 Life from New York it's that's this engineer everybody and welcome to ask the engineer It's me lady Ada the engineer Broadcasting live from downtown Manhattan in our secret headquarters. We're just doing electronics non-stop We got exciting show for you tonight about an hour's worth of maker hacker 3d printing Engineering creative news all sorts of cool stuff going on I've got mr. Lady Ada here on camera control and all the segments you know and loves Let's get right into it. Why don't you tell him what's on tight show mr. Lady Ada? All right on tonight's show We'll talk about one year in because it's a year ago to the day almost what happened Well, we closed a different closed data fruit ahead of some city and state guidance to keep our team safe But we'll just do a little bit of recap of what's been going on and more we are still Shipping smart and safe our entire team. Thanks. You these are some pre-COVID photos And this is what has allowed us to survive for the last year and these are some of the folks that when you place an order That's who you're helping out. So please continue to do so and After we get the show started we'll talk about what's ahead and more Show and tell people are on the world showing sharing their projects jp was the host tonight lady It'll talk about who was on the show and tell what they had to share Time travel look around world makers hackers artists engineers a little bit of a reminder for some things and then also We're going to add a new segment and we're going to play two short videos from inside of time travel Yeah Python and hardware news I'm going to take a look at the newsletter that we send out every single week about all the news that happens to be python on hardware related and there's a ton of tweak because Pico and the rp2040 run circuit python and micro python. So you can expect to see a lot of cool projects with that Made New York City factory footage Got some things from adford's factory right here in Manhattan some 3d printing We got digikey and adafruit present ion mpi this week is ideal tech swiss technology at your fingertips lady It'll be talking about this week's ion mpi got some new products. They had a lot of cool new products We have top secret this week We're going to take questions You can put them in the end if you put them in during the show at adford.it slash discord or discord.gg slash adford Just put them in again at the end but sometimes we get through Different parts of the show and then sometimes if the show has a lot of stuff, which is us tonight You have to get to the questions at the end. Yeah, we don't have any other staff. It's really just We're doing the show. So we don't get your question. It's because we're doing it's because we're doing it's live And anytime you can join all 27,000 of us in the adford community On discord is 24 7 hacker space that you can bring your grandkids to Or pretty much any kid. All right, all that and more on you guest at ask an engineer All right, cool. Let's Stop over to what I was going to talk about. So we're one year in march 10th 11th ish of last year there was Straight up no good guidance. Sorry, you know like I don't think you know, I don't think that's a surprise at the time There were experts saying don't you know, you don't need to wear a mask at all There was closures talked about in some locations. There were city officials saying hey Go check out this really cool thing in chanetown. Yeah, like it was not clear So here's what we decided to do We decided to Give our teams all the information and then make smart decisions together. So about a year ago Even before that we had done Low occupancy staggered shifts were already thinking about ventilation One interesting thing about adefruit's building. It was built right after the pandemic of 1918. That's right So one of the things about our building is the radiators If you've lived in new york, there's like these big metal radiators in some buildings and they're like near the windows It's always like why would why are they there and allow and they're and they're too hot What's up with that? They're too hot. They are. They're crazy hot. Why are they so hot? Yeah, so I want answers What happened was after the 1918 pandemic buildings were designed with this in mind. And so they were designed to Run with the heat on and the wind is open So we had some pretty good ventilation already. We had started stockpiling mass for our team also hand sanitizer because it really wasn't Specific information. How was it getting transmitted? What was happening? So um as The city started to talk about potential closures in the state We decided to shut down a little early and We were ahead of it by like a week or a few days or whatever and the reason for that was it was really Too challenging to figure out what was right or what wasn't so the safest thing at the time was well, let's Just get through it And the best way to get through that was to keep Everyone home as possible as much as possible. So that's what we did and then we were asked by the city to Make face shields And then also components for all sorts of medical devices including ventilators. You don't hear about ventilators as much anymore But at the time that was that was the scarcest thing on earth and we spent pretty much 24 7 for march and april on Trying to help the city we got named the central business and one year later. We're still around Still surviving and we're crawling out of a year of just operating in a very different way And the reason that we were able to do that is our community Placed orders our staff was able to adapt to this we did all the safety That we possibly could and then some we actually even have a page ateford.com slash open safely where we showcase And celebrate the things that we all came up with the team on how we were going to say safe We put up a pdf of our protocols and more so you know to Look back a year later And so far so good. We're going to see how we do in march and april Compared to last year, which we think would be better and our next round of hiring is for our shipping department and for our fabrication departments because we feel like the demand is there So if you're looking for like economic indicators Looks like if there's a 100% woman owned Loan and venture capital free company Like ate a fruit in york city that's hiring that might be a good indicator of Things are starting to recover. So that's what we're focused on right now and we're going to just continue to keep Doing the best we can and taking good care of our team and thank you out there everyone who's been Purchasing stuff because that's been Really helpful So that's where we're at one year later. All right When you place an order though, we have 50 days left in our 100 days of masking up 16 states that we're not doing mass anymore. So like I don't know It's a collector's item if you're if you don't use it or need it. Give it to your dentist. I don't know But we're so close with Whatever a low or high estimates for herd herd immunity Um that's coming up is you know, just wear a mask for a little bit longer. It is just a little bit longer So, um, hopefully our our freebie mask that we send in Each order in the u.s. Over dollar is helpful. Um, or just you know, save it for the next thing Look, I mean, I would love it if at 100 days of masking we did it We gave away these masks and on the 100th day we hit, you know, 70 percent Uh vaccinated like I mean, that'll be awesome. Like I don't like wearing masks I'd be psyched to to get through this and get everybody vaccinated and safe So You get a free mask and then you get other free things Yes, I'll tell them about the freebies So in addition to the free mask for any order over one dollar So just like order something at the dollar I mean like you could order something at 25 cents, but we had to put a we had to put a number in Uh, $99 or more. You get a free perma proto half-site breadboard perfect for making your projects a little bit more permanent You can take your solderless breadboard project and bring them over and solder them in place $149 or more. You get a free stem IQ t board. We have controllers and sensors and devices And even I think a stem IQ t board you can get and um, you know, you'll get a different random one from our assortment When you Book an order and if you make an account Not a guest account We'll even keep track of which ones we've sent you so you get a different one each time $199 or more. You get free ups ground shipping and $299 or more. You get a free circuit playground express Our favorite all-in-one development board and people ask us. What's the best hardware to get started with? I'm just a beginner. I need it easy I said get one of these circuit playground express. It's so easy to get started And they make wonderful little gifts for people too who are excited about learning and making it's a good one Okay, and then show and tell um We switch it up with host uh, this month jp was this week's next week is known Pedro and then end of the month as lady eight and I We did last week. So, um, it's mostly and you're probably wondering why do we do that? Well one Probably get tired of us sometimes but two Um, so that extra half an hour or so, um, at least right now Uh, is so valuable like when you when you divide up when you divide up a day and all the stuff that we need to do to to run a native fruit. So, um, thanks team who's doing that and, uh Also, you know, it's super fun to hang out and chat with the community. So we shouldn't hoard that all on our own I also think that on Pedro and JP do bring a little bit of a different touch to the the show until that's the whole point of having a team Yeah, they have a different viewpoint and that's good. Yeah. That's why we have and also, you know, um JP not included because I met JP when I was at make Um, for the most part how we find each other As far as like eight of fruit remote team members are doing some special projects together is usually through the show until anyways Yeah, so as we restart and reboot as a country and as a even as a community for a lot of in a lot of ways Get on the show until even if we're not, you know, hosting it. Um, usually watch it. Yeah, we Yeah, we'll we'll we'll we'll we'll see every single one of them But, um, you know down the road as we continue to look for more time You know down the road as we continue to look for more talent to add To our open source community and team. That's a good place to show off your stuff If you want to do stuff with eight of fruit down the road So join and join discord who was on show and tell what they show this week I'm glad you asked enough with Kevin from digikey Premoing another serving of pie day So I guess on pie day, they're going to do a Video stream and I