL or just have them email me. Okay. It is Python on hardware time. Blink-a-blink-a-blink-a. Blink-a-blink-a. Okay. Like every week, I try to pick out a few things from the newsletter and then I have something I focus on. This is kind of neat. Blues, wireless swan, a powerful circuit Python compatible board and a feather form factor. I showed this as like breaking news last week, but one of the things I thought that was kind of neat, Andrew noticed. He said, Inifruit, wondering if you caught Ray Ozzy, the CEO of Blues, wireless showing off his new feather board at Edge Impulse Imagine conference. It can run circuit Python too. That's pretty neat. That's right. They did a PR to add support for this chip, which is so awesome. Thank you, folks. Yeah. So I mentioned this, I think, in a past show, but I also want to mention something. So when MOSFET, our cat, passed away, Ray Ozzy donated money to the cat shelter that Lady Aida got MOSFET from. Yeah. He got his cat from the same shelter. And we were exchanging emails. And you know, I know it's silly, but it meant a lot because it was like devastating. And the fact that... I miss MOSFET. The fact that someone... I mentioned MOSFET today. I referred to 10 pound weight. I was like, that's one MOSFET. Yeah. That's how we measure things. Anyways, and now Ray is the CEO of this electronics company and they're doing feather stuff and it has circuit Python. So anyways, maybe check it out. If you like cats. Anyways, the Raspberry Pi released a new data sheet, the RP2040 data sheet. It is gigantic. So check it out. It has everything. Next week, a Lovelace day. I'm going to show some of this video. We did a virtual factory tour. So stick around for the show tonight and you'll see the rest of it. I thought this was neat. Python 3.10. They had a release party and they're starting to do these cool... 3.10. Sorry, 3.10. Oops. They're starting to do these cool graphics where it has some of this stuff that has something to do with the... I think this is cool. I think we should have like tattoos, like temporary tattoos for release. Yeah. We have a poster and I'll talk about that for each thing that we do. The Halloween Hackfest with DigiKey and Hackaday and Adafruit that's still going on. And it's open hardware month. Talk about that again. Make sent out a big old thing. Getting started with Python on hardware. And this is kind of a teaching Python podcast made this circuit Python error bingo card. So if you are learning a programming language and you get an error, normally it's like, oh no, I am the worst. I can't believe this is happening to me. The folks over at teaching Python podcast decided to make it into a fun game. And I think that's the way to do it. If we can normalize making mistakes, be way better than the alternative. And then, you know, catch up the rest of the odds and ends. I think there's one more thing I wanted to show. Oh, yeah. The Pico system, it's a pocket size handheld console built around Raspberry Pi or B2040. It uses things like C++ and of course, sort of Python. And so that is the newsletter news. And then speaking of of launch graphics. So the Python 310 graphic thing is there. We have friendly snakes. We have our, we have the great merge poster. So seven circuit Python seven, it's out now. And we wanted to like show that micro Python and circuit Python are on a collision course together. And now they're like one snake, one snake absorbed the other snake. So it's one, it's one snake. So a lot of the micro Python stuff is now in circuit Python. Next up plays video from Jebler. We have a cool camera thing. Hi, Jeff here. I've been working on supporting another camera module in Adafruit circuit Python. This time it's the OV 5640. I had to put it on a long extension cable to get the shot I wanted to the LCD. And that's what's leading to the glitches that you're seeing here in the video. What's working is RGB, YUV and grayscale capture, of course, displayed LCD. You can also control the saturation level and turn on special effects such as sepia, negative and test pattern. Next up is implementing JPEG image capture at a startling five megapixels. The library will be added to the circuit Python bundle when it's ready. See you around. Okay. And then there was a question. Is there a name for this snake Hydra? No. In fact, I tried to find out if there was a name. Is there a snake Hydra? There's two snakes. Yeah, but they're kind of like... Oh, the micro Python snake? Yeah, well, so... I think it's called the micro Python snake. Yeah. So I asked Damien and he said there's no name for it. And we redrew the snake form because he didn't think he had the artwork, so he made one form. It's two snakes. It's Blinken and the micro Python snake. Yeah, but they're kind of like, like maybe... But no, no, no, they're not. If you look carefully, they... No, I know, but it looks like it could be a two-headed snake. And that happens in nature quite a bit, at least more than maybe other types of animals. Anyways, so back to the camera stuff. So here's more photos from the camera. JPEG photos, testing out some different JPEG modes. Yeah, and I think... Not bad, not bad. This is a very low-cost, couple-dollar camera module, and it works quite well. Yeah, I think it'll be neat when you're able to build your own DIY camera. Yeah. Anyways, and that is Python Harmony News this week. Oh, Kidoke, we