 New York, it's Ask an Engineer. Hey everybody, and welcome to Ask an Engineer. It's me, Lady Ada, the engineer. It says so down there, that's how you know. With me, Mr. Lady Ada on camera control. We're here at the Ada Food Factory. That's behind us is a real factory. We do manufacturing and electronic goodies here in downtown Manhattan, the Ada Food headquarters. It's a little quiet right now because everyone's gone home except us. That's why machines are off. And we are here doing our video show to do every Wednesday night at 8 p.m. It's time for Ask an Engineer. Yeah, from New York, that video and the intro. Oh yeah, that was this weekend. Yeah, there was lots of pride festivities and it's a little recap of some of our day that we had. We like to bring in the sight and sounds in New York City. It's one of the reasons a lot of people tune in. All the joy without the vomit on the streets. It's a good time. All right, well we've got exciting show for you tonight, including all sorts of new news. We do. Cutting-edge news. On tonight's show, the code is ITISHOT because it is hot outside. So 10% off native withdrawal all the way up to probably like 10 p.m. Or until I remember to turn off the code, put stuff in your cart, get ready. We also have new products at the end, but put stuff in. It is hot. It is hot. It is hot. It is hot. It's mega hot. I'll do a little bit of a reminder about the holiday that's coming up. We're gonna talk about our Adafruit Live series shows, including show and talk. Briefly go over it. Time travel. Lots of news this week in the world of makers, hackers, artists, engineers, you name it, it's covered. This is Adafruit News Network this week. Help Wanted, jobs from the Adafruit Jobs Board, jobs.adafruit.com. You can post your skills, or if you're a company, you can get really great makers, talented people in the community, post up your job there. Main York City factory footage. Got a 3D printing speedup. We have everyone's favorite segment, IonMPI by Digikey and Adafruit. We got some new products. We got some top secret. We're gonna answer your questions. We do that over on discordadafruit.it Discord, join all 29,000 of us. You can hang out there all the time and you can also ask questions throughout the show, but we answer them live at the end, but you can ask questions anytime and during the show, other folks in the community might answer it as well. All that and more on, you guessed it, ask an engineer. Woohoo. All right, so first up, don't forget the code, it is hot. If you do order stuff, it's America time here at Adafruit. These are our holidays. In case you ever wanna go, you can just look on our page that we have. So Adafruit, shipping holidays. This is Independence Day coming up. So this is Independence Day, but it's also a holiday. So we're giving everybody off on Friday and Monday. So, and some folks are leaving on Thursday, some folks are checking off Tuesday because we survived the last 18 months. And so it's definitely a company holiday. There's some folks that are gonna be doing some stuff because they want it to be like a float holiday for them, but for the most part, I don't think it'll ship out till Tuesday, so just keep that in mind. So if you're using the code and you're wondering what's going on, it's because it's America time. Yay. So that being said. Go America. Free stuff, freedom. We did it. Freedom isn't free. When people put things in their cart, they get free stuff. But these things are. What did they get? Okay, $99 and more, you get a free Permaporto half size breadboard. It's our custom PCB that's great for soldering your circuits to. One 49 or more, you get a free Stema QT board. We select from our assortment about 20 different boards that we have in stock. You'll get a different one each time. If you make an account, so make an account and we'll make sure that we don't send you a duplicate, unless of course you've made like 30 orders. One 99 or more, you get a free UPS ground shipping that's in the continental United States. And two 99 or more, you get a circuit playground express, our SAMD 21 based board with 10 neopixels, two buns a switch, a piezo speaker microphone, sensors of all sorts, capacitive touch, USB and battery. It's great for getting your coding or maker project off the ground. There are no soldering required and it supports Arduino, circuitpython, code.org, CS discoveries and make code. All right, we have a bunch of live shows. We did show and tell. Show and tell we just did some 30 PM every single Wednesday. We'll have our next week and all the weeks forward for as long as we're doing this thing. We also do desk of Ladiata and that's on Sunday. This Sunday, we're not gonna have it, but we're probably gonna just do a special segment and release it at some point. This previous Sunday though, what did you show off on desk of Ladiata? Okay, so we first did mail bag because I'm working on some circuits that I'm gonna order, but I showed off a layout for the IS31FL3741 that I talked about a couple of weeks ago. So I'm doing a breakout for it and I'm sort of slowly routing all 139 or whatever LEDs. You can see here. And then I also showed off flip-flop designs and some cool milk pudding caps for the MacroPata sample. So, and then we went to the great search. Yeah. And we talked about how to, how to design birds in a part, extreme part shortage situation where you want to maybe make boards that support multiple packages. In this case, it was either QFN or SOIC or TDFN or SOIC so that if you can't get one package of the chip but you get in a different package, right? Same equivalent functionality, but just different physical size, you can design your PCB to support either. And I also show a couple of tips and tricks from how to read the data sheet to make sure that you're getting the right part and finding alternatives. So it's kind of all I do all every day. I'm looking for alternatives, redesigning boards to deal with this part shortage that I don't see much end in sight for at least six months. All right, speaking of no end in sight, every single Tuesday, JP does a JP Prada Pick of the Week. Here is a highlight from this week. The Trinkie QD2040 is a USB key and a QDRP2040 all-in-one. I have a magnetometer plugged into it over the STEMIQTI squared C and then I'm gonna go ahead and plug it into a hub that's plugged into my computer. I'm gonna run Python code on the computer that is then using the USB connectivity of the Trinkie to access the sensor here. So if I take a magnet and go ahead and move it towards and away from that little magnet sensor, you can see I have the values changing in the little terminal there, as well as the NeoPixel that's built onto the Trinkie updating and increasing its brightness or decreasing its brightness. So that is one really cool way that you can use the Trinkie, which is as a sort of go-between for your Python on your computer to talk to circuit Python-based devices. It is the Trinkie QD2040. All right, also coming up, JP's workshop is tomorrow and here's a preview of some of the things he's gonna show and then we're gonna show the latest circuit Python Parsec. Okay, keyboards and synths, two things that JP loves. For the circuit Python Parsec today, I want to talk about playing a WAV file, an audio WAV file inside of circuit