 and welcome to Skaladiata Halloween Edition before we go out for Halloween festivities. Yes. Okay, I gotta take these off, please, sir. This is a cool non-Pedro project. Actually, it's interesting when it's green and it gets all kind of messed up looking. Check out some of the great Halloween projects that we've done over the last 10, 15 years for all your Halloween goodies. Yeah, so let me just take care of this. We're gonna do stuff, because we've got to jam out soon. That's why we're doing this early edition. So first up, we have our regular series of shows all week Tuesday, JP Product Pick Wednesday, 3D Hangouts with Non-Pedro. Show and tell, Non-Pedro will be hosting that one. Ask an engineer, we're back. Last week, we had the Adabox unboxing, which had a very spooky meaning. And Adabox is shipping now, yeah, yeah, yeah. People, Adabox is shipping. This is our fall edition. We're moving things to seasons because of supply chain and shipping crises. And so the winter box will be shipping in the winter, it'll be December, January-ish. And this one is fall box. So some folks got a little bit following me, some folks in, and thank you everyone who was totally cool with that because you're a human who's in the world and understands what's going on. And then Thursday, we have JP's workshop, and then Friday, we have Deep Dive with Scott. So Lady Adabox, what is on your desk this week? Okay, so first up, do you wanna mention if you're watching this live, we have some Pi Zero, 2WZ. Oh yeah, they're gonna be gone, but go for it. And I'm gonna tell you right now, well first off, there's a limit one per customer, please, so everyone has a chance. After this batch is sold out, I do not know when we're getting more. So if you are thinking about it, pick up another thing as well to help us out. Nobody knows. They're basically sold at cost. Speak of a case or a cable or something. Yeah, buy something so this isn't the most painful thing in the world for us. Yeah, we love to help the community, but it is definitely Pi Zeros are an exciting and non-profitable thing to sell. It's part of our... It's just fine, I'd like to support who has reply community and people should get one and take a round with it. So I've been playing around with STEMI QT boards and finally, we got that AT Tiny 817 board out. And so, let me shoot this back. So with the AT Tiny, oh, don't forget, there's a board. Yeah, flip it over to the other side. So there's a board guide with Digikey. You can hold it up on your regular screen. Yeah, hold it up next year. Thanks, yeah. So if you subscribe to make, you get this. And then I believe there's also a version online. Lots of AT for it stuff. If you use the app, there is an AR feature and our apps pop out into cyberspace. Is that an interview that we did? Yeah, like you have a little video and stuff like that and Ebyn's in there and so is exactly part of it. AT for it stuff, spark fun stuff, seed stuff, micro bits, Raspberry Pi, micro bits. Yeah, and like, you know, I'll say this, I'm pleased about it. Between us. It's not a competition, but here's what I'll say. Tim Roney. I am pleased about. Yeah. So Adafruit has the most certified open source hardware. We have the most open source repositories and we've managed to listen to the community and give them what they want, which is things in the feather format, things with STEMI, things that has scripting languages like Python. So I think when you look at all the choices in these boards, be choosy. Be choosy. Pick the best ones. Choosy, choosy, choosy. Because I think a lot of them are gonna be Adafruit. Yeah. All right, so what else you got? Okay, so back to the overhead. Back to the overhead. So now, you know, we couldn't get San Vio 9s. I designed a whole bunch of boards I had to redesign them for AT987 and then I had to get the programmer working and then get that fast enough to make it possible for us to make, you know, quick breakouts with this chip. And also we had to port the CSI library, which was written in like basically ARM GCC and we ended up kind of pouring it back towards Reno. So it's kind of what I wanted to do originally and it's okay, we got there now. You know, we're gonna do this chip. One thing that is really nice about this chip is it's three or five volts. So you don't need an extra regulator. You don't need a level shifter. Whatever voltage you give it from three to five, it's happy to run. So this board, and it's got all the peripherals you expect, you know, analog input, PWM, et cetera, et cetera. And it's fairly fast. You can clock it about 10 megahertz at three volts. So it's like a little chip. So this is a breakout that converts a long slide potentiometer to I squared C. And, you know, this doesn't make a ton of sense if you have a board that has a lot of ADCs. You could probably just wire up the potentiometer on its own. You don't need an I squared C converter to basically take one analog pin. But if you have something like a Raspberry Pi or a single board computer, or maybe there are semiconductors that don't have ADCs, I think the propeller doesn't. And, you know, the Pico only has three. Maybe you don't have a lot of extra, but you want a lot of analog inputs. You know, this is a nice panel mountable solution. And it's also got some neopixels in it too. Let me unplug this thing and I can show a little demo. So I'm working on two of these boards. So I've got the, you know, Metro Mini with a STEMI QT connector. And