think JP is going to be joining it. Um check out digikey.com also check out their social media I'm sure they have more deets there Um from Adafruit team. He had Trevor come by. He's been doing a lot more with Adafruit AR our AR kit for iOS app Apple has this really cool AR kit thing that you can do and add overlays and like augmented reality to your camera and um, they've been doing some overlays. We think we just finished up the um TNC 4.1 overlay and uh, he did a raspberry pi 400 overlay So looking at the back of the pi 400 will tell you what all the pins are for the gpio port very handy for hacking Jepler came by and showed off a draft pr that he's been working on to implement mp3 decoding on the rp20 40 The rp20 40 is a cortex m0 Non-m4 so it's missing a couple of the instructions Do you really need to do good fast mp3 decoding? You know samdi 51 can like decode two or three streams at a time The rp20 40 can do like you know audio book level. I think it was like 32 kilobit per second audio It's it's not you know full High def mp3, but you know it is compressed audio Um compared to wafile so you can fit, you know a half an hour or so of audio maybe on a on a rp20 40 board where it has A couple megs of ram and of course or megs of flash and then maybe on sd card We'll try out sd card or sdio and see if we can get um Audio streaming from that as well. So it's a draft pr. We're still working on it. Um melissa Oh, melissa actually didn't come by sorry But we're gonna we'll talk about the stuff she did later. Um, but she's she's might I scott came by with the q-spy sockets add on he did for a Feather rp20 40 so he could hack around with different q-spy chips um to try out Trying to optimize the second boot state execute in place flash definition thing which If you've watched our streams, you've seen us, uh, just slam into like a brick wall I'm gonna solve it and he also made this cool board that takes like, uh A spark from micromod and then has these little like socket flex pcb adapters I'm gonna call them scott sockets, but I don't know. It's kind of a neat little like plug-and-play system um Todd bot, uh, got a qt pie and a round tft and made like a little locket to display um images of Cats mostly everyone loves that and also a rotary encoder project Uh bill binker from at maker is making head control mice. So an open source way of using um a head mounted I am you to control a mouse and then by dwelling on something you can select it So using this with speech boards allows people who you know may not be able to touch a speech board to just move their head And look at something and then it gets selected so they can actually Form sentences with speech boards. It's just like really nifty Um, and he said usually these are extremely expensive and they're not easily hackable So having an open source version can be awesome for the accessibility community, which we always love to see Liz made a sailor moon spinning crescent moon like Circuit playground board. I actually didn't quite catch exactly what it's for but she's a really big fan of sailor moon I think she wanted to have maybe her own sailor moon like Display or headdress like not exactly sure. I got to go back and watch some sailor moons Um, and then daniel made his first circuit. It's a massive arcade button connected To a microcontroller that acts like a foot pedal talk switch So on zoom calls or other like video calls The audio is only demuted when you press with your foot So you don't accidentally leave your mic on And then you just remember to like press the foot pedal or press the button when you want to speak But if you're used to push to talk type systems, he basically we made that before a computer Now show and tell all right. It's part of our eight fruit live series of shows We do this every week. So if it's uh 8 p.m It's ask an engineer 7 30 show and tell those are our wednesday shows in addition to new impadro's 3d hangouts every wednesday. We'll talk about that a little bit later. And then on sunday We do desk of lady aida and then this week on desk lady aida We showed a few different things including something we're going to show for A top secret later. Yes. It's a top secret. I don't ask. Yeah, so we also do like keyboard stuff Yeah, so keyboards a lot of keyboard keyboard things keyboard hacking and um that that got us to the great Search Yes, it turns out you can Uh get cherry mx switches on the digikey site and you show exactly how to do that and milnex sockets. Um, these are like Small solder and sockets that let you um mechanically attach and detach Cherry mx switches. So these you know, I saw that a lot of people were doing like group buys on Reddit and other forums, but you know, you don't have to you can actually just go digikey and just buy Cherry mx blacks or blues Right now. So you have the clicky blues or the smooth linear Black switches. Yeah So if you want to see a lot of the in-progress stuff, so whatever we work on during the week Sunday night is kind of a recap desk of lady aida and then lady aida does a specific Um feature the great search with digikey brought you by digikey And she uses all our good powers of engineering to help you find what you're looking for on a gigantic site Like digikey. Okay, uh Other live shows that we do tuesday was jp's product pick. This is the recap I'm going to show this in a second and the cool special thing about this is We do a live video from the product page. It's embedded inside the product page and we do a discount While we're doing it. So that's you know, kind of like you know, we used to go to concerts We'll be going to the concerts again, but you know, that's you can always until then watch jp shows You can always get digit digitally downloaded music But there's something special about being there and participating in something live and being in the chat um You can get the product there and we also Sell jp as an nft And so you get to JP's top hits. Yeah jp isn't a bid right now. He's an nft And uh, that's kind of our new business model. Don't give people the ideas No, I know uh, I'm on a mailing list Well, it was an email list and it was about open source hardware and patents and all stuff And I said, hey, you know the open source hardware community may has well get ahead of Um, what may happen with some of these interesting, um experiments that are melting the planet or ripping off of artists or great for the artists all these different, you know Yeah, so, um That's a little bit of an unknown But jp for sure you can watch the show and you can Use a discount code. I think he's an sft. He's a super fungible token. Maybe all right. So here's a little bit of a highlight from uh, this week's aw 95 23 16 pin gpio expander on i-squared c and led drivers that use constant current 16 pins arrayed around the top and the bottom There's I think 11 on the top and five on the bottom there And all those pins are in pairs because they each have that v in Uh for the voltage 16 little three millimeter red leds plugged into the board and as you can see I'm doing some different little fades and uh lighting them in some sequences turning them on and off right now They're getting brighter brighter brighter and then they'll drop down use the little stem of qt connectors You could plug in up to four of these on one microcontroller And then you'd be able to run buttons leds galore. That's the product pick of the week this week Again jp's workshop is on thursday and uh, if you saw the show and tell or saw his last video There's a really neat technique the jp shows on how to use this really neat reflective material And um our little neopixel ring and it produces better results like we use a green screen I know i'm gonna i kind of want to get rid of our green screen Yeah, we someone and then use the system because it's so much we could we we have a different We have an issue because we have like two there. Yeah, and we have a pretty good light source um, but generally speaking um, and i'm going to show the highlight clip Fully expect elgato to have this as a kit soon. Uh, totally. So so it today is march 10th 2021 all right at 8 21 p.m. Okay And by the way, they should um, this isn't a just like we thought of it first We're not the type of people who care about that because guess what like it doesn't matter if you thought of something first Who can you bring it out to the widest number of people? Can you do open source even a bonus? Here's another thing about it. That's really nice. You can change the color So sometimes you don't want green because like I wear my raspberry pie shirt It's got like the green and so it like gets green screened out So you can dial in different colors So you can have a blue screen or like a purple screen or a teal So you know what whatever orange screen whatever the color is you can you can change it and it looks perfect And there's no shadows. Um, so I think it's cool digital green screens It's totally the way to go and um So, you know, I'm gonna show the little video in a second So one of the cool things about it is it it shines the light on the screen It's super reflective 3m who makes like everything amazing out of materials the the light bounces back Directly and it makes a really even green screen or blue screen or if you can even you know Pop out other colors if you wanted to And the neat thing about it is you can get really close to it and the shadow and the wrinkles don't seem It's more forgiving. Yeah. Yeah, and um, because it's just so bright. Yeah So I think like Elgato has things for gamers and streamers. They have this thing where you you lift it up It's like the projector. You remember in school. They pulled down a projector and over the chalkboard Well, these are ones that it's they sit on the ground and you pull them up I fully expect there to be a reflective material one at some point. They'll probably do it Yeah, what it does is that you'll have a light source because they already have a light Yeah, normally another thing that happens is we don't have the green screen if you have glasses, especially The bright Camera light bounces off the green screen and then the green kind of like shimmers onto your skin Or like your hair like your hair gets kind of shimmery if it's a little all shiny or your glasses They start having green reflection and it's cool about this material is because it's so retro Like reflects in every direction. You don't get that Bounce off. So so cool. So check this out. It's really neat. And I think Um I haven't I've been really busy. I think jp's watching the show. So I could I'll just talk to jp through the show Hey jp Um, he's on the blockchain. So like you can talk to him through the blockchain now. That's right. Um So, you know, one of the cool jp will probably remember this So