 And welcome, just Lady Aida. Hey everybody, and welcome to another desk of Lady Aida. It's me, Lady Aida. This is my desk. I got a little bit of Korean bibimbap on me. Delicious dinner time to check out what's going on in my desk. I thought I would do a sample Sunday, mostly because I'm drowning in a pile of samples and I kind of promised the purchasing team I'd get through some of them. So let's check out some of the cool samples that are on my desk. So first, actually, first before we go to the samples, let's find out what is hidden in Tan New Scott's lead developer of Circuit Python, GitHub repo. He's made a really cool build for the DVI Feather. So you go to the overhead real fast. This is the DVI Feather. This is the one without the silkscreen. Most of them have silkscreen text. So it's our RP2040 Feather, and HEPIOs are connected to the DVI HDMI port here. And you can control a display from it. And we've got Arduino library called Pico DVI. That's our adrenified version that Philby Paint Your Dragon did for Arduino. But everyone's like, hey, Arduino is cool and everything, but what if you could control an output to this display from Circuit Python? And it turns out that if you are sneaky and you dig into Scott's GitHub repo, you'll find that he has a build that has a display. So maybe go back to main me. I don't know if that's possible. Oh, cool. So it's reflecting the green. So it's a little bit weird. But this is the Whipple for Circuit Python. And that's running off this HDMI monitor I've got here. And the DVI connector is just plugged into the back. And this, you can see down here, it says feather RP24 DVI with RP2040. Only thing is, this is really, really early. So I tried running turtle graphics. And it doesn't know about the graphical frame buffer. It just has the Whipple output. But it's an excellent start. So for folks who are like, hey, or also I could have gone wrong. But for folks who want to play with displaying monitor HDMI projector output, we'll have that for Circuit Python really soon. Okay, so next up, let's check out some other samples. So I've also got here, somebody recommended these for me. These are CNC encoders. So they're rotary encoders. And on the back, there are terminal blocks for power ground A and B. And then they just act like a normal like gray code rotary encoder. But it's got this like cool handle. And it's like kind of neat, you can go like this. So this comes in silver. It also comes in black. It's got a nice, I don't know if you can hear that, but it's like a little clicky wubby sound. And then I also got a larger version. The larger one did come in black. But I actually don't like it as much. It's a little bit too big. So I think I'm just gonna stock the smaller one. You can see the bigger one. I mean, like it's cool and everything, but it's like, yeah, maybe it's because my hands are too small, but I'm like, ah, so big. I don't know. And the motion doesn't feel as nice as the small one. So, you know, that's how it goes. Like half, about half the samples I get, I don't end up stocking. Okay. So next, let's go to overhead real fast. Hold on. And I'll show up some more things. So next up, I've got some cool, conductive fabrics. Whoa, hold on. Let me make a little bit of room. Let me unplug this DVI feather because we've shown it off. And I'm gonna move on with other things. Sorry for the jiggling. Okay. So next up, this is conductive fabric. So I got a couple of different ones. And I think this is like silver coat. So this is a weave, which means it's not very stretchy. It like doesn't stretch at all in the X and Y. It does stretch a little bit in the diagonal directions because it's like a square weave. So this is a conductive woven fabric. And then this is a conductive knit fabric. I actually really like this conductive knit fabric. So this is like stretchy in all directions and it's very soft. And it's made with like silver coated thread. Eventually it does oxidize, but for like many projects, it will last many years. So good for lots of wearable projects or like projects where you don't need to pass a lot of current. Or you wanna do capacitive touch, especially on a soft surface. So we're doing like a toy hacking and stuff. So this might be good for capacitive touch. Like you touch the toy so you don't have like a big copper wire or something. So some kind of neat materials stuff. I'm a big fan of conductive materials. I agree. Next up, I've got, you can see this is kind of an old sample. This was at the bottom of my pile. So this is the TMAG 5273. So this is a 3D magnetometer. And then maybe when Mr. Lady I can flip over. I flipped to my computer. So this is a linear hall effect sensor with I squared C. It's actually kind of similar to a sensor we have right now called the TLV. Actually I'll show it really fast. It's called the TLV 493. This is by, not by TI. I don't know who makes this. Maybe, I don't remember. So the TLV 493. So this is a also magnetometer, three-axis magnetometer with I squared C. And it looks like this is kind of like a competing product. Came out pretty recently, 2021. So I got the samples a year ago. Two versions, one with 40 militecela, one with 133 militecela. So two different ranges. What I do like is that has a dedicated I squared C but I interrupt pin IRQ pin. The other one does in the IRQ pin is like shared with the SDA pin, which is kind of weird. But it's like a very general purpose. Like you wanted, it's meant for 3D joysticks type things where you use a magnet to detect X, Y, Z of the joystick. But it also be used for like general magnetometer purposes. So the low range one could be used for like earth magnetometer measurements and the high range one would be better for like actual magnets because the magnetic field was much stronger. So I did put together, whoops, this is different. I did put together a quick breakout for