 All right, remember what the doormouse said, feed your head, feed your head. It's from the desk of Lady Aida. Hey everybody, that's us and our Christmas time relaxation pods. That's how my hair gets pink. That's right. It's in the pink pod. It's me, Lady Aida, here at my desk. We've been having the relaxing long weekend. It's Christmas time. Merry Christmas to those who celebrate. Happy holidays to those who don't and happy Chinese food and movies all that stuff. All that stuff. So we've got some stuff I've worked on. Some stuff we went out and did things, but also it was nice and quiet. I did some hardware for first off, Mr. Lady Aida, who is behind the scenes here. What are the updates and news? Things you want to talk about? Yeah, we got a bunch of updates and stuff. I'll go fast. Here's a reminder. Look, if your plane got delayed, if you had to get a COVID test or something, if you forgot to get a gift for someone, don't worry about it. You could pretend like you thought about it ahead of time. Adafruit.com slash gift certificates. They're going, they never expire. We don't spam. We don't harvest emails. We don't do any weird things like that. They're good forever. And you could pick up a gift certificate and just be like, oh, hey, things got busy. Sorry, you know, this whole Omicron thing or like whatever it is. Oh man, there's snow or there's no snow. Whatever it is, you can still be a hero by getting someone made up of gift certificates. Stay in, do electronics. Okay, next up, I have to do this now all the time, every single week, because people are crummy to each other online. So we did not buy Radio Shack. We have nothing to do with Radio Shack. I interview the new owners or CEO of Radio Shack every time there's a new one every four or five years. It's like a new version of, speaking of the matrix. So this is a sign we bought off the side of a building in New Jersey when the Radio Shack shut down. It's a cool sign. Yeah, so this is the back of my desk at the office. It just says heckar. So we have nothing to do with it. They have a crypto coin and all that now and someone right away blamed Adafruit because they don't like women doing anything in technology or online. And so they take out all their frustrations and they make up shit. Okay, next up, speaking of, we added another shirt. So we don't do NFTs. You wanna pop to your computer real quick? Yes. Okay, so Adafruit doesn't do NFTs. We don't endorse NFTs. We don't do ETH. Well, we do have adafruit.com slash NFTs. And this is a gallery of nice F and T shirts. So you could see the gallery of all the shirts that the Adafruit team, we all collect cool T shirts and stuff like that. So we added, this is a nice fish T shirt that just got added. So that's our drop. But on a serious note, we've put in a clause for Lady Aida and for our team for years about don't use our Lady Aida for things like holograms or metaverse stuff, or now it's called NFTs. So we almost had to deal with people thinking that we had something to do with NFTs again. But we told the photographer who did a project a few years ago, no, you can't, don't forget, you can't use Lady Aida in your other projects. You can only use it for your one project. So if you go to adafruit.com slash NFTs, scroll to the bottom, you can see the language that we have there. And you also get a chance to look at some nice fish T shirts. So all that being said, Lady Aida, what is on your desk this week? Okay, well, first up, let's go to the overhead. I'll just show some hardware. I didn't do, I did some hardware, not a ton of hardware. Yeah, I did the overhead. Mm-hmm. Okay. I'm working on a camera, like a smart camera, like machine learning board, with an ESP32 S2, although I'll probably update it to the S3. I've got a TFT here, and it's on the high speed TFT line so I'll be able to like get data from the camera and display it to the, the SPI TFT really fast. The camera uses a ton of pins. So to handle like more GPIO and buttons and stuff, I actually put a seesaw chip here, an AT Tiny 817. I also have a SD card so we can like save images. And I just got this board up and running and it mostly works. I made like one or two mistakes, but not too bad. And next up, I'm going to test out the camera module. And then I'm going to maybe revise this to use the mini version of this module so I make the board a little bit small, because it's kind of big. And then more and more, I'm just going to test it with circuit Python because we've got some circuit Python camera support for sure. Okay. Next up, don't forget, we still have pink feather RP 24 years. We're going to get more pink boards in. Yeah. Oh, how about on your computer? You get adafruit.com slash free, just so folks can get an idea. So this is a good way in place to update oneself. So right now you can see, here's all the free stuff we have when you add stuff to your cart. So you get a pink feather for $99 and more. Yeah. Okay. Great. I think we still have some. Yeah, what else you got going on? Okay. Next app. Oh, we got the Scorpio PCBs in. I'll show those off on the