 it's Ask an Engineer. Hey everybody and welcome to Ask an Engineer. It's me Lady Aida the engineer with me Mr. Lady Aida on camera control and this is Ask an Engineer. We do one hour of news and updates and code and discounts and new products and projects and more. All of that was happening in the maker community and we're broadcasting live from downtown Manhattan. That's where we have all those manufacturing machines that you saw in the video. We make stuff. We make stuff and we ship it to you so you can make more stuff. Wow, it's all about making. Yep. Let's get right to it because we've got a code and we've got all sorts of stuff going on. A lot of double new products as well. We do. We have a show. All right. So let's get right into it. On tonight's show, the code is Proto Under. 10% off an age of freestyle. All the way up to a little 59 p.m. Eastern Time. Or Pro Tounder. Yeah, whatever way you want to pronounce this fine. All the way up to a little 59 p.m. Eastern Time tonight. You use it and you also have free stuff to talk about that in a bit. Talk a little bit about our live shows and screen show and tell. We did not have a desk of Lady 8 over the weekend. We had family visits so we took off but we'll be back this Sunday. Yep. We'll be doing a highlight from JP's product pick of the week. A little bit of time travel news, a little bit of stuff that's going on, some updates to Aida Box and more. We got some New York City factory footage. We got a bunch of videos because we are catching up. So we've got four 3D printing videos tonight. We're going to do some iron and PI analog devices this week. Part of the digi-key. A bunch of top secret. A bunch of new products. We're going to answer a bunch of questions. All that and more. We answer your questions. Aida fruit dot it slash discord discord dot gt slash Aida fruit. That's what we're doing tonight. Big show. We're here till nine. Ask an engineer. Okay. So yeah. So we're going hacking. Proto Under is the code. You get free stuff. Lady 8 one. Yep. Yeah. 10% off would use the code. And when you order from the Aida fruit shop, we always love that because we get to give you some freebies. Yeah. When you order from Aida fruit dot com, $99 or more, you get this beautiful gold and black PCB coaster made with two millimeter thick PCB material and you get some bumpers to protect your desk, put your hot or cold drinks on it and look cool and gothy. One for you. None or more. We're still giving away the KB 2040 and RP 2040 based pro micro pinout compatible microcontroller board with all these extras like buttons and LEDs and USB-C. We might be changing this app soon. So if you want one of these for free order soon, 149 or more. Yeah. We still have our free UPS ground shipping in the content for the United States. $199 or more dollars in the store and you get free ground shipping. And finally, we are still doing our circuit playground express giveaway because the chip shortage is over. So we have lots of circuit playground expresses to give away all in one dev board for the SAMD 21. It runs code.org CS discoveries, micro Python, Arduino, circuit Python, make codes, micro list, all sorts of stuff. It's a little little dev board with LEDs and buttons and sensors all built in. So it's a great way to learn how to program without any stopping or tools. Okey-dokey. Next up, we have a bunch of live shows. We just did our show and tell. That just happened a few moments ago. A little bit of a recap. So on the show and tell, watch it. And you're already streamed. Liz showed a really cool Elgato control using circuit Python. He used this physical switch to control things. We use this type of light. So I'd like to do that for our setup here. So I don't have to use the software that comes with it. JP had a really cool retro camera. Sonamoon had an LED fan and you can check out their journey of making at PCBs, flexible PCBs, and ordering stuff from JLCPCB and more. Mark had a flight simulator with physical controllers in the circuit Python. It's on the playground too. It's on the playground. Yeah. Do you check out? We'll go over some of the playground guides when we get to the guide section of our show. And the nanographics had an outstanding, excellent demo of what an electron microscope can do by making a, by using a sample to look at an electron microscope mirror, essentially. Yeah. So you look at the look at it. Yeah, there's a used basically a round mirror, a gazing ball. Yeah. That we get charged up and then could turn into an electron mirror. Yeah. And what's neat is like this stuff is actually possible to use and find and make and nanographics has some open source hardware they're releasing. So if you've ever been interested in like how particles work or how you can use it to do imaging and more, this was stuff that, you know, maybe once in a while you'd see a photo of something from an electron microscope and be like, that's neat, but like how does it work? And is it actually something that you could do? I've just come by every week showing some stuff. So check out some past show and tells and check out this one. We do show and tell every single week. Next week we'll be doing show and tell and next week is also Aida Box. So during this time next week, we'll have an Aida Box unboxing. Let's stop by. On Sundays, we have Desk of Lady Aida. We skipped last week. We had a family member visit. Yay. And so we'll be returning this Sunday and we'll be doing the great search and all that. So stay tuned. And then JP's product pick of the week was a week previous. So we're going to play in the previous week's highlight. It is the 3.5 inch TFT capacitive touch feather wing. You can plug nearly any feather into. There it is just running really quickly through some images there. I am reading one finger X and Y. Here's two, three, four, five fingers. It's really happy to report all that data. We're lucky enough to have a guest on the show and that is Liz Clark. RP2040 plugged into the back. And what you see on the front here are four buttons. There is a touch button library. It works with display IO. So you can add these buttons to the screen. And when I press the buttons, you'll see that they register touch. But because this is multi touch, I can press all four