 Life in New York, it's Ask an Engineer. Hey everybody, and welcome to Ask Engineer, the longest running live engineering and electronics show in the known universe. It's me, Lady Aida, with me is Phil. Yeah. So it's Mr. Lady Aida on camera control and interesting commentary. Is that a commentary? Sometimes. Sometimes not. He's the brains, the operation. But we are here broadcasting live from the Downtown Manhattan office, where we do all of our manufacturing, kidding and shipping and testing and videoing and coding. That's right. It's Aida Fruit behind us. It's Aida Fruit in front of us. And it's Aida Fruit for the next hour. As we go through what is up in the maker engineer hacking community, news, new products, videos, secrets, and more. Yeah. Why don't we kick it off? You want me to kick it off? Yeah. There's a lot going on tonight. On tonight's show, the code is truffle. 10% off in the Aida Fruit Store all the way up to 11.59 p.m. Eastern time-ish or whenever I remember to do it. I'll try this. Look at that, look at that, look at that. Okay, it's part of, you know, some live shows that we do. We're going to talk about all things that we do during a week and more, including our show and tell, time travel around the world of makers, hackers, artists, engineers, things that are going on in the world, jobs, very special job on the jobs board tonight. Main New York City factory footage, 3D printing, got a couple speedups. IonMPI brought to you by Digi and Aida Fruit. New products, top secret. We'll answer your questions. We do that over on Discord, AidaFruit.it, slash Discord. Join all 30,000 of us over there. All that and more on, you guessed it. Bam. Ask an engineer. That's right. Yeah. Okay. So let's just go through some stuff real quick. So tonight's theme will be all about... Snakes. Snakes. This Friday is Circuit Python Day. We'll talk about this in the Python and Hardware section. Friday, we have a whole lineup of shows. Show and tell was filled with show and tell folks doing Circuit Python projects. Lots of them. Joyfully. Yeah. So we have a lot of stuff going on in the world of Circuit Python. Is that fourth Circuit Python? This is your four, right? Yeah, maybe. Plus two. And we're doing a lot of virtual events, of course, because it's time to talk about COVID again. Oh, yay. Oh, we're done with this, right? We're done with this, but it's not done with us. Yeah. So during the last year plus, we've been giving everyone updates about what's going on with Adafruit, with New York City, because New York City got hit first and really bad in March and April of last year. So here's where we're at. A lot of New York City is vaccinated. And the infection rate is low starting next week. New York City is not going to account the infection rate as one of the metrics that's hospitalization, vaccination, and I think deaths. The ways that things are changing in our city that's very fast is basically Shake Shack runs New York City policy right now. Yeah. And I'll just tell you why. Health policy is set by some tasty ass burgers. Yeah. They're tasty burgers. And I'll tell you why. So the city and state, they want businesses to say vaccination, proof of vaccination for everyone, including the people coming into your restaurants or whatever, venues, entertainment, Broadway, so. Last week, Shake Shack announced, hey, this is what we're doing for our staff and the customers, vaccination. And they're even moving away from talking about weekly testing. Masking is now, the signs are back everywhere, but the sole focus is vaccination. So we're not a tiny company and we're not a big company. We're right in the middle. We're waiting for guidance. Almost everyone, if not everyone by now, is vaccinated a fruit. But, and I'll just tell you from being on the ground yesterday, we had our first breakthrough positivity. Person's fine. They weren't feeling that great. Testing is everywhere, still in New York. And they're like, well, may as well. And positive. So they're isolating. They're fine. Anyone that was around them, luckily, this just happened to work out that they weren't. Everyone's okay so far, but we all know what's coming. And then people that we know outside of Adafruit, but in the New York area, they're reporting that, oh yeah, I was feeling fine, but I just got a test because I just had a little bit of a cough. And it's folks that have been vaccinated, but it's very mild. And that's kind of what vaccines can do is just lower the severity, chance of going to the hospital or dying. And we're seeing that already. So in case you're wondering what's happening, you can get your news from all sorts of places and a lot of people do. This is what's happening right now. So I think that's going to be commonplace. You know, we have a very specific bit of protocols that we do when anyone is symptomatic or if they test positive. And now we're in the, you've been vaccinated and you've tested positive or you're vaccinating your test negative and you're still having some symptoms. Some people end up, they're like, yeah, it turns out I had streps throat. And there's a test for that and never has folks been so happy to get streps throat. No, I mean, people are actually going and getting other diseases because they're hanging out without masks in public. I mean, like they're doing all the things that you do to get the diseases that we always get. So colds and flus and streps. So we'll see. And you know, one of the things, and this is just us as an employer looking at this, seems like one of the, you know, you never know what timeline we're in. It seems like this timeline that we're in is COVID will eventually evolve to an annoyance because of vaccinations, immunity and a combination of things. But it looks like every time this virus mutates, it's not getting weaker. It seems to be getting stronger and more transmissible. So anyways, that's just us on the ground here in New York City with the workforce of like 100 plus people. And if you haven't got vaccinated, please consider it because we're seeing it get all the way through. Folks have been vaccinated and we really hope everyone sticks around. Talk to your doctor. I think that's going to be what I say from now on because the folks that are like, I don't know if I'm going to get vaccinated yet. Apparently if their doctor tells them and their doctor works with them, if they have any issues, that is what gets it. Not shaming, not incentives, actually just talking to their doctor or being told you can't travel or go to concerts. That one works too. Yeah, if you're going to trust this guy to like, you know, cut open your spleen, you trust them to tell you whether a vaccine is a good idea. So anyways, that's what's going on here and we'll continue to give you all updates. We're still chipping. Everything's fine. We have royal wearing masks. We've never stopped doing that. So we're safe, but this is happening. Okay, so code is truffle. The reason is we watched pig last night with Nicolas Cage and I'm still thinking about it. So that's the... I want to know what happened to the baguette. I am traumatized by the baguette which went missing. Where's my pig? Okay, so in addition to 10%, you get free stuff. What did they get? 99 dollars or more, you get a free perma-proto half size breadboard, a PCB for taking your projects and making them permanent. 