back like peak make magazine days. We would see things in maker fairs or Um I'd be posting stuff on make or even when It started hackaday. I saw the same trend where whatever makers are kind of experimenting with there's a commercialized product of it Yeah, uh later and that's a good sign. And so if you're if you're really Interested in technology And you want to do startups or just be part of like new inventions or see all this stuff or actually be able to Build it yourself. This is where it happens first And this is like one specific one that it reminds me of because i'm like, oh, yeah, like there was a bunch of things that we all did Um, we're like, oh cool. Let's try this thing out because like we were writing about it and make or Maybe earlier at the time. No, I feel like we're back there like 15 years ago I think so so he watched this highlight and um, it it really is magical and something you can build yourself Okay, so if you want to see a glimpse of the future Or if you want to help build it jp show is tomorrow All right time travel look around the world of makers hackers artists engineers um Good news bad news good news There will be an ate a box coming out in april bad news You can only sign up for it now because our slots are full so um Do sign up though because we do get when we charge the cards about a hundred slots open up So do sign up and you'll get notified so you it's not too late But you'll have to just Yeah, listen So my suggestion is sign up because once we process the first rounds Especially over the last year a lot of people moved a lot of people are moving back. Let address changes credit cards get Cancelled or they did something so you'll have a shot, but You need to sign up and you're probably wondering Hey, why don't you do that thing like when you go on like a plane where they overbook the flight? You know because like 10 people always don't show up. So like they just book an extra 10 people Because nothing bad could ever happen, right? We don't do that Just like we don't do back orders. We don't overbook the ate a box We only sell the slots that we have available because we want to make sure that there's no risk of anyone not getting it because of Overbooking. Yeah, also, I've been bumped from a flight once and I'll never forgive united. Yeah So uh, this next portion of time travel that we're pleased to announce is uh, philby painter dragon who works With ate a fruit has for a really long time And specifically with lemur on a lot of the board designs that you've seen including the cyber deck Including the cyber deck which we're going to show tonight has been doing these little vignettes And um, I thought I was going to put this in maybe the open source hardware section Then I was going to put it in the separate section But this is kind of just like a glimpse of what's going on and some time lapse of sorts too So I'm going to play these back to back. This one is um designing a pcb the differences with eagle And then if you're going to use something like illustrator because you want to do different graphics And then um, there's Origins and some of the silk that we did for circle playground So take it away. Here's a board designed entirely in eagle versus one with a custom silk screen design in adobe illustrator Check out those fonts The process starts in eagle by enabling a specific set of layers. I found help with the layout There's a print a pdf option. You'd think would be just the thing But the output is weird and junky. I can't do anything with this Trick is to use eagle's dxf export option I've modified the script a little bit and illustrator is able to make better sense of these files The dxf file only contains lines arcs and triangles So there's an entire process here of converting this into solid shapes that we can then design on top of This is like 15 to 20 minutes of work, which has been compressed into a few seconds Finally we have something resembling the physical board and next we can start designing our custom silk screen on top of this I've been doing some videos about silk screens lately and I just wanted to tell a story about fonts Some of these boards are so tiny. You don't really get to choose your font You just try a few things and whatever's even legible at that size. That's what you run with And then other times you get to spread out and you can actually theme things a bit like a like a transit theme Or some art deco stuff going on But I want to talk about circuit playground for a second And this was designed with education in mind and just I had this nightmare scenario that someone was going to be like Oh, yeah. Hey, this is this is kid stuff We got he was like crayon fonts on there or comics on yeah And I'm like hell no because believe it or not I was 10 years old once and I remember you're doing science You want like some crisp helvetica or like that Euro style extended bold or the nasa worm logo because you don't want this patronizing crayon stuff You're doing science. So that's why it has this no-nonsense look to it And now you know, so that's our time travel segment for this year. Yeah, all right Python on hardware news. Okay lady data this week. Yeah Um, so six point two point zero beta three is released We're doing a bunch of betas, but we're also just fixing so much stuff. Um We added the second usb serial. So if you want to have like a non-repol serial port, we've added that We've added some bitmap tool. Thank you so much for the community for adding these contributions Uh, I've done a lot of display IO work. I've also seen a lot of stuff happen with label presence port Bug fixes in esp 32 s2 and rp 2040 those are going through a lot of churn We're even planning our next beta already because we're just fixing so many bugs and adding so much stuff So, um, you know keep thank you everybody for testing the latest builds We're getting so many more contributors and it's really awesome to see people coming in and saying Here's what I want circuit python to do and giving us code to do it or reviewing code or bug fixing or bug reporting it's a team effort and uh If you have an rp 2040 in some form like a pico or now a feather The good news is you can get lots of updates. There's lots of enhancements lots of fixes and more um, I did see Uh a discussion on twitter, which is never a really good idea I don't even know why you're just throwing that but someone was saying they were trying to compare like circuit python and micro python The two have different goals. Yeah, but one of the things that someone said is like Oh, there's always a lot of activity going on in circuit python land because we're we're doing a lot of updates And we're supporting a lot of hardware. So i'll say this and that's good. I'll say this There's there's always trade-offs and the way that we're doing circuit python is you want the easiest and the latest and greatest Hardware support for everything. So that's why um micro python for instance One of the things that people do is they're make if they're making hardware for it They'll fork their version the fork micro python and that's like frozen in time for their thing And then they're not doing any more updates on it. We're circuit python We're trying to get as many boards as possible that support circuit python that support all these libraries that support all the hardware and grow that Ecosystem so you get any anytime you're putting circuit python on something that supports it You're getting all the latest the latest. I mean, it's it's good. We're fixing a lot of bugs I mean people are saying like this doesn't work that doesn't work and We actually go and fix it. You know, we also added like mp3 support today, which is really cool Like that's you know, that's a pr and so that will be part of the next beta release It's it's just You know, we you know scott who is the project we made the decision really early and I've sort of you know been Been reluctantly but now enthusiastically excited, you know interested in his decision, which is Make it's it's better to have lots of changes if it means a development cycle keeps going then to Let the project stagnate because um People are and and this is kind of true. There's contributors are attracted to projects that have contributors You know if if I go to look it's true if I go to a github repo and I haven't seen any You know events occurring any pull requests or issues closed in the last five years I'm going to assume the project's dead, right? And so if you see like wow, there's a lot of activity people are contributing and responding And moving I think that will attract People who want to have their country contributions merged in and developed on it. I think the circuit python team does that really well the hardware that you have Gets tons of you know free updates forever if it supports circuit python every time there's an update to circuit python You get new features. Yeah, so a new hardware supported So I just wanted to like you know, because we have this section that we talked about python on hardware This is really good news because if you like things like the pico and rp any that's rp2040 stuff any of the Feathers or you know spark fun has their version of a feather and it's support circuit python Like every there's so many things you get with with this now That we think that we're going to keep doing this like the more new features and the more hardware supported the better and Keeping that vibe of it's as easy as possible and as the rp2040 launch one of the things that we looked at is So when people want to do something fast and easy and learn from what are they using they're using circuit python So without being said the feather rp2040 is out. This is one of the easiest best ways to Explore this new chip from raspberry pi and then also Use circuit python and then you get the full feather ecosystem. Yes and stem IQ t plugin and a megabytes of flash It's it's still you know this I don't want to call it beta. I'm pretty sure the hardware is good to go But you know, I'm I'm always interested people if they if you find any weirdnesses with it Open up issues or let us know in the community Because I'm you know This is our first board with this chip and the first board of every chip is always kind of where we were like Oh, hey, look at that. We didn't realize, you know x y z and now we do So I I'm doing this board definitely helped me design the itsy bitsy and cutie pie I had to do a revision of each because of things that I learned and and just to um Bring this back. So if you did a bunch of circuit python work on the nf the nordic nrf 52 840 That code, you know besides the bluetooth part works on a rp2040. Yeah, so like this is pwm I was actually the same thing. So the code that does the audio over pwm is the same I mean, we