buttons at once and it sees that they've been touched. And this has been my product pick this week. It is the 3.5 inch TFT feather wing with capacitive touch. Check out GPs workshop tomorrow and then on Friday it's deep dive with Tim Friday at 5 p.m. Eastern. Good news, everybody. If you or an interbox subscriber and you've been waiting to do your unboxing, it is next week. So Wednesday, March 20th. 8 p.m. Eastern time. Join JP for the return of 8 a box. It is going to be a fun, exciting, interesting. This 8 a box channel. This 8 a box time. Yeah. One week. Yeah. So we'll be doing show until next week and then 8 a box unboxing. So that means we're back on track with 8 a box. We really wanted to get 8 a box out the door. Again, you know, essentially the thing that kind of spiraled everything out of controller at the four year anniversary of, you know, the lockdown stuff like that. So there was COVID and there was a supply chain shortage for all sorts of reasons. And then it took a little while to get parts pretty much like two years. So the second we could launch a box again, we did. Thank you everyone for your patience and support. We very much appreciate it. And some new folks were able to sign up and we'll open it up for more for the next 8 a box, which you should be shipping over the summer. Yeah, you can sign up now. We have some slots. We do. Because some folks didn't renew. So now is a good time because we will fill up. Yeah, you know, every, we actually were full up before. And we finally got some people managed to sign up. We only have like a one week window. But now you have time to sign up for 022. Yeah. Okay, let's do some Python on her bar. Python hard hardware this week and then newsletter. You want to talk about a few things? So we have a Python nine release candidate. Yes. Finally, enough bugs were squished by Jephler and Dan and Scott and some other contributors that we were able to get out of beta out of alpha and into a release candidate. That means we really want more people to use 9.0 find bugs. We will squish them. They're doing an excellent job. And we hope to do an actual release in the next week or two. So everybody will be updated. This is a major release. There's a couple of breaking changes. Just documented. You can see the blog posts for the changes. I think display.show is one that I think got moved and also other API changes. SD card. Mount location needs to exist as a, you know, can't make a fake directory on fly. And then what was the third big one? Boy, I don't remember. There's a couple of little details. An MPY format change also because we merged with upstream micro Python. So yeah, you're going to have to re-download your MPY files, but that's a great reason to use circup or the bundle fly. Okay. And then what else did you want to talk about this week? Let's see. The other thing that I thought was interesting, I don't remember. I told you, but then I took it. Yeah. Was it in this? Was it in this? Boy, I don't remember what it was. Shoot. So jogging memory as we go through this enormous newsletter. There's a lot of cool projects. I like this. Oh, well, the pager thing was funny. No, wait, there was something other than the pager thing. What was it? There was the RC candidate. Can you keep going down? No, no. Boy, I don't remember. I feel a little full. I should write it down and send it to you, so I don't remember. Well, we want to talk about it. Well, this was actually cool. The embedded Swift was that was quite interesting. So I think Apple is like, oh, hey, micro Python is kind of cool, but we want people to use Swift. So they've created Swift that can run on SCM and RP2040. So I don't write Swift, but it's like, it's kind of interesting to see a language go back, right? Not just to require more intense circuitry, but going back in time. I don't remember what the other thing, but the pager step was, I think, funny. Because when we did pager projects, we did some pop sag decoding projects using a pager to get the... There's a bipolar signal to a differential signal that you can parse with a microcontroller. And so we did a pop sag decoder that used an existing pager. You'd use the guts of a pager as the antenna receiver, and people were like, totally how rage you're like, how dare you decode pager? And I'm just like, it's not encrypted, guys. If you're using pager data, it's out there. And there are people who still use emergency responders, still use the pager network. So I thought it was, yeah, it's not so different than if you have a radio scanner. You can listen in on radio signals from police, fire department, and emergency. So I thought that was kind of cool to use Python to decode pop sag and print it out. Yeah, I mean, people, you know, I remember a kingpin was decoding pop sag pagers in like 97. So yeah, this is a perennial project. Every generation, we just cover this. And then it's not DJ Devon mentioned that General had mentioned is the weekly meeting. There were about 300 plus unique contributors between eight and nine. Remember what it was, we hit the 9000th issue slash pull request, we had PR number 9000. So now we were over 9000. There it is. That's right. It was a pull request 9000. So it's it's issue and pull request, but still it's like, that's a number. That's a big deal. Also, it's like nice. Yeah, we're almost up to 3000 learn guides we have, you know, we've had over 9000 issues fixed. Yeah, we're up to nine. So this is a thing in 9000. It's thematic. Yeah, one of the cool things about circuit Python is this is open source. We want the world to have it and use it. And it's, you know, it's doing surprising things that we never expected or planned to do. And there's lots of people working on it. And it's something that people run their businesses on, they they're able to make hardware and not have to worry about the latest firmware. We generate all the firmware bits and stuff. And there's easy ways to. Can I say, can I say a quick thing? So one thing that's interesting is from a previous IMPI, which I had to do the text, the, you know, the layered module, we didn't realize is actually they have a micro Python build for the module for the NRF. And it's, it's, you know, they don't release the source code, but it's still very interesting