this one. And I just used the TLV 493 PCB and I kind of pulled everything off. So you can see like some of the old silk screen is the pretty pin silk screen from the old version. And then I just like deleted stuff that wasn't used and then routed out another interrupt pin. But this chip is available. So I thought like, I mean, I got the sample, but then like I couldn't get it for a bit. So this is, this will be fun to put together. I always have a little magnetometer samples mostly because I can't, a lot of magnetometers got discontinued over the chip shortage. And so like I'm kind of always looking for having many options available. So I'm not stuck with like the MLX series or the list series, both of whom are hard to get. Okay, and then we'll go to the last sample. So last sample is on the overhead again, if you can flip over. So this is kind of interesting and we'll go great into the great search after I've shown this off. So this is a, this is what a normal character LCD looks like. And we sell these, they tend to have 16 pins. It's a four pin digital plus a read and write latch and a select latch. So you need like six IO pins or output pins to control these character LCDs. They're very popular, but six pins, a lot of pins these days. I mean, who has six pins in this economy? So instead I got some samples of these I squared C versions. So this uses, this is like the HD like 87740 or something. And this is the, I think AIP 83 something something like A363 or whatever. Very similar look. This has the same look, but instead of having separate pins for, you know, clock, latch data, you could just use I squared C. So you can see here SDA, you know, this is clock. You also use SPI if you want, because it is a write only. So you can like write data and then power and ground. And so this is a, this chip, the AIP is kind of a well-known chip. And so I found a driver online. I'll, when I flip back, we'll show it. It's the Arduino liquid crystal wired. And so, you know, sometimes I get samples and I'm going to write my own library because I want to make sure it works at CircuitPython and works with our hardware and everything. But while, you know, before I do that, just to get a sample up and running, I'll often just look, does anyone have any example library code? And this one's actually really good. So it shows scrolling and text moving and custom animations, a custom character. So you'll see that heart as a custom character. So this worked out really well. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to get a version that, you know, this has header pins and that's cool and all, but it would be great if I had a STEMI QT port because then you just plug it right in. And these are very inexpensive is another nice thing. So you want to have to have a separate PCB. I wouldn't have to do any, you know, soldering. You would just come ready to go plug in. So that's all my samples. I got to do a bunch today. So let's go on to the great search. Where is the great search? Brought to you by Digikey and Adafruit. Every single weekly, there's a private venture to help you. Yes, you find things you need on digikey.com. Lady, what in the world are you trying to find on digikey.com this week? Okay, this week we're going to locate some character LCDs that have alternative interfaces. So since we're going to slice the video, let's go to the overhead and I'll explain my current state. So this is a very standard character LCD display. It has a blue backlight and then white characters that shine through it so that go negative polarity display. And this uses the parallel interface. So you have an addition to power and ground. You have select and a right latch, enable pin and then use either four or eight IO pins. So basically you need at least six IO pins and some people use, you can use up to like nine IO pins and that's a lot of IO pins. Most people don't want to spend that many pins, especially if you have low cost back controllers that don't have a lot of GPIO, why waste it on an LCD? So this is a sample that I got that has a SPI or I squared C interface. And then I realized these are actually fairly popular and there are a lot of options. The place I got that only had blue and white, the trade-off is the backlight has to be on and this is not daylight readable. But I thought I'd show how on DigiQ you can get almost like any configuration you want of character LCDs including I squared C or SPI interface. So let's go to my computers. So what I first looked up character, watch out, there's two categories. One is LED character in numeric which I accidentally went to first. But what's nice is when you go down and you look at the image, you're like, wait, this is, you know, LED, this is not character LCD. So LED works by, you see there's one LED for every segment and it literally like blasts light through to light up that segment. Whereas with character LCDs instead of LEDs, what they do is they have an eight by five dot matrix and the liquid crystal turns on or off to let the backlight through or if it's trans-flective, it reflects light back into your eye. So different uses, you know, if you're like, when should I use LED versus LCD? LED is gonna be a lot more, is a lot faster update and it's gonna look a lot, it's kind of daylight readable and night readable. But, you know, it adds up fat, and also if you don't use many characters, LED is good, especially if you only have to show like two or three digits. But if you're gonna show like text, especially other languages and stuff, character LCDs is where it's at. So let's go back and select the correct category. Okay, so lots of options and you'll notice there's a lot of different varieties. There are character LCDs like these and if you remember a long time ago, we covered an I squared C to LCD converter chip. This is a raw LCD, so you would not, you don't write it with I squared