149 or more, you get a free stomach QT board, one of a variety of boards that are available, whatever we have in stock. You'll get a random one or if you have an account, we'll make sure you get a different one each time. 1.99 or more, you get free UPS ground chipping in the content of the United States. 2.99, you get a free circuit playground express or all-in-one dev board that has LEDs and buttons and sensors. Perfect for use with Arduino, CircuitPython, code.org, CS Discoveries, and MakeCode as well as other development platforms. Okay, we have a whole bunch of live shows. We just got off air doing our CircuitPython show and tell day. Please watch it and also special thanks to Marcos in the chat and offered to give show and tell badges to folks just like, oh, let's go to this. This is what they look like. You want to go to the overhead? Yeah. Do you want me to light it up? No. Yeah, I mean, maybe. Okay, well maybe, maybe later. Here you go. Okay. Nice. Cool. Okay. So, anyhow, we do a show on Sundays called Desk of Lady Eda. This week, Lady Eda talked about... I took this RGB LED matrix breakout and first off, I ordered the PCBs. Finally, I got off my button, did that, and I got to test them out and then I'm making LED glasses because I've always wanted to have my own pair of LED glasses. So I'm breaking apart that matrix into glasses shape. And then, we also talked about a really weird thing we'll cover later about chip pricing. We'll talk about in the open source hardware section of the show. All right. And then, this is the great search portion. For the great search, I just showed how to find Nine Doff IMUs and some things to look for when purchasing IMUs if you want to use them for orientation. Okay. JP's product pick of the week was this week. JP did an amazing Adabox unboxing last week. You haven't seen it. Check it out. It was so cool. You can check it out on the Adabox page or on any of our social medias and more. Here is the product pick of the week this week. The NeoKey 5x6 Ortho Snap Apart. I have some simple demo code running right now which just lights up keys when I press them. I wanted to have some non one-unit standard spacing. So these are actually two-unit spacing. So in order to do that, you can see I've done a little bit of soldering here where I am running power where it's needed, ground where it's needed. I run the row pin horizontally and I run the column pin vertically. That allows it to still treat it as a matrix. This one's actually acting as a number pad. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, this is a delete, this is numpad slash star plus, this is a enter key or equal. Here you can see we are still able to light up the NeoPixels. The Ortho 5x6 NeoKey Snap Apart PCB. And tomorrow is JP's workshop. You'll see his segment on CircuitPython including CircuitPython Parsec. So tune into that. Also, Friday tune into Scot Show which is deep dive at Scot and it'll be all about CircuitPython, of course. CircuitPython. And Scot will be participating in a couple other things and I'm going to get to that when we do our CircuitPython and Python on hardware segment. Okay. And that's time for time travel. It is time for time travel. Philby has a very, I like his videos a lot and he's like, I'm usually doing three things. Eatin' pizza, sleepin', or working on LED eyes. And so, so check it out. Yes, that's true and that's not a bad life, by the way. It's a good life. I would like, yeah, I would like to have that life. Okay. So here, just take it away, Philby. I've got three modes. I'm either sleeping, eating pizza or working on LCD eye projects. I like having a lens. It gives it a bit of depth. It's not just a flat screen. And I've tried a lot of different lenses. I have acrylic. I have glass ones. I have a whole bag of strange lenses. A problem with all of them is that the image goes away when it's viewed off angle. So I had this idea one day. There's this mineral called eulexite and it's like a fiber optic from nature. Anything behind is projected to the front. Sometimes you can buy polished spheres of eulexite. They're not cheap, about $50, but hey, science. And I took a whole day, took the train into San Francisco and went to the James Bond building to a gemologist to cut the sphere in half. That was another $50. So it's interesting. It does project the eye image to the front, but I learned that the off angle performance is even worse than the regular lenses. So that was a $100 mistake. But I learned some things and now you don't have to waste $100 making the same mistake. All right. That was cool. I feel so sad. Yeah. He's like, and then I went to the train and then the puddle splashed on me. But you know what? I think this is important because a lot of people, and we're talking about this segment we're doing soon, is a lot of people don't show their mistakes. They're afraid of talking about their mistakes. We have a whole new segment that we're starting next week, I think, called, Mistakes for Made, Lessons to Learn, and that is the way to move forward because we're surrounded by computers and computers are made to make billions of mistakes a second. We have to show... We're still going to make mistakes. Yeah. We have to show that the computers aren't going to beat us. We're going to make mistakes, too. And so, I think that's just one of the things that we do different is we're willing to show the work. The other thing we do is we'll go through that entire thing so you don't have to. