 Did you key and ate a fruit present? This week's ion MPI is CUI devices Lady Aida, what is the MPI of this week? All right, I'm glad you asked this one Well, I made the joke in the text that you know If you're reading like Redditors or you know stock tip sites, they always say buy the dip Well, I this week we're going to talk about buying the dip Switches as we're going to talk about these new rotary dip switches from CUI devices So this is you know, what a rotary dip switch looks like There's actually a couple different of varieties and family in this family. We like this one for its jaunty pink tall actuator But before we get into rotary dip switches, let's kind of explain the history of what these Used to be and why these are way better So in the before times when engineers had to have you know custom setups for their hardware some configurable things You didn't have an LCD. You didn't have a touchscreen. You didn't have you know, like a full keyboard maybe but you did have jumpers and if you remember, you know, if you somebody who built a computer you might remember having to set jumpers on You know your ISI ISA Sound Blaster card to set the IRQ or this is really common if you have a SCSI drive You would have to set the SCSI address on the back by by putting in, you know Various jumpers and then like, you know, we'd write speeds and whatnot And you know jumpers are really annoying and they get lost and so eventually some folks were like You know, we have to do something better than jumpers because they you know, they're a penny a piece But like once they're lost you can't buy them at a hardware store and like your people end up all hoarding little bags of jumpers So instead folks eventually Started coming up with dip switches. So dip switches, you know, they look like this and they have, you know, usually they're numbered There's like one up to like 16 switches and each one is a single pulse pull single throw These switches are all off. You can see the on direction is on the other side and you can kind of nick them with your finger tip and Push each one on and it will close the switch and then you can use that to configure your setup and the dip in this dip switch is Stands for dual inline, which is the same as you know a dip chip And in fact, the nice thing about dip switches is they are 0.1 inch spacing so they're really easy to use on a breadboard or a perf board Because they can like they can even use sockets if you want or you can just use, you know, the same Pin ordering as you would for a dip switch And you know, you still see dip switches used Unconfiguration hardware like we just quickly just googled for like, you know dip switch manual and other than old motherboards You know, there is this is like a collagen water filtration system and it's got dip switches at the top and The dip switches Are used to configure like, you know, the the ice maker and whatever so basically, you know, you have engineers and they're making hardware You have to have some sort of like user or technician configuration You know using dip switches is a way to do that. The only problem is is that You know, it's kind of hard to like you have to have a manual like this which actually says like Okay, this one's on this one's off and you have to have these little drawings That said, you know if you want dip switches See why makes a lots of just switches and we use dip switches a bunch Especially the SMT ones which are great. You just pick and place them onto your design And they're super easy And they come in like right angle and slim and surface mount and piano style is my favorite But what you can do if you have a you know a four switch Dip switch is instead of like having this like binary code table where you have to tell people like okay For configuration number one, you know flip the first one for configuration number two flip the second But for configuration three you have to flip the bottom two right because you have to do binary code instead if you have a Rotary switch Like this it's a little dip switch. It does the encoding for you So you have with this kind of friendly human friendly 10 or 16 positions and there's a little arrow and then you just have to turn the arrow using a screwdriver From zero, you know to nine or from zero to F so, you know, it's basically the same code as a Normal dip switch is just you know, it's it's simplified. You only have the outputs you need the center two pins are ground pins and There's six pins so the center two pins are ground pins and the outer Four pins are the four dip switches and there's a bunch of dips rotary dips available at CUI So I you know, I said I took a screenshot of one, but there's actually a couple different variations Great angle SMT through hole thin, you know flats There's ones with Actuators, there's like right angle actuators There's the 10 position is 16 and you know from what I can tell the only reason you'd want one of the other is just for like user simplicity If you really don't need to have more than 10 configurations Some you know, it might be confusing for people to see like what is a through F because they don't know hexadecimal Okay, next is Okay, and this is just some some more types tiles So yeah, we picked up a couple and I thought I would just show them on the overhead real fast I'm just showing off these really nice photos that they've got so Zoom in Okay, sorry Okay, so this is a 10 position and you would use a screwdriver and you rotate You know you basically put it in the slot and then whatever the slot is pointing to you again The code comes out on the pins on the bottom the center two are Grounded this one is is like, you know, there's this large body type and there's a small body type But they're both I want to show they're both point one inch spacing So you can mechanically use either this one's just smaller. It's a little tougher to read but you can see this one has a All 16 outputs printed on it I was kind of hoping that I could turn this with my finger and maybe when it's soldered in you can you can only use pliers but nothing really beats a flathead screwdriver and then I opened it up and you can see the switches on the inside and then this little Plate which is what actually closes the switches and when you look at the actuator you can see like this This binary code, which is what presses down all these will not just press down on the switches to close them That's how it works like as you twist it. It has a like a like a player piano kind of effect where it pushes down on the relevant points Okay, so get this on Digikey and If you're looking for it on Digikey This is short URL digikey.com for a short for three F nine BR also the Product ID to search for it. You could probably do two to three RDS 10s 10 for five Yeah, indeed, but you could probably just also find it by searching for like CUI Rotary dip switch and that'll that'll take you to there's a whole family of them again There's like 25 different kinds of all the different configurations. I'm just picked a Demonstrative sample here. I think these are underused. I think engineers should definitely put them in their projects because it's a great way to Set configurations or like brightness or like an address of a wireless node If you have multiple ones and you want to like quickly configure them You know for like a couple cents you add one of these and it's it's a mechanically strong way to Configure a project and then of course if you need more configuration bits You can you know get the 10? Selection version and then just have multiple ones in a row so you have You know if you if you want like a thousand configurations you take four of the 10 position Rotary dips which is to put them in the world one that one is the thousands one is the Hundreds ones the tens and ones a single digits and now you have like, you know massive number of possible configuration outputs So yeah, Rotary dips which is is my recommendation for an API