Python on a microcontroller. The key here is that we have this library called Audio Core and from there we can import the WAV file. And once we have that, we can go ahead and open up a WAV file that's on disk. So you can see here I've got four WAV files loaded onto my little QD pie sitting right there. And then I have a little macro keyboard, actually that's that one by four plugged in there so I can pick some different samples. So I open those WAV files, I assign them to the WAV file object and then I am actually gonna do something fun here. I'm gonna play them back at different sample rates which will speed up and slow down the samples. So next thing I'm doing is setting up I squared C so that I can use my little one by four Neo key here. And then playing back WAV files once you have them opened is as easy as audio.play and then the name of the WAV object that you created. So in this case I have audio.play, WAV zero, WAV one, WAV two and WAV three. Now when I click on these keys, you're gonna hear this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this. That is how easy it is to play back a WAV file inside of Circuit Python and that is your Circuit Python parsec. All right, and then Friday's got student deep dive. If you watch show and tell you can see some of the web Bluetooth stuff that's got to do. It's really cool, I'm looking really forward to it. So if people remember what it was like to program for Circuit Python, remember that when you would have to upload code and then verify it and like every time you wanted to change something and then Scott came around and said, hey, what if we just reload code on save? He's doing the same thing wirelessly. So you can use, where he's working on making it so Bluetooth though energy and then maybe in the future wifi, you'll be able to program your boards with Circuit Python and again, instantly reboot on save and instantly transmit over wireless. So he's so cool. All right, time travel. Gonna look around the world makers, hackers, artists, engineer and more. First up and I'm gonna put the links in the chat. This is super, super, super important. Super important. Adabox will be shipping in a couple of weeks. We have very few slots. We opened up some more slots. Yeah, so we opened up a couple hundred slots. We opened up a couple hundred slots because we're not doing Europe and... Switzerland. Switzerland and UK anymore. So those are filling up already. I think when, as soon as we opened it up that we're down to like 150. So if you go to adabox.com, sign up, there's things that you're gonna want from the Adafruit store and they're not gonna be available because they're gonna sell fast and or there's gonna be a part shortage. So this is the best way to get what you want which is Adafruit stuff. It also supports the company. Also supports everybody here and it's also a very fun thing to do. So adabox.com and it's gonna be shipping in July and if you've seen any of the previous Adaboxes I think this is gonna be one of our best ones. This one's gonna be a very popular one but I don't really like it. It's a great value and I think it's, here's the good news. We're not including masks anymore and hopefully we won't ever have to include masks in Adabox again. We did that because we had to. We had to. We did our part. So that is now in all of the chats if you wanna join and please do. Okay. By the way, once it closes out we can't make new slots. Like that's it. We can't like, oh, we have a couple stored in the back. There ain't none in the store in the back. Once we're full, we're full. Yeah and we're at the point where like to get all these Adaboxes out we might not be able to add more slots for a while anyways. So this is, get, reserve your place. Yeah, well once you're in, you're in. Yeah. All right, next up. This is a continuation of the Speak and Spell video series that Philby did. Take it away. Master Speak and Spell. Bear with me one more about Speak and Spell. Couple years back in the spirit of those retro game consoles a sort of remake was made. Outwardly it does look pretty close and it plays the same sort of spelling games. What I found disappointing is it's all new recordings with modern fidelity. Doesn't have the original accent which was most of the charm really. Next spell, surgeon. Let's take a look inside. The original was popular for circuit bending making weird music. Here you can access the speech rom, the decoder and the CPU. In the remake most of it's under an epoxy blob. It's a mystery. In the corner though, a common flash chip which likely has all the recorded audio and if you're patient you could decode that, perhaps reprogram it with all those swear words you always wanted. Otherwise it's just a lot of air inside and maybe the best hack potential is simply as an enclosure for something like a raspberry pie. Or there is an Arduino library that emulates the original speech chip. All right and every single day Monday through Friday unless it's a holiday. Colin's lab nets, we're gonna play these back to back as well. But we have an entire playlist of these on all of our social media channels and more so if you ever wanted just to have a full hour day of Colin is the best way to do it. People ask and this is how you do it. Back to back. Installing an operating system on your raspberry pie is easier than ever. Download and install raspberry pie imager to a computer with an SD card reader. Then open the imager. Insert an SD card you want to install to. Choose the operating system to install most likely raspberry pie OS. Optionally, you can preconfigure the OS at this point by pressing control shift X. Then choose your SD card. Write, verify and your system is ready to operate. You may have noticed certain chips are available in a much brighter package material. Not vintage white ceramic, but a white plastic body. Most often worn by optocoupler ICs like the 6N138 and 4N25 with no readily available explanation. And I'm guessing manufacturers wouldn't suddenly start prioritizing color coordination outside of PC motherboards at least. But after some digging, I did find a data sheet from Fairchild comparing test results of the same opto isolator in light and dark variants. The white package showed a much lower capacitance between input and output pins, which seems to contribute to overall faster switching speeds. It does make sense when you imagine the dark material absorbing some of the light from the optocoupler signal and brighter materials reflecting that light. One piece of info you're likely to find printed on the top of an IC is a date code specifying when the IC was made. It's especially helpful when a manufacturer needs to identify a defective batch of chips. Date codes are most often listed in the YYWW format. The first two numbers being the last two digits of the calendar year, and the second two digits being the week number. So this Atmega328 was produced in the 47th week of 2013, which was the week of November 17th. Of course, to keep things interesting, some chip makers list the week number before the year. So when in doubt, check the manufacturer's documentation for their particular method. The ultimate GPS is a breadboard-friendly breakout with built-in data logging, a ceramic patch antenna, as well as a UFL connector for connecting an external