overhead. Yeah. Well, let me take everyone on the journey first. Okay. Okay, go on some journey. Yeah. So. You do the journey. I'm going to look something up really fast. Yeah. So this journey is as follows. So we were trying to think of a name for this Scorpio board and it's like eight bits and buffering and all that stuff. So I started thinking about the number eight and you know, the easy things are like octo and like, you know, octo and octa players. So I started thinking about numbers and like Timothy Leary has like some brain circuit thing and there's just like, there was a bunch. I went into the rabbit hole as they say. And but then I was thinking like, oh, the eighth house and astrology and spiders have eight legs and scorpions are part of spiders. Things with eight legs. It's the same family. Yeah. And so we started thinking about like, maybe it's scorpion. So we came up with this thing called Scorpio and that's the name of the board. There's a lot of iconography and things that we're doing that we think folks are gonna like. Here's just like work in progress. And then there's neat things like real scorpions, not digital illustrations like I just showed. They glow and they have this layer on their shell and it can glow for like millions of years under UV light. It's actually pretty neat. So that's where we got the name Scorpio from and then this was a thing that I walked by every day. And then of course you start to notice things. And I took a photo and when I got really close to it, I noticed that the artist had sculpted these little caterpillars onto the eight. Yeah, it's cute. And like, there's all sorts of things that you just, now I'm seeing scorpions everywhere. Yes. But that's where we got the, that's where the idea came from. Eight and spiders and there's also that fable about the frog and the scorpion and the frog is like, hey, how's it going scorpion? Scorpion's like, look, I just wanna cross the river. Can I hop on your back and frogs like, no man, you're gonna sting me and then we're both gonna sink and drown. And scorpions like totally won't do the, I totally hear you, totally not gonna do it, trust me. And frog, you know, says, okay, hop on. Scorpion goes and stings the frog in the middle of the river and now they're both drowning. And frog's like, why'd you do that? And it's like, hey, man, it's in my nature. So, you know, once in a while, you just gotta understand that something's gonna sting you no matter what they promise you. And there's probably a life lesson in there. Maybe you don't ride frogs either. Okay. You don't ride frogs. Yeah, so let's go to- Let's go to the overhead. Yeah, look, I had to take everyone on a journey. And that's while it's calm scorpion. Okay. Yeah. This is the board. So I got, you know, just the PCBs. I tacked this onto a PCB order I had and I got a little stencil as well. It's got the purple PCB action going on here, USB area, battery charging, the RP2040, and then the eight PIO pins in a row over here. The reason I haven't put this together is I'm still waiting for that level shifter that I designed in. I talked about that I think a week ago or two weeks ago. The part that I thought was in stock actually wasn't, I wasn't fast enough checking out and somebody bought it under me. So I bought another part and then it was Christmas and so I didn't get it in time. But then as I was working on this, I was thinking, you know, it would also be good as a logic analyzer maybe to have like this eight bit input. And so I might actually get a similar to 74 AHC 245, but like the 2245, which has two VCC pins so I can do bi-directional logic level shifting. And the reason I want to do that and not use like a TXBO108 is I find the TXBO108's oscillate and if you put a pull-up on them, they get really confused. I'd rather just say like, look, either the eight pins are inputs or they're all outputs. So you can use it as an eight bit logic analyzer like to read or as eight bit, you know, addressable LED writing, you know, and that those are the two direction pins you can use. So I'll still put this version together, but I'm just waiting for that last part to come in. And since it's like a fine pitch part, I don't want to have to rework it after the fact. I want to stencil it and place it. You know, sometimes if I'm missing like a, you know, a bigger part, I'm like, oh, I'll just solder it and later I'll get everything else working. But this part is a fine pitch component. So I'm going to, I'll just be patient. Oh, one thing too, Darian's really sharp. So one of the things that, it's not getting here was RP and PIO and- RPI. Yeah. And so, you know, one of my favorite logos of all time, well, there's two, well, there's a lot, but the FedEx logo, because it was a hidden little arrow, the Northwest logo, which that airline doesn't really exist anymore because the logo itself means something in addition to the words that are physically there. Northwest, point to Northwest, an arrow has this little thing. Scorpio has a RP and PIO. So good guess. Yeah. Good observation. Okay, what else you got