are an open source hardware company. It is open source hardware month. Go check out OHS, ohm.oshwood.org. And the latest thing that I saw, that was kind of cool. So Michael Weinberg was on the show and tell last week, talking about open hardware month, and he's like, there's a big surprise coming soon, and this is it. The guidelines for sharing FPGA designs are now published. Yay. For the folks who don't know what an FPGA is, what are they? An FPGA is a kind of chip that you can turn into any other kind of digital chip, which is really cool, because usually a microcontroller, you can program it with code, but you can't change the underlying peripherals of the underlying core. Like if it's a RP2040, it's an RP2040, it's an 8051, it's an 8051, it's a Zilog Z80, it's a Zilog Z80. With an FPGA, you can program it with any chip, but customize the chip itself. And it's instantly fast as well. Everything kind of happens at once, which is very powerful. A lot of people use FPGAs for, you know, very timing sensitive stuff, video stuff, where you have to push a lot of data around very quickly, or for prototyping new silicon. So when you're designing a new chip, you use an FPGA. Design it. All right. In addition to us being an open source hardware company, we have 2,553 guides to prove it. Yes. This week on the big board, Lady Aida, what do we got? Okay. All right, starting with, we've got, I like how it's a little, it's kind of like wide. Yeah. It's like chunky. We got from Dylan a whippersnapper project. Whippersnapper is our extension to Adafruit IO, comes free with Adafruit IO, where you can make projects without any code at all. So it's a no code interface for making IoT and sensor projects. And then, so just showing how to make a door alarm. So one example that emails you when the door opens. We also have a guide from JP on using those inductive coil LEDs to make models, showing a couple of different models. One is like a, like a Star Wars model. One is, I think, a figurine model. And we also did a Lego model. So different techniques and how to build a stand and how to really use these inductive LEDs in the previous way. Also got a guide from Ketney on the ANO directional navigation and scroll wheel rotary. So it's basically iPod classic wheel, you know, it's four buttons and then like a little rotary wheel that clicks and it's very tactily and enjoyable. We have that sensor and a breakout for it and Ketney wrote code and a guide for Arduino and circuit Python. And then from Liz Clark, no and Pedro, we've got this cool mini LED matrix audio visualizer. You can just plug one of our 13 by nine RGB LED matrices into a feather sense and run some circuit Python code that'll take fast Fourier transform and show you some cool bubbly LEDs. Okay, we got two more. Also Dan, I think either updated or wrote this guide on custom HID devices. So if you want a custom descriptor for an HID device, for example, you want to mimic a Microsoft rotary surface dial, you can do that now. It's something that, you know, was possible in Arduino and, you know, if you were willing to code some C code, you could do it in circuit Python, but now you can do it purely in Python. It's really cool and powerful. You can make custom HID devices. So if we don't natively support the device you want, we can still interface with it. And Dylan wrote another getting started with Whipper Snapper Guide. This one is just button press input. So it's a very beginner guide on like your first Whipper Snapper project. Okay. Manure City factory footage. This week we're going to do something a little different. Yeah. So on Friday of last week, it was Manure City. Like how we're in it, but we're not in it. Yeah. It was Manure City week and Adafruit is I think one of the only electronic manufacturers in Manhattan. I think so. I think so. And then it was also a manufacturing day. Yeah. So all in the same day. So we said, okay, fine, we'll do a factory tour. So this is a slight speed up. This isn't exactly, because I wanted to be around a little bit over a minute. So this is where we ship stuff. One of my desks. I have a desk on each floor here at Adafruit. But this is where we do a lot of the shipping and storing of things. All of this is velocity storage. So the things that we ship the most of are closest to the shipping stations. And you could see a whole bunch of Adafruit products around here. Things are a little different since we've had COVID happening in our lives. So obviously see people wearing masks. We changed some of the layout and some different things. And we're also continually trying to maximize our space. But I wanted to do a little video. So I asked Tano, who works here in manufacturing, to run down and make a quick video because it's really hard to do multi-floor live broadcast. And so this is the other part of the tour that we did. And then this side, this is the other side of one of our floors. This is where we have a whole bunch of storage. Yay, boxes of stuff. Stuff and stuff and stuff. All labeled and counted and accounted for and tracked and just where all the backlog. Back when we were an apartment company, storage was in the living room and shipping was also in there. We had a closet full of boxes. But now we have a lot more stuff. Yeah. So it definitely has that cost cofee a little bit. And you can see more of that area. Then we also did a little