had to adapt it for the hardware But you know that was first introduced on the nrf 52 840 and now it's available on this chip too So we have I haven't counted the number of chipsets, but it's probably six or well the stm f4 So I mean that's like hundreds of different chips right because there's like a bunch of them But you know of families, I think we support a good like eight Eight families of chips. Yeah, and then there's things like the sp32 s2 and esp 32 uh, there's the c Well, the c3 we're probably not going to support quite yet the s3 we'll support I think there's actually a pr for the s3. So like yeah, we're we're moving along Circuit python was on tom's hardware pie cast scott was on it. He blew their minds talked to les who we just sent a Feather over in the uk And scott also talked about maybe running circuit python directly on a raspberry pi one day python 3 1 0 0 8 6 is available for testing It's big news if you're into python deep dive with scott is this friday news around the web You could check out some of the projects. This is getting started python So pi pico neopixel leds keyboards and bananas Yeah, and um You know the other the other thing by a lot of folks are Exploring mo because it's an easy way to do things with circuit python and these boards More cutie pi projects braincraft outrunning raspberry pi pico using Pi to zero adapter an adapter for a pi pico on a feather wing. Look at this cute keyboard Yeah, this is a raspberry pi pico and circuit python. This is a keyboard again This is what we see happening If you want to do a keyboard and you have a pico the easiest way to do it right now and to build on top of an expanded That's open and you just get all the support is it's been circuit python. So we're happy to see That getting out there. Here's a light sensor. This is using micro python. This is a feather wing little servo Oh, that's the dynamix. Oh, yeah, and then scott is also scott's been doing the rounds Um simple electronics podcast number 14 And then uh, this is the it's large. Yeah, this is a little round display The tab I just showed on the show and tongue. Yeah Oh, here's another pico with the display. Look, that's gonna work great with circuit python because we've great display support So as you can tell there's a theme if you really like keyboards And you really like displays and you really have really good native display support for circuit python Believe me, it's like it's it's not the going to be a you know as low level, but um, the high level stuff is amazing I mean you can have objects in front of other objects and we do clipping and and and bitmaps and um, you know beautiful fonts all the stuff which is A lot harder than you'd think actually getting good font support, but it's all in there Yeah, and we've been working on it for years So you'll continue to see a bunch of um projects and more. Um, there's a neat python comic That's in there. You can see all of our guides all of our libraries We are up to to do 303 and we still have a couple more events Coming up we're sponsored the open hardware summit. We just sent, um Cutie pies So if you're if you're part of the open hardware summit this year the swag bag will have a cutie pie pycons coming up And more so that is our python on hardware news this week. What's stuff going on? Nice Okay, we're an open source hardware company to prove it. Uh, we publish We have some guides our source code our schematics our files and we have guides and videos for each thing We have two thousand four hundred and thirty three later. You know, what's on the big board this week? I'm glad you started from the top left. Uh, the amg 8833 thermal camera Um, it got the guide isn't new the guide was updated because we qt pie qt qt ifide The amg 8833 it's now plug and play compatible. I'm sure people love that you can make thermal cameras Even easier now. Uh, we've got that guide from jp that everyone's loving the retro reflective green screen Light ring with a cutie pie and circuit python Um, no impedro made a mega guide with liz. It's a Raspberry pi pico powered led arcade button midi controller Sometimes these are called midi fighters There's like a product called the midi fighter and this is kind of our take on it It's it's different because it has like an OLED and you know a switch and a pico and it's open source And it's circuit python, but if you want to make like a cool like drum machine sequencer These are arcade buttons that light up This uh, raspberry pi pico powered, uh build it it's a it's a big build But it's not they did a really good job documenting it. I think people could do it You know if it's not maybe their first project, maybe the third project you could build one of these Um, jim c phome guy did an awesome guide about updates to the display text library and circuit python Again, you know displaying text beautifully You know, i know steve jobs had something to say about that But uh, we did a lot of work to add native font support and um graphic support and you know all sorts of ways of displaying text Beautifully, uh, we've also done a lot of optimizations to make it faster than ever So if you're if you're like, oh, I used it a couple years ago and the bdf fonts load really slow Try it again. We we've really sped it up, you know, 80 80 90 percent Reduction by using pcf fonts and some some a little level helpers um, also got that guide for the Feather rp 2040 that came out. We got a quick start guide Using the pico with airlift. Um, this is by request a lot of people we saw on discord We're having problems or we're curious about how could they add wi-fi to the raspberry pi pico And we're like, oh, yeah, you can do that with airlift and they're like, I don't even know where to start So we have a quick start guide It just gets you going with like the wiring for the pico So you get like the spi pins Going right and then how to, you know, make your secrets file for your wi-fi password and and usernames and all that And connecting to a to for dios. So it's it's quick and dirty But if you want to add wi-fi to a pico, it will definitely get you going and then of course, uh last week's project We had as the a started with right by getting started with raspberry raspberry pi pico Guide update from catney. I think we added a uh internal temperature sensor page And erin did a shadow box project last week Okay, um, let's do some main york city factory footage So these are Feather rp20 40s we made more this week. So people are like, wait, it looks like from last week That's because we made more and here they are coming out of the machine So our first one we learned a lot and then uh second one we've been uh tweaking our capabilities to improve the yield because it's a it's a very fine pitch chip Yeah, and then this was just a still that's the 3d printer, but it's kind of cool. It's like an hdr Here's us making some soil we made a ton of soil sensors So there you go There you go popping off. This is the board loader It loads the boards into the machines. That's all it does Here's more Here they come out of the oven And here they come out of the oven in in 100 speed. This is not sped up. This is actually how long it takes What is uh What's what what is the c159 60 on the The side of the panel. That's the cid. That's the component id. Yeah, so we label them so Probably the first panel So we know what it is because all the feathers look really similar. So we want to know which board it is Yeah, one thing um while we're going over these things is uh, we built our own Inventory system, um, we had to and so when you see there's product id's and then there's component id cid pid And if you look in your products, you'll see the work order id so the w number That's the work order so we can keep track if there's something that goes amiss We can we can track down every product from that work order All right, and uh wouldn't be new york city factory footage unless it was uh, it's a rebar party It was footage uh from outside our window. This is the disney building going up across the street um gotta go A sunset that you can see that happened like right near the machines behind momentum and Shadows nice sunset. That's a nice sunset. Oh, that's nice. That's factory footage. All right, uh, 3d printing with domed pager They're back with the video Next week, but we have a speedup every week. So we're gonna play this one All right, learn how to make all this stuff and more on 3d hangouts with domed pager Everyone's there All right, it's time. Did you key and ate a fruit present? Hi on mpi This week's ion mpi is from ideal tech leida What is that npi new product introduction? from ideal tech Partly by digikey this week. Okay, so you you heard me talk about ideal tech We've done tools by them before they um, they I think the wire strippers we did a couple months ago And um, I saw this pop up and I really like those wire strippers So they released an update to their pcb like rework stations So, uh, this is what it looks like and I've got one here and I'll demo it live as well So these are pcb rework holders. Um, and they're they've got a lot of little details, right? So like chance are you probably have a pcb vice or something and they're they're low cost and they're small But if you're actually going into like doing production work, you have to do a lot of soldering There's a lot of little details here that can save you a lot of time So start off. There's these holders are available in three sizes, which I will colloquially call Kind of large big and huge So I got the smallest one and it is still quite large They they have multiple railings. They're they're not designed for a single pcb You're supposed to or expected to I think put, you know A panel of pcb's or you put in 10 to 20 at time because you're soldering or reworking a bunch of the same board all at once And so that's why they're so large, but the largest also gives them a certain strength like they're Easier to work with because they're kind of heavy and that heaviness makes them stable So just be aware that there's three in this series is the pcsa holder series So what's interesting about this is that there's a lot of like hinges and I'll demo this live It's it's kind of even the data sheet even though it's good. It's hard to really see What's going on? But there's basically these removable parts and these hinges you can move The work into a couple different positions It can be like upright completely 80 degree angle Like like 70 degree angle and then like a 30 degree angle And each angle has its own like completely flat and each angle has its own like like rework Speciality So if you're like inserting connectors, you might want to move it into one orientation and sort all the connectors And flip it into another one It's really well