going on? And then I thought I'd show off quickly the learning system template guide. So let me go to the overhead again real fast and I'm just going to show the boards I'm working on to explain why. Oh, by the way, I just looked up, we actually did win out of pink feathers like today. So I just swapped it. So you'll get a black feather. Sorry. We sold out of them. We put them in as long as we could. We made 2000 and we sold out. All right, sorry. Sorry about that. We'll have more doing. Then we really just sold out today too. So some of the boards that I'm making recently like this Cutie Pie S2, the KB2040, the Feather ESP and this new Feather M480 Longer. I'm starting to like do a couple more things to make it easier to use for low power stuff. Now historically, I haven't really cared about low power because a lot of the chips I was using they're just not very low power. And also I was like, I'd rather just get this hardware done instead of caring about like low power uses, which you know, it's not hard to do but you have to do a couple of extra things. I sort of was like, I'd rather just ship it better done than done well. As I'm doing some more designs, I'm starting to like pick up some of the low power practices that I've been tried and I'm learning things as well. Like, you know, I made a mistake on the Feather ESP2 design that I'm going to revise. So just learning kind of like how to do good low power stuff especially with wireless, I think it's important. Like the Circuit Playground Blue Fruit I actually cared about low power and the MagTag of course is low power because it has to, you know, run for a month on a battery. One of the things by doing that, you know, when you go into low power, when you want to use stuff for low power is turning off peripherals, being able to turn off whole sections of the board with the good GPIO. And so, for example, the I squared C port, you can turn off the power. It's actually off by default. You have to enable it. So, you know, the board comes up in the lowest power and then as it boots up, you can turn on I squared C. With the ESP2 QDPI, the NeoPixel has a power pin. The NeoPixel has a power pin. So instead of just being a quiescent one milliamp at all times you can turn on the NeoPixel when you want. And it comes on, it's circuit python by default so it can do signaling. You can turn it on and off. The feather, you know, you can turn off power to the SD card and you can turn on off power to the QT port. And other weird stuff like the KB2040 doesn't have an indicator LED. It only has a NeoPixel LED and it has two I squared C ports. And the wire one port is on the QT and like same with this there's like two I squared C ports. So some of these boards are getting a little bit more complicated and a little bit weirder. Like it's not like in Arduino Uno or compatible where there's like one I squared C port, one SPI port. There's one NeoPixel pin. There's no, you don't turn off the NeoPixel power. There's an I squared C port. You don't turn off the power. Like everything that's connected is on and that's kind of historically how Arduino boards have worked. It's like it kind of comes up ready to go. You don't have to like, you know, add any ingredients to make it work. But that's also made it a little tougher for people to use because I know especially with the feather people didn't realize like, you know, even when we put in the documentation you have to turn on pin seven in order to enable I squared C power. People like kind of just didn't know to do that. Or the NeoPixel power, you know, you maybe didn't realize you had to turn it on. And on some board support packages like the SAMD board support package we have a little like startup hook that enables all the stuff to begin. So you actually don't notice it but with Expressif for example there isn't a startup hook. And we're gonna probably try to get them to add one but for now like the boards all come in tri-state you have to actually enable everything manually that you want to happen. So let's go to the computer. So one of the things I wanted to do is add documentation for every board for stuff like an I squared C scan test. Especially since again there's a lot of like dual I squared C ports. And a lot of people are like, I don't know if I squared C is working and I can't get this to work. And I'm like, we have to do an I squared C scan and they're kind of like, I don't know what to do. And like the examples that are online don't enable the pin. So what we have here is, you know, a guide page that goes through and is really explicit, you know, it says like here, you know, you have to add these two lines. And then when you go down here, there's like examples code and if you copy and paste this code it does everything for you. Like for example, if you're using wire one on ESP32 you actually have to like set the pins. It doesn't, like a lot of platforms if you define FDA one and SCL one and the variant the board support package will just come up and say, oh, you must have a secondary I squared C port I'm going to define it for you in