 And well, that's Lady Aida. Hey, my desk is getting definitely piled high full of stuff, because there's a lot of electronics engineering going on here. What's going on? It's me and Lady Aida with me, Mr. Lady Aida. We're at my desk, it's a Sunday night, we were resting, we went for a long walk, and so we're a little, we're gonna go late today. That's called, hack or clock means anytime between like noon and three in the morning for me. Like I'm up really late because it's like I can get it so much better. I'm up really early, Lady Aida's up really late, and we deliver the show to you every single week. Lady Aida, what is on your desk this week? Okay, so I did a lot of floppy stuff this week. Well, first off, I actually wanna talk about a new whipper snapper thing. So can we just like quickly go to my computer and I'll show this. Wait, I wanna sneeze. Yeah. Sorry. There we go. Here. Commercial break. Sorry. This segment brought to you by Flonays. It's a- Flonays for when you need to naze. Okay, so look, I'm a little flimmy. So whipper snapper, which is our no code IOT add-on for Aida for I.O., which lets you take boards that have Wi-Fi right now, hopefully more to come. Let me just say this. Plug-in sensors. Yeah, well the cranky people who always say we make things too easy for everyone. You're gonna hate this. You're gonna love this. Yeah. Because we're making IOT so easy that stuff just shows up online and you can instantly do data logging and more and you don't have to go through the whole rigmarole. Rigmarole is the time to work. It's up there for me with like dungarees. Yeah. Rigmarole. So anyways- Okay, so go to my overhead and I'm gonna show- If you think things were easy before, wait till you see this. Horrible. Okay, so this is my ESP32-STQ, I really just did a video. I didn't see it. Let's not show this live. Okay, great. Some people haven't seen this. This is a BME280. So we recently added more iSquared C devices and you're like, wow, I didn't take a month to add two more iSquared C devices because the developers working on IOT completely gutted and refactored how iSquared C sensors works that we can dynamically add new sensors without programming the backend. Like the first sensor was totally hard coded, just like proof of concept to make sure it worked. And then we rewrote the whole thing so that if there's a GitHub repo and you can see like you can add new sensors by writing an JSON file and getting an animated GIF of the sensor and like a still image and then adding the code to Adafruit Whipper Snapper. So in theory, anyone can add support. But anyways, so exciting news is that we've added a couple more sensors. So this is a BME280 and I just plugged it in and this is running the Whipper Snapper UF2. So again, no tool chain, no BOSA command line. It's drag and drop the UF2 onto here, plug and play this. There's a text file that shows up and you enter in your deets. I can see. How many go to the computer, why are you doing that? Yeah, maybe let's go to the computer and I can even show. There's this, this is the Whipper Snapper. I don't want to open the secrets of JSON because it has my stuff in it, but that's where the Wi-Fi settings are. And then, so let's go to the computer again. It's safe now. So this is already, you know, it's been detected and I can add a new component. Oh wait, so I can do an I-Squared T-Scan first. And that's really handy because you can see, we added this tool for us, but also others. That's like, you can always see what is plugged in. So it'll scan for you very quickly and then you can add a new component. And then if you scroll down, you'll see, we now add the HT20, which I'm kind of covering up as of the left, BME280 and DPS310. And so we're going to be adding more and more because now it's dynamic to add more. You add the BME280 and then this is like a smaller 30 seconds. And then, sorry, this browser window is smaller than I'm used to. And then I said this shown up, mystery. I don't know. Bug report. Do you want to change the resolution since we're getting this done? No, no, it's okay. It's just I couldn't change the rate, but I'm going to, I'll send a bug report. I think it's because my resolution's smaller and that the people testing the web app don't use a 720p. Yeah, we changed it for broadcasting so people could see it better. But you can see I've got humidity sensor data coming in already for the pressure sensor. Let me try. No, it's interesting. This won't. No, you could maybe do. You could hit command minus and maybe shrink your browser screen a little bit. Oh yeah, I think so maybe. All right. I'll see if that does anything. Oh yeah, now it works. You're so smart. Okay, no. I'm just, I've just been through a lot. I know, that's a good idea to shrink it because it's yeah, this was tested on 1080p so I'll send a bug report. This is new software. You can see the humidity pressure and temperature data is coming in instantly into the browser and we also exported, there's