made. I really like the quality. It's got steel that's painted. It's got some aluminum It's got some precision fit plastic the one of the things I really like about it is like There's a certain kind of detail to the precision of the parts that you can tell like when you're moving the railings You know, they have these really nice thumb screws that just are very easy to loosen and very easy to tighten Same with like the hand screws like nothing is hard to use It's all like you can use even if you're wearing gloves or if you're like, you know Trying to do like three things at once And also when you're adjusting the railings, they don't get so loose that they are hard to position Like they you can loosen them just enough that you put them where you want They're a little bit Stiff so they don't move around and then you tighten them to to really fit them into place completely So let's go to the overhead because I want to show off Um the the thing because it's it's it's big enough and it's kind of complicated enough. So, um First off, um, so this I should turn this around This is how you normally mount it get myself a little bit more angle space here um, so these are the railings and um You loosen them with these thumb screws and then these railings move up and down and so You know, you can get extra railings if you want to include More hardware, but like let's say I have this, uh, you know panel of PCBs In here is a groove So you can slot this into the groove here And into the groove there And then you know, this has a little bit of play But then you put you tighten the screws To uh To fix it in place and then like, you know, this is now not moving just really good Um, there's also this like hinge system So, you know, you're not going to be able to see it as well But basically I can position this in a couple different ways for easy rework And then the thing that is really cool. So I'll show you what I really like about this This is like I think my favorite part. So this whole thing flips over And then you're like, what is this like swiss? What's going on with the swiss thing? So this is the foam overlay holder and this is what holds through whole parts together And what's neat is that there's like this There's this button here And when you press this button This just snaps right open. So you don't have to even unscrew it. So this this foam Piece comes out. This is anti-static foam. You can get replacement foam and this is like It's hard to explain, but it's just it's firm but soft, right? It's again. It's a good it's like a mattress You know, it's got a little bit of softness at the top, but then it's got this firm foam In between to give it, uh, you know strength so what you want to do is So let's say you're like, okay, I have to Do a bunch of through-hole soldering. So I'm just going to, you know, mimic it I'm going to do one piece. But let's say I have to, you know, I'm making these cyber decks each one of them has a, uh Header piece and the the header has to be soldered in, you know here I would fill in all parts of the, um The panel, of course, I put six in and then here's a common thing you've you know If you've soldered through-hole parts How do you turn it over to solder without the parts falling over? So sometimes you hold it with your finger and then your finger gets burned or you use like a piece of tape But then you have to like deal with this tape The tape comes loose. The thing comes to skew and now you gotta rework it So that's where the foam comes in. So the cool thing about the foam Is once you've placed all of your through-hole components and then, you know, of course This could have usb and ethernet and whatever headers you want and then, um this Foam piece slots in so this this little hooks into this part hooks into place And then that button, you remember, I push that button. I push it again And now the foam is down and then I can just lift this Rotate it around And then re-slot it in place I'm gonna give you a close-up of this And now I can um work on the board and the foam is holding the Through-hole pieces in place and because the foam is just soft enough. It's not Shaking around. I'm gonna just show so because we did it it made sense to show it on the top view so you can see things But yeah, here's a side view of oh, yeah, so I'll show if you can hold it carefully. Yeah, I'll show this rotates around Like this Thank you kind assistant and then this hooks into place and then I push this button To release the foam holder. Yeah, and then this hooks out and then You see that the through-hole piece it's perfectly it's kept perfectly Pressured in place So you don't have that annoyance of like even with usb connectors, you know, they snap in But then they get a little bit loose Or like if you try to touch, you know, one corner of time it doesn't it You can be the uneven this way you get like perfect even pressure across all of your through-hole components So this is excellent excellent excellent if you're doing a lot of through-hole soldering Because it you can you place all the parts you snap the foam over you flip it over right and it's like it's very fast There's no there's no work that you have to do with it And then you can solder in all of your through-hole parts all at the same time Very very easily. So this is what it's really good for. It's also good for rework But like the foam thing makes it like like Perfect chef kiss for through-hole components. Yeah And it's available on digikey site That's right So they have three different sizes like I said, so the three sizes they're basically the same price There's only like maybe 20 bucks difference between them So, you know, get the one that's the right size for your boards and your panels Not necessarily you don't have to worry about like only the smaller one is cheaper They're basically the same price so just get the one that's the right size for you So, you know, I got the small one and you can you can see how how big it is It is quite large, but you know by the time you insert a panel in it, you know, and yeah, it's not as big as you think I'd say it's about the size of the classic Dell laptops from the late 90s. It's totally got that. Yeah, it's the pizza box laptop size It is actually by the way personal pan pizza. It's like a personal pizza size Yeah, that's what it is. So there you go. It's not too big not too small And I really like all the thumb screws, by the way, like good thumb screws like they add a little bit more to the cost But boy is it worth it. So this is really really nice. I'm going to hand this over to the um, yeah, do you think it'll um Maintain pressure on parts if they're uh, if they're different heights. Yes That's why the foam is so good. The foam is just soft enough that it conforms over So I'm not worried about different heights. Yeah, I think it'll be fine I mean, look if it's if it's a short piece right next to a big piece Maybe not but like for something say like a raspberry pi or you've got ethernet and usb and then you've got a header I think it would be okay. Yeah, okay, and uh Short urls there and also the product id that you can look it up on digikey site 214 pca sa 1 N and d in the short url d url is digikey.com For it's a short for slash b5 n tp2 jd and uh, this video is their um Tutorial video from the website. I have the sound turned off Yeah, because it has a bunch of music and that's problematic on youtube So um, I'm not going to play the whole thing, but they have some pretty good videos and resources On how to assemble it and how to use it Yeah, and all the stuff that I just showed if you want to see it, but um done in a Large table um by someone with really nice manicure. I check out this video. It's on the ideal tech page. It's also on the digikey um page, so if you go to the digikey site, you can see the um Yeah, this video and watch it in all its glory. All right, and with that is Okay, uh, I gotta put this away so I can do new products. Yeah, put that away and then we'll uh Go into new products. Okay, put it to storage mode Yeah PCSA from ideal tech. Okay. All right Thanks everybody. We're gonna kick it off. Yeah, let's do this thing Okay, first up, okay This is such a weird thing But I just thought it was really useful for maybe some weird purposes So this is like, you know, you have a kbm and it's like a smart switch that lets you like Share one keyboard and mouse and monitor with two computers Well, imagine if you had that but it was only a usb port and it was totally mechanical So this is it's a weird thing, right? It's got um Yeah, so here's a good good image. So it's got two usb a plugs and they can go into no, uh, yeah Uh, they got two usb a plugs And um each one can plug into a computer and then you can plug in one peripheral device into that socket And then the switch I know it says like on off. It's like one zero But what it really is it switches between the two What is this used for so for me? I actually was using this for testers So I would like have a board plugged into a raspberry pi and then I wanted to like plug it into my computer And I'll be kind of like plugging it back and forth Um with this I just used the switch now one thing I'll say is this is it's a it's a little bit of a Hacking way of doing it. So power is connected through to both boards So just that that's not usually not a problem usb ports don't usually mind having some back power The switch is only uh for the two data lines. So it's it's a you know dual pole double throw whatever switch So it's it's only the um It's only the two data lines that are swapped over That said, um, you know, it does work. Um, it's it's funky. It's weird But I think you know, it's it's not I wouldn't put it into like a finished product But for rnd or for some situation where you're like, look, I really just want to connect one arduino between two computers or something Um real fast, you know, I I'd feel okay saying like hey, this is a good little development tool for that so I don't know what I call like a micro kvm a usb switcher or something like that. Okay Next up Okay, next up. So well, what's this? I'm gonna plug in this this is the um The oh my goodness actually don't remember the name of it. It's this raspberry pi case Um, and it's the it's the pro model of the pi case Um, and it's designed for the raspberry pi for although I think you can fit other raspberry pies in it and an official raspberry pi Seven inch monitor. So the monitor you see here. It doesn't come with it If you have a raspberry pi, you see the raspberry pi four plugged in on the left there the seven inch monitor um, you connect them together put them into the case and You basically have your own like all in one raspberry pi enclosure with a touchscreen and it's like a really beautiful nice display