antenna. This one is thick, so it'll probably be hard to desolder. But I've got my hot air station and a positive attitude. And if those don't work, there's always the mini hot plate. You can see some of the components sloshed around in the molten solder, including the prominent MTK339 GPS chip. It's supported by a 32 kilohertz crystal, as well as a 16 megahertz temperature-controlled crystal oscillator. That center post, of course, is the antenna path. It feeds through an amplifier, then a filter before entering the GPS chip. A solderless breadboard is the natural choice to connect all those development and breakout boards you've been collecting. It's fast and easy to configure. But beginners often think breakout boards are solderless, too, sometimes mounting them loosely on the short ends of the header, other times pinning the board down using the long ends. Mechanically speaking, it is fairly stable. But electrically speaking, it's not. Unless you're using boards with secure connectors like a STEMIQT or Grove, you do need to solder in those headers. Cut or snap your header down to match the number of pads on your board. Plug the long legs down into the breadboard, place the breakout on top, then solder all the pins. Now that's electrically connected. All right, so tune in for more Cullin next week. It'll probably be Tuesday. It'll be the next one. That's right, because we got that long weekend. All right. Hope you want to add jobs at Adafruit.com. This is our Jobs Award. We review all of them. Make sure there's no sketchy, scamy things. Great time to get a job. You want to work remote? Yeah, so this week we got three. We got a lot. And the trend now is a lot of people are doing stuff in Circuit Python. So someone wants Circuit Python Coder. They want a Circuit Python Coder needed for Adafruit Matrix Portal Project, a Circuit Python Project, and a Color Object Tracker, or a Object Color Tracking, one of the two. Good, good. Raspberry Pi Project. A lot of people, they're like, I've built projects like this before. Well, you paid for it now. Yep. All right, time for some Python on hardware time. There is so much going on. Every single week, please subscribe to the newsletter. We're getting close to like, I think 9,000 people who read this thing. So some highlights. I'm going to go over the big one in a bit. We did an interview with TI. That's going to be what I focus on. We have Adafruit, Adabox Reminder. We now have Keypad, support for Vector and Matrix Key Scanning in Circuit Python. Yes, you know a lot about how to do it by hand. Look, you could always do it by hand, but now it's done for you in Circuit Python, debounced, and you get events. So it's like so easy to build your Keypad-powered projects. Great for the new Macro-powered, that just came out. We're keeping everybody updated on microcontroller shortages. It ain't eight weeks. I don't know 18 weeks. I don't know where they came up with 18 weeks. I would say 95-week lead times. They get notified every day. One of our camera support that we're doing, there's an online editor for Circuit Python, deep dives with Scott, and then the news from around the web. It goes on and on and on forever. Projects, projects, projects, projects, projects. There's still a lot of keyboard stuff. Keyboards, projects, Pico's, keyboards, Trinkies. So this week's, oh, and we also went over all of the MicroPython Circuit Python things inside of Hack Space Magazine this week. So check it out. You can also read on the web at all times. And it has our stats, all the things that we're doing with Circuit Python and more. And this week's highlight from it is, so we saw the calculator come out. Can you give me the box? Box. Yeah, so this is the box. This is the TI-84 plus CE Python edition. And we're like, wow, this is kind of interesting. And the TI calculator forums, because there's a big, gigantic TI calculator community, said, oh, this is running on a fork of Circuit Python. And I'm like, really? So I tweeted with the folks at TI calculator and TI education. And they were able to get us questions, sorry, get us answers back to some questions. So their team allowed us to interview them, which is really neat. And basically, the interview talks about, well, why are people using these calculators? Why Python? They also have a really neat history of the TI calculator timeline, by the way. Great. Yeah, great proceed. Okay, cool. Now I'm cooking up. These are cool. I like that first one. That was great. So I have to say, I've been interviewing CEOs and interviewing developers and engineers and business leaders and founders. And I recently did the Siemens interview because I acquired Supply Frame and Hackaday and Tindi. And I'm always thankful for when anyone gets back to us because we're, although we're an electronics company, we're maybe one of the only independent entities talking about electronics now. So this is interesting for us. And it's one of the reasons we still like to be a publisher. That's why we have a blog and all that. So go through and check this out. It's on our blog. And I just wanted to focus on a couple pieces. Why add Python? Because every calculator that we have been purchasing lately has Python on it. There's the NumWorks. There's the Casio. There's the multiple TI. So I'm just like, I would love to hear it from TI. Why? They say coding skills are basic literacy these days and introducing students to one of the fastest growing programming languages the world gives students knowledge. They can apply to future STEM careers by providing Python on our TI-83, TI-84, and TI Inspire Graphic Calculator. Students can learn a program using the same dedicated distraction-free tool they're already familiar with from math and science courses. That's cool. Cool. And then I wanted to know, like, okay, like, you know, what are some of the features? They say that. And then like, you know, the most important question for me was like, why did you pick CircuitPython? And they said, CircuitPython meets our needs for Python functionality in a constrained hardware environment. That's cool. Okay. And then we asked if they'd willing to put some upstream stuff up there. And they said they filed bugs and provided test cases to MicroPython for some of their changes. And then they had a list of the accessories that you'll be able to plug stuff into and use Python, CircuitPython to control things. And then we have this really big graphic. So what we did was... Go to the overhead. Yeah, I'm gonna go to the overhead in a second. So what we did is we have one of these. We cracked it open. Cracked it open. And we actually saw the chip and they put a chip on there just to do this. Yeah. There it is. So close. Yeah, so that little pink dot there on the right is where a Fork is CircuitPython. I like to imagine that the key way dot is pink because Blink is pink. And then this is the flash memory that goes with it. So there you go. All right. So that is... Blink got loose here. All right, next up. We have a bunch of news. This is breaking news. This happened right before the show. So open source hardware segment and patent trolls are a thing. We've been... There's been a Temptik store Adafruit five times now by patent trolls. And usually they start out with letters that are threatening and they're like, give us