bit of filming of the other floor. And this is where we're at right now. So this is where we do a lot of manufacturing. You can see the pick-and-place machines here. So the two pick-and-place Samsung machines. The inspection space station, the oven, testers for the upcoming products, the nitrogen generators. You know, it spins around. The rework and testing benches. A lot of these are, we've actually spread out a lot of people. There's me. Hi. Hello. And then there's Phil over there. Hi. And then we've got the hack sign. And let's see what else. We've got all the real storage and component storage, old oven that we keep around in case we ever need it. And then a TARDIS. A TARDIS. Well, we kind of saw that a little bit. Okay. So that's tour. And then that's where we film. So this is where we film right here. This is where you see us. Hello. Yeah. That's where we're sitting right now. That's where we're sitting now. Huh. That's cool. I didn't realize it ended like that. Okay. And then I'm going to show the rest of the regular olfactory footage that we do each week. So here we go. And it wouldn't be a food factory footage unless you could see the Disney Marvel, whatever. Complex. I think I figured it out. We are the watcher. I guess we're watching it. What if this building is never completed? I won't interfere. I don't know, man. Except for once. Just going pretty fast. Yeah. Anyways. Okay. Let's do some 3D printing. Okay. We're going to play these back to back. We have a little visualizer and then we have this really neat speed up video of this like little lizard creature. Hey, what's up, folks? In this project, we're making an LED audio visualizer. We designed and 3D printed a case for this lovely little LED matrix and an Adafruit Feather. This is a 13 by 9 LED matrix that features the IS-31FL3741 LED driver. It's packed with 117 RGB LEDs that are 2 by 2 millimeters in size. Stem AQT connectors make it easy to plug and play over I2C so it's easy to connect to a microcontroller like the Feather RP2040. The Adafruit Feather Sense NRF52840 features a PDM MIMS microphone for audio projects. The LED driver features libraries for both circuit Python and Arduino so it's easy to quickly get up and running. In the demo code, RGB colors are set up in an array to generate a heat map of the incoming audio data. This demo code was ported by Liz Clark from the MicroLab Waterfall Spectrum Analyzer. This particular demo was written by Philip Berges and features a bounce effect when the audio is peaking. The MicroLab library allows you to crunch numbers fast in circuit Python with numpy-like commands to quickly process data. Be sure to check out the Learn Guide by Jeff Epler for a full breakdown on using this library in your projects. The LED matrix and Feather Sense NRF52840 are secured to a PCB bracket. It's secured to the 3D printed enclosure with M3 hardware screws. The case and back cover snap-fit together for an easy assembly. On the side of the case is a port opening for connecting the Feather over USB. We designed a built-in button pusher so you can use the reset button without having to take it apart. We had a lot of fun putting this one together and hope this inspires you to pick up the LED matrix and the Adafruit Feather Sense. Make sure to subscribe for more 3D printed and circuit Python projects from Adafruit. This week's INFPI is a Raltron crystal oscillator kit that I saw pop up on digikey.com slash new. They got a cool logo. Raltron apparently they're like I think in Miami, Florida. So it's cool they have really great weather there. Raltron. Yeah and they've also got great crystals so why not. It's a Rami technology company. I guess they're yeah small business and they do manufacturing and they're here in the US so let's check out this week's new product. Okay so the new product is the crystal resonator design kit so chances are you've used like the best trapper keeper. Basically it's a trapper keeper. So you know crystals you know if you if you've never used crystals in your electronics they're not necessarily like the bedazzly type crystals. Instead they're the kind of crystals that come in a metal tin. Usually you have to have two capacitors with them to stabilize the oscillator and inside the crystal actually is a little piece of piezo-resistant material. It's a crystal. It's not like a you know amethyst type crystal or like a quartz crystal but it is a crystal material and when voltage is applied across it it vibrates and it will you know oscillate back at a certain frequency and so by setting up in a feedback loop and you kick it once you will get you can get quite precise oscillations out of it. So you know one of the these are used for is creating a timing signal for microcontrollers and other chips that need to have a precise measurement of time because you know you can make an RC oscillator but RC oscillators they're not very precise. They have plus or minus maybe five or ten percent. Maybe you can sometimes tune them to get one percent but a crystal oscillator is going to work much much better. You're going to get you know maybe 20 to 50 ppm that's pulses per million or parts per million error rate which is pretty good for a timing oscillator and so you know oftentimes your microcontroller will use a crystal also as a source for a multiplier like a PLL to multiply that frequency but we'll get to that. So you