to see more and more companies are using micro Python as a way to get their valve boards up and running quickly. Yeah. A lot of developer investment time. Yeah. I think since so many people know Python, I think that's been the change in the past. Maybe there's a lot of efforts, like maybe they'll try Arduino, but I think now Python seems to be where, where folks to get started really faster going. Okay. That's Python on hardware. We do this every single week. You can get this delivered to your inbox. You can get on GitHub. You can check it out on AWS for daily, all those places. Check it out. Okay. Let's do some open source hardware news, Lady Eda, on the big board. Yeah, we have almost 3000. Okay. So most of the more updates this week. So if it's a bit to ESP 32, we now have whippersnapper support. Can you click on the that guide? You can see all the way to the left. Click on that and then scroll down to whippersnapper setup. If you want to use whippersnapper, which is our no code IoT platform, literally no codes required. You can do everything over a website to upload the firmware to the device and then you can plug and play, I sportsy sensor. So no soldering, no coding required. You can click on essentials. Go down. Essentials up. And then scroll down. And click on I sportsy sensor. So you can plug in, I think in this case we have a temperature sensor you plug in and then you can use Adafruit IO, scroll down, scroll down. You can use Adafruit IO to add the sensor device and immediately start plotting it and you can have, keep going down. And you can have like alerts that tell you when the temperature reaches this, you know, above or below a certain temperature. Keeps going. And you can add multiple sensors and then you can use the fee for different IoT logging or if you want to like reference it later. You can also set how often the data is sent. So as quick as every 30 seconds or as slow as every 15 minutes. I must have like other, can you like click back and forth? Or can I use the mouse? Between where, yeah. Yeah, I'll just use the mouse. So also Neopixel. So, you know, onboard Neopixel and you can, I think it's really cool he had little gifts that he made of configuring the color of the LED and the LED changes color. So check that out. Good work on Tyeth for getting support for this board in Whippersnapper. It's always, you know, it's open source. Anyone can do it, but still we like to do it. You'll have a new guide from Melissa on setting up the web workflow for the Memento. So the Memento is a camera that uses the ESP32 S3, which means you can use Wi-Fi workflow. You don't have to connect the USB cable. You can connect over Wi-Fi to download data, upload data, reprogram it. And in this case, I think she set up a time lapse and then you can download the images over Wi-Fi from the camera somewhere where you can't get to it. And then finally, we have a couple updates for the AidaBox021, just adding more projects and links. Just don't forget that unboxing is next week. Okay. And then as we mentioned before, you can go to Playgrounds. It's linked at the top. You can be forced. There's anyone. Oh yeah, already? Yeah. The Flight Sim Controller. All right. Custom Flight Sim Controllers with CircuitPies on and Moe Flight. And then check out all the rest of the guides and more in Playgrounds. You can post up there. Share your projects with folks. And you can see if your project was on the show and tell or if we've, you know, love all these, but we love all them. We'll give you a little badge. Sometimes we love some a little bit more. All right. Here is factory footage. That's factory footage of the week this week. We're going to do some 3D printing. We have four videos because we're catching up. So we're going to play these back to back to back to back. It's going to be like about four minutes altogether. So we'll see you on the other side. This is Memento, Adafruit's DIY programmable camera dev board. With Memento, you can take photos using the fancy camera software with CircuitPython. You can take photos and save them as JPEGs or animated GIFs. You can even apply image filters like this Game Boy-like effect. You can use the built-in button to change settings like the photo resolution and switch between different image filters. The Memento features the ESP32S3 Wi-Fi chip from Expressive. It's a dual-core processor running at 240 megahertz with 8 megabytes of flash and 2 megabytes of PS RAM capable of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth LE. On the front, it's got a 5 megapixel camera sensor with built-in autofocus. It's got a USB-C port for programming and built-in LiPo battery charging. The built-in color TFT display has a resolution of 320 by 240 at 1.5 inches. There's also six user buttons, a microphone, a speaker buzzer, and an accelerometer. On the side, there's two 3-pin JST ports and a Stem-A-QT port along with a microSD card slot. The LED ring plate is an add-on for Memento. It features 8 new pixel LEDs for adding unique lighting effects to your photos. You can cycle between colors in the LED color mode using the direction buttons. You can also adjust the brightness of the LEDs by going into the LED level mode. The Memento features circuit Python support for fast development. With the Pi Camera Library, it's easy to make custom camera projects. The fancy camera example code gives you a point-and-shoot experience where you can cycle between modes, image filters, and NeoPixel LED colors. The Adderfruit Learn Guide features even more example codes so you have tons of projects to get you started. Our 3D printed enclosure features an LED ring diffuser. The two halves can be printed without any supports and snap fits together without any fasteners. It features access to all of the onboard components and the expansion ports. It also features the spot for a threaded tripod screw insert. We've been enjoying the Timelapse feature that's a part of the circuit Python fancy camera software. It lets you adjust intervals and automatically locks exposure so you can capture smooth time lapses. For longer time lapses, you have the option to adjust the power to save battery life by dimming the TFT display. That's just a few things you can do with Memento. There's tons of