what's actually kind of nice about programming these is, you know, I plug this into the breadboard and then I've got here, this is a USB serial adapter cable, like a standard FTDI cable. And I have that wired up to the UPDI pin. So I have two Arduino windows open and one, you know, I can run the seesaw peripheral code that I program it into here. So I'm like programming this device. And then with another Arduino window, I'm reading and writing the data from. So you have your black spot on all the screens. Must be green or something. Where? It's stuck to the camera. See this right here? Look at us. Look at that. That is weird. That's on your monitor. No, it's not. Because they can see that in the chat. Weird. Where is that? Maybe touch the lens underneath. Maybe there's a little thing. No, what is that? What could it be? I don't know. Oh yeah, it's over there. Oh, it's the green screen thing. Oh, right, yeah. No, no, no, I know what it is. Oh, it's a little piece of tape? Yeah, it's a piece of tape that's moved. Yeah. Hey, we have a tiny apartment. So anyways, yeah, it's not, you don't need to adjust your screen. Okay. Okay, sorry. So then I can upload the Arduino code so I can go to the computer maybe and take a look at this. So, where's the computer? So this is, you know, I'm working on the peripheral code here in C and then this is the code that runs on the Arduino that connects the CSOP board and creates four NeoPixels. And let's see if this recognized it. It did. But it's not working for some reason. Oh, cause I left a while one in here. Oh, debugging. All those programs. So one of the things that I recently added, which I thought was neat is, go to the bottom here. I added a little thing here that detects the date code, the code at which the code, the code that's running on the peripheral was compiled. You know, it's kind of a neat, like, you want to add like a version number to your firmware maybe, but like who wants to actually like sit around and increment the number every time you compile it. And so one of the things I'd like to do is use like the date that it was compiled as like the version number because it's like monotonically incrementing. So you may not be aware, but in AVR GCC, there is this special macro called underscore underscore date. And that will give you a string that is, that, you know, always is compiled. When you compile the code, that string will automatically be entered in with the date. And the date format is month in three characters, like Nov, Dec, Jan, Mar, whatever. And then a two-digit day of the month and then a four-digit year. And this can be again handy if you want to somehow embed the date into the code so you know when it was compiled. So what I did is in the peripheral code here, I first I stir copy the date into a buffer and then I now terminate it. And then I do like some stir, stir and like pointer or the arithmetic and I kind of like kind of go through the buffer to parse out the three letter month. And then, you know, I check what the index in of this month name thing to get the month. And then I parse out the day and then I parse out the year. And then I pack that into a 16-bit. You know, it turns out that you can fit day, month, year in binary, you just pack it into five bits, four bits and seven bits to fit the year into your day and month into 16 bits. And then I return that value on request. I did write this code originally with scanf. I found a code online that was like, oh, use a scanf. And that like totally destroys the amount of memory you have available on these little chips. So, you know, a little bit of like stir talk, stir pointer stuff, you know, it's one of those like annoying things in C that I always end up like, you know, like a project's not done until you have like some string parsing going on. But this works nicely. And then, you know, in my Arduino code, I will turn off auto-schooling. You can see, I can parse it out and say like, hey, the code running on this board, this is when it was compiled. So I find that a little better than like version 1.1 or 2.3, you know, when I have the date code and I can cross-reference that with my git commits to see exactly what changed at every point. Anyways, this code, you know, as I slide the potentiometer that the number goes up and down. And then if we go to the overhead, the code also changes the NeoPixels underneath. So it's four NeoPixels and they do shine through the orange PCB. So they're, you know, you don't get blue as much, but you do get, you know, some LED pixels. So I thought that's kind of a nice little thing. You could have a little bit of more user feedback, you know, as you slide up and down, maybe it's brighter or dimmer so you can kind of visualize the volume or maybe it is a color picker type thing. So that's the I-squared seed potentiometer. All right, this one says there are two other macros in GNU, GCC for time, underscored time, underscore and underscored timestamp, underscored timestamp. Don't know if they're available in AVR, GCC. I like date. I don't want the time, I want the date. Yeah, you can get the time and I've done that for like RTC setting, but I actually sort of prefer date code. I don't care when I compile that as long as I know what day. Okay, then the other board I designed is this one, let me put this guy. So this is arcade button to I-squared seed. So it's got very similar that, you know, AT tiny eight one seven on the bottom and then address selection