 Hi, I'm an MPI brought to you by digikey. Thank you digikey. This week's it's Orion fan. Yes, although it's not a fan. I mean, I'm a fan of this. Yeah. And you can see I've got my MIT shirt on because this is an MIT themed I an MPI. All right, let's kick it. So this is the ML 2010. And this is a mini lab kit available from Orion labs. And it's kind of great because they do make fans. And then like all of a sudden they made this like lab suitcase. What is this thing up? Okay, so this is kind of an all in one like prototyping power supply. It's particularly good at analog circuitry prototyping and development. It's basically got like a full test lab inside of it plus a gigantic breadboard prototyping area and more and it comes in like a suitcase that you can pick up move around plug in whenever you want to work on your project and then you can close it up to safely put stuff away. So the reason I was like when I saw this, like oh, this is so cool is because it reminded me of MIT when you do the digital or analog lab classes, you have a thing called a nerd kit. And that's what the nerd kit looks like. It's also a suitcase, although it's more breadboardy stuff. And you see like there's some power supply stuff at the top. You have a built in power supply. I don't think they had built in a sweep generator or like, you know, function analyzer, any of that stuff the way the ML 2010 does. But it was something that you would use to design your analog or digital circuits. So for example, here's 611 digital lab, you'd see that the the kits would become very, very complicated, very quickly with lots of wires. But what the really nice thing was that, you know, when you came to lab, you'd work on your project, you'd open up the suitcase, you'd plug in all the wires and chips and get all that working and use the oscilloscope on the bench. And then when you were done, you would close it up and put it back into your locker that you'd have. And then, you know, the locker would have a combo lock on it. So, you know, there was this joke after everyone would finish their lab classes that they're like, oh man, I wish I could keep the nerd kit. And you couldn't buy them, they were only available while you took the class. And nobody even came up with the idea of like maybe not returning it. Like we didn't even want to know what would befall us if we didn't return the kit. Like you had to give it back. And, you know, there's been other similar like trainer kits like Heath kit has this trainer kit that has, I think a built in a function generator built in power supply and a little breadboarding area. But of course, these are not made anymore either. These are from Heath kit. Although there's some really cool documentation about this. And also these mini labs are kind of similar to also to the, you know, Radio Shack 150 in one where you would have, you know, this workspace. And then in this case, it doesn't use a breadboard using these little spring contacts that you would connect wires to. And it would let you sort of prototype your basic project. So think of this, the ML 2010 is sort of a combo. It has way more capabilities than the original nerd kit has not just a power supply also function and sweep generators. And also like switches and buttons and speakers stuff that the nerd kit didn't have but is kind of borrowed from this 150 in one style electronic kit from Tandy. So this is what the ML 2010 looks like from above. So massive prototyping area. And you can see all the knobs and little mini breadboarding areas. So the idea is that you can actually with just wires connect to the little, the different interface elements in this kit. And, you know, you can always solder to the prototyping area on the right, if you like, but you can get going very quickly with just sort of list breadboarding prototyping style. So this is all the labeled components will go through them. You see, there's inputs, outputs, like I said, power supply function generator and also something D sub connectors, perf board area and a fused on off switch on the top right. So on the top left sweep ramp generator. So this is really good for analyzing analog circuits and filters. You can have different waveforms. It looks like triangle square sign. I don't have a top of my head the frequencies, but you know, you can tell it's like from one Hertz up to one mega Hertz at least. And then two pots for changing sorry, three pots for changing the DC offset, the amplitude and frequency within the decade counter range like one to 10 10 to 100, 1k to 10k. There's also the clock out from the function generator that you can go into your oscilloscope, if you want to synchronize to that pulse generator also good for analog circuitry analysis. You also have the LED indicators, you can just connect those up to your digital circuits, two power supplies. I really like this both positive and negative 18 volt adjustable as well as fixed negative and positive 12 and fixed negative and positive five. And I think you get an amp out of each speaker and two generic analog pots, you could use that for input and output. The speaker is actually on the right hand side. Bottom left, you've got some D subs, I think 25 pin and looks like nine pin as well as well as a B and C that you can use for your signal generator input or outputs. And on the right, a bunch of switches, some of them are the bottom set the eight are digital logic switches. So those are going to be like from zero to five volt like logic high and low. And then there's also momentary and toggle switches that you can connect to different voltages so you can like turn on or off or switch analog voltages. And then on the right, there is that's a perf board. So that's solderable perf board, you can of course get it's removable. So you can solder on circuitry that needs higher frequency, you don't want to use a subtlest breadboard or has like a weird shape doesn't plug into a breadboard very nicely. And then on the bottom, some more switches and then you know the other side of the D subs to connect cables for passing data, or you want to use serial input or output and then some more B and C jacks as well. All the specs, you know, you can check specifications in the app, no data sheet, but basically, you know, you could use this with TTL logic, but it's going to be really good for people doing analog circuits, maybe some lower frequency RF audio, especially would be a good use case here, filter design, I don't think what else like, you know, transistor level logic, it means a little retro, but there's still people doing this kind of work, so the power supplies and the function generator I think are a pretty sweet deal. Like I said, you know, one amp from a variety of sources and it's all fused and goes through one power supply so you don't need a separate power supply. The pulse generator and sweep amp generator as well looks like, you know, they go up to like 3.3 volts and the TTL logic can go up to like one megahertz or so. And then speaker potentiometers, indicators, switches, LEDs, it's just kind of nice, you know, it's you have maybe your chips and your op amps and your resistors and capacitors on the working breadboard area and then, you know, you don't have to worry about having a potential or dangling off with some wires, you just connect to the little breadboard on the mini kit and you've got your multiple potentiometers, multiple switches, and LEDs and speaker. It is in stock, yes. Not inexpensive, but I think this would be really good for schools, labs, companies, especially when you have somebody who's working on a project, they want to be able to put it away safely, bring it back out. It's meant to last for a very long time. So, you know, maybe not individual makers would, you know, want to throw down to get one of these nice lab kits, but I could definitely see if you have a prototyping lab in your school or office or company, having one of these will be really handy.