C or even parallel. You actually have to like toggle all the IO pins very, very fast. Usually you have a controller driver chip to do that. Some controllers have a built-in LCD driver, but like it's a very specific thing. And I think we did a show a few months ago, maybe a year or two ago, where I showed like, hey, you can manually control it with a GPIO on any mic controller, but it doesn't look very good. You get ghosting and it's hard to keep up. So really you want a mic controller that supports it. But there are also lots of character LCDs like this, where you see you have a smaller number of pins and it's like a module and there's like this metal plate that goes around the LCD. And this has the controller as well for you. And then again, gives you I squared C or SPI or parallel. So if you go over here, you can see the different interfaces. So if you see dash, that means there's no, like there's no controller. You're like, you have to toggle the pins. Parallel is again, that's kind of standard display, but you see, oh, you got like serial and I squared C. So a lot of varieties there. Let's pare down what's available to see we can get to. So first off, only for active. And then let's just all solely look up stuff in stock. Okay, so again, some of these are manual drive. I don't want those. I want only ones that have I squared C, let's say. So I'm going to select all these and then option click I squared C over here. And then we've got 75 options. So what's options here? So not surprising, New Haven is like a big seller of these. Some of these have an RGB backlight. And you'll notice a couple, there's like two basic types of LCDs. There's the ones that are negative polarizing and these have kind of like a cool look because the backlight is the color of the text. And then the background is like a dark blue or black and they look, I mean, they're very striking looking, but they again are not very daylight readable. If you want daylight readable ones, ironically you want to get ones that have black text and especially if they say trans-flective. I think, yeah, the trans-flective ones rather than the passive ones are the ones that look best in daylight. You also want to check the datasheet. People always ask me like, what kind of LCDs are best for daylight? So definitely don't get the negative polarity ones get the positive. Second, you can get them with different color backlights. Now you're going to pay more if you want an RGB backlight like this one. But what's cool is you can actually do color mixing to get like, you know, any shade. And it could be nice if you want to like, I use RGB backlight for our testers because people don't always read the text, but if it's like flashing red, they're like, uh-oh, something went wrong whereas it's a nice green color means go. So even though I don't use all the colors, you know, sometimes I have this stick. If it's in the middle programming, I'll make it orange or blue and then green or red on successor fail. So there's a couple different types here. There's, this is like a slim type, which is I think very cute and I like the little mounting tabs. There's also ones that are FPC mount. This is kind of like a classic original style. All of them, by the way, we'll have LED backlights. The old style used to have electro luminescent panel and they were extremely loud and very power consuming. Now it's LED, which means you can often PWM the backlight as well. There's also OLED versions. They're more expensive, but they like look really cool because again, they have that nice glowing look and they do look better during daylight, but they're a little bit more expensive. They also come in like, you can get four by, four by 20 is kind of the largest you're gonna get four characters by four rows by 20 characters. But you can get like two by eight, 10 by four. You'll get anything almost less than that. It's just that 20 by four is the largest of the classic LCD configurations. If you want something bigger, you're gonna probably go with a TFT display. So there's a lot of options here. Another thing to watch for is these days, almost all LCDs run from three or five volts, but some of the older chipsets only run off of five. And so if you are using a modern microcontroller, check the voltage supply to see. Like it's not guaranteed like this one, for example, you see it's like a five volt only. It's an old style, this is like yellow background is very old style. And then some of the modern ones only run from 3.3, not three to five. So it's not guaranteed that you're gonna get three volt or five volt compatibility. Do take a look to see what it is. Oh yeah, IAP that was the one that the sample I was using, which is very cool. So in fact, I think that this is going to be, this has been compatible, I'm sorry, code compatible. This is gonna be my pick. I like this because it's got the transfective display, cool white background, I squared C, uses the chip set that I've already got code for, black text on white. So this one's really good. And then let's see, I'll sort by quantity available. Yeah, this one's really good. And then this one, these are both two that I think would be really, really sweet, very nice looking. So these are my picks for the great search. And that's great search. And they're in stock. Where are you? Okay, Lady Aida, that's our show for tonight. I know, okay, we got through a lot. Zipped through, lots of samples, lots of good things come out. Design, so we all tried, we did a whole bunch of designs and I got to get some samples. Should get both checked the things into the shop. Oh, I missed one sample. But you know what, I'll get to it next week as I'm sure the mini camera. Sample sample sample. It's okay. All right, thanks so much everybody. Shows are all going on this week. Stay tuned to the socials. We got lots of fun and surprises coming out. Bye, everybody.