money or else. It's cheaper if you just give us money. And so we're like, well, let's talk to our lawyers. And so far we've been successful dealing with patent trolls. Usually they say, well, it's not a good idea to publicize that you were victorious against them for these extortion things. And so we just do what our lawyers have said. But we knew at some point there would be a suit that was filed. Inevitable. Not just the extortion letter, pay us or else, the lawsuit. But this time, this wasn't us. So this is on the SparkFun site. SparkFun has an article and it's called SparkFun gets hooked by, hooks a patent troll. So here it is here. And... This is cool. I did, when I... I think it's cool. So SparkFun style and Nate, the founder specifically is to, okay, this is like what this patent troll is doing. This is a little different. So Nate posted up the previous extortion letters from the past and sounds like SparkFun got this similar ones that we did. Razzdog. But this one in particular, they just decided to file. They just went straight to sue. Well, they technically don't have to send a letter. You don't have to tell them. Yeah, straight up just filing. Which is interesting. And it's from Altair Logic. And let me just put back on the graphic here. And the reason we're showing this is because it's on the SparkFun site. Nate, the founder is talking about it. This isn't just like, hey, you know, look at this thing that no one knows about. It's public. And so Nate breaks this down and says basically it's an expired patent. It's a bogus patent. And what they want, which is kind of the weirdest thing, is royalties on the PC Duino. And now, I don't know if y'all remember, we never stocked a PC Duino. Just wasn't a thing. That's a long time ago. It was a terrible name. Didn't like the product. Single board Linux computer. Yeah. Link sprite, the company. We had some run-ins with them because they kept taking Lamor's name off code and saying it was theirs. Don't do that. Don't do that. So basically we never stocked a PC Duino. But this patent troll is saying to SparkFun, look, we want to know how many sales you had for the PC Duino during this time that you were selling it. And that's what they're, it is a lawsuit. So the thing that I didn't know, and now I do now, because I always wondered how many did SparkFun sell? Nate says, and I'll quote here, he said they sold 221 units over the entire time they carried PC Duino. And they figured out the royalties. And he said, do you want to sue us for 500? Well, there's a reason, like there is this thing in patent law where there's like a reasonable, you can't ask for 200% of royalties, right? You can't ask for an reasonable amount. So it's not, you know, about 10%, right? Is kind of the max that you could expect to get a lawyer to actually, unless a judge to agree to. So they're saying like, look, you have 200 units and they're like 50 bucks a piece. You're not going to get more than a couple hundred dollars. Yeah. So check this out. It's a really good article on SparkFun. The last time there was an article like this, someone who had the Spark trademark went after them and they published size that. So that is, you know, like I said, when I saw this, I'm just like, oh yeah, like Nate's going to do a post about this. And they did. Yeah. So check it out. And I'm going to correspond with them, see if they need any help. But it's like basically like this A9 processor, if you ever sold anything with it, like they're coming after you. Yeah, but it's not actually, I mean the patent is bullshit. It doesn't apply, but like, they think that if you're selling something that has to be sold. Or if you sold it a long time. Yeah, this is like back sales in 2015. Yeah. All right. Do they know that there's been a pandemic since then? So more of a source hardware. I have follow-ups from the last week topic, which was our closed source libraries allowed in the Arduino library manager. And so the reason we asked is because we saw the microchip Q-Touch. MCP. Yeah, remember about touch library. And it's a closed source thing. It actually says like you cannot, there's no source code. You can distribute it, but there's no source code. That's part of the license. And it says you agree and acknowledge you use these terms of license below. So everything kind of turns into like, first like Arduino community and then Arduino business. So a long time ago, like Arduino was a smaller company. Adafruit was a smaller company. And we would correspond about what are we doing in open source together? What are we doing? So behind the scenes or privately or even at conferences, it was like, Arduino was not going to put in closed source stuff in the library. And we're like, okay, cool. We won't either or we'll ask or whatever. We like doing open source, but that's good to know. So what I did was I got clarity because there's now this microchip one in there. There's an open source thing that we did that you can use if you don't want to use the closed source one, but we wanted to know because we get asked and this is the problem and this is why we're not open source cops. We don't care. Arduino could do whatever they want, but we get asked like, oh, if I use your stuff with this, with this. Well, we actually had companies ask us, can we have libraries closed? By the reason I said, oh, those aren't allowed in the library manager. And that's actually turned out not true. That wasn't true. So now we do know. So now we know it is a fact. You can have closed source libraries in the Arduino library manager. Pre-compiled binary blobs can be in libraries and can be listed in the Arduino library manager. Do we want them in there? No. Are we going to make closed source ones to put them in there? No. The reasons that they might be in there, and this is why it's good they have a, let me make sure I get the title right. This is from Alessandro, the head of maker business open source and community. Why would you want this in there? And they basically said there's two reasons. One would be if it's a trusted Silicon vendor, microchip, and it provides lots of value. They still prefer open source, but that's how it is. And that's probably the number one reason but there's sometimes like a Linux machine, like it's linked to closed source things that gets certain things to work. It's true. Look, Wi-Fi, well look, you know, everyone remembers like, oh you want the Bluetooth or Wi-Fi module to work, you have to download a binary firmware. There's like in Debian, there's you can have different package managers and like some repos have non-free. I think it's just a matter of communication. Now like we have clear communication. So here's what I've learned. No matter what's happened in the past with the beginning of open source projects, it's always good to get clarity now because we always assume no closed source was allowed in. That's not, apparently it was always okay, but now we have clarity. They gave us something, I posted verbatim. So my next question back, which I just sent over, is is there any clarity we can get for Arduino files? So if you buy an Arduino, you can get the Eagle files, you can get the schematics and PDF, you get the fritzing. It says documentation, open source hardware schematics. The Arduino Nano 33 VLE is open source hardware. You