 Digi-Key and Adafruit present. Hi, on MPI. All right, this week's eye on MPI is from Gaptech. Yeah, we have not covered Gaptech before, so congratulations, Gaptech, on your first eye on MPI. But I saw these show up on digikey.com. And I really like this sort of thing. So I wanted to highlight it. These are Gaptech DC-DC switching regulators that are in the shape of or pin out of an LM78XX series, which is, you know, everyone here knows about the L7805, 7803, 7812. Linear regulators are really, really common. But what if you want more current? Like these can do up to three amps of current and they're switching regulators. So you don't have that heat and size and heat sinking that you have to deal with. And of course you get much, much better efficiency. So let's take a look at this series. These are available both in five volt and three volt versions. And there's actually a whole family of these, but these are the new ones that are up to three amps output. And three amps is actually kind of where I would say it's better to get something pre-made than trying to DIY it. Why? I mean, we've covered DC-DC regulators before or switching regulators and controllers. But once you get to three amps, you're starting to deal with, like, layout is really important. You might need two ounce copper instead of one ounce copper or four layer PCBs. And if your design needs a high current but isn't overly complicated overall, something like this is really easy to use. I mean, this is the usage schematic. V in, give it at least 10 microfarads. V out, give it at least 20 microfarads. You're done. You've got five volt clean out with very low ripple, up to three amps DC with, I think, I think from six to, like, 24 volts DC input. Something like ridiculous and very, very high voltage range. And it's all done for you. You don't have to do any work. And it's, like, fully potted, and it's happy to go. So this is, you know, what it's replacing. This is, you know, common, again, 7805, 7803, 7812, et cetera. There's many of them in that family with input, ground, and output. And the only thing is that they're linear, which means that any voltage difference, so if you're regulating five volts out and you give it 12 volts in, that 12 minus five volts, that whole, like, seven whole volts, times the current has to be dissipated as heat. So, like, let's say you wanted an amp out of the 7805, which is about how much you can get out. That's going to be seven watts. And to dissipate seven watts, you absolutely need a heat sink. Because, again, it's inefficient. You're burning it off of heat. Whereas these modules on the inside, right, they're very small squares. And this is their open frame version. There's an inductor. There's a little switching converter, passive components. And it's capacitors to just maintain stability. It's fully potted, but it's done for you. And the layout is very nice. And you get all the efficiencies. And it's plugged in. You can plug it into socket header. Of course, you can solder it into the PCB. And you get that great efficiency. I mean, you can see here, you know, at full load, coming from 12 volts down to 5 volts out at full 3 amps, you're getting about, like, 95 percent efficiency. That's way, way better than if you were using a linear regulator. It would be, you know, 40 percent efficiency just because it's linear. And, of course, you get even more current, right? This is a full 3 amps. Whereas most subnatal fives are maxed out. It may be 1, 1.25, 1.5 amps. So a lot of current. I think this would be really good for, you know, if you have a project that's running at 5 volts, that's a single board computer. The Raspberry Pi 4 needs a couple amps. This will do the job. You're using something with a lot of neopixel LEDs. Those really add up in current. Maybe you've got something with RGB matrix panels. There's also use up a lot of current. Maybe you've got something with motors or servos that need 5 volt power, steppers, solenoids. You need a lot of current. You know, you want to have it regulated. 3 amps, it'll do the job quite nicely. Right now, for the 3 amp version, there's only 3.3 and 5 volts available. But in the 2 and the 1 amp version, I think I saw like 1.8 volts out and like 6 volts and 12 volts. So there's a big family. They're probably going to come out with more versions of this regulator, the 3 amp regulator and different voltages. I think they've started with the most popular ones. As you can see here, it's the 3 volt version. That's the 03 and 3.0 is 3 amp out. All right, available on Digi-Key. And do you want to show this before? Yeah, I just thought I'd show it because I thought it was just so neat. So this is the TO-220. Again, this is what you would swap this in. So you don't have to do any work. It's pin compatible. It's basically physically the same size, although usually you'd even have a heat sink on this. So this is much, much smaller. The moment you have to have a heat sink because you're doing an amp or half an amp, this you don't need to heat sink at all or worry about air flow. So even though these are more expensive than DIY, they've got a lot of simplicity going for them. It just works. You don't deal with heat sinks. You don't have to relay out your board. It could be a great way to upgrade or improve the performance of an existing design without having to do any board relay out or PCB restuffing or a lot of hot air rework. And that's a great church. On MPI.