and case with a camera in the front so you can have even have it like you can make your own little like a Camera web app web camera type like interface thing where you have like video You know transmitting over the camera over the display going back and forth So that's kind of the upgrade is it has the the camera slot and the usb Port comes out for power, but the sd card is not is not exposed so people can't rip it out So this would be like a little micro kiosk. Maybe um, so let's go to the overhead and I'll show it off So this is kind of nice So, um, you've got here the the touch screen so it's Focus on it It's so so bright so it's a little confusing But um, you've got the seven inch monitor here and it's a touch screen like you can see I can touch and select stuff um usb and ethernet for the Raspberry pi four on the back. Um, this is a really nice Metal bottom, so it's a little bit heavy Hinge you can hinge this and it's adjustable then you screw it in place Um, another nice extra it comes with a fan you can use to cool down The insides and there's like lots of little mounting holes on the back with venting This is where the usb comes out So there's a little usb if you if you you know, we go back to the contents. You'll see there's a little usb Adapter thingy so that the usb comes out nicely on the side and inside it gets routed into the power port Um, but basically, you know, it's the it's the camera slot that makes this kind of special so you can mount a raspberry pi camera here and then You know use it as like a like I said like a kiosk with a webcam for like av Interfacing or like a mini video station type project. So Um, yeah, if you go here So you can see it comes with all the hardware and the cables to route internally all the camera And then there's hardware as well for Um, mounting all the pieces together. So you do have to put it together Uh, it doesn't come with a raspberry pi 4 or the display. So you just have to uh, make sure you grab one of those But it does come with the fan Okay, next up Um, next up. We've updated our 2.13 inch Uh, tricolor e-ink displays. Um is very similar to the previous e-ink displays. You can see here You show stuff even when it's not powered. It's got sd card slot built-in ram So you can use it with everything from arduino uno up to like a raspberry pi We've got e-ink libraries for python circuit python In third we know Um, what's nice about this is we've updated it To be higher resolution. It's now 250 by 122 Uh, tricolor pixels. So I you know, I don't remember the previous resolution I think it was like 200 by 100 or something So I got a little bit of a boost in resolution. So you get more pixels With that the chip set has changed slightly. It's now the ssd 1680 So, um, it is a new product id because you can't reuse the exact same code as before You do need to recompile the code For the new ssd 1680 chipset. This is Unfortunately a thing about e-ink displays is that the chipsets keep changing Um For the user it doesn't matter, but just the for the developer they will have to recompile it All right next up. I think might be Besides that little tiny keyboard that we showed during the python on hardware section This might be either the cutest or second cutest thing we showed tonight. This is so cute Um, this is a miniature hot plate It's a miniature hot plate. It's way smaller than you think and before yeah, I was going to say so Yeah, you can look at these photos and just be like, well, how big is it? Is it the size of a refrigerator or is it like It's really small. So what board is that that you have? So this is like a sort of a generic Okay, so it's like a little stem of size Stem IQt board. So this is it. It's very very very very small and um, here. I'll I'll you can actually do it Yeah, I just plug it in real fast. Okay. So, you know what we can do is we can Try to angle this a little bit here. So We can see well. Yeah, I just thought I'd quickly show it. So there there's some buttons on the back I'll show the user interface. There's a and b buttons so that you can You can check the manual, which I totally haven't read yet. If you want to make a cutie pie factory Yeah, this is how you it's basically if your boards are about one inch by one inch Uh, this is perfect for you. So it's booting up. It's got a little display. This is by minware They make a lot of really high-end tools. They have like smart tweezers and They have the uh, yeah the smart tweezers we just put in they have the smart soldering iron Yeah, is it having Is it doing a thing? Maybe my power supply isn't good enough Let's try again It was just working. Okay, there you go. I think I just wasn't uh, it was plugged in all the way Okay, so don't forget to plug in the USB all the way So there's settings and then there's heat up. So if I select heat up It'll heat one of the things I thought was so adorable about this is this little led Um, it's a kind of like indicator of what the temperature is So as this heats up and you see it's like 35 36 degrees Um Yeah, once you start using electronics on it don't start melting s'mores on it by the way But um, if you're just going to make a s'more melter. Yeah, just more just s'mores Don't don't mix it with electronics. So as this is heating up it's getting to like 60 degrees C and you see it's turning yellow So the um, the led does warn you how hot it is. So this, you know white, okay Like definitely dangerous. Uh, and then I think it gets to red when it's when it's really hot. So, um It works. It will reflow boards. Uh, you know, we did it live on discolata. We did it live on discolata Ada, um, you know, it's it's for very small boards But if you are making these small development kits, you're making like tow moves or whatever or like, you know, nanos Um, this this will do the job and it heats up pretty fast in about two minutes You'll get up to 240. It can do, uh, leaded and lead free No problem. Yeah, someone said all you just buy a bunch of these put a sticker on it Start a Kickstarter and it's your own like personal s'more Device. Yes. Yeah for s'mores. That's the second product that you're going to see later on that you saw first on a electronics show. Yeah the screen The reflective screen and then the uh, okay, so I think what I'll do now that we've we've seen it I'll yeah, I can actually see the little smoke going off. You have a little bit of smoke I want to be careful because I don't want to damage this. Yeah, and now it's red now. It's red So you can see the red light so let me uh I'm gonna zoom in focus and do you want to zoom into it and show that it's like Well, I think I have to bring this out a little bit. Good And then focus It's either like all or nothing today. Yeah, maybe Okay, I don't know if it doesn't like maybe the heat's confusing it Okay, so there you go. So um as it gets up to 240 I can sort of poke poke the parts with this maybe Let me see Oh, I think I have to tell it. I want to go even higher Yeah, you can tell that it's uh hot right now. It's definitely hot though One thing I should have done is probably uh read the manual, but it's at 220 which is lead solder But this is lead free So I think I need it to okay now it's going up to 220 225 230 so you're gonna actually start seeing stuff really melting here Let me see if I can zoom in on it now that we're in okay zoom in territory I don't know 240 Yeah, you can see it look look look look You can see it going around the resistor there. See I'm melting. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, I don't know how much more I'm going. This is exciting Yeah, all right. I do want to I do want to yeah, I can't zoom in more but I'm going to just take a look at that Live reworking. Yeah So you can remove parts. Yeah very carefully So when we're gonna part off and then while you're still dead don't I was going to say you could see I was going to show that it's red Yeah, so you can see that's why you gotta be careful. This is so hot. Yes, it's this like it's 250 So I'm gonna unplug it And be very careful So just be just be super careful because this thing is like it it gets hot. I mean it's small but You know 250 260 degree C That will toast you so Don't do no idea. Don't don't flick off parts with your finger. It's a terrible idea to even try to do live demos with this stuff Just live demos in general. This is why no one does live demos But we did it and we showed it to you so we're gonna do it But um, basically if we were I've reflowed like little boards on it. Yeah. All right. Next up Okay, next up. This is the revision. This is the amg 88 33 so we've had this thermal camera for a while Now the thermal camera just has a stem and qt connector. So you can plug and play it with any of our stem qt Interface boards including the cyberdex we're about to show or you know, if you've got a Clue board you can plug it in and then have like make a little thermal camera And what's nice is that for a while it's actually tough to get thermal cameras But it's starting to become a lot easier to pick them up now. So if you've been Wondering like hey, how come I can't get thermal cameras? During COVID it was like impossible to get them. Yeah, and now they're trying to come back So we still do temperature screening every single day. Like I know everyone's temperature and I defer we We have our teams work on that to make sure every day when folks come in they don't have a fever I do think that you know Years from now or months from now as people kind of look back At this pandemic, um, you know, the fever thing really didn't become a way to Determine if someone had it because it was asymptomatic and I think one of the things That would have been better Would have been a portable smell test Believe it or not where When you walked into a building there was a few different scents like somebody with like a rotten milk and they're like smell this No, just a few different scents would be In the area like you would put your head just you know, close as you do for a temperature sensor But it would be like what's the what's the smell because that seems to be Or at the time especially during peak a lot of people lost their smell and that would that would have been a way to say Okay, because temperature just didn't seem to be a thing. So that's why Long story short. We have more of these in stock. That's right. Maybe because everyone agreed with you now Um, but yeah, so it's the same chip the same schematic. It's actually even physically the same size We did we arrange the pins a little bit to make them in our stomach qt standard And of course they have the plug and play connectors on the end to make easy thermal camera projects The stars of our show tonight the lady of the community Our customers and our team here at data fruit are the cyberdecks. We