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So, next up, AidaBox, we pretty much sold out of all of them. However, you can sign up for the next one. It'll be AidaBox 20, shipping October. There's such a big part shortage and everything else. This is the closest thing you can get to a back order. Whatever is the coolest, interesting thing that we're doing at AidaFruit, probably around October, it's going to be the AidaBox. You may as well get it at AidaBox.com. And then it'll be the holidays and we'll probably run out before the holidays. So, you can even give it a gift now. Get in before it's too late. Yes, right. That's my AidaBox feel. All right. Every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, we have a column's lab note and this week is no exception. So, I'm going to just play a couple of the latest ones. You can check them out and then we'll see you on the other side. The LED definitely delivers the photons. No doubt. But many are unaware of the LED's ability to detect light as well. Truth. Most light emitting diodes can also play the role of photodiode. Specifically, a photodiode which responds to the same color light it emits as an LED. Sort of satisfying symmetry. It's less sensitive compared to an actual purpose-built photodiode, but will still pass enough current to be detected by a microcontroller pin. This water-clear LED normally emits red. Since the white light from my phone here includes the red spectrum, I can use it to trigger the LED's photosensitivity, which is in turn detected by the microcontroller. In fact, it's possible to connect two LEDs in a loop and by exposing one of them to light, produce just enough current to power the other. It's like poetry. When a microcontroller's input pin is not connected to any electrical signal, it's said to be floating. It sounds peaceful, but a floating pin can appear in a different random high or low state whenever it's read by a microcontroller. Now consider connecting a normally open switch to that floating pin. Without a known default state for the pin, we'd have no way to tell if the switch was definitely pressed or not. That's where pull-up resistors come into play. By connecting a 10k ohm resistor between the input pin and positive voltage, we effectively give the pin a default high state. When the switch is pressed, it creates a connection from pin to ground with almost zero resistance, much lower than the pull-ups 10k connection to positive voltage. When the chip reads the pin, that path of least resistance determines its new low state. Jobs, jobs, jobs. Jobs.aidafruit.com is where you can post your skills or if you're a company looking for someone to join your team, it's one of the best places because we screen all the jobs, make sure they're not spam or weird, and then we also reach out to partners and companies and friends where we're like, hey, don't forget, we have this job award if you're looking for someone. And this one is probably one that a lot of people are going to apply for. Seeking an influencer and content creator rockstar. Where? Where? Where? Did you key? Might be remote. Check it out and definitely talk to them. I can tell you all the folks that we work with did you key are amazing. They're a really good company. And whoever gets this job, you're going to have a lot of fun. Yes. So check it out. A lot of makers should apply because you're probably doing projects that they'd like to see. Yeah. And one of the things on the job description is you use Adafruit stuff. So if you use Adafruit stuff, this might be something for you. Apply. It's free. It's Python on hardware time. Okay. All this week, we have stuff going on with CircuitPython Day. Friday is the big day. Today was our show and tell. So here's what is going on. On Friday, 11 a.m. Eastern time, FOMI Guy is going to stream all about CircuitPython. You can watch it on YouTube and Twitch. 1 p.m. Eastern, there's an edit, Reddit asking me anything in AMA with the Python, with the developers of CircuitPython and MicroPython. R slash Python is where it's at. So that's one of the bigger Reddit. Oh, great. At 1 p.m. Jeff Dan and Katnie discuss CircuitPython. 3 p.m. LadyAid is going to do a board tour. 5 p.m. Scott's going to be doing a deep dive. And we have a bunch of other stuff going on. Do the hashtag. CircuitPython Day 2021. There's discounts for books. 10 Game Circuit Playground Express. That was 99 cents. Now. It'll be more later. And then we just finished up the special edition. The other thing that we have is this neat little video trailer. So I wanted to play that. And we'll see you on the other side. It's all about CircuitPython Day. And CircuitPython. Hey folks. CircuitPython Day is August 6th, 2021. And it's the snakiest day of the year. This day highlights all things CircuitPython and Python on hardware. Tag your projects on social media to have them showcase on CircuitPython Day. CircuitPython is an easy to use programming language for microcontrollers. You can install CircuitPython on a different board from Adafruit and the community. The libraries and code live on the board so it's way more accessible. The board shows up like a USB drive so you can just drag and drop a UF2 file. It automatically installs the firmware so it's really easy to upgrade to future releases. This makes iteration much faster so you don't have to compile your code like in Arduino. It works like a USB storage device so you can drag and drop files right on the drive. BundleFly will grab all the code and libraries from any project files like fonts and images. All of the files are bundled in a single zip so you'll have everything you need to run the code. We think this makes maintaining code much better and it's just awesome for beginners. For all things CircuitPython related check out the links in the awesome list. You can listen to podcasts, chat on the Discord server and subscribe to the newsletter. So go to CircuitPython.org and get your projects up and running. Okay, so that's CircuitPython Day coming up. We'll be back after making that cool video. And we'll see everybody Friday. Full day of CircuitPython stuff all day long. I'll be around. We're doing virtual events this year. Hopefully we'll have in-person events again next year. Yay, maybe. And that's Python on hardware. Okay, we're an open source hardware company and before we get into some open source hardware news, I want to talk about some hardware news, you noticed something. Yes. And it was a part-shortage related thing which a lot of folks have been commenting. They're like, thanks for talking about this because I can't find out anything anywhere and no one's just talking about it. There's no information. There's no information. So we have a blog post about this and I'm going to pop over to our blog. And the title of this blog post was Large Price Increases for Silicon Chips Yeah, from Official Distributors. That's the title of it. Here it is. Because it's a little small. No, it's fine. And so the thing that you noticed was what? So this is a lot of people talk about how if you can't buy a part from an official distributor you can go to like great market distributors or like secondary market and you can sometimes get parts but the prices are really inflated. Usually the prices historically from secondary markets have been cheaper