know the most common crystal kind of used like in any electronics is the 32.768 kilohertz crystal. The reason you know that's quite an odd number like why 32.768 kilohertz? Well because that is a two to the 15 number and so if you have a binary counter in your microcontroller and binary counters are very inexpensive as it counts from zero up to 32.767 when it gets to 768 it'll flip over and that overflow will let you know that one second has passed so it's a very easy way to count one second so it's used for timing. So in this case this board that is shown here has a real-time clock so it's something that keeps time it runs for years on a coin cell battery and it can do that because 32 kilohertz is quite slow it's a common crystal value but it's slow enough that you're not running very fast electronics it sips power like you know like microamps are less. So there's a lot of different values so this kit this and I'll also open up the kit of course and show you the pages inside it has the most 32 kilohertz crystals like it has all sorts of different sizes and packages and also the load capacitors. Now yes oftentimes you have to pick the load capacitors that go with your crystal like if you look here on this Arduino board on the left you see there's kind of the metal tin and then above it there's two little yellow dots those are the load capacitors sometimes you pick them but actually sometimes I've noticed certain chips or devices they actually have the load capacitor like a tunable number inside the micro or like you kind of have to pick a certain loading value and so that's why they have multiple even though you know I tend to use like I don't know 12.5 picofarad for 32 kilohertz and maybe I use 18 picofarad for you know 12 or whatever they do give you a full range with multiple sizes and also load capacitances. So I showed you the 32 I call them 32 kilohertz but they're 32.768 they also have a lot of microcontroller you know common microcontroller values like if you have a USB microcontroller you're going to have 6 12 or 24 megahertz because USB is a 12 megahertz protocol and so you're going to have something that's like a multiple or a divisor of 12. A lot of microcontrollers also you'd like to run it like 8 or 16 or 20 or 40 megahertz those are pretty common values. The microcontroller sometimes runs at that value but again it's pretty common for inside the microcontroller there's a phase lock loop and so there's a non precise higher speed oscillator that they then tune against the precise lower speed oscillator and that way you can you know a lot of my controllers these days you may have noticed you can actually change the clock speed sometimes even on the fly so you know original AVR microcontrollers I think you could maybe clock divide only but in the SAMD 21 you know you can you can clock up and you can even overclock if you'd like or the SAMD 51 you overclock it to 200 megahertz even though it only has I think a 16 megahertz crystal on it but you know it's important especially if you're doing radio frequency stuff you want to have really good precise crystals. Next up there are a couple of weird values in here too like 27.12 megahertz you're probably like okay that's an odd value and it's not even like a multiple of two what is up with that this is a RFID board so this is a PN532 and it's an RFID transceiver board an RFID for like NTAG and my fair chips is 32 sorry 13.56 megahertz that's the frequency and so multiply that by two you get 27.12 so it's another thing if you have certain RF work you're doing you'll need to really get that crystal to be the exact multiple also if you're doing you know video stuff old NTSC video you had to have the color burst crystal and it was like 3.96 megahertz the crystal actually does matter you don't round up or down you want to get the exact value and again you want to have the the loading capacitors match because that'll get your value as close as possible to the stated. So inside the binder are all these pages and I think that these are like I'll show them also in the overhead but I think they're pages that are used for like like baseball cards or something yeah this is clever so each inside there's five there's a five piece tape of each crystal and they're in the little clear pockets and then behind it is a printed out piece of paper that goes that you know is behind the clear part and it has the part number the frequency the stability the load capacitance the ESR operating mode operating temperature and size and then there's also a short URL that you can go to get the data sheet and also a QR code one nice thing about the short URL they got their own URL shortener big ups for that because it would have been really easy to like use the Google one or bitly they actually got their own which is very smart don't rely on other people for your URL shortening what are the chances of like a giant global network going down and no one being able to communicate probably not okay well it's available on digikey that's right you can pick this up digikey also has capacitor kits and resistor kits I always recommend having a resistor kit and capacitor kit I use them all the time we sell some you know in the shop and digikey also has them nothing beats having a resistor capacitor kit you never know you need some weird value sure you're all here and a crystal kit also really useful because