other projects you can make so be sure to check out the Adderfruit Learning System. We hope this inspires you to check out the Adderfruit Memento and start making camera and vision projects. You can build an interactive robot that tracks your face using Memento, Adderfruit's DIY camera dev board. This project uses code based on the camera web server example from Expressive. The code was modified by Brent Rebell to be compatible with the Adderfruit Memento. This isolates the face detection code and draws a bounding box around a face on the camera's built-in display. A servo moves the robot's head and actually follows your face. When the robot detects a face, a NeoPixel ring lights up making this feel like an interactive companion robot. The Adderfruit Memento is an open-source camera that features the powerful ESP32S3 Wi-Fi chip. It's got a 5 megapixel camera sensor with autofocus and built-in JPEG encoding. On the back, it's got a TFT display, buttons, accelerometer, speaker buzzer, and microphone. It's packed with awesome goodies and features. The Memento features the tiny UF2 bootloader so you can easily install new firmware. The code is available as a file that can be uploaded using Adderfruit's web serial ESP tool. For advanced users who want to tweak this project or expand it, you can modify and compile the code using Platform.io. Be sure to check out the guide on the Adderfruit learning system for a code walkthrough and CAD files. We think this project is great for intermediate and seasoned makers who are looking to make advanced camera projects. You can pick up the parts to build your own face tracking robot from the Adderfruit shop. The CAD files are free to download, links are in the description. The NeoPixel ring press fits in front of the robot while the servo is secured to a 3D printed bracket. The Memento is secured to the same bracket with fasteners and everything plugs into the DevPort's expansion ports. The main bracket is mounted to one half of the robot and then joined together. A servo horn is sandwiched in between 3D printed plates that have press-fitted NeoDinium magnets so you can easily prop it up on your shoulder. We hope this inspires you to check out the Memento for building your next robot or computer vision project. That was a bunch of 3D printing. Okay, don't forget the code is ProtoUnder, we're going to roll right into IonMPI. IonMPI, we're just by DigiKinaid. This week it's Analog Devices Lady, what is the new product introduction of the week? This week we're going back to ADI, we kind of did a couple other brands but now we're back to classic. So ADI, this week's IonMPI is, and it's a blank chip, it's their I-Coupler I-Squared-C Galvanic Isolation chip which is the ADUM, so they said LT, they also own linear, but ADUM 1252 and the 1253. So these are bi-directional and unidirectional I-Squared-C isolators. They are specifically designed for electrically isolating the I-Squared-C controller and peripheral. There's two versions, one has a bi-directional SCL pin, it's a little bit more expensive but supports clock stretching and multi-controller mode and the less expensive I think the 53 is unidirectional, there's one controller, one peripheral, there's no clock stretching. Okay, so isolation, when do you need it? Well there's like three basic usage although like one of them is two usages. So hazardous voltages are noise, so industrial or robotic usage where there's a lot of high voltages or there's a lot of electrical noise that you're dealing with and you want to isolate your motor power supply like and ground totally from your sensor power supply and ground you might want galvanic isolation. Secondly, medical devices, so a lot of medical devices, you know they're in literally messy situations, there's a lot of liquids and fluids and they're getting kicked over and they're accent you know you don't want to have to have anything accidentally connect a power supply to the sensor that connects to somebody's EKG, they often have high sensitivity requirements, again you don't want a lot of noise and then also regulations especially for you know power equipment, you know you might have to have you might there might be a legal requirement for you to keep grounds and power supplies separate, this is where you want truly electrical separation not just like a little ferrite bead to kind of clean up the power supplies but there's literally no electrical connection between the ground and power on other side. Just an example you know especially like you know you're doing a robot or a medical device, you have an ADC that you really want a nice quiet power supply, you have an analog ground and analog power and you want to be separated from your micro controller, micro computer that's running at 3.3 volt power and logic and has an earth ground and a you know maybe a messier power supply. This is where the ADUM 1252 and 53 do an excellent job. So what's interesting is that the ADUM series uses a galvanic isolation that's not an optocoupler, this is kind of what a lot of people think of when they think of like you know MIDI has isolation, there is a package and they're usually kind of chunky packages, there's literally a light and a photo detector and then signal is sent, usually digital signal, you know there's maybe some cleanup that helps transform the digital signal into the right LED output and then the receiver is a photo transistor and maybe there's like a Schmidt trigger or something to to give you some hysteresis control and the whole thing is potted and so this gives you full actual isolation because the you know the light doesn't pass current and there is no electrical connection between the input output. The problem is is that often these well first off they're not bidirectional obviously, they're uni-directional, you'd have to have a separate optocoupler for the other direction, you'd have to have support circuitry to switch directions and all that good stuff, second they tend to use a high current because you need to have the LED turn on nice and fast and sometimes the photo detectors aren't very fast either and so you'd have to get a special version if you're going into like the high kilohertz megahertz rate. So analog devices have the iCoupler series and the way