like wonderful everything. But, you know, some BSPs like Expressive don't do that, they're very lightweight. They'll define only the main I squared C port and they'll add, then they'll require you to use set pins to assign the secondary peripheral that all the peripherals exist but you have to assign the pins. So one of the things about this is that, you know, we have all these boards and they're all, they all have kind of like something going on but that something is a little different from board to board. Some have two ports, some you have to enable the I squared C some the Q, you know, the stomach QT is wire one you have to set like there's all these little things. And so I want to take advantage of the template system that we have. So this is like the editor behind the scenes for learn and you can see that this is like, hey, this is a template page, you can go here. And so what a template page is is I write all the stuff that's like, here's basic information about I squared C and then there's a little area where when I template the page, when I make it, you know, a sub page for this template, this is where the board specific information goes. And then, you know, all this stuff like, okay, you have to install a library. This is the same for every board support package. It doesn't matter if you're running a circuit playground or a QT pie or an Arduino, you're gonna install a library the same and the code is gonna be the same and opening up the C reports the same and like, okay, wire up this sensor, all that stuff's gonna be the same. And then here is like, okay, here's where you put the fritzing diagram. That's the gonna be the thing that's different. So template usually has like four or five sections that are a little bit different, but everything else in the middle is the same. And then if I ever update this page, it kind of, it percolates out. And this is something that I used with Dreamweaver. It's kind of how I originally made Ladyata.net, when you make webpages, you just do Dreamweaver. And I use cascaded templates basically to manage all this content. It's shockingly hard. Once you get past three boards, it's very, very hard to maintain documentation. We know this, we have to constantly go back and update and revise and like, Raspberry Pi comes out with a new operating system. I think they're up to like Bumblebee or something now. Whereas before it was Buster and, no, sorry, it's Bullseye. And you see Buster and Bullseye, like they killed a lot of things. And that's probably fine. Like, okay, maybe OMX player wasn't needed, but all of our guides that depended on OMX player now don't work, you know? And it's tough. We have 2,600 plus guides. So just, and you know, 1,500 repos. So a lot of the architectural decisions and the code decisions that we make are based on how do you maintain and manage that much documentation? It's incredibly hard, but you want to have as much information and you don't want, you know, we would mirror pages in, but then they'd be too vague, right? It's like, you have to have the documentation cover everything and be specific, but if it's too specific, it's unmaintainable. So there's just like real struggle when you're dealing with documentation updates. So the templates, I think, help because, you know, when I make a template and then I go in here to the iSquad C scan page for the QT pie, you know, instead of saying, okay, you have to power the pen, this is where I say, okay, don't forget, there's two iSquad C ports, one on the QT and one on the cast lead pads and they're different and one's called wire one. And then it's like, hey, you also have to do this thing where you do the set pen. So it's like, I try to put it high up in the beginning of the page. But then the rest of the documentation is similar. I just, you know, I put in a fritzing image just so it's kind of cement, here's how you set it up and I warn them, hey, don't forget. Again, you have to put that set pins line in. And then finally, you know, I have the output which shows both the primary and secondary ports. So this weekend I worked on a bunch of Arduino templates. Katnie's been working on circuit Python templates. You used to have kind of more generic examples for all the boards, but as the boards became just more and more kind of varied and different and weird, the existing pages we had started to become like really unwieldy because they had all these like weird call outs like, oh, if you're using this board, this is the thing. And if you're using that board, this is the thing. And then before you know it, you have like six warnings for different boards and actually people couldn't keep track of them. Like they'd read the page and they'd be like, why are you talking about, you know, the QE pie when I have a circuit playground? They didn't understand that it was like, it was one page that was trying to document for everything and that was just not really maintainable. So we're doing templates. You know, I think it's gonna work out. I've used templates before and they're okay. It's hard, but you know, hopefully between