because it's a secondary market but because the part shortage is now secondary markets are now like charging like exorbitant prices. Chips that would be a dollar, they're asking $5 and like somebody maybe is that desperate and they'll give them the money. So they're kind of taking advantage of the situation. And that's something you expect, right? You know, if you have secondary markets one of the benefits for them is if there's a shortage they can take advantage of it. But what I saw for the first time ever and never seen this happening before in my life is a back order from an official distribution changed prices from about $3 to $15 or $20. I basically multiply the price by like 3 to 10 times sorry, 5 to 10 times for an existing that had been booked months before. And the reason I think this is important for people to know about is that if you're an engineer and you're doing back orders, you're doing board specifications you want to make sure that you don't set the price before you get the parts in hand. Historically if you booked something at a price $3 or $4 you'd get it $3 or $4. That's no longer true. Even booking an order and like putting down your credit card does not necessarily mean you're going to change the price that you booked to that. The price could change underneath you. So it's a new thing it's a weird thing. I feel like there's going to be a lot of people who get bit because they specked out their bill of materials and their price. If you have a Kickstarter you probably can't do it. If you're someone who has a $20 board and your part initially was like $3 or less and now it's $20 until you get the parts in hand nothing is assumed. That's what's going on right now. Beware. Okay. Next up other open source hardware news the state of open source hardware report came out. State of O S H W . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . This wasn't in the report, but I'm going to say this. I think it is so cool that the top open-source hardware company is a woman-owned business. That just means that ceiling, that got broken. It's not a male-dominated industry or that market, and then eventually you're kind of like, okay, now there's some diversity in it. This is starting out with that, so that's cool. Good work, you. Anyways, that was a report. But everyone should check out that report. Okay, the other way that we're an open-source hardware company, and we prove it, is 2,519 guides. Lady Ada, there's a bunch this week. Okay, well, if you want to... We're going to start with this. So these two are the two. Yeah, those are the two that we didn't get to last week, so you can start with those. Okay, so you've got the Catnida guide for the ortho-snap apart, so you want CircuitPython or Arduino code to show you how to put together that and wire it up to my controller. Phil B did a cool guide on how to make your own VQ GANs. If you've never done this before, it's not hard. You can use Google Colab. You don't even have to install any software. You can do it all through the web, but it has some tips and hints and some cool art that he made with it. There's the Mecopad Braille keycaps, either all in one print or just top prints for making Braille keycaps. That was cool because you could do accessibility projects. We have a guide on how to capture camera images from parallel port, parallel cameras. In CircuitPython, we have support for the RP2040, ESP32, S2, and 7051 for camera capture. And so we're starting to add all sorts of capabilities based on that. Yeah, and then we have... We've also got some updates to the MacroPad RP2040 guide. Catney wrote a guide on using the library for it. Of course, we have the Adabox 19 unboxing guide. Thanks to JP for doing the unboxing last week. Liz Clark published NeoKey Emoji Keyboard. So it's a little four key keyboard with a QDPy that types in her favorite synthesizer and cat-based emojis. The Olympics are going on. And if you want a MacroPad to hotkey, get you to your favorite events. This MacroPad overlay works with the previous guides that have done MacroPad overlays to specifically be for Olympics viewing. It'll take you to the right web page and stuff. Yeah, and I'm just going to play a few seconds of this video to show you what it is. Because I was watching the Olympics and I'm like, boy, this would be handy. So you can select all the different events. So if you're sailing or rugby or climbing or volleyball, and then it'll take you to the web page. And then some of the times you can even, you know, watch some of the stuff right there. All right, next up, more guides. OK, we've also got a quickie guide on using Web NFC by Ann. This is kind of neat because, you know, we've had Web serial, we have Web Bluetooth and now we have Web MIDI and Web NFC. So, yeah, everything is becoming web. It works in Android. JP did a Minecraft MacroPad overlay. One of his kids still uses Minecraft. And here are some useful macros that you can use to automate things or just to kind of like quickly get into modes and after doing like slash typing long strings. And then we've also got some more camera projects. So this is a webcam, which you can use to grab images and then upload them to Adafruit.io. So it's kind of like a webcam. It's a very slow webcam, but it's all in circuit Python, grabbing camera images and then uploading to the Internet. And then drag and drop is our MacroPad project, which doesn't use HID. It's a game that's played on the OLED and it uses like a rotation mode. So I think Philby just wanted to show, hey, you don't have to use it in like the portrait mode, you use landscape mode and also you don't have to use it for keyboards. It's it's a pretty handy all in one system that has a good name. Drag and drop. Yeah, it's a good name. Yeah. All right, so. So lots of guides. Yeah, and I'm just going to show a couple seconds of each video. This is the Minecraft one, and then I'll show the NFC. So you can see how helpful this is when you're Minecrafting. And then here's the NFC one. OK, time for some New York City factory footage. Take it away, Android factory. Manufacturing and progress photos, things that we're making here. And for it, you can try to guess what they are. Some mistakes were made, some lessons were learned. And it wouldn't be New York City factory footage without. Behold all. So Disney has all these new offerings, like Galaxy crews and like lightsaber pass or something. And it's like a thousand bucks or whatever. Yeah. And they're using they're using that money to build this building across the street from us. OK, 3D printing. No, I'm paid to reprint up a storm this week. I paid her off. And so we have two speed ups that they sent us at a time. And we're going to play