can build in your own boards using the following files, download the Eagle file, all of that and more. However, the new boards, the portenta or newish, I mean they've been released for about a year. These say something different. It says open source hardware schematics. However, now it says study how the portenta board works using the following files. So there is no downloadable PCB file. You get schematics, you get the data sheet. There is a viewer for Altium, but the viewer is this embedded encrypted viewer that has this little GPG thing. And Arduino currently says all of their boards are open source. All Arduino boards are completely open source, powering and able to build them independently and eventually adapt them to their particular needs. They have stickers. There is open source hardware definition. We all worked on it for a year. It says, you have to have the files in some type of editable format, whatever they were made. Everyone on the Arduino team signed it. Lady A to sign it. Nate from Smartphone signed it. Speaking of Nate. And so that was my next question. Because clarity is good. Is the pro line different than the regular Arduino? Which is fine. Which is fine. Don't care. We don't care. Because now we know about libraries. So now when people ask us, I can send them a link to this time coded video. Next up, we're an open source hardware company. You know, I know we post our files and we do all that. That's how I know. We have 2,500 guides. Yay! That's our big news. I know. We got to 2,500. I wasn't even keeping track of it and then you told me and I was like, oh yeah. All right, so we have 2,501 actually. What's on the big board this week? Lady A to. Okay, so on the big board this week is we've got the macro pad guides that Catney wrote. We've got a Rotary Trinky project that Tim C. Fomey Guy took on and that is using a Rotary Trinky to send brightness up and down command to a mobile device. It's an interesting example of how you can use USB and HID and Circuit Python to communicate and control a mobile device without having to write an app, which I thought was interesting. We also have the how to capture camera images with Circuit Python. So we've added that capability to do parallel image capture in Circuit Python for RP2040, ESP32, S2, and SAM251 sort of kind of. So check it out if you'd like to use a camera with Circuit Python to grab binary data. And Dan Hubbard also published a guide about the keypad and matrix scanning capability that is now added in Circuit Python. We've got a KittyToeBean keypad from Noah and Pedro and we'll show the guide and then you had a little Pie Leap Device Enabled project that is a secret. It's basically a top secret that's not. So you'll be able to browse the learn system with the app and that app will be able to get the code down and we're calling these device-enabled guides. We also have a Neo-Q1 by 4 breakout. I don't remember if that was last year, last week or this week, and of course the QT2040 guide as well. So I think we're caught up all of our products that we've been releasing the last couple of weeks should not have guides. And we have a one minute video from FomeGuy on that crank project. Hello everybody, FomeGuy here. In this video I'm going to show you the latest project that I've been working on. This rotary trinket brightness crank device can help folks who want to limit their usage of social media and tech devices. The rotary trinket makes this project easy. It requires just a rotary encoder, a USB OTG cable, and some 3D printed parts. When I plug the device in, you'll see that my phone's screen brightness will go down after just a few seconds automatically. In order to keep the brightness steady, you must crank the device at a medium speed. So you can see my device brightness is going down. If I crank it at a medium speed, the brightness will stay steady. And if I want the brightness to go back up, I have to crank the arm even faster. Researchers at UC Berkeley recently used a similar device to study how adding physical activity can help dissuade people from mindlessly scrolling to consume content. And we have some New York City factory footage. New York City factory footage without some time lapse. Well, they put stuff inside. That's right. So this is the Disney headquarter thing. They're trying to put things in there. Yeah. All right. I wonder if that's parking. Next, 3D printing with Noah Pedro. This week, we just have one thing. We've got to speed up. Take it away. Pokeball. Noah Pedro. All right. So don't forget to tune in every single Wednesday for 3D Hangouts with Noah Pedro. All right, lady. Is it time? Yes. This week, not only is IonMPI brought you by Digi-Key, but the IonMPI is from Digi-Key. Oh my God, I know. It's like a weird. I heard you like Digi-Key. So we put Digi-Key and you're Digi-Key. I know. This is the first time that we've had a Digi-Key product as a Digi-Key IonMPI, but it's a really good one. And maybe there'll be more in the future. So this week, we just got our copy of the Digi-Key innovation handbook, version one. So this is the product and they have a nice print of the cover. So what is this? It's a notebook with reference and gridded paper inside of it that you can design your projects with and also gives you quick reference information at the beginning. This may sound familiar. It actually is like a descendant. It's like the granddaughter of the Maker's Notebook, which I remember we got these like a decade ago. These were made by O'Reilly, Make Magazine, and they were really cool. And you should get both. They both have their own pros and cons. This is what the Maker's Notebook looked like and it was very cute. But for example, if you look at this register color code diagram, you're like, ah, man, I like the blue spot color, but what if it was in full color? Well, the innovation notebook is in full color. It's a very nice printed full color as well. It's not like Dithered. It's a pure full color thing. It's got 40 pages of reference information. So like NeoPixel, addressable LED info, and then there's part numbers. So if you're like, I just wanna get the most popular NeoPixel ring. I wanna get the most popular like RGB LED. It's like right there, they give you the pinout, but they also tell you the part number that you can immediately just get it. So it's just like, this is like the top 100 products that you can sell, the most popular ones. So you don't have to even search, you just type in that part number. They've also got, what I really like is they've added more boards and pinouts. So here we've got some feathers and they list some of the more popular feathers and their specifications. They also got the teensies. It's really great to see other people in the maker community getting highlighted. There's also a website that you can go to. It's just Google for DigiKey Innovation Handbook, the URL is there. If you go to the product page, you can see the page. This one, it has all these downloads and PDFs and calculators. So it's like, if you're on the go or you don't wanna use your computer or you wanna just have a quick paper reference, use the book, but then if you go to the website, there's more detailed automatic calculators and automatic like registry coders and all that good stuff. But the core of it is also online. So