this works is it uses instead of an opto isolation it uses an electrical isolation using a transformer. So if you look at and this would be great under the electron microscope nanographs by the way if you decap the chip there's literally two halves with little coils that are created by using a standard wafer technique but then adding a polyamide insulation layer and then another coil on top. So this is like kind of half circuitry, half post-circuitry you know manufacturing technique but they've been doing this for like you know two decades and they've gotten really good at it and you can see there's two kinds of coils so there's some adum chips that do power and you can see in the middle image there's like two bigger coils and then four smaller coils so those that you know that's is a chip that would do both power and signal transmission um but the chip we're talking about don't do power transmission so you do have to supply the power and ground on either side although I'll say our usb isolator that we sell in the Adafruit shop um we have a you know we have two chips and one does data and one does power and the power one does this um electrical isolations like a mini transformer and DC DC converter um to give you five volts on either side of the um output from the five volts input but again fully isolated. The only thing is you're like wait a minute uh you know transformers I know transformers they don't pass DC they only pass AC that's why they're used for AC trans uh transformation from you know you know whatever couple thousand kilovolts down to your home 120 or 240 and then from your 120 or 240 down to 12 volt AC although we tend not to use transformer based power supplies as much these days they're used in some situations but you need to use AC you can use DC and so what you need to do is convert that DC or I mean it's not DC it's digital signal but it has a DC component it's not true AC convert that to AC and then decode it and so if we look here again this is what this is mostly what the circuitry is doing is actually handling that encoding and decoding uh bi-directionally okay um there's also some extra circuitry in there that I thought was kind of nicely added in um they had a added a hot swap controller so if you know you know if you're doing this safety isolation you probably also want to make sure that you don't end up with a stuck i-squared c-bus which absolutely can happen if you like plug in a device or if there's a wire that gets jiggled or whatever um you have your you know something come in at the middle of an SCL pulse can get very confused because you really want it it wants to see eight SCL pulses before it you know knows what to do next um and so on one side there is a a pre-charge and a glitch filter um so it will determine when you're actually at a stop condition on the i-squared c-bus and then it will connect um the two sides together so you can also use it as a hot swap controller which is which is kind of nice like it's like a two for you don't need a second hot swap controller as well there's also an undervoltage lockout so if I think you can use either you can use either side as a level shifting i-squared c-converter 1.8 to 5.5 volts so either side can be 1.8 to 5 volts and you can shift up or down in addition if you go below 1.8 volts there's a lockout so you won't accidentally um have them you know have an undervoltage affect the signal on the opposite side of the galvanic isolator while this chip is i-squared c uh there are different isolators available from you know usb lvds amplifiers rs-232 spi so you know or ad you know adc or can even so you know this is specifically for i-squared c it's really only designed for i-squared c please don't try to push it into can bus or something but if you do want isolated can check out the icoupler series they've made like they've kind of you know cooked this technology into every kind of isolation transform where you could possibly need no bonus yeah uh both versions so again one is a little bit the 1253 is a little bit less expensive unidirectional uh scl pen 1252 is a little bit more expensive but has bidirectional scl for when you have multi controller or clock stretching all right we have a really good video we're gonna do this that's right hi Dave hello mark you know we have been building and improving our digital isolators for years and i still get questions from people about whether our insulation is as robust as an optocoupler it's like gossip it just keeps coming around yeah it really is frustrating after all the materials research we've been doing be really great if we had some dynamic way of showing how robust the insulation really is you know i think i have just the thing in the lab we can do a side-by-side transient isolation comparison between optocouplers and digital isolators come on let's go do this okay so what we have here is one of the most powerful surge testers on the market it's up to 24 kv and it will deliver up to 40 joules of power on every pulse that is enough to ruin your whole day and we also have a high-speed camera to catch any failures is this the machine that does the 1.2 by 50 microsecond pulse that the agencies use it's exactly the same and vde requires a 10 kv pulse as a proof of reinforced insulation so we're gonna start with a 10 kv pulse here you go yeah but we all know that the optocouplers gonna pass this test yeah but fair is fair and we really need to test both of them all right just make it quick let's put in the digital isolator well we know that both optocouplers and digital isolators will pass this test that's where we get the questions optocouplers claim to be much better than the standard while people worry that digital isolators are just barely passing well it wasn't a very exciting test i'll grant you that but what do you say we turn this machine all the way up and really test the limits of these technologies all the way sure 24 kv what i tell you and here's the optocoupler okay 24 kv here we go now that was an impressive failure that blew that optocoupler clean in half let's look at that again in slow motion i would say that result is a pretty clear rebuttal of the gossip digital isolators are as capable as optocouplers they have matched and even surpassed them in