this back to back. And then we'll see you on the other side. Wednesday. Well, at least next week. 3D Hangouts with Noam Pedro. OK, lady, it's time. This week's. Item PI, a long time coming. We've been waiting to do this one. It's from Digilent. And I just also want to mention, especially thanks, Digikey. To double Digi, Digilent plus Digikey, not related. Digikey and Digilent. Yeah. What is this week's item PI, lady? OK, so this week's item PI, we actually, a year ago, we did the Digilent Digital Discovery Kit and it also stocked the Analog Discovery Kit, which is a little like USB, oscilloscope, logic analyzer type thing. And so this week, there's a new product from Digilent that is kind of like, if you like the Analog Discovery Kit, this is the next generation. This is the Pro Analog Discovery Kit. It is the Analog Discovery Pro ADP, 3450 and I think 3250 is the other part number. And this is kind of like, very similar circuitry to the Analog Discovery Pro, but it's kind of more ruggedized. It's in a nice case. And it's got a couple of cool things going for it, which we'll talk about. So to start off with, this is a two or four channel oscilloscope and logic analyzer. Here's just one side of it. And I'll show the whole, all different sides. It's in a kind of like a pizza box case. And this is the back of it. And you can see some interesting stuff. There's four USB ports. There's ethernet. There's the device USB. There's power in 19 volts. There's two trigger inputs. There's a power port. And then actually, you know, I just realized that photo doesn't have the front. So let's go quickly to the overhead and I will show off the front of it because I think it's worth showing early. So this is me taking it apart. So there's a logic analyzer and waveform generator here. You can sort of see there's two by 16 pins. And then this is the four channels. This is four analog inputs. And what's really neat about the oscilloscope inputs is that we actually have BNC jacks so you could put probes on it. And then this is the Wave Gen Out. This is a dual DAC output 14 bit, 125 mega samples per second. Okay, so let's go back to this. Okay, so next one. So I can't see the text, maybe you can because there's a lot of specs and I wanted to get them all in here, but basically you've got two or four channels, 55 megahertz bandwidth. There's oversampling that you can get about 400 mega samples per second. If not oversampling, for a lot of repetitive, you have 100 mega samples per second, plus or minus 25 volts, 50 volt protected input, 128 mega sample record mode. You've got analog outputs, digital inputs, advanced triggerings, just kind of all this stuff. It's a little bit of like a bento box. You get a little bit of everything here in the analog discovery. So even though it's called the analog discovery, it does do digital stuff as well. So this is a USB connected device. Chances are a lot of people they're gonna connect this to their computer. It doesn't have an LCD and it doesn't have any knobs on it. If you wanna do the control part, you download the Waveform software, you install it and then you can see you can run on Raspberry Pi, Mac, Linux and Windows. And then when you run it, you can do the kind of USB oscilloscope stuff that you would think of, capturing data, data logging, analysis. You can of course run scripts on it as we've covered Waveform has a scripting language that lets you automate the inputs and outputs. It's kind of like put pieces together to create data acquisition that's more advanced than most USB oscilloscopes. So again, it's got all that extra stuff, the inputs and the outputs. But Waveform is kind of like they've been working on this for a few years. This is very solid software. And I liked how responsive it was. The graphics drawing was very fast, which I can't show you here because it's still, but if you're using it, and I think there's even a simulation mode, it's pretty easy and there's a lot of widgets. So the thing that is I think interesting to think about is yes, it is a pretty good oscilloscope, but compared to like a Benchtop scope, it's not gonna be as good. Even my old tech TDS scope from like 15 years ago had one giga sample per second. So the question is why pick up something like this, something that is not that powerful as a Benchtop scope, it doesn't have an LCD, doesn't have a TFT, doesn't have the knobs and buttons. And I think as I was using this, I kind of realized that there's two reasons to use an oscilloscope, right? There's the debugging where you're analyzing a circuit and you're trying to figure out like, why is my iSqrtC not working? Why is my crystal not the right frequency? Whatever, you're trying to do analysis of a circuit. Why is my power supply jittering? What's the frequency? What does this waveform look like? So it's the kind of analysis look. And then what this is good for, and you can absolutely use it for that, but what this is really good for is if you're working in a lab and your national instruments is the wholly owned, the wholly owned Digilent. And they're famous for LabView, which is if you're an engineer or like a Mechie or chemist or biologist or physicist, you're using this for data capture and analysis in academia and in industry. And so what I actually think this, the analog discovery pro and the analog discovery and digital discovery are really good for is, I remember when I was at MIT and I had even like people who were EEs, they were like, I really just want to quickly get data in. I had to do very fast data capture for my physics experiment. And they were like fighting with all these data acquisition tools and they're like, Arduino isn't fast enough and this isn't good enough and that doesn't have good enough precision. You want something that's like an oscilloscope but something you can script and you can use within LabView. So I think that this is kind of the sweet spot for this product. Yes, it can be used as a general purpose tool but it's kind of big. It's not pocketable like the analog discovery. This is a bench top tool. This would be good for bench top data analysis, data capture, testing, if you're doing testing and analysis of a product and seeing people who have a product they're going to put it into market. They want to do a lot of testing on it. This would be able to do like current capture and waveform output and testing the digital side and the analog side all at one and it's scriptable. Again, with LabView, it's going to have first class support and if you're used to LabView, this is a great partner hardware for it. Is another thing that I thought was really interesting. So this is, you know, anytime you see something with four USB ports at ethernet, you're