 Life from New York. It's Ask an Engineer. Hey everybody and welcome to Ask Engineer, which is me, Lady Aida the engineer Normally we're broadcasting live from the Aidaford headquarters, but right now we're broadcasting live from the Lady Aida headquarters That's right. With me is Mr. Lady Aida. We're in doing Ask an Engineer in a slightly different format Yeah, we have a couple surprises. So we we have to do this from Our bedroom and we'll talk about why in a minute, you know during COVID we Broadcasted from home and now we're broadcasting from home again Because we had a kid I'm gonna talk about that in a few moments. So we'll see we're gonna try to reconfigure everything We just did the show and tell and now we're doing Ask an Engineer. That was pretty great Yeah, special thanks to everyone on the Aidaford team who's been helping out in the last few weeks while we brought life into this world and more and We think we're gonna be able to continue to do the shows we shall see so this is a lot of fun AV stuff There's a lot of green screens. There's a lot going on here. I know so well, this will be changing You'll see they'll it'll be dynamic change is good. So let's kick off the show and then we'll go into some some news And more on tonight's show lady. Do you know what's gonna happen? Oh, well, let's find out first up It's time for the code. It's the code. The code is kick off for kicking off 2023 together and we'll be able to give you a discount 10% off in the Aidaford's draw We have to live 59 p.m. On things that are in stock and more. We have a lot of stuff in stock The chip shortages sub diet subside a little bit. Um, we were celebrating this year together Thank you so much everyone for joining us. We're gonna talk about some of our live shows We just had to show and tell a disc of Lady Aida. We've resumed doing that over the weekend. We have JP's product pick So JP does a show. We have some time travel. Got to help one in announcement We have some advanced manufacturing made here in New York City We have some 3d printing videos. We have a recap of 2022 and we also have Some fun speed-ups INFP eyes back. We've got top secret. We've got a ton of new products. We're gonna answer your questions We do that over in discord a deferred at t-discord Sorry slash discord and you can also go to discord.dj slash a deferred But we're there all the time and you can ask your Questions all that and more on you guessed it Ask an engineer Okay Lady Aida Yeah, first up Let's tell folks the free stuff they get before we go into some. Well, we've changed some of the free stuff some family news Okay, we're gone. Okay. So we changed it up a little bit Historically we had the promo proto half-sized breadboard as the $99 freebie But we wanted to give away nudes. Everyone loves to receive free nudes Yeah, we'll send you nudes in the mail. We'll send you nudes in the mail when you place an order you get Or the most popular which is kind of the warm white Short flexible nudes. You get one with this is showing pink imagine. It was a warm white color. Yeah, sorry a little bit shorter That's what you get, but it's still got that flexible cool effect and it's a three volt led you just Use it like an led and it's just a neat we got a couple neat projects in the learning system So that's free with your order $99 more. We still have the kb 20 40 freebie a pink circuit board A pcb with the rp 2040 eight megabytes of flash Great for making keyboard projects. That's what the kb stands for but you can also use it as a general purpose microcontroller It's got stomach u t connector usb-c lots of gpio Castellated pads and it's pink And then if you order $199 or more you get free ups ground shipping in the continental united states And while supplies last we're still doing the free Circuit playground blue fruit when you order $299 or more. So as long as we've got those in stock, I think we still have some We're still doing this freebie as well Okay, and we get to do one of those how it started how it's going things so our big news and we'll get into the show is we've kiddo and No one survives. Yeah, no one really noticed over the last nine months on ask an engineer because you know we filmed from our our next down but um Lady had a big baby inside of her and we had um, I think on our last show we showed We did show one little sneak peek. So we get to do the how it started Yeah, and how it's going. Yeah, so um, we're keeping kiddo off social media For one day for kiddo to decide if they want to be on social media But you know, um, no hands and back of the head is fine. Um, machine learning can't really identify Yeah, this is basically like, well, do I think machine learning will be able to a spot and in facial recognition this baby probably not Yeah, so We uh involve the child in our lives and kid is part of our daily experience Do stuff at Adafruit. Um, she's already interested in electronics and more We made some high contrast things babies like high contrast. So I did a blog post about this. Um, She likes to stare off into the side and then someone asked me as I was like, what's that? What's that green thing over there? And that's a cosmic background radiation plushie. Turns out they make this Um, and then you want an excuse to get one. Yeah, turns out. Um, you can just get these You don't have to have a kid to get them. Um, but they do have um, the entire particle zoo Um at particle zoo dot com of all the particles and then um, lady is doing some interesting projects So wait, we had a little video. So I thought I I'd show that but um, that's what we've been working on That was our our new product and uh, thank you again everyone who's been taking care of Adafruit while we took a little time off But um, here's a fun project that we thought would be a fun hack for new parents early data, what's this? Hey, I just want to show a tip that might be helpful for other people who are using Lv pumps. I really like these portable pumps But they use a micro usb port to charge and you have to charge them You know at least once or twice a day sometimes you did more depending on how often you pump and how long And this is really hard to insert a micro usb cable at four in the morning when you're really tired So um in the shop we have these magnetic tip cables And um, you know, there's the tip that's the micro usb tip So what you can do is you insert this in here And it makes a nice seal and then I can plug this into usb And then when it