you don't have to buy the innovation notebook, although I think you should. There's also the most popular wireless modules, community boards, arduinos, Beaglebones, Raspberry Pis, feathers and of course the teensie. They've also got all those passive components and motors and addressable LEDs. What I like is that it's made a little bit more modernized. Again, like a lot of old reference books didn't have addressable LEDs. Maybe they didn't cover motors. Maybe they didn't cover Raspberry Pi computers. But now this is, you were as likely to throw a Arduino Pro Mini into a project as you are a diode. So yeah, these should have both in there. And then of course all the part numbers for the most popular versions. And if you wanna stable together your own notebook, they also have a downloadable Smith chart, isometric paper which is cool or gridded paper so you can create your own custom notebook or if you have a three-wing binder. But I do recommend if you have a cart on DigiKey, toss one of these into your cart. And then next time you check out with some components or whatever, this'll come with it and you'll be like, hey, this is a cool gift because this is a very affordable book and I think it would make an excellent gift to a student or an engineer or a maker. Like you'll wanna have one of these as reference because some of the pages are things that I'm like, oh yeah, I'm constantly looking this up. And it would be great if I didn't have to remember how to Google it every single time. All right, it's available on DigiKey. Hundreds in stock, hundreds. DK Handbook is the way to get it or you can use it for URL which is right there. And I think this is the first DigiKey NPI that's from DigiKey. Okay, so do you get a little like the standard like ohms lost stuff, you're used for that, reference info, this is really handy for me. I'm always like, what is 550 nanometers? Well, now you can see what the color is and it's in color. Like if you're gonna have a color, I feel like if you're gonna have a color printed booklet you should have a color reference. HTML, CSS colors are also good for neopixels because they're also addressed with numbers. Of course, symbols and logic gates, conversion formulas, temperature fun facts. Of course, your standard resistor book and then if you wanna just pick up a resistor pack they've got their resistor kits. I like these because they have five of each resistor. Capacitor and derating information, addressable LEDs. The most popular SMD LEDs and through-hole LEDs. You just want a blue five millimeter diffused. Here's the part number. It's like, you don't have to think, just get that. And you know, it'll be good because it's the recommended one. Op-App circuits, linear regulators, transistors, motors, I thought this was cool because oftentimes this doesn't get included but vibration motors, DCs and servos they're so common for people to add into their projects. So having the reference information here. And then for me, I'm always looking up what are the USB pinouts for USB connectors. So this is really good for me. Like is white data minus or is green, whatever. Now you can just look it up. Various connectors and like ethernet and D9s and terminal blocks. Package reference sizes, common packages. And I think these are to scale too, which is kind of nice. PCB specifications. And then I forget they have a PCB service now. Wire ampere, SIM cards, IOT, popular dev kits including Raspberry Pi Pico that made it into this. So you can tell this was, they pushed this out but not before they got everything in. Community-based boards, prototyping pinouts for your favorite development boards. And then of course, Digi-Key Fun Facts before you get into 120 gridded pages. So good for your projects, good for reference. What a lovely presence. I like this idea too because Digi-Key was known for like their big catalogs but those eventually aren't accurate because there's- And they're also so big. And you may throw it away. This you'll keep maybe forever and it's a useful thing. So that is this week's IONMPI. IONMPI. IONMPI. All right, Lady. It is time. That's right. Before people load up their cart, just get ready. It is hot. Is the code. It is hot. Let's see some new products. Yeah. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. All right. First up, we have some revisions and more. We have a lot of revisions. Okay. So we revised Lady to Toolkit now has a nicer temperature controllable soldering iron and a nicer soldering iron stand. Otherwise the same a great starter toolkit for anyone who wants to get doing electronics and wants a little bit of everything. I know you can get like your $20 starter kits for electronics, but this actually has the good stuff. All right, the good stuff. Including a power supply circuit. That's it. We also have been revising our GPS devices. So our old GPS module suppliers are making the GPS module, which is unusual because I really liked it. But we found a GPS module that has the same performance and the same pinout. So it's a little bit thicker, but it now supports GLONASS, which is the Russian global positioning system version. So you can maybe get more reception around the world, not just from the US system, but also from the Russian system. And we have it in our breakout. We have the breakout, the USB breakout. We've also got the Raspberry Pi hat. So we revised that. And then we are going to do Arduino Shield next, or we're going to do Arduino Shield. But you're going to see every one of our ultimate GPS products get revised. Little thicker, but in the antenna query command, change a little bit, but otherwise it's pretty much dropping compatible. Next up. Next up, we've got, this is you requested. This is a USB-C right angle cable, one end standard USB type A, although it's reversible. Good for keys. And this is a right angle on the other end. So you can flip it around right angle. What I like about USB-C, of course, it's flippable. So you only need one right angle cable. What I hated about like, micro-B is you need to right angle both directions. Yeah, and you can see it's weird. It's reversible on the other side too. All right, next up. All right, next up. This is by JP's special request. People who know JP knows he likes his keycaps. He really likes windowed keycaps. This is a windowed keycap. This is kind of an obscure type of keycap. It's opaque black plastic, and it has a little clear window. So hold on, let me get in close. Okay, so you can see this keycap. It's opaque and then the neopixel. So this is, of course, you want to use something that has LED underlining. The LED is down here. It shines through the body of the key, because this is like a LED compatible key. And out to here where you can see the light shine through and it kind of curves around. It's kind of an elegant minimalist. It's a little like 2001 space Odyssey. But if you like the look, these keycaps are hard to get. So I snagged a couple hundred of them. They're not inexpensive, but this is kind of the only place you can get them. They're very, very rare to find. So some people like the look, and then of course you can customize the top however you want or just keep it nice and neutral black. Okay, next up. Okay, so this is a chunky battery. So we've already stocked the 660, sorry, 6,600 milliamp