like, that's not a microcontroller. That's running like embedded Linux, right? Because your microcontroller is not going to be able to do USB host. It's very hard. And in fact, it is running embedded Linux. It's got an ARM core inside of it. And so what's interesting about this is that you can get into it and log into it as a Linux computer and they're like really into that. Like they're like, please log in and then you can run software on it natively. And so you don't have to worry about the bandwidth issues of trying to stream like very fast data over USB and ethernet. Yes, USB ethernet can do very fast data, but not as fast as like native on device data capture and saving. And so, you know, you could plug in a USB, you know, USB data stick and do like massive data capture where you're, you just have less layers in between so you have a higher throughput and lower latency. So I thought that was kind of neat too. Does anyone run DuMona yet? I'm sure they will. Okay. Okay, so there's four options available. There's the 3250, which is again the two channel, the 3450, which is the four channel. And then you've got a version with and without USB prob. So as a BNC scope probes and all the add-on cables, if you've got your collection of scope probes, which I do, you know, you can go for the cheaper version. If not, get the version with the probes. And you're gonna of course pay for more channels. It's almost twice as much because that's where the cost is is this expensive, let me see. It's the AD948 and non-visual converter. That's what the cost is. And also the extra memory and the processing of the FPGA. So pick whichever option I think we highlighted. You know, this is one which has all the scope probes and the BNC as you can see the inputs and outputs. Yeah, it costs a little bit more, but you're ready to rock. And they've got them all in stock, which is a great reason to have INMPI. I love it when things are in stock. That's right. This is part number, this is short URL and you wanted to play this video. Yeah, it's a two minute long video, but it kind of covers everything. Okay, let's show it. Take it away. Digilence ADP3450, the first in the analog discovery pro line takes the capabilities of the analog discovery two and adds pro level functionality and performance. The ADP3450 is an all in one measurement solution in a compact chassis. It features a four channel, 14 bit oscilloscope with over 50 megahertz of bandwidth that can sample it up to half a giga sample per second and has 128 mega sample memory depth with BNC inputs for each channel to connect a standard oscilloscope probes. Two more BNC connectors provide outputs for the two channel, 14 bit, 125 mega sample per second arbitrary waveform generator. The ADP3450 also offers 16 channels of digital IO running at 125 mega samples per second, a two channel digital power supply that can be programmed between 1.2 and 3.3 volts and two BNC trigger ports. The ADP3450 has integrated USB and ethernet connectivity for use while connected to a PC in standard mode but it also offers a Linux mode with the ability to run tests and store data directly on the device. This eliminates the bandwidth and latency bottlenecks inherent to streaming data to a host PC. In both modes, developers can use Digilence free waveform software suite to control all the functionality of the ADP3450. In standard mode, waveforms provides virtual interfaces for each instrument with the ADP3450 capable of being configured as a digital logic or bus analyzer, spectrum analyzer, network analyzer and more in addition to its primary oscilloscope, wave gen, digital IO and power supply functions. For Linux mode, engineers can script entire test routines that run directly on the ADP3450 without any host intervention. The ADP3450 provides great value as it comes with all instrument capabilities unlocked and the ability to use them together. It also offers four USB ports that can be used to add storage or additional hardware such as a Wi-Fi adapter. To learn more about the ADP3450 Analog Discovery Pro, visit store.digilentinc. Okey-dokey, we're now going to go and remind everyone that the code is Truffle. Where's my Truffle pick? Yeah. And this will be going on until I remember to turn it off tonight. Truffle, Truffle, Truffle. Truffle, Truffle. Truffle, Truffle. And it's pretty much everyone's favorite time right now, right? It's time. It's time. You want to do this? Yep. No, no, no, no, no, no. Some little bit of breaking news. What? Someone just mentioned, hey, we could port Blinka to that scope. There's no hardware, though. Okay. Not about idea. All right, so let's kick it off. Ready? Okay. What's first? We have previously had RGB Neopixels, like these ultra-high-powered three-watt RGB Neopixels. And some people are like, hey, can you get ones with RGBW? And I was like, yeah, and look at this beautiful video with the starburst. Yeah, I'll show you. So we have two versions, one with warm and one with cool white. So it's actually four separate elements in the LEDs. Let's look at a close-up of the LED. So you can see it's RGB and W. There's four elements inside. And so you get true white. Instead of color-mixed white, which for some people, they really want that clean look of a warm white or cool white. So yeah, thanks. You get, and you can see the four diamonds there. Each one is one watt. It uses the Neopixel protocol, but because it is four watts, you need a very big five-volt power supplies. Just be aware when you're using these that each one of them can be using up to an amp or so, half an amp. So each one comes on a chain. It's soldered with wires. Of course, you can remove them and solder anything you like. There's an aluminum-backed PCB, but if you're going to turn these on really bright, you might need more heat-sinking. Just be aware. This is, did I mention it's four watts? It's four watts. It's a lot of brightness. It's blinding. Yeah, so this is, just so you, I mean, like, you can even see them reflecting off me. And this is bright in here, but check this out. Yeah, it's super bright. In fact, it's so bright I think I overheated a little bit. Let me do a thing, do a thing, do a thing, and then this. There you go. OK, so this is the one with the warm white. So yeah, I mean, these are just like, these are very, very, very bright. Yeah, these are bright. And, but what's nice is they're just neopixels. They've got some mounting holes on them. And they're pretty easy to use. And this is the aluminum-backed PCB. So don't forget, if you're going to use them with a microcontroller or microcomputer, you can use them with Raspberry Pi and stuff, because we've got neopixel support there. But make sure it has neopixel support, and