this and you know, stuff like Adafruit Sensor and Adafruit Bus IO trying to make this stuff more generalized, particularly because there's so many board chips that are supported as well. Again, a lot of the stuff didn't, didn't make, you know, even have to have all these weird exceptions when everyone was using AVRs, people using STMs, NRFs, NXPs, ESPs, so many different chips. Choice is good. Choice is good, but it makes documentation a little more challenging. So you're gonna see some of these template pages pop up on some Arduino boards. I'm going kind of backwards in time because again, the most complicated weird stuff is the most recent because we've got these like, you know, I'm adding semi QT ports to everything, but what I'm trying to do is like, if I can squeeze another two pins onto that QT port, I will, but now you've got two I squared C ports and it's very confusing to people. Although I think overall it's still good because you want to have, it's better to have two ports. People really like that when they need it, but if you don't know, that's what you got to get confused. Okay, do you wanna do the great search now? Yeah, I just don't know if there's any questions. No, let's keep going. All right, let's go ahead and pick up and then we'll do a great search. Where? All right, the great search brought to you by DigiKey, I think in DigiKey, Lady Eda uses her powers of engineering every single week to show you things that you can find on DigiKey. And this week is a special gift giving favorite tool edition of things you can find on DigiKey's site after we saw something cool. So take it away, Lady Eda. That's right. So I actually didn't do a lot of DigiKey part-switching this week because everyone's on break, which is wonderful. But I did see this really cool thread that Thea Valkyrie posted on Twitter. So it's on my computer and I can show it. Ta-da. So I love this idea. It's like, you know, the day after Christmas or the day of Christmas, ask, you know, what did people get this year or for the holidays, that especially tools that you want to show off. And there's like really good examples in here. So check out Stargirl's tweet thread because there's like, there's more showing up and I'm not gonna get to all of them. But the first one that came up is from Timon who does awesome, really cool open source hardware. And they said, this brush and these little swabs are cleaning PCBs. And even Eva, whose team made a fruit intern was like, that was really cool. So I thought this was actually a really good idea to show off. Swabs, ESD brushes are pretty common, but these swabs, what I thought was interesting about them is they're foam tipped, not cotton tipped. And so that means that they're, you know, you can use them to get flux remover in on your circuit boards and clean them up without getting like the little snags of cotton that always kind of come off and get hooked, especially on like little sharp corners of your components. I don't like that. But these foam tip brushes are good. So I thought I would show how you could find foam swabs on Digikey. So I go to Digikey and I actually just, I actually was like, I'm just gonna search for foam swabs. And it turns out that there is a whole section called clean group swabs and brushes and this stuff is like, there's like such good stuff in here. So I said to you, because I'm not looking for a specific thing. I'm just looking for a general thing, but I'll look for active and in stock. And there's cotton ones, of course, but we don't want cotton tip. We want just like foam. Note that there's like hog. You want like hog tip swabs. You can get that. But I want foam. So let's look at foam tip. And in particular, this is probably propylene. There's a couple. This one is sort of like a, yeah, like this is where the mouse over photos come in handy, because I was able to like really scan through them. Short has kind of like a rounded swab. These are pre-saturated. This is from Chemtronics. So it's kind of like the coolest, weirdest, like graphic treatment of all the chemical components companies. But this is actually the one that was, I think the closest. So you get a 500 piece pack for 65 bucks. And yeah, this nice sharp pointy tip. But I'll say that there's a couple other options as well. There's like flexible ones. There's ones that have a clear tip to them. They're not like made out of wood. There's ones that do are made out of wood. I wouldn't, you know, I guess I was going to this. I was like, these look a lot like COVID test swabs. Don't use them for that. This is for cleaning your PCBs. Ones that are like guaranteed ESD safe, all sorts. But check out these ones. This is a kind of a really fancy swab. This is for like soaking up. So if you spilled a little bit too much flux remover, you can I think use this to kind of soak up some of that material very gently. So checking up a lot of options. But I think the one that looks closest to the one they had was this one from Chemtronics. You get 500 packs, 500 pieces in this pack, 44070. But check out the other swabs and cleaning