sometimes you don't realize you're laying at your board you get all the parts you don't realize oh shoot like the you know the crystal I need is the wrong size or I need a slightly different frequency I misread it I thought it was 20 it's 24 the crystals are using everything right so it's it's not a bad idea just like you have a your your kit of regulators your kit of resistors your kit of connectors get a crystal kit as well yes all right I'll show this book and then we'll okay so design kits for crystal resonators thank you so some instructions on how to use it and then basically this is how it works so you see that there's these clear pages and they're used for like baseball cards or whatever and then underneath it there is for each one a description so these are like super tiny 1.2 by 1 millimeter 32 kilohertz crystals and then moving up there is 3.2 by 1.5 and then they've got 32 megahertz they've got 25 megahertz 27.1 to 27 the other one too 32 37.4 30.4 40 48 16 20 24 25 they have a couple different frequencies in different sizes but they kind of cover them all these are all the kind of the most common frequencies I've seen and of course once you've used these in your production and you're happy with the package and the size and the stability you can of course use that part number type indigiki and then purchase it by the real your heart's content so you go you got 66 different values and then 55 sorry five pieces of each value so multiply that out okay and that is this week's high on MPI tiktok okay let's uh show the code time of flight and then let's jump right to new products lady okay new new new here we go okay okay first up this is a revision revision revision it's actually such a revision that is I don't even actually call it a revision because you don't even know you don't even know what changed so if you look carefully you'll see the dfn version of this chip the lcs uh oh nine two seven oh nine two whatever uh is no longer available we can only get the bga version and so I respond the board for a bga chip it's a smaller chip is exactly the same component same pinout same functionality it's just now it's now this is available it's just available and this is part of this so look at next up um next up we've got these little uh dust covers uh we had them we got no while ago for like usb and usbc and usba and hdmi and micro is being people like oh i want mini hdmi so this is the mini hdmi plug if it's perfectly into your pi zero which is kind of like the most handy thing and if you want micro hdmi uh little dust cover plugs we've got those two these are rare so they're not as cheap um but you get a pack of 10 so you plug to your heart's content and if you lose them no worries you've got more um actually wish i could i should get like the 3.5 millimeter plug because like you know i i actually get a little like a it's dusty in my room and like when i plug in my headphones sometimes it's like a little dust inside so i'm gonna i'm gonna pick up some of those next up um we've also got an update we uh finally got in the six pin version of this uh pico blade i think it's one point two five millimeter pitch pico blade connector um you know a to a type you know people are making their own you know boards they want a very nice durable extremely compact connector this will do the job quite nicely with six pins next up um we're also carrying uh you know we we stopped a couple different we stuck the 24 pin version of these extendos and now we have them in 20 30 40 sorry 20 30 yeah whatever oh actually let me look we've got a variety of choices for you and you can see the photos of them as Lady Uday gets these out yes this time there's time okay all right i'm gonna show this off yes so um i think these are the 20 30 and 60 uh because uh because we already had the 40 and the 24 um so basically if you have something with a flex connector um and you want to extend it what you would do is you get fpc cable which we you can cut an existing fpc cable down or you can get another one and what's just nice about this is that it has two uh little ear knobs on each side and then when you plug them in like this they're now connected through and so you can use this to extend your flex circuits and they do so very compactly i do like how cute and adorable these are so you have flex cables if we don't have the exact flex cable you need uh check did you key they stock you know flex cables of every sort and kind um we use them for basically if you have a 40 pin tft cable uh you have 40 pin tft you want to extend it farther away you use one of these plus a um plain flex cable like so and make a little extendo out of them so um it's very inexpensive and compact and uh i think i kind of like these more than the pcb versions because they're they don't they don't get in the way they don't snag on anything all right next up okay next up from aid tech um we've got two of these little suitcasey like storage bins these are very small storage bins we also store we also have like these uh snap open boxes but this is like all in one um so the gray one is got clear tops i also got labels if you want to label them and then we also have a black one which is anti-static but the tops aren't clear so there's kind of two options here for which one you want um anti-static of course is better for storing chips but you you'll definitely have to label each one