and I-squared seed connection on the top. I've got four vertical JST XH connectors and those can go to arcade button. So these like terminal, you know, these quick connects for arcade buttons. And I thought this would be kind of neat because it could do the PWM and the LED buttons and maybe this would be useful for people who are like, look, I just want four inputs and four PWMs and maybe again, you know, you might not have that on your microcontroller, microcomputer, you may not have PWMs available, you may not have a bunch of extra GPIO. So having that available over I-squared seed. Okay, so then. Yeah, and then one more thing. I guess there's also for readable logging, you can use function name in printf from where it called it underscore function. Yeah. And there's no, yes, of course, this will not fit on a AT tiny eight one seven. So, and again, there's no, there's no output. I'm just using the, the date code. What else? Okay, so this one, this demo, we've got, you know, two buttons and you can see that there's PWM support. So it's really, you know, very easy, simple board. One thing that made this design a little bit more complicated is some of these LED arcade buttons, you know, they really need five volts for the LEDs. Like you can't, you know, this, the white LED actually is in parallel. So there's two white LEDs. So you can actually kind of power it from 3.5 volts, although it really wants five, but the red LED version of this has them in series. And so you, like, you really can't power from three volts. You need five volts. And so I wanted to have this, have five volts power for the LEDs, not just 3.3 volts, because again, the board could be from three, but then the LEDs I want five. So I didn't want to say like, oh, for this one STEMI QT board, like, you know, if you don't have five volt power, you can't use it. I wanted to get a little booster to boost up the three volt to five volt. And so that's the great search is, how did I do that to make it very inexpensive and easy? All right, here we go. Yes. Where in the world is that part I just did your key? The Great Search brought to you by Digikey and Adafruit. Thank you, Digikey. Every single weekly data shows you how to find stuff on digikey.com. And one of the most useful skills you can have on planet Earth right now is being able to find parts. Lydia, what is the Great Search this week? Okay, for this week, so I was working on this iSquared C, and there we go, go ahead. Yeah. This iSquared C adapter board that can connect to LED arcade buttons. I love these, these are durable, they're pressy, and of course they're glowy. So we've got a PWM output and a digital input that's being read. And some of these LED arcade buttons really need five volt power. Even if the board itself is three volt logic, I need to give the LEDs five volts for them to light up and that's not unusual. A lot of arcade stuff is still very kind of five volt land because a lot of controller boards are meant to plug into USB and so they have five volts available. But since these Stem IQ T boards can plug into 3.3 volt logic and power, I want to make sure that we had a way to give them to generate that five volts. And so normally you're like, oh, I've got three volts and I need five volts. No problem, I get a boost converter and I love boost converters. There's nothing, there's nothing wrong with DC-DC boost converters. But they're always like, you know, you're like, how hard can it be before you know you need a chip and they need a diode and they need an inductor. And then like, you sometimes even need, you know, a compensation cap or you need a resistor divider. And you know, when I don't need a lot of current, if I need only like 50, maybe 100 milliamps of current, I actually prefer to go with a charge pump. They're great for when you just need a reference voltage. If you need a small amount of current, they're not very power efficient because they always double the input voltage and then regulate it down. They can't, they're not like a boost converter where it can change the PWM rate into the inductor to change the boost voltage. They'll always double, they're doublers. The way they take the capacitor and they switch the connections back and forth, they basically double the amount of voltage. So if you give it 3.3 volts, it'll double it to 6.6 and then linearly regulate down to five. So again, they're not power efficient, but they're really cheap and something like this, which isn't going to be battery powered. Personally, I think it's just fine. Okay, so let's go to the computer and I'll show you. So this is a schematic I have for every LED switch. So I've got the switch here, one pin connected to ground, one pin that's connected to the digital input. And then over here, the other one, I've got the five volt power. And then because I might have three volt logic, I have to use an end channel, FET to, you know, or you can use an NPN. In this case, I'm using the end channel FET to quickly turn on and off or you basically connect the other side of the LED to ground. I can't do a high level, not easily, because again, the logic level might be three volts. So like, you know, I have to reference it to ground. I can't reference it from, from five volts below. So that's a PWM controller. And then this is the switch cap. So again, I like switch cap converters because they're so simple. You know, you've got your VCC input and then you've got your switch cap, which is one