had two of them That's right. Although the cyberdeck bonnet was probably going to be in stock tomorrow But if you're not watching this live then it's probably in the store So you've got two cyberdeck bonnets. These are plug-in boards for the raspberry pi 400 That have these really cool angled sensors as angles as angled headers And the angled headers mean that when you plug them into the raspberry pi 400 You get the display coming out at a jaunty angle If it was flat, it would stick out. You would see it if it was completely upright It would be not easy to see it either But it's like 30 degrees which we scientifically determined was the best angle See, there's two versions. There's the bonnet version and we're showing it here with our OLED bonnet. You don't have to use it with the display. You can use it with like literally anything That's like mini pi zero hat shaped But we happen to think the OLED was a good demo. It's got this beautiful silk screen by phil b shown here and then You're gonna go back down? Yeah, um, because I'm just talking about the cyberdeck bonnet Um, it has mounting holes so you could attach, you know, any, you know, again Pi zero hat or fat or mini hats, you know, whatever you want to call them and then um, there's connectors on the sides So you get two jst ph connectors or two millimeter pitch connectors You get power ground and then either pin 18 on the left or pin 13 on the right And then there's two stem aqt connectors above those So if you want to like plug and play that thermal camera, for example Or our sensors or OLED displays or whatever you get two connectors for i squared c on the cyberdeck So that's the cyberdeck bonnet, right? So it's for the smaller boards and then we have the cyberdeck hat Same thing you get those connectors on it jst sh and jst ph for connecting i squared c or other boards um, and then um You've got uh, you know that 30 degree angled header. So it plugs in nicely into the raspberry pi Um, and then here it is for example with a sense hat So, you know, if it's a hat shaped thing it plugs in quite nicely And again, it shows it an angle. So if you want to use a sense hat with a raspberry pi 400 Which, you know, it has sensors and a display and you don't want to have it like Dangling off a cable you plug this in and then it kind of holds it up at a nice angle. So i've got a demo with it on the pi 400 So this is uh the pi 400 with the cyberdeck Bonnet plugged in right to the bottom here and then um You know if you want to see the angle Yeah, the angle is kind of tough to show but you can see it's You can tell kind of coming up. So you see like the it's a it's actually an original pi one hat Um, and then it's you can see the text very nicely while you're typing on it So this is kind of my example of like, okay, I want to uh, you know Hack a system by pinging it. Okay, I can do that um, I even did a thing where I wanted to see if Can links to ate a fruit? I was like, okay Well, you can always put a graphic interface on it, but I thought it would be kind of fun to show it with um With text Oh too much back off Okay, so you can even search for uh cyberdeck So you can browse the internet and maybe find the text version of this product I'm just having fun with links Okay, here you go So I can now go to the the product page for the product on the product in text That's right. Um I'm gonna zoom out. So let me control x Quit I still remember how to use links after like 20 years and then uh You can do uh, you can also show, you know animations and graphics. I got like a wallpaper To show just some some, you know, you can have it display stuff gifts Whatever all of our examples already worked because all it's doing is Adapting the raspberry pi 400 to hold our existing hats and bores and only to plug on top of a raspberry pi 4 But now you get it at this again Nice jaunty angles. Maybe you want to go to the yeah, I was gonna say like maybe we can see yeah I think this is the best way to show it. So yeah, you see it's like Yeah, there's other products out there not from us that go up and down We wanted to make sure when we launched this it had a really good angle. So this is very it's super readable It's really cool. It is super cyberdecky cyberdecky. So make your cyberdecks or or just connect things to your pi 400 Um, I think this is great, you know, we you know, we try it a couple different angles I does have a little bit of of adjustability. You can like move it up and down by about five degrees But it's very solid and then of course you can use the accessory ports to Plug in other hardware, but I think like if you want to just make like a cool Add on for your, you know, it doesn't have to be displayed. I personally like displays, but it can be almost anything You get the bonnet in the hat two versions And uh, yeah, it'll just work with anything because all it does is bring all the pins out and up Like it's all it does. It's a mechanical adapter. Yeah, if you're using a pi 400 I think this is a good secondary display for like sensors You could do a lot of neat work on the screen and then look over at your little mini screen And see what the microcontroller stuff that you wanted. Yeah, I think this makes this is so much fun I mean you can have hdmi and all leds are like a sense hat, right? This is a common Add on for the raspberry pi, but how would you use it with the 400? I think this makes perfect sense because you can still use the buttons. Yeah in a sensor Yeah, visualizer. There's all sorts of things you can do. Yeah, and with that it is new products Okay, we're gonna roll right in to um, you can put your questions up in discord data for dot it slash discord And join all 27 000s over there, but while we're Loading up some questions. We're gonna do some top secret. Okay. Oh, yeah, shoot Okay, so top secret this week lady. What do you have? Okay? Well, okay, so I've got I still have the pi 400 here So I made this, um Hold on. Let me get the pi 400. This is not plugged in. That's why it's not working. Hold on It's super top. Hold on. So top secret. I forgot that I have to plug something in It doesn't work without power turns out. Okay, so I'm thinking of doing some like a home automation board I wanted to make a board that would work with um Um, I don't tell me this isn't working either No, it wasn't on Okay, you can do it back it up so we can see that it's okay So after being able to turn stuff on it's got this little debugging cable here So this is a um, I wanted to make a board that's for like home automation that can work with Home assistant or raspberry pi or on its own uh to do like home automation projects and we've done like iot projects, but I want something that specifically Was for interfacing with home assistant or like Hue lights or like people who want to automate stuff around their house because I think a lot of people have been indoors a lot for the last couple months and maybe they have projects that they were like You know, I want to be notified when my dishwasher is done or when my cat comes in, you know through the cat door or something Um, so I made this little board and it's house shaped and we're going to design like a fun silk screen This silk screen is like my stick figure quality It's got our tft screen here. It's got some buttons I'm playing around with capacitive touch for the first time. So this has a little capacitive touch slider And um, it's not working on the design, but I think I think the slider is okay I mean you don't get huge resolution, but it's enough that you could like turn something You know up to eight levels and then there's um Two little cap touch buttons here and then there's a little cap touch button here And there's a led and there's like you can see there's five Dot stars. I'm just I'm just having them flicker random colors There's some sensors. I put a doorbell here. This is the reset button Um, but it's a doorbell. So I guess if you want to like ding dong like wake up board You can hit that And then there's a little buzzer and I'm off switch and some sensors and on the back Um, I got my esp 32 s2 and a bunch of socket connectors for sensors and stomach qt There's actually not a lot going on the back here because it's capacitive touch switches You don't really want to have anything behind them That's why a lot of the pcb is bare and it has this hatched silk screen. So um, you know, what's cool is that we have esp 32 s2 it's native Wi-Fi support for um circuit python And I feel like with the mag tag we really kind of nailed down getting Wi-Fi support for the s2 So I want to do some more, um products. I mean I'm doing the feather boards Those are coming out, but you know boys want to have a home automation design and um Here's a cool, uh trick that philby came up with after I designed it He said, you know, it's basically the same size as a raspberry pi So it actually is even though it's like pointed up here The envelope of it is the same size as a raspberry pi and the mounting holes are the same too So you can even mount this on top of a raspberry pi to have this be your little accessory board Um to work directly with it like you could act against a shield It wouldn't plug in through the shield connector would plug in through usb, but it would still Like it would be able to plug in through the the connectors. So it's not that yet. Don't ask Okay, that's top secret. Okay. I have a bunch of questions lined up. So we're going to speed around some I'll spend some time with those others All right, um first up. This is earlier another chat. Uh, how to design a charging power bank module pcb Um, well, we've got um a couple different chips in the shop and boards in the shop I think you want like a power boost 1000c. That's pretty much A charger bank controller. You just plug in a battery and you can charge boost control All right, and this next one. Um, someone gave a better answer. I think then we could Um, so I'm gonna just do the questions. I can do the answer Someone has zero experience in electronics ee. They're currently in schools and adult in their 30s trying to Obtain an e degree. They're about halfway there. There'll be almost 40 when they finish should they quit? And someone said I started programming at 40. Thanks, Adafruit Went through a web development program and now I'm an embedded software qa test engineer So you'll be fine. So I think that's the best thing is to hear from the community for other people Never too late to do anything. The thing is things are moving so fast by the way that it's not like Yes, it's always good to have more like if you learn earlier, sure, that's great But it's not like you have 40 years to catch up on like you don't have to catch up on it because things Are moving so quickly that they kind of embedded stuff that you