only like two values. It's like, hi, you're alone. We added in your feeds, you can see your sensor feeds automatically. They're generated now so it's also kind of handy in case you want to like have actions or like end points or whatever with your feeds. This is very neat. Okay, here's a question from the chat. Yeah. Are the ITC, or I guess Icebergs, addresses standard enough to make guesses for the components, at least if they know if they're Adafruit sensors. Yeah, it does a mix of, in the back end you can see it does a mix of I squirts the address selection. Well, when you make a component, you can usually actually select, it'll automatically try to detect, sorry, you need to select a BME 280, it knows that there's only two I squirts the addresses and so if it finds, it does the I squirts the scan, it finds a matching address and it can initialize it. Like the back end software will be like, oh yeah, I found the sensor for you and then like now you can configure it. So it's a mix of I squirts the scanning and smarts. I mean, if you plug in the wrong sensor that has the same I squirts the address, it'll fail on initialization because you will be able to initialize the sensor in the built-in software. Okay, is there a limit other than the fact that addresses are seven bit integers on how many I squirts the devices can be on the bus at the same time? You can have, yeah, 100s or so, you can't use all seven bits, some bits are special at the first 10 or 20 or so. In general though, I squirts the chain, you really don't want more than 10. Okay. Wait, no, you only support three, so that's that. I'm curious when folks hit that limit, what they're doing, that'll be cool, because then we'll see. Well, there was a person in the forums who had like, I think 15 or 20 I squirts the sensors on one STEMI QT bus and they're like, it's acting flaky and I'm like, I squirts he was meant to go like three to five inches and you've got like five feet. So yeah, you know, and each device can have finniqueness. All right, so that's Adafruit IO. So check that out. It's in production now. I think it's cool. Yeah, everyone can try this for free. Yeah, and it's like instant data logging. Well, so they change how we do the documentation to make it easier for people, as we add more sensors. And if you have sensor requests, I think it's on our GitHub, Adafruit. Yeah, we also have some videos coming up soon. Under whippersnapper components. You know, there's a couple issues and we may not get to all them in the order that they're in, but if you have a sensor request that I squirts he sensors, especially one that we own, if we don't have it, it's gonna be, he's gonna take us a lot longer to add it. But in the components, you can see I squared C with the BME 280 looks like. There's the animated GIF, the JSON definition, which says what the I squared C addresses are and the name and the type. You know, you still need to have the Arduino code that does the sensing, but luckily, you know, we've already written those drivers, so that's cool. All right, next up, Floppy stuff. Did more Floppies. Thank you. What's the name of this character again? I don't know yet. Okay. Floppy, the floppy bunny. Two things. So one, I'm refactoring the Adafruit Floppy library. I had to take a break for a couple of weeks and take care of stuff that was important. But getting back to doing some Floppy stuff this weekend, so I got, we're trying to like figure out, you know, how to best support some hardware and I really did like all the bit banging code that I wrote. I thought it was cool, but we were having some weirdnesses and we didn't know if maybe it was related to the bit banging code. And so we were like, well, we should really use timers. So Philby and Paint Your Dragon and also a nice person from the Arduino forum who like 10 years ago posted up the exact snippet of code I need to capture pulse widths on the SAMD51. Put that together and put that to the Adafruit Floppy GitHub repo under a branch. And so now I'm using the SAMD51 timer to read and write floppy pulses. So they're like really picture perfect pulses. They're really beautiful and it doesn't matter what the optimization is or what the clock rate is. And so this, it's probably the right thing to do. We still have that bit bang code in there. And then the RP2040 Jephler is updating the code. So far I think he's got reading working with the PIO interface and then writing is next. Ironically, I think writing might be easier than reading. But for the SAMD51, it was not super fun to do, but we did get it working. And so I was able to write a floppy disk and I can even show maybe. Yeah, I don't wanna show this. On the computer. On the overhead. Maybe I'll just show my exciting adventure here. Thank you. Obviously I guess do a split screen or something if you want where it's like the desk and the computer and I'll do that soon. No, no, no. This is not exciting enough. This is fine, this is okay. So, I know we got a lot