because you can't see through it so let's show on the overhead so one thing is is these are smaller than you probably think um well they're they're this well i mean i i felt like they were larger it's like a slice of a lunchbox yeah it's like a lice it's like a lunchbox but but slimmer i mean they're not that small but they're they're definitely compact um and what i do like is that both sides have these little storage bins and so you know you can see through it and you can also label them but it's good for um a small zoom in here do you want to zoom no no no no no no no no no no no i'm zooming in okay i'm in the box that's okay sorry i'm zooming out okay um okay so inside here we've got um you know resistors or something again this is not the anti-static box so you don't want to um you can store chips in it if if you know you don't care you're not worried about it um but then you can you know it's nice and flat so you can see all the components pick them up uh store them and i do like that they have nice uh big finger friendly latchy thingies and then you can hear it latch open and close uh connectors you can store some connectors but it's not big so you know you can't put in make your own electronic event calendar yeah that's mentioned well there's this is like for like many months i don't remember how many it's like 150 boxes i don't remember the number but it's a large number of containers um so again this is the clear version and then um it does latch closed and then this is the anti-static version so as you expect um you can't see through it because it's anti-static plastic but i think one of these hold on let's see she said it was in the middle there it is it's a little game okay you can store chips sorry this way oh wait this got flipped yeah i think you flipped it or i flipped it um yeah so um good for storing chips and then of course you'll want to label it but uh scott recommended these um they're very cute and adorable and they're great if you don't have a lot of space in your um workshop but you want to have a little kit of components and you don't want to like store all those little bags with the labels on them you just take the parts out and you put them here and then this is you know between these two like this is kind of all you need to basically have a full electronic component lab all right next up okay um from chromatech um so they contacted us and uh they make a thing that people have been asking for so these are momentary and toggle buttons um that have a neopixel in the middle so if you want to light up the ring um you know you can see there's like three pins in the middle and that's like the normal like the common normally open normally close switch and then the four pins on the outside are for like the neopixels as part of the ring so you treat it like a neopixel you send a neopixel data to it and it glows and it glows nice and smoothly um you don't have to worry about PWMing each RGB pin uh so it's it's very easy to use and it comes with a cable harness so you see here like the you know there's like this long tail coming out of it um so that tail you can detach it but don't recommend it um instead you know keep it attached and you can use that um to you can you can detach it but like instead of soldering to those um lugs you can just solder to the ends of these wires and you don't have to end up like soldering to your buttons it's also makes it easier to do installation so it's kind of a very fancy um neopixel LED momentary button or latching button and then another nice thing is the neopixel signal there's the output too so you can chain them if you'd like okay uh next up the circuit python seven poster um we're going to hold this up this is actually another example of like weird supply chain stuff so you think posters would be easy to get uh we normally have these right before the launch um but this everything's taking longer everything takes longer so we have it now and half the amount you expect to get but this is a really neat poster um if you order one you might get a surprise and there might be a previous version poster in there too sometimes we do that if we have any leftover um these are limited edition as in like we only make a few we only make one for our team yes and then like if anyone else gets them um great but um you know the contributors in the community and a lot of the folks that that's where we uh send these out to first but they're available now and this is the great merge poster as well yes i'm naming that the great merge the unnamed micro python python becoming best friends we have we are actually keeping up yeah all right and the star of the show tonight besides you ladies our community our customers the ate a fruit team is this uh new breakout the vl 53 l one x it's actually a popular sensor and if you can tell by the part number i actually designed this a while ago and i kind of forgot to release it um but i finally got around to it again so the vl 53 one l one x is a time of flight distance sensor uh we've already stocked the vl 60 180 which is like the first gen the vl 53 l zero x which is the second gen which i think you do up to two meters and then the 53 l one x can go up to four meters um it's quite a powerful and uh fast time of flight sensor you can get 50 hertz resolution i think the cone is about 20 degrees so it's it's not nearly as wide as like sonar like