hour version of this battery. But batteries have improved in like the 10 years since we stocked this 660. So this is, sorry, 6600. So this is 10 amp hours, so it's like 40% more, or maybe like 50% more, but it's the same physical size. So it's still three 18650 cells, but these are the high capacity version. These are the three 3400s, not the 2200s. So the batteries are a little bit nicer, a little bit better, so you get more capacity. You get what normally would be like four batteries worth you'd need. You only get it a smaller package from PK Cell. You really like, these are already, they're packed and welded, and they're symmetric and they have a battery protection circuit. So if you really need a high capacity, do this. Don't DIY your own battery packs. Just get a pre-made battery pack with the capacity you need, like this one. All right, next up. We've got the SHT30 enclosed sensor. It's basically an SHT30, which folks here know, I love it, it's an I-square-T temperature humidity sensor. It's high quality from Sincereon. This one, it comes enclosed. It's not waterproof, okay? It's not even waterproof, but it's just like protected. And I just popped this off very quickly. It's got a nice mounting holes, it's got holes in it. So this is kind of nicely enclosed, but inside you can see it's just the sensor, capacitor, pull-up resistors, and then a nice cable at the end. It's a very convenient wired I-square-T sensor. Folks, stop using DHT sensors. Use this instead. Much better quality, much easier to use. Don't have to mess around. Use this real I-square-T. This is the good stuff. Throw away your DHTs and use one of these instead. Next up. Next up, another request. You wanted us to carry some like cyberpunk panel mounted mousing devices. So this is a panel mount friendly or like a touchable friendly touchpad with two buttons. And we also have a version that is a track ball. So we kind of got one of each. The track ball version has like three buttons. The touchpad has two, it's just USB mouse. So you plug it in and the touchpad shows like a digitizer. The track ball shows up like a mouse. It's great for use with like a Raspberry Pi or a single board computer. Or anytime you're making, a lot of people make projects with single board computers. They want a mouse, but they don't want like a literal mouse that you have to like move around because that's like an external thing. This way it's enclosed inside of, you know, your project or it's mounted on the top. It's more durable because there isn't like this cable and this mousing hanging off. But you can give people the ability to like do a touch controller. Also, sometimes you don't have a touch screen or you don't want people putting their dirty mitts on the screen. These two will work great. And again, just plain USB. All right, and next up. Okay. From SparkFun, our friends at SparkFun, they have all sorts of cool, quick, STEMI QT compatible boards. Somebody sent this to us and said, hey, you should stock this. I'm like, you're right. This is a great add on fat or like mini hat which plugs onto a Raspberry Pi or a Raspberry Pi Zero, anything with a two by 20 header. It also works with the Jetson Nano and other two by 20 header single board computers. And it gives you the iSquared C connections with STEMI QT connectors on the top. So you can plug in any of SparkFun or Adafruit, iSquared C sensors and we make like hundreds of them right in no why required. Really easy to use with iSquared C and they even give you a little button on the end. All right. And my request of SparkFun's watching, we stuck a bunch of your stuff, stuck more of ours, asking for a friend. Okay. All right. Start the show tonight. Besides you, lady, to the community, our customers, our staff and more is. Feet. A bunch of feet. I can get you a human toe. Do you need a human toe tonight? Well, I got these toes, I don't need any of your toes. We have all these feet in different colors. Feet, feet, feet, feet. And I'm just gonna show all the different colors. Black. Really fast. Gray. Yeah, and here's a. Next to a coin. Yeah, silver. Silver. Green. Blue. Circuit path on purple. Red. Red. And then here they are. Okay. So I'm gonna show this up. So these are just like fun. They're actually designed for keyboards but I think they can be good for any enclosure design. Anything with electronics where you want really nice little feet on your project, especially if you're using a anodized aluminum enclosure because these are also anodized aluminum. So they come with an M4 screw. So that's how you attach them. Of course, you can also put foam tape. There's a lot of surface area and it's nice and smooth. You can put some 3M foam tape here and use that to attach it to your enclosure. So they're kind of cool like cyberpunk, like, you know, cylindrical conic section things going on here. And then this is a silicone or other soft rubber bumper thing. So inside here, this whatever touches the floor or your desk is nice and soft and it doesn't move around easily. So it won't scratch, but it also won't slide. And it comes into multiple colors. Like these greens or like I said, we've got this cool purple color. I like the purple, but some people like other colors. We've got the red color. And we've got, I can't really make up my mind. There were so many colors. And I love the look of anodized aluminum. I always think it looks great. Black, silver, and gray. So space gray, you know, and a kind of a silver color. So you've got all these different colors. You get two each per package because usually you'll want either two or four. And I don't know, they look like eyes, multiple eyes staring at you. They do look like eyes. But they're great little feets. Nice feets. And that is your products. All right, so don't forget the code. It is hot. It's hot. There's the code. All right, we're going to do some top secret. And while we're doing top secret, post up your questions. I've got some loaded up. We'll get to them. Yeah. Let's do some top secret. What's in the vault? Well, I'm going to play two videos back to back. And then we're going to look at one of the boards you just posted. Ready? Yep. All right, Ada, what is this? Hey, this is a older product we've made. This is the Charlie Wing. It's got an I squared C to 15 by seven LED driver that can do eight bit PWM for all these LEDs, which is great for like, you know, monochromatic LED projects. You can see the nice dimming of each LED. But there's a new chip. This is the 3731. There's the 3741 from ISSI. And this one is full color because it can do so many more LEDs. It can do 351 LEDs. And you can divide it up. Here's the chip itself. And here's the LED matrix. I'm actually driving it from this Metro Mini. And yeah, it's a 39 by nine dot LED driver, but you can divide this by three. So it's 13 by nine RGB LED driver, which is a lot of LEDs. It's often used in some keyboard. All right, Lady Ada, what is this? These are some cool wireless LEDs. You'll notice that they have, they're LED soldered onto inductors. All right, it's like a 2.2 micro Henry inductor and there's an LED capacitor. So how are they lit up? Well, there's this gigantic coil underneath. So this is like an inductive charging system, but it's split in half so that this is the large coil and it's powered from 24 volts. And