going on here. So we've got my Feather M4. So I'm doing the SAMD51 in Jephler during the RP2040, so we're like tag teaming. I got these cool rainbow floppy cables. I'm gonna get them with black connectors and we're gonna get them in the store. Those are cool. And then my floppy feather wing to my Shugart 34 pen and then what I'm doing now is I'm actually testing out because I can't get in stock 34-pin Shugart disk drives like your standard large floppy disk drive which I don't have, it's behind the green screen. They're available on eBay, you can get them and there's millions of them on the planet but I can't get them in quantity. I don't wanna bid on each one to stock in the shop but what I can get is USB floppy drives and USB floppy drives as we discovered in a previous video are just, they come in an enclosure like this. Me, me, me. Da, da, da, da, there's a little floppy drive and then there's the cable and this is just a laptop floppy drive in a plastic case with a little USB adapter thingy. We don't want the USB adapter thingy because it's not as helpful to us for some of the hacking we're doing but and also like it can't read 800K floppies or 720K floppies and it can't do re-reads and it can't do flux copies and stuff. So there is definitely benefit to having the raw floppy available and using this adapter here, I'm converting the 26-pin FPC to the Shugart connector over here with the power supply and okay, so sorry, and then I've got a diskette. So put the diskette in here and then at the computer, let me see, I can do, do you wanna go to the computer? Yeah. I can, I can write now and you can see it's able to write and verify. Now, it seems like once in a while it has to write and rewrite a couple of times. That's not too unusual, I think even on computers. I mean, it's like you're blasting magnetic pulses and those are weird. So it's not too surprising that you have to rewrite a couple of times and it takes a while with flux engine but it does work and so what's cool is that this is kind of the, I feel like an hour ago I got this working, this is one of the first diskettes I'm writing and so I took an image of the diskette I made a while ago with text files on it and now I was able to write it. So this is good. I wanted to make sure, I mean, there's no reason why this wouldn't work but it's like until you really try it and you verify it, it's like hard to know because floppy disks can be weird. The only thing that's a little bit of a bummer is these laptop floppy drives don't seem to be tuned up to do Mac 800K floppy MFM pulses. They kind of struggle with them, which is a little bit of a bummer and I wanna try some other diskette formats and now that I can write, I can like create floppy disks that I can read, like you need to like have to be able to create them to read them and my Sony disk drive is cool with writing all sorts of like weird formats I think. So the Sony drive is happy to read 800K floppies. So what I did is I got a couple old floppies including, so I got this, so you go to the overhead and I'll show this really fast. So I got this couple Mac 800K and 400K floppies. This is actually a Mac 400K and I was able to read this with the setup we've got here and the Sony drive, which again, I can't get thousands of them to stock in the shop or hundreds of them to stock in the shop but I did get one off of eBay. And then I took a disk image of this and I uploaded it to internet archive and let me see if I can, I don't know if I was being a little slow tonight. Yeah, it's being, okay. So yeah, so I took a photo of the disk drive and the disk. And then within internet archive, if you set the metadata right, which only took me like seven tries, you can actually have the disk image load within the emulator and you can play this game. And this guy was kind of interesting. I saw that there's actually an interview with him. He wrote a lot of early educational software. So this was written in 1984. This is like one of the first Mac games, extremely early, only runs on system five and earlier it doesn't run on system six or seven. And so actually it wouldn't run on the PowerBook 180. But you know, it has a kind of cool sound effects and graphics and like you can call people on the phone. It's got a little bit of that hypercard feel. It's not hypercard, it was handwritten. But yeah, for 1984, this is like a beautiful game, you know, really impressive. So it's cool to see that I was able to get a diskette, rip the diskette using the Adafruit Floppy open source, you know, top to bottom set up, upload to that. It's like a magic cap OS. Like that's- It does like a little, it has a little bit of that. Yeah, it's like I'm a little, like they did that for a while. Oh, Mac Desk. They're like, if you're gonna be a business person and you have this, you know, computer or PDA, we need to reproduce it exactly. Like news is a newspaper on your desk. Phone is a phone on your desk. But do you have to water the plant? The plant, I