sonar can be can spread out quite wide you can get bouncing effects um this is you know fairly fairly precise uh comes on a stem iqt connector um you know it's plug and play you know another nice thing about this sensor is it uh does have a um uh default address of o x 29 but you can change it um if you connect up the um shutdown pin like it does have the ability so if you have multiple of them the the library that is released actually by st thankfully they released narduino library um can can remap the addresses it doesn't permanently remap them so it kind of has to do it every time um but it makes it a lot easier for you to connect multiple of these sensors so they're great for robotics or um like human computer interfaces or like anytime you want to measure up to four meters of distance um very accurately very precisely all right do you want to show a demo i do but i need to find what micro usb cable point all right well why are you doing that there's one here but so many cables i can find you can if you want no no no okay he was right here okay so okay so of course it's pointing at the floor so i can point it at the ceiling which is about three means probably hitting that lamp up there uh but you know four meters away pointed at me but it updates at 50 hertz and um and then i'm gonna make my hand get closer okay okay get closer get closer close close close close i will say it's not good after you know if you get too close it's not good under like 20 wow that's neat like 20 i mean it says it's closer but it's not i don't think it's rated for that distance the vl 6180 i think is better at low distances but um but what this one is good for is very long distances again it can do up to four meters um which is cool it's great for it's a great upgrade basically if you have a sonar and you want something with a narrower cone of interest and um you know you still get that four meter distance okay 12 feet or so and that's new products okay so uh don't forget it's time of flight and you can use that for anything that's in stock um start putting your questions over on discord adford dot it slash discord if you put your question in before we do it again sometimes it's hard to scroll and find them and uh you can hang out all the time and ask questions in all the different channels but let's do some top secret why y'all are loading up some questions sure from the vault all right so we're going to show two videos and then we're going to show a preview of the new graphics for desk of lady and so the first one is a new product that we're going to have in the store soon and next one is the updi stuff that you're working on yes early and what is this hey i am checking out a new sample i got this is kind of cool it's a stand um and i think it'd be really useful for hot air work so when i do hot air rework i usually like i'm kind of holding it and i'm like tweezing and that's annoying because i have to hold it but this stand holds it for you and then it can put your board underneath and i can do all my tweezing and i don't have to worry about holding this and uh you can go up and down maybe this looks pretty cool so i'm kind of liking the sample i'm going to order this put in the food shop there you go nice work stand is this well i finally put together my first at tiny updi based programmer and tester kit this is for the new at tiny 817 breakout um unlike many avrs this uh new series it's programmed with a uart system called updi um and i have this running the programmer itself is running on this metro m zero so it's like hey where's the board so i'm going to insert the board put the right orientation like this plug it down and you'll see um you know it does fuse checks it erases the chip it programs it it actually does a full test of the the gpi over the product as well um this is cool because it's so fast even compared to using something like a usb console cable with a pi mcu prog which takes like 20 to 40 seconds this is like two seconds to program only thing to watch out for if you're using updi is every time you write a fuse you have to erase to unlock the chip and it took me a couple days to figure out but now i know okay and then um we'll probably deploy these graphics on sunday um as you can tell nature's healing like when you're dealing with uh multiple crises for you know almost a couple years um you don't have time to do some of the graphics stuff you want to do so this is the new retro look of desolatiate i'm going to show the the video intro with the the music that jp just did and uh we're probably going to change up the music every once in a while we're going to try to update graphics all across the things that we're doing but here it is and that's off secret it is retro back in the vault okay we're going to do the questions now okay here we go you ready yeah some of these yeah as we speed around yeah we're going to do speed arcs okay i understand okay um let's see first uh question i wanted to build a text to speech project but want to transmit the audio for bluetooth the speakers what would be the best way to do that uh a raspberry pi will do the job really well it has the text to speech code using something like festival or there's other things and then the audio you can pipe it out of bluetooth automatically with a raspberry pi so that would work really well next up uh question repost the data sheet for the uh lc 709203 