critical safety parameters like transient withstand well my work here is done uh make sure that you uh lock the lab on on the way out and uh sort of clean this up the lab manager likes it tidy in here all right we're gonna roll right into new products before we do don't forget the code is proto under and here we go oh new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new i almost forgot new new new new new new new new new all right first up been a busy day okay so we've got an update for this m5 stack like cool little watch thing um biggest thing is the screen's been updated i think it was like 128 by 80 and now it's like 160 by 128 or something it's a nicer resolution screen uh oh boy on the back is yeah it's well it's 135 by 1 by 240 instead of a 0.96 inch display um it's got the esp32 pico which we love inside in the batteries a little bit bigger and a couple of sensors got updated as well but this is the most adorable little dev board so if you want all-in-one esp32 with a display buttons and a case and a strap uh we have these back in stock next up next up we also finally have back in stock the memento case kit so if you have a memento camera and you want the beautiful um paint your dragon designed case with the front plate that has an rgbw led ring and the back plate to protect the buttons and the hardware and the little adapter jst to power the leds and a sticker to mount the battery inside check out this case kit i will be making a lot more of them soon as well but it's a great addition to your memento next up we had a request for some thicker solder wire this is not lead free it's leaded solder i know this isn't 60 40 but i call it 60 40 because it's like 63 37 it's very very close it's actually hard to get true 60 40 but this is close enough i think and it acts the same i love this series of solder i've been using it plenty just remember it's not rojas and it never will be it has lead in it uh so use it where uh you definitely the lead we also have lead free solder of course and it has rows and flux in it so great for kits this is a thicker wire so good for through hole soldering we'll make it a lot faster speaking of through hole soldering what you don't need that solder for is this board it's the feather esp32 v2 which we released a year ago it's got the new pico modules it's got eight megabytes of flash and two megabytes of ps grams is a really nice upgrade to our haza feather with a smaller module we also had space for a neopixel for a stem iqt port and a second regulator yeah second regulator still has a usb serial converter and battery charging and all that stuff and now if you want to use it without soldering any pins the pins come pre-soldered on it so you just as you see here plug and play it's a buck more but uh could save you some time and effort if you want to get right to it except okay next up we have a series of boards there are new pico bells so we're gonna talk about all them together and they'll shut off so this is the terminal bell um so this has terminal blocks on the side there's big green things and those allow you to connect i think 18 to 26 gauge wire but look at the product documentation case i don't have the number correct using any um flat small flat head screwdriver you can open up the terminal blocks and plug the pins in and what you're supposed to do with this version is you can solder in socket headers or you can solder the pico directly in um or underneath however you want and you get those terminal blocks um as well as some mounting holes we also have a version that'll be in stock tomorrow with the sockets already soldered in so it's a little more expensive so why would you want one or the other well with the socket soldered inversion it's ready to go you just plug in your pico directly so we can go to the overhead and i'll show this off so this is the version without the sockets plugged in this is my prototype so it's it's green but you can imagine this is very similar don't forget to look at the bottom to see which way is the usb port the usb oh sorry i'll look at the pins so this is pin 0 and 1 so this is where the usb goes so with this version uh you can just plug right in ready to go if you have your pico h or the pico w h especially it's going to be really easy because it's just ready to go and then you can kind of the terminal blocks you have stomach qt port and a reset button with this version you do not get the header soldered in but it means you can do funky stuff like you can use stacking headers if you want this to connect through to something on the underneath you can't do that with this one because it's already soldered in so this is a little bit more advanced but more flexible another thing is if you soldered the pins on your pico like upside down as it were you could plug it in from the bottom and solder to the top for like a very slim you know setup this is a pico bell but the same same idea or if you wanted to solder it directly in you could have another again a very slim how long do you line this up a very slim setup solder it directly into the pads here um and that's not sticking up at all so you know more configurable more advanced but not as plug-and-play this is the two versions of the terminal okay and you have just to um show the terminals there's a terminal block for each pin so there's gonna be lots of ground pins and then you know one for each gpio and then on the bottom you can see the labeling for what each pin does just look on the bottom and then i also have like four little break apart feet mounting or you can remove them if you want to keep it slim all right and then uh stars is a show tonight besides you later our team our customers and everybody who makes this thing is done it's the proto underplay which is why the code is proto under so this is kind of an inversion of our uh pico bell proto again you can plug in your pico into it and what's nice is that we use double row headers so you can see there's a row of headers on the side you can plug wires into very easily um so you can come to a breadboard or you can you know plug leds or buttons directly in as you like you get a little prototyping area in the middle a reset button and a stomach ut port and all the pins are nicely labeled plus mounting pads