don't, I mean, it's point and click, but not everything, you know, there's like a memo. Yeah. They didn't get into the Tamagotchi things quite yet where it's like, you have to water the plant. Like the plant doesn't just die in the background. Yeah, I don't, I don't, I'll, I'll- Oh. What? Call someone. Well, you need to know the number. Call, call, ready? I'll give you a phone number to try. No, it doesn't work that way. And then you can go outside and then it's like, you can be like, you need stock. And then I was reading this memo before. Do you have to use Bitcoin? Yeah, this is a, this is actually an NFT project. I don't know. Nice frickin' telephone. And then you can like speed up time. Okay, so it's just like real life. I like how it actually has the correct date. That's pretty impressive. Ooh, clean up desk. Disconnect phone. Water plant. Oh wow, there is a water plant. Yeah. This is cool. They thought of that. Take vacation. Bye. Okay. The vacation's over. That's, okay, that's, that's real time. Yeah. Oh, you're gonna go back and the, the business is just gonna be wrecked. I guess I took a four week vacation. Um, okay. Oh, the plant died while you were gone. You forgot to water the plant. Oh no, I have to water the plant. All right, maybe it's gonna be okay now. Shoot. All right. Well, tough game. But you're impressive. 1984, very early. Okay, so anyways, so back to this. It's cool that the time does work. That is kind of weird. Yeah, I know. They're like, how, where are you? How did this happen? How did you get to 1922? Back in time? Yeah. So anyways, this is the finish of the, the Discrete Read. Okay, so that's, that's the desk lady. So before we move on to Great Search. Yeah, what else do you wanna talk about? Well, I was going to show how to get this flex cable for the Great Search, this one. Okay, now you wanna do Great Search? Yeah, I mean, there's many last questions, if not. No, did you want me to, what about that video? No, no, because I did have not. Okay, I know that. Okay, let's do the Great Search. Sorry. You ready? Yeah. Every single week, Lady Data User Powers of Engineering to show you how to find things on digikey.com, things you need. It's a useful skill now because global parts shortage. Lady Data, what are you going to show how to find this week on this Lady Data? Okay, so working on my floppy disk project, I needed a special flex connector that was a little different than most. And so I thought I'd show how to, I was actually kind of curious, like where am I gonna get this custom flex cable? And then I kind of realized, while searching on digikey, that they have like every kind of flex cable in every length and every size and every pin count. So, like already stopped, which is pretty amazing. So let's look at the overhead real fast and I'll show what it is that I am using. So to connect to an existing laptop floppy drive, I need to get a FPC cable. So this is a flex cable. And the thing is, is that I actually got the wrong kind of cable here. So I wanted it to be like, you know, this way, but it's twisted, you see it's twisted because I want the contacts to be on the same side. I'll show you what I got and then I'll show you what I need. So this is what I got and I got the wrong thing. So this is, I believe these are called AB cables because the pin A here goes to B, like it goes to the opposite side, but basically there's like reverse and they're same side. There's not a formal name for them, but there's two types. Either you have the contacts on the same side or you have the alternate side. So I got the alternate side one, but what I really wanted was this to go like that. So I wanted it to be on the same side, like not like this, like twisted, you know, so it's like blue and blue. And this is not a standard connector pitch. This is one, ooh, shiny. This is one millimeter pitch, not 0.5 millimeter pitch, which is much more common. Most displays are 0.5 millimeters, what you normally kind of deal with in electronics. So we're just going to look on Digikey to show the vast number of FPC cables that are available. Anyways, go play Make Millions with Tom Snyder. It's a fun game. He even has a Wikipedia entry. This game is more famous than you, Bill. Yeah. Okay. So let's look for FPC. That's actually what I searched for. So there's the connectors and the cables. And like I said, there's 18,000 cables, a lot of cables. So the first thing we want to limit is the number of pins. So I just like sat there and counted and there's 26 pins. So the number of conductors is 26. You'll see, like you can get any number you want up to 80. There's a lot. So now we've got it down to 26 pin cables, connectors, but you'll notice that there's a lot that are fine pitch. So we want to make sure that the ones we're getting are one millimeter pitch. And because I only need a couple of them, I just want to quickly kind of get them, get this working. I'm going to only search for in stock. And I also only want active