these are little LEDs that when they're within like a foot or so of the coil, I can move up and down and around, they light up. So these are used by model makers a lot, but they could have some like cool jewelry or like installation or aesthetic purposes. And they're kind of neat. You can see they can, you can move them around anywhere in the open space of the coil. And they stay lit. Pretty neat. All right, and then you have these three things that Well, there's just two and then the back. So I just, I'm making, you know, I'm trying to get back into my STEM, my QT game. I was doing one a week and then I kind of got distracted a little bit because it got nice out. So getting back into that, our two popular RTC boards, I sort of re-imagined them, but in STEM and QT format and we'll battery holder on the back. All right, let's stop secret. Get back in the vault. Let's get to some questions. Yeah, we're going to do questions. Let's do it. So I'm going to load these up. I'm just going to start with this one here and then I'm going to balance to a bunch. So we'll speed around and ready. The Macro Pad seems like it might be more complicated to manufacture pick and place, board alignment, OLEDs, through-hole soldering. What is the most complicated product Adafruit has manufactured so far? The Macro Pad is pretty complicated. Is it the most complicated? I think the Qualia is one of the toughest ones that we make, but the Macro Pad has a lot of steps, right? Because it has both the display and through-hole soldering. Actually, the Pi gamer was really complicated too because it's double-sided. There's through-hole soldering and there's a hand soldered display. So the Pi gamer and a little bit of the Pi badge are pretty tough. All right, how do I connect a relay to a prototype board properly? The pins don't seem to line up. Yeah, they don't. Solder wires to it or use a relay breakout. They're not on a grid usually. Okay, next up. Question for later in the show. I'm remote sending. I have no problem using the libraries to read and send remote codes, but I can't seem to get the range of the Basic Factory TV remote. I have a project that needs to blanket two bookcases with on and off signals for battery-controlled candles. The remote candles that ship with the, uses a CR2032 battery and works clear across the living room. I've brought two pack, brought pack after pack of IR emitters. No luck. So you can't drive the IR emitter directly from a pin. You have to use an amplifier. So check out the TV be gone or look online for how to use a transistor as an amplifier. That's why remote is working. You can't just plug the IR LED into a Metro pin and expect to get any range. Okay, what factors do you consider for trying to plan? How many of our product to release? How did you do this in the younger days of Adafruit? I usually, you know, earlier in Adafruit I would do 50. Now I start with 250. That's pretty much it. All right. Next up, are there any good sources to find updated list of SOICs by features? For example, what's out there that's well-supported via Arduino to something comparable to a expressive ESP chips with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth? I think you just have to kind of like read, you know, blogs and see what people are working on. There's no central repository. You can check the Adafruit blog. We try to post about stuff, but it's just, you know, ambient knowledge of what the new chips are because there's so many companies. You know, you could try to subscribe to all their newsletters, but there's a lot of gunk in them. Yeah. Next up, how does Lady Aida come up with fresh board ideas? How are Adabox ideas pitched? And how did these ideas transfer to manufacturing? For example, Funhouse, Macro Pad, et cetera. We go to Chinese dim sum and we just think what would be fun. And then throughout the year, we collect ideas when we see things we're like, oh, that would make a good Adabox project. And so we have a secret list of, you know, 15 different projects that we can pick from when we can finally implement them. Sometimes we're like, oh, we can't do this yet because we're missing some magical and green or some components out of stock. But when we can, we'll pick an idea off the list and use that. We broadcast everything. This is one of the few times because we're usually eating in a restaurant. We wouldn't do that. That'd be weird. So looking back now, I think one of the ways that we do it is I basically interview Lady Aida about what's currently possible? What's the best possible chip right now? What's the best possible thing that we can do? And then I ask her a bunch of questions and then for a theme like Halloween, we try to take like the state of the art best things possible or like the coolest open source stuff that we've just been working on. And we try to find a theme. And now we also have the added complexity of what is JP gonna dress up like? Right. And so that's- So we have to think about it. Yeah. So that's why it takes dim sum and sometimes drinks to figure this out. But I have a sketchbook-ish thing of each Aida box and they're pretty spot on. We'll sketch out what the Aida box is gonna be and then months or years later now, it's pretty one to one. But sometimes we have to wait. Like there was no such thing as like RP2040s. There was no such thing as ESP32S2. And so it's like whatever is the best thing possible and what can we do and get them out there? Let's see. Might be all the questions. Oh, the wireless LED thing, is that just the soldered straight onto the inductor? Like the- Yeah, basically. It's just the LED on inductor with a cap. Yeah. I mean it's very- It's a fun idea. I mean the LED is a diode, right? So you don't need a diode. Yeah. And let's see. I think we got all of them. Oh, someone just signed up for Aida box. Thank you. Yeah. So with that, those are our questions this week. Yes, subscribe. Keep hanging out. Discord, ask all the questions. I'll join 29,000 of us over there. All right. So we're gonna wrap up the show this week. Don't forget, it is hot. It's hot. Yeah, and we're going to see everybody next week. Have a safe, happy, healthy fourth or whatever things you're doing this Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. Don't forget, we're gonna be gone. Don't blow off your fingers or damage your eyes. Friday to Monday, but order all your stuff now because it'll ship out in the next day for sure. We're sunscreen. And thanks to Kara. Thanks to Kara's behind the scenes today. Thanks to Kara. Thank you so much. And special thanks to all the Aida for team members, the community members, our customers, and everyone who's keeping us going. And thanks for reading some of the articles we've been getting out there. We're trying to not only be a weirdo, independent, cool open source hardware company, but we're also trying to keep like independent journalism going on for the electronic space. So thanks to the folks that answer the questions that we send over. We like publishing those because we get a lot of questions and we like to be a good advocate for the community. And also, we're curious. So that is everything this week. Here is your moment of zener. Thanks everybody. Have a great July 4th. To play us out after, we're gonna play the little Aida Box song that we have.