that I learned in school Honestly, it's not that practical like I learned MIPS assembly. I don't write any MIPS assembly It's okay. Like I could have just skipped that part I think there's a lot of like that teaches you problem solving Yeah, that's a good skill Which you would you know as a 40 year old anyways because just to get to the age of 40 you have to have like Learned how to solve problems in your life. Okay, so I thought it was a good answer Thanks for that. Uh, how hard does it create a product from scratch from an stm 32 chip? What's the process like? It's not too bad. There's a lot of good Dev and eval boards you can you can crib off of, you know, we have the stm 32 a 405 feather you can Use that it's open source based your design off of it It's not too hard a lot of stm 32 chips are really similar But you'll have to probably use their ide one thing that is true about the stm 32s is like It's it's kind of there's one way to program them and the ide is the way to do it That said it means all example code you're gonna find is gonna work because it's all meant for the same ide All right, um Have we ever built an automatic cat or dog feeder? Yeah, we have a guide. Okay Dan who did it first cat is very cute. Can you use voice commands with a raspberry pi? You can there There are some voice command tutorials. We have one for google assistant. Like you can make your own google assistant There is some voice recognition stuff. Um, I would just google around for like, you know Voice recognition on raspberry pi and just follow those tutorials. All right next up. Um, how do you check to verify flight controller design? Is good before moving to a pcb design A flight. Well, I don't do flight controllers So that I don't know. Yeah, but how would they verify it? I mean I would you know, do do prototypes You know on a breadboard and then maybe solder it onto a breadboard and then turn the product Turn product and then you can make your first pcb But it's normal to have six seven revisions of a pcb So don't don't feel like it has to be right the first time I I don't get it right the first time do you test a micro controller dev board with different sensors Then combine the sensors motors etc after everything works. Okay, then you go to pcb Um, no, I do something a little bit different Which is normally what I have a new component. I'll make a breakout just for that component Um, and then I will learn by doing that breakout How that chip is expected to be used and then I would use it in a product. So for example You know, this this board uses a 1.5 inch tft So when I forgot this tft the the first thing I did was make a breakout board for it just to like Connect it to an existing feather Learn how the display wanted to be used and then once I felt comfortable and I had a good footprint Now I can add it in any product. I don't have to think about it. Okay about a year ago You posted a blog about someone who found a way to test uvc wants to see if the output was truly uvc Two part question any other tips for looking at an led to make sure it's legitimate uvc Not just normal led and any trusted suppliers you recommend or do you plan on stocking some so Um, I still think the best thing is to get the testing equipment for it Or you can rent it or there's there's places you can send stuff and they'll test it for you because the equipment is not cheap It is a couple thousand dollars There's really no way unless you have the equipment you need to have Something that that's a very specific frequency uvc leds any plan the stock does They're actually really hard to get right now because they're still being used a lot. So we we put that on hold Yeah, um, you know looking back though, that's another thing. Um, if you would have Said well, what are some of the technology things that you think you're gonna come out? Um, I think because of vaccine was just an idea it was like, oh my god, we're gonna do it There was a lot of like well, let's get thermal cameras as door doorbells Let's get um, let's replace fluorescent lights with like uvc and just like try to sterilize everything and you really don't see Um that you don't see that is one of the major deploying strategies like let's uvc everything Um, there's uvc sanitation, but you don't even hear about them as much now The bakery place was supposed to have there was a bakery They said they're like we're gonna have uvc lights and they never did I think it was I think you know march april of last year It was just like what are we gonna do about this? How do we kill this thing in the air? And I think everyone tried just about everything And then you know the solutions that we ultimately have was like mass and distance and now there was a vaccine But there wasn't really a technology solution to this. Yeah initially Next up, uh, what screens were you using for the cyberdeck hats? Uh, we've got the oled bonnet on the on the bonnet cyberdeck and the 3.5 inch Pi tft in a pi tft series Um that we we have a couple different sizes screens and that's on the hat Okay, um Can ethernet feather wing be used with a feather rp2040? Absolutely. Okay The new raspberry pi case. Can you switch off the display by keeping the pi running? Um, well the display automatically turned off after it's not used you can set the delay time for screen saver mode But the display does not turn off. I think you can change I can think you can turn off the backlight Through a command so you could do something like that Yeah, knowing what you know now if you could do things differently in the past year for the business What would you change this is a tough question because if I knew anything about what was happening Um, you know so many people uh are dead and or suffering So, you know our business survived so Because we did all the things we did and we did everything right and we Took care of our team and our community took care of us Um, that's a hard one because like if I had any type of go back in time Or like if you knew something I'd be like, you know, five over 500,000 people are dead and Um, I got each one turns out. I mean like what would that even make a difference? So, you know, there was a Yeah, there was a limited time where we could have had a really big impact And I say we is like a society and it ends a country To really mask up in the very beginning that could have slowed things down And we wouldn't be in the situation that we're coming out of now um, but as far as the business goes, um, we Around the clock we did everything we possibly could to keep everyone employed and in safe um, it was really tough though, and um, I wouldn't do anything different But I will say this there's consequences like physically and personally like This has been a tough year. We're exhausted and then, you know, we're starting to Rally to turn the page So it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, like we had all of our team helping us make all smart decisions So I wouldn't do anything different Um, but I will say like it it came at a huge cost for all of us Yeah, this this hurt and it'll continue to hurt for a while And so the best thing I would say is maybe not Do anything differently going Because you can't go in the past We're going forward, um, there's a lot of things that we help our team with and talk about being proactive because, um, there's a lot of Crises that are going to come up in people's lives and you can get ahead of some of them So I think um going forward one of the things is like, hey like for our remote team members that are in like organ Have a have a go bag because there was fires last year. Well, you told me then they Like it doesn't matter. Well, there's just but what you can do is just like You can be proactive on some things that you don't have control over that'll just reduce the stress That's one of them. Uh, next up Any plans to change a usb connector to type c on circuit player and express? Um, not because you know, there are so many already I don't want to mess with people and folks a lot of folks still do have a lot of micro usb cables Uh, it's aida box opening up anytime soon You can sign up because we're full but there will be openings as we start the ship Yeah, um on dust of ladiator. You should appears this trip from uh form And form kind of thingy. It was quite interesting. Is there a part number of place to look for that? Well, we'll stock it. I think we have them on order Okay, uh What would you do now or plan for a near future to be ready in case another epidemic situation? So I don't know why are we like suddenly responsible for like this entire country's epidemic response? Because we probably do a better job I don't know. I mean I think we we put people first and we care more and I think everyone's trying to figure out Like how do we make sure this doesn't happen again? So here's a here's a way to look at it. So every time a disaster happens One of the things they tell our team is hey in texas right now, there's a You know, this was a couple weeks ago. There's a there's a power outage. It is frozen This is not good Look at the stories that are coming out and think about if that happened to you where you're at How would you deal with it? Do you have a go bag? Do you have a place that you can go to have you? um, do you have all the contacts that you need to Get a hold of do you have um Alternate form of heat. Yeah, you know where you live in a different part of the country So don't let anytime there's a crisis don't let those goes go to waste. So that's how I'd say prepare Every time something happens. Don't think boy. I'm really lucky. It's not happening to me I think it's more like How how can I use that that's going on over there? That pain and suffering for good here to help people to avoid that going Going forward. Let's go. I was like get old questions. Yeah, I think we got all of them. Yeah Oh, so I'll give you 10 bucks on a sweet. Okay. Okay. I think we got to All of them All right, so on how to they saw the show and tell they were a little down now. They're happy. Yeah, it's good. All right Yeah, I guess I'll say one last thing kudos and shout out to Naomi Wu Who was on the ground in China and we were asking her directly what's going on? What are they doing in China and we listen to what she was saying? It was cool. We're like, okay. It was cyberpunk. Good to know So that was actually really really helpful. Okay. So that's our show for tonight. Thanks everybody. Thank you Chikara who is over in the Adafruit Slack chat helping out folks. Thank you everyone to It's helping out the community here and special thanks to The folks in the different chats. We'll see everybody next week on ask an engineer and I think I think I got everything. Thanks everybody. All right. Bye everybody. Here's your moment of zener