parts. And then the question is the length. So the exposed ends, it doesn't really matter. Like it's the connector is pretty big, so it's fine no matter what. The length, I actually went a little bit too short here. I really want it to be around like 150 to 200 millimeters. I want like six to eight inches. The one I got was like four inches. It's like much too short. I've determined. So apply all and a lot of options came up. So I ended up getting, I actually kind of just sorted through price because I was a little lazy. And I picked up some of these. So watch out because the image is like symbolic, right? It's only like eight contacts, they're not 26. It's symbolic. But I also want to make sure I've got the right termination style. So the way they describe it here are top on both sides, background on both sides, top on one side, bottom on the other. So top on both sides mean it's, the contacts are on the top and top and bottom means they're inverted. So I want top on both sides. So both ends have the contacts on the top just to make sure. And then yeah, this one that I saw, so you can see like you want it like this where it's like blue is on the same side or this is actually a better image so you can see. That's what I want. I want the contacts to be on the same side. So it's, you know, when it comes in and goes into my connector, it doesn't twist 90 degrees. You just have to watch out like it's pin one, pin one, I don't know, just make sure. But I'm gonna just pick up, you know, there's like 3000 stock here. And then bonus round, I'll also show how you can find the matching connector. Because if you look on the bottom, it actually tells you some good options. And this is actually a pretty cool story I want. Top contact, 26 pin point one, sorry, one millimeter pitch. Only thing is this is actually, while this is what I want, it's not in stock. So I'll just quickly get an equivalent. So yeah, this is what I want though. It's like I got that wide one millimeter. You can see that the pins are like kind of wider apart. And you got the little nubs and the contacts. You can even see the contacts there on the top because it's top to top connector. So I'll just quickly go down here and I'll say, okay, well I want flex connector and I want it to be active, surface mount right angle so I want it to come out the side. Context on the top, 26 positions, one millimeter pitch. The rest is not as important. It's like the color and stuff. And so there were a lot of other options available, which is great. And I'm going to search only in stock. It's only five options and I ended up getting this one, which was either there's a couple, this one has a photo, which is kind of nice. There's also this one, but I like this one looks very similar to the style that I'm used to. It doesn't have a 3D, but it has this little pull tabs that work very easily. So this is what I'm going to get for the great search. All right, and that's a great search for this week. Okay, and question came in. Yes. For those who say I'm going to make things too easy any chance that Adafruit will make a series on how to use PIO. I noticed you're using it for the floppy and I just have seen some very cool USB host solutions with it. I definitely read and watch them. I don't have any current plans to do PIO chores. I know that I think Sean Himmel did a guide on PIO though. He did a video series. So check that out. And also there's a great set of tutorials on the Raspberry Pi type. I clearly remember floppy cables had a twist of about five wires. Is that not necessary anymore? That's for when you have two disc drives. I only have one. So I don't have to worry about the twist that selects between disc A and disc B. I'm only using disc B because it's already too much. One disc gets enough. I don't need to. Yeah, that's cool. I remember that now too. That's right. I have one. Okay. Well, we have our regular series of shows all week. No plan changes. We'll see everybody on Tuesday with JP's product pick of the week on Wednesday with 3D Hangouts with Noah and Pedro. And then after that, later on is show and tell, late eight and I. And then we have Ask an Engineer Thursday, JP's workshop and then Friday, deep dive with Scott. And very soon we'll be adding some more shows and clips and people and things as we kick off 2022 together and we all recover and build this world the way we want to together. So I'm looking forward to work with everyone. Thanks for sticking with us all this time. We'll try to keep you entertained and excited and inspired. And thank you so much for supporting us weirdos doing cool things with electronics and more. We'll see you on the socials. I have a ton of retro photos. Y'all are gonna love. Stay tuned to all the different places that we post every single day. You're gonna love them. We're gonna hack some stuff. We're gonna take some stuff apart too. We'll see you all during the week. Thanks everybody. Goodbye, have a great week. That's a song. That's a song.