supplies. It's one of those things where future you will thank you when you get good cleaning equipment and good tools. Cause then when you need it, you're not like, oh my God, I don't have, I'm losing a Q-tip. And then you're cleaning the Q-tip off the board. Anyways, check out these foam swabs. I'm going to pick up some of these, I think for our firm department. Okay. And that's your pick. I checked out the thread. It's still going on. The thread's still going on. I just picked one item out of it. It is amazing. And then the other thing that I'll say is I sent a note to some maker community leaders. And I don't know if people want emails from me anymore, but I had this idea. Very Christmas. Well, so it was the day after Christmas. And one of the things I noticed is so we don't post links to Amazon because some people have issues with Amazon. Some people love Amazon. What we try to do is always post a link to the maker's website. If someone makes something, whether it be their own personal site or a Tindy store, or if it's even someone who's, we don't think Sparkfun's a competitor, but even if we don't make something, but Sparkfun does. Oh, I send people to Sparkfun all the time. Yeah. And so we do our holiday sales stuff where we link to everyone who sells electronics. Like, you have motor drivers, go to Pololu. Yeah. They got that covered. And so, in this parting great search, because this is the last desk of Ladiata for the year, I just wanted to say like, so when we're all posting up links on social media and more, if you can remember to link to the maker's site, that's really helpful, especially if you want to reward open source companies or women-owned companies or minority-owned companies. You know, sometimes there is a cheaper worst version on Amazon or there's a cheaper worst version on Taobao or Alibaba and it takes forever to get. But people will say, oh, it's here, but they don't really even know if it is or not. I think we can all spend a couple extra minutes. So I sent a note to community leaders in the maker world. And we'll see. I thought this would be something we could all do in 2022 together because I think, you know, you've heard the term virtual signaling. People are like, oh, Amazon's the worst. And then some people say Amazon is great. They're one of the biggest employers in the country. Well, no matter what though, that debate aside, when people are sending things to each other on social media, if you can link to the person's website, the company's website that you like, that you want to support, do that anyways. Even if they also do sell on Amazon because often Amazon takes a big cat. Yeah, so just generally speaking, if you can find it on- Go to the original. Yeah, if you can find it, it just takes a minute. Like, we're all smart. We all spend like hours researching what socks to buy forever. And we read all the reviews and we're like, fine, I'm going to get these tactical socks. Tactical socks. Coming soon, nice tactical socks. Can't wait for our tactical socks. Nice freaking tactical socks on Adafruit. But I think that's something that we can all do together. And I think that that's a nice community thing. I used to do that at Meg, did that at Hackaday. I'd do that at Adafruit. I think we can all do that. And the makers, all the y'all there in the chat and super fans and part of the community, that's why I think you like Adafruit because we'll always point you in the correct right place. Even if it's something that someone else would consider a competition, we'll always do the right thing. And we don't do affiliate links and we don't have any policies that says we can't link to any other site. I know there are some sites that can't link data for it and I think that's weird, but that's their problem. So, anyhow, so with that is The Great Church this week. Thanks, everybody. I have to play the song. Play it out. Yeah. Last one of the year. All right, well, thanks everybody. We had a nice freaking time. It was so much fun. Hanging out with y'all, so. Just a reminder. Yeah, programming note. We're probably not gonna do show and tell and ask an engineer this week. We'll probably do other short video snippets because this week is just all over the place with, you name it, everything's happening all at once. It's like that yearly Fourth of July video that you see where like, uh-oh, the fireworks factory accidentally blew up. All the fireworks are happening at once. We're doing fine here in New York and at Adafruit but everything got moved a little bit over there. Everything got, everyone, a lot of people's travel got, we scheduled, they can't come back, they can't come forward, they can't go right or left. We're gonna focus on just taking care of our TUs. We'll do a little videos here and there. I promise you there's gonna be fun, weird art and cool electronics every single day on the Adafruit site. Yeah, probably even more than ever. More than ever. Anyhow, that's our show, that's everything. Thanks so much everybody. We're gonna go do some stuff and then go back to our pods. Enjoy it. Bye everybody.