and another thing that's nice is you go the overhead real fast we um left the holes on the bottom and so what this means is that it's really hard to see but these are actually that kind of hollow connected through so if you have again stacking headers if you want you can put stacking headers through here imagine that this is 20 pins long and you have two of these you can plug in your pico and then the pins come out the bottom so you can then plug something else in so you can have it like stack through and that's why these are super slim style um and then you have nice labeling and then of course this works with the uh whoops there's the pico here and then the usb for yeah you can plug the pico or the pico uh w if you have the pico h of course you're gonna be most happy because there's no soldering required and it's like a nice slim contraption you can use the prototyping area or like i said you can plug in wires into these pins here i should have should have brought a wire with me but you can imagine uh plug wires in here um to connect to any of these pads that are nicely labeled that they all echo each of the gpio on the pico all 40 of them all right and then we have okay and then we have coming soon it's gonna be in a little bit later maybe later this week the doubler version so i took that board and then i like did the clone tool and i put two side by side so now you can have your pico you see on the right there's like a pico and on the left you have a good dvi pico bell so if you want to like connect a pico with a pico bell or other circuitry together and you don't want to stack them you want to have them side by side the doubler will do that um and another nice thing about the doubler is if you click here um so you have the stomach qt connector for plug and play sensors olas whatever and then reset button but it doesn't make sense to have two reset buttons and two stomach qt ports because they're chainable so on the right side or the other side we have a battery connector for your like standard lithium ion or lithium polymer battery with battery charging circuitry and the auto switch so if you plug in usb it'll charge the battery and when you um change oh when you unplug the usb or ud power it switches to the battery to run and then that will go into the visis um uh pin that will power the buck converter on the pico or pico w so it's like an auto switching battery backup and then on the bottom of the board um if you have alkaline batteries you want to use you can cut to disable the charger and that way you can use this with three triple a or doubly batteries um and you can you know it has a little bit less prototyping area but i think it's worth it and then um since you're on battery power you don't want to unplug and we plug the usb constantly there's an enable switch so the enable switch will let you uh turn off the uh buck converter on the pico pico w i'd save power so it'll be really good for wireless projects as well um you can use it without the second port being used if you just want like oh i want like you know this you know battery charging and on off switch and reset button and send me qt um but this way you get a little bit of everything kind of like a a nice um sprinkle of different hardware accessories that'll make your pico much much better new new new new new new new yeah you featherified the pico platform i'm feather flying well you know i because i'm doing more pico bells and i was like oh my god i really use you know wireless projects you want a battery pack okay we have some questions lined up we're going to roll right in top secret there any questions we're going to try to get in here i'm nine on that way can i actually speed around one of these okay uh this is like a little breakout board that will let you just connect step by qt and it has a pull up resistors and led and then i made two trinkies so this is i have a lot of samd 21 e18s i gotta get rid of these and i was like oh you know i should get back to the trinkies because we were making like a tricky week so um this one has a samd 21 with a recent button neopixel and sht 45 which is like a really nice precision temperature humidity sensor now for the final version i actually added a little cutout uh to isolate the sht 45 because there's a little bit of self-heating going on i also made a version with the sht 41 uh this is um somebody requested this they want a little fan simulator for like a computer to like simulate a pc fan so it's like oh yeah the little like 555 timer with a little potentiometer could be useful so there's a little switch to switch the capacitor so you can do you know zero ish to 250 hertz or to 25 kilohertz you can do for audio on the right or you flip it you can do it for fans which are like about 100 hertz and then this is a usb host bff so using the max 3421 e and and on the go micro b connector you'll need like the on the go adapter but you can add usb host we're doing a lot more usb host stuff with the max 3421 we've got great arduino support and more circuit python support is hopefully coming soon so this could be you can make really tiny little usb host interface and then finally um the great search two weeks ago we were looking because we were talking about the sht 45 and i was like well what other humidity sensors out there we found this really cool ultra precise uh 0.5 percent uh accurate you know relative humidity sensors so it'll break up forward with again we'll cut out to give it some thermal isolation and that is this week's top secret okay rolling right into questions we're going to get to all of them there's a bunch um while this is loading up here we made a recommendation to uh check out the root robot and uh someone got it and the person liked it so hey yeah we thought that would be okay a good one okay uh first up i could probably do this one um someone got one of the carplay lcd's it doesn't work anymore are all tft panels with 40 pins and a four pin touchscreen are all the pinouts the same they probably are it's probably like the standard 4.3 inch tft display and so if you look in the shop we have there's two there's the rgb 666 and the rgb 888 it's probably the rgb 888 so you can use it with um our dpi kiba which is like a board that lets you use it as we pie and