f8 if your field gauge says that it's for single so life those i assume it cannot be used with battery packs that are in the store like the 440 micro amp hour or 660 um sorry 6600 live hours or 10 amp hours correct or is my interpretation wrong you can use it with those packs you can't use it with anything that has two packs in series to have a higher voltage basically has to be no more than 4.2 volts when charged okay uh let's see do you have a favorite brand or anyone have a favorite brand here of hot air stations the ones in the adafruit shop are the ones that i've liked the most we have a low-cost one and a fancy one yeah those are the two best ones next up uh question adafruit friends or adafruit can you recommend some affordable types of translucent material to diffuse neopixel ring sticks matrix etc try the led acrylic that we have in the shop i think we sell a one foot by one foot section and then we have a smaller section too um you'll have to laser cut them or you can score and cut them but nothing diffuses leds and looks as good as that led acrylic okay uh will the new time of flight board have a certain have circuit python support at some point um i'm not sure when i will get around to it but um i i think i will be able to port the library over what is the resolution of the time of flight sensor can it do more than one millimeter i would like better than one millimeter at 25 to 50 millimeters the software delivers one millimeter but does the center do better no i don't even think it does one millimeter accuracy um for sub precision you'll have to pay a lot for something different okay let's see uh oh any oh no that was something folks are help helping each other out for that uh is it possible to run more than one new pixel eight on a processor not no it takes over the processor we use like all timers okay uh looks like we got that one uh people have a bunch of new pixels okay i think i got through those let me see if there's any uh how precise is the distance for the time of flight sensor you can check the data sheet i think it's a couple millimeters um precision it is um one or accurate right it's it'll give you a number the number it gives you is a millimeters um but i don't you know i think it's within like five percent like two two percent or something of the distance yeah like just when i was eyeing in everything i'm just like wow this is really good it's it's it's better than a sonar for sure right time of flight you're gonna get really good it's basically light our um accuracy and precision but if you want the actual true numbers uh check the data sheet i'm not going to quote them and get them wrong okay um for the mag tag um we don't ship that with uh circuit python no is there a reason we don't ship it with circuit by that yeah because esp support is constantly updating so just install the latest version it's very easy to okay all right um i think just about how precise this is looks like folks had the same question on this one thanks for writing the updated num chuck library you're welcome um i think we got them all oh yes okay great all right thank you everybody that was that was yeah we got through them those are the questions i mean like you know for folks who watch the show every week we folks are answering and helping each other out throughout the show so thank you for that yeah also um thanks for saving your questions for the end so let's uh wrap up the show okay time of flights to code thanks so much including the sensor that we put in that's right uh special thanks to tukar who's running stuff behind the scenes in our aid of fruit select channel special thanks to everyone in the chat that was helping each other out tonight everyone who showed up in the show and tell looks like an epic show and tell i can't wait to see that and uh if you're here watching this thanks for sticking with this for the last you know decade or so or if you're just new or if you've been with this for the last couple of years um i've said this that we have an all company meeting called stay the fruit that we do every week and you know there's there's ups and downs when you're on a company and especially over the last 18 months it's been just really hard for for all sorts of reasons um but if you are someone who's looking for like little glimmers of hope like i think a lot of us are um things are getting better um we have a hundred plus people we're all vaccinated uh new york city there's so much stuff going on the halloween parade is back we're doing a ton of decorations here i think october is our month that uh you know we all thought it was going to be over the summer but um took an extra september yeah september was was kind of like a leak over of the summer week it was still quite messy and uh you know i think it's pretty clear how we get out of this and and us as a company decided to do this and um you know a lot of us here we know we're working on something bigger than uh just you know an online website or you know even just making electronics or something bigger and more special um and i'm glad that you're all part of it and you've been you've been through it um i feel like i've aged like 50 years but um maybe we can uh chill out over the holidays or something i don't know but anyways thanks everybody we'll see everybody next week that's our show this has been a native reproduction here's your mom zina later