microfarad. And then you've got the output, which is five. And another nice thing is these are always, they kind of come in a standard six pin T-SOP, SOP 23 package. There's a shutdown pin if you want it, but pretty much it's like voltage in, voltage out, one small capacitor, no inductor, no resistor, no compensation, no diode. So I'm a big fan of these. I really like them. And again, they're good up to usually about 50 to 100 milliamps. So you can draw, you know, you can draw a couple of these of them. So let's go to Digikey. And so finding these is a little bit interesting because they can actually be in two different spots. So, you know, I usually just type in DC-DC charge pump to try to filter out all the inductor based boost converters. So normally you'd think, okay, let me go to, you know, PMIC voltage regulators, and that's not a bad place to start. Let's go with active, positive, single output, and the output is five volts fixed. So that'll at least get us, you know. And there's ones that do other voltages, by the way. For example, if you're doing UART to TTL, UART TTL to like RS232 logic, you'll want to boost up to plus or minus 10 volts. So you actually usually get two charge pumps, one that takes your five volts and gives you 10, and another one that inverts the 10 back to negative 10. So let's filter, and then let's see what we've got available. So there's, you know, there's a couple of things. They do come in other packages, and I will say a lot of them, you know, are in the five pin or six pin category. So if I'm looking for one that's equivalent to, you know, the package that I'm using, it's gonna look something like this, you know, this six-sot. So let's also only look for in stock, looks like a foot 56 options. But here's the thing, they're cheap. I mean, like, you know, for quantity one, they're 95 cents. This is probably the closest, you know, again, that package, you know, originally used the AP3602. AP3602 has just continued, but you know, luckily there's a lot of, you know, crossable, pin compatible charge pumps, but here's, there's, you know, there's a bunch. So the thing is, is that, you know, there are some here, but you can also find them in, oh, I know one more thing. I just wanted to, before I leave, show you the current output. So a lot of them, you know, they'll give you, as long as you give them, again, it can't be less than one half the voltage because it's a doubler, so you have to give it at least like 2.7 volts. But yeah, a lot of them will give you, you know, 150, 120 milliamps, 60. They say it's a small but a fair amount of current. And another nice thing is they're not noisy. Like, you'll never get inductor noise from them. The other place to look though, and this is the thing, you gotta be careful because, you know, I went here and I was like, ah, you know, I found a couple options. But also look under LED drivers. They're also, you know, they're often considered for like LED drivers. And so even though, and I see this for a lot of DC DCs, check both locations because, you know, for example, my OLED boost converters, whenever I look for those, the chip I use, which is a constant current, sorry, a constant voltage, like the fan 533, 13 volt boost converter, it's actually sorted under LED drivers, not under voltage regulators. And it's one of those things. Okay, so again, active, one output, voltage, five volts, wait, no, sorry, voltage output, five volts. And let's also only look in stock. So there's also a couple here. And so actually, the one that I'm using nowadays is this RT61AGE. Now there's not a lot in stock right now, there's only 130 because I recently bought a wheel of 4,000. But this is what I use. And it's, you know, it's dropping replaceable with the AP3602. And it works lovely, you know, just gives you a nice clean five volts with just an extra capacitor. And you know, in quantity there, they can be as little as 30 or 40 cents per chip, which again, by the time you add the inductor and the diode and the chip is gonna be, you know, maybe half the price of a boost converter with only like one or two placements, you'll need that one capacitor in the chip. So if you're doing manufacturing, you're paying for placement and you're paying five to 10 cents of placement, you know, you're also gonna be cheaper to go with a charge pump. So this is my great search. That's a great search. Charge pump. Where are you? All right, cool. Happy Halloween, everybody. Yeah, so if you wanna see some Halloween photos from Adafruit, you can go to our Flickr photo set or you can check out our blog. I came back from the dead. Yeah, you event. Did some vengeance. This is Ashley with our TARDIS. And you can see a bunch of folks having a lot of fun. This is Sam and I. Sam dresses like that every day, which is like the gym. Yeah, our dress code is cosplay at Adafruit. And a lot of people do dress up every day. Kimmy was Velma Jinkies and the Art of Electronics was a book and she had some Scooby Snap. So anyways, check it out. This is our mini Halloween parade and more. And then, you know, we got a lot of Halloween stuff going on on the Adafruit site. Check it out. Happy Halloween, everybody. And if you're gonna get a Raspberry Pi, maybe put something else in the cart because, you know, that'll help us stay alive. So that's everything. We'll see everybody else during the week. Thank you so much. Thanks, everybody. Happy Halloween. And that is your Descalinated this week. Get some candy.