we also have a a tfp4 or one board that'll do hdmi to those displays if it's the same with the rectangular pretty long one you might want to read this over they would like to connect 16 32 as a quick neo slider linear encoders in the macropad can they use 803 pca 95 48 expert c multiplexer to do this they're like can they use two multiplexers yes you can just your code's going to be like a little hairy because you're going to have to make two multiplexer instantiators and then within each two remember to do the eight neo sliders on each one there's no there's no reason it won't work just keep track of which is which because it's a lot they want for uh yeah you can do it channels i don't know what are these in tribes want to ask for us yeah it looks like you can you can do it but it's just like again just do one multiplexer add the eight and then add a second multiplexer and add one and then add the eight to go slow cool okay uh question about the lm66 200 ideal do diodes would the expectable usage be with solar panels having to identical solar panels each on separate vent pins and it would switch to the higher voltage and in theory offer two angles to get more daylight example layout would be sunrise and sunset yes as long as the voltage out of the panel is within the lm66 200 max voltage which i believe is five volts so that's not 16 volt the ideal diode so that's the only thing you gotta watch out for don't give it seven volts if it's an open circuit voltage it's like seven okay um is there a breakup board or some way of testing isolation rather than big lab equipment um i mean if you're really testing it there's no there's no better way than having lab equipment um i wouldn't recommend at home taking like main voltage and just like plugging it into your isolation circuit people who make these circuits for medical devices or or power robotics they will use a testing lab okay for the moment to camera why did you use a three wire bridge to the front back could have instead done a pogo pins or is a tall header pin bridge i wanted i didn't want anything to stick out and get knocked off of the the memento and so this was actually of all the way i was thinking like oh i could use the the standoffs but then i was like you know let's not try to be clever i think cleverness is it's you know it's clever but then you regret it later i wanted to go simple okay it's a simple st micro not the 64 bit micro controller um as we're named the st m 32 b 25 what are your thoughts on a 64 bit micros and circuit python will eventually run on it nisha overkill inevitable i mean i think it's interesting um you know eventually yes there'll be 64 bit micro controllers i don't think we need to address that much ram yet so you know um i guess it would be for computation um i mean i think that you know if it says mp might make me think that's it you know maybe a um a crossover processor so it's a micro controller but it probably is also fast enough to compete with their f7 h7 line maybe one of the next even and then uh how's our switch going the key card going we're getting there we're just yeah it's a little round yeah we're gonna be publishing as our journey gets started when we can do a series of guides we'll be doing that so you'll be able to do i have to 2026 so we got some time um i think a meteor is going ahead in 2026 anyone oh yeah well there we go okay and i think those are all the questions okay right we should just exactly on time so i want to know i'll answer this one we heard from uh radio shack lately no you know they were so yeah the brand got acquired and there was like a holding company and then we interviewed one of the new owners and now it looks like it went to someone else and did he sell it again i think so oh yeah we don't really keep track of it i've measured time by who's the new ceo radio shack change the new ceo yeah it's a standard issue i'll say this uh unfortunately though um you know my my days of journalism are coming to an end um you know we interview the ceo radio shack i was i interviewed one back when i was at make yeah but unfortunately now when you when you interview someone they think you're like this is must be a paid promotion or this has something but like you agree with everything this has something to do with crypto or why did you give that personal platform i just wanted to know what radio shack's doing and our community wants to know what radio shack's doing and like we put all our editorial disclosures like we don't get any money from anyone for doing it i didn't get batteries yeah and um i get it because the world is kind of broken and everyone assumes the worst um but every time i've interviewed someone recently or done something you're like oh this is an industry plant it's like no we're just interested in what radio shack's doing because it's a brand that people knew and that's where a lot of people used to get a lot to be honest nothing to do with should say no to get interviewed from us because usually after you introduce somebody then like something very bad happens yeah i mean so the like statistics actually we're going to bounce but you know kind of a funny thing so a million years ago when tech shop was going under someone bought it up and it was like there was all sorts of controversy surrounding and i interviewed this person named dan rasher and uh i said okay like what experience do you have like running a company you know like run tech shop into the ground he's like i i had interest in my wind farm from mike Pompeo i'm like the mike Pompeo and that was like secretary of state and now there's you know toxis might be a choice for a vice president so i'm like i was googling like mike Pompeo i'm just like i wonder if my article is gonna come up sure enough so now someone's gonna accuse me of you know being in politics because i mentioned um in an interview from someone's words that they worked with a guy so anyways that's how it goes so anyways probably it's it's not a clock i don't know what's going on we gotta go okay we'll see everybody later bye everybody thank you so much don't forget the code is proto under the code is the mike but um and an inappropriate production thank you so much everybody we'll see you next week here's you everybody have a week