make sure that it has RGBW support, because it's got that fourth byte for the white data. OK, next up, a very adorable mini solenoid. This is so cute. This deserves to have its own Pixar movie. Yeah, solenoids. It's a little solenoid. I mean, it's a lock solenoid. I think folks, they like our larger lock solenoid. This is cool. You can make a little diary that opens up, like with a microcontroller. OK, so let's go to the overhead. So this is it. So it's normally open, and then when you power it, this opens up. So because most of the time, it's not going to be powered. Most of the time, it's going to be locking whatever it's keeping you from opening. And then to open it, this pulls in. So this will be either the clearance you've got. You've got a couple millimeters of clearance. This is a 12-volt solenoid. So you have to give it 9, 10, 11, 12 volts. Draws about 300 to 400 milliamps when it's powered. Unlike the larger solenoid that we have, this part is not rotatable. Like the other one, you can actually open it up and rotate this. This is actually kind of hard. It's bolted in in a way that you cannot change it. So not a big deal, because most people want it in this orientation. But that's that. There's some mounting holes. But it's just a tiny little lock solenoid. We're making electronically controlled locks. I like that you could get the tiny hot plate and then this little tiny lock. This tiny lock. And then you can watch Timothy Chamele, is that the name? Yeah. Tiny horse. OK. OK. This is kind of interesting. So this is a NR52840 dongle from RayTac. And this is not something that you can plug into your computer to give it Bluetooth or no energy, like it doesn't have a native operating system kind of driver to it. Instead, think of it as like a very small microcontroller dev board that is easy to plug into a computer. Because inside. It's a Trinkie. It's kind of like a Trinkie. It's a BLE Trinkie. Yeah, this did not. And I don't have to make a Trinkie character for it, because this is what it is. Yeah. So let's go to the overhead and I'll show you. I don't know what I would make it. A beluga well. OK. So this is OK. So I just opened this up. So inside, there's the NR52840 module. And you can see it's soldered in here. There's a couple of components. And in the back, there's a single button and a single LED. And that's it. Like there's no other hardware to connect to. So what would it be useful for? Well, I think that there are still some situations where you want a standalone Bluetooth microcontroller that you can just plug into USB, or you could power from a USB power pack. For example, I think this could be a USB beacon that stand alone. It's easy to program. You plug it in. You program it with Arduino or circuit Python. And now it's standalone. I think if there's some situations where you want to communicate with a Bluetooth device, but you don't want to have the native operating system involved, there can be some situations where you can't. It's Windows 7 maybe, or it's a lockdown, and you can't install Bluetooth support. But you could connect over USB serial, and you could send data back and forth. You could turn this into some sort of like a Bluetooth automation tool. I don't know exactly what it's perfect for. But I think it's interesting, it comes, like this particular one, even though it's the same part number as the generic version from Nordic, we have this come with the Tini UF2 bootloader. So just be aware, if you buy this, and it's not from Adafruit, it won't have the bootloader. It won't work. We specifically have the bootloader on it. When you press the button, plug it in. The bootloader comes up. You can install CircuitPython or Arduino code on it. And that's not true of the generic module, which comes blank. I like that you could just pop this on a big USB battery bank, and it'll just be a beacon forever. Yeah, I'm sure there's something that somebody will find useful for this. Next up, if you finish all your dinner, you get your pudding. Yeah, so these are pudding keycaps. It's like an add-on kit. So you get, I think, like 15 different keycaps. It's not like the alphanumeric keys. It's kind of like the number pad keys. All the extra keys. I thought this would be useful because some people like the look of them, but they don't want the full keycap set. Now, here's the thing about them. As you can see, they do not have the same profile. They're designed for a keyboard that has a curved profile. And so you'll see there's R4 and R1 and R2 profiles. And so when you're putting this on your macro pad, just keep in mind that you kind of want to keep all the same profile one on the same row. It'll look and feel best that way. And if you don't, you can kind of get an uneven keyboard-like profile. So you can show on the overhead. Here you can see, maybe I'll turn this off so you can see it clearly. So you see these are tilted and these all have the same tilt, but these have a different tilt. And if you mix and match different tilts, it'll look weird. Like in this case, I kind of tried to kind of match them up. I still think it's useful. I still think there's a lot of combinations that'll look good. It's just one of those things, like I tried to find these, glow-through, pudding-style keycaps. But without the profile tilt, and that wasn't possible. This is kind of what's available, this is all you can get. And I still think they're kind of neat. I think there's a lot of times that you want the word pause or arrow keys or shift or control or function or any of the other keycaps that it comes with. Maybe you're willing to put up with the fact that it isn't a perfectly flat DSA or XDA profile. I still think it's of some use. It's just something to watch out for. You can't mix and match every combination and have it look great. Okay, and the star of the shoot tonight, lady, besides you, our community, our team, and our customers, we have two breakouts. Yep, two RTC breakouts. These are kind of the same. We haven't breakouts for these RTCs before, but these are now the Stem-AQT versions. So we've got two. We've got this, which is the DS3231, which is a high-precision temperature-compensated crystal real-time clock. This is kind of like the finest of the fine. This is like the truffle of RTCs. See, this is how we tie in it together. High-quality RTC over I squared C. And on the back, there's a coin battery holder. And then if you're like, well, you know, I don't want that, I'm okay with truffle oil, which doesn't actually contain truffles. The PCF 8523, I think this is a perfectly fine real-time clock, great for data logging, maybe not for clocks, you know, just because it will lose a few seconds, a second or two a day compared to the DS3231. But for many purposes, the PCF is perfectly fine. Also has the coin battery holder on the back, plug it in over I squared C. Now coming with Stem-AQT connectors, it just makes it really easy to plug and play these into an existing system, because it uses our I squared C connections. Can do this? Can do this. Yeah, you can do either one. And, you know, you can pick and choose, right? You can start with one and then decide you want higher precision or lower, switch over to the PCF. Of course we have Arduino and Circuit Python code for both of these, because they're just Stem-AQT versions of our existing breakout. These are kind of my two favorite RTCs. You got the high-quality and the budget quality, both of them. Budget, high-quality. That's it. And that's new products. And new products. Okay, cool. I have some questions lined up. Go put them on Discord while we do some top secret. We'll be over there in just a second to answer them. Top secret from the vault. Secret, secret, secret stuff. You never know, we're not gonna ever tell you. Yeah, we are. Just don't ask any questions. Okay, this top secret, what is this, Lady Aida? Okay, so I'm redesigning the Matrix Portal to run the ESP32S2, because I can't get Stem-B51s, and this is what it looks like. Okay. This is that RGB Matrix breakout with the IS31FL3741, so it's a lot of RGB LEDs. And then, I sent that out. This is from last week. And then, yeah, this is our first iSpy board. It's a board for a TFT display. These are like, it's a round-rekt TFT. It's our first rounded rectangle display. We haven't actually even had circular ones, so this is interesting. It's not like it remaps the pixels, it just cuts them off, right? So the corner pixels are just like, they're not there, they're missing. But you know, it's kind of a pretty display. I like the rounded rectangle, very apply. Okay. And that's top secret for the week. Yep. Get back in the vault. All right, we're loading up the questions. I have some ready to go, and then some folks are putting some in the Discord chat. Here we go. Yes. Lady Aida, are you ready? Yes. The first one is question for Lady Aida, the QDPie RP2040. You have the Bootcell button connected to the GPIO for additional functionality, and I see that you passed the QSPI underscore CS signal through a diode. If I wasn't using Bootcell as a user button in circuit Python, would the diode be necessary? I tend to think not, but maybe I'm wrong. The diode is there, so you can use it as a GPIO with a less risk, because you don't have the interfering signal. All righty, line up this one. About how long do you think chip shortage and or chip price increases are gonna last? Through mid-2023. What? Yeah. Really? I guess so. Probably 2023 is when, like early mid is when we're gonna end. How long do you think this COVID pandemic is gonna last, same time? Well, I don't think so. Yeah, maybe there's correlation with that. It could be. Who knows? Okay, next up. When boards like the ESP32 S2 first come out and they are in beta and still not fully stable, is there a set period of time you have for watching a project for stability, hours, days? How do you know when it's time to say, well, this is not really beta, this is like. I'll say Espressive is a very particular case. They like to release hardware very early before the firmware is wrapped up. It usually takes about six months to get the firmware in a good state. In fact, ESP32 S2 is now I think it's a year old and they're still only now releasing 2.00 as a release, not just as a beta. So it's been in beta for a year. Okay, yeah. And I think for us, like, we'll do a short run of boards and we're like, hey, this is for a new chip and then we'll see what comes up via GitHub with issues or customer support or like when we're actually using it for projects. One of the reasons we make a lot of guides because we kind of find out all the things that folks will have to find out if we don't. You don't know what you don't know until you actually try it. Okay, next up, is it even, is it possible or even remotely feasible to make a joystick that is connectable using a STEMA connector? I mean, the joystick itself, no, because joysticks are the mechanical, but you could connect it up to a STEMA ADC and then read the data over ADC and that's how you'd read a joystick. Okay, and I talked about this earlier. Someone mentioned, could you run Blinka on this? I don't know. I don't know how much documentation they have for the chip and again, there's no hardware accessible. I'm sure it's all binary blobs, so it's sort of like, yeah, could you undo them on it? It's like, you could, but there's no screen, so what are you doing? It doesn't make a ton of sense. Okay, let me give it another chance right now. In another chat, folks want to know the discount code. Discount code is truffle. Truffle. Let me make sure you know it's truffle. Truffle. 10% off anything that's in this dog right now, all the way up to probably 11.59 PM. You can use the button. Yeah, I can use the button. I just want to make sure it's in the future what I'll do as well. Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. Yeah, much faster. I'm not faster. Much faster. Yeah, I'm trying to. Okay. It's scary. A little scary. Okay. Okay. And let's see if there's any other questions. Before I bounce off to, no, we got through it. Okay. Those are the questions. All right, everybody. That is our show for tonight. Director, tune in on Friday. Yep. We've got streams, videos and more. Yeah, that's everything. Special thanks to Jesse May, who's running things behind the scenes. Thanks, Jesse May. Thanks, Jesse May. Special thanks to our entire team who've been keeping it together. I know that we're in yet another round of challenges to get through, but we'll do it because we did it before. We'll do it again. So thank you, everyone, for keeping it together. Thank you all the customers that keep ordering stuff. This is where we show everything we do every single week. And we all have a choice of where we buy stuff from, especially in the world of electronics. So if you like seeing something like this, please consider, oh, did I, let's see, person that said, did you answer my question from the start? Yeah. Skur, I think you were asking about the RP2040 thing. Just hit rewind on that. We did. And we're very thankful that we're able to take care of our team and get you all good products. We're gonna get through this, because we're New Yorkers and we did jury duty. So now we're stuck here. I can't, I don't know how to do anything else. So I'm just gonna keep doing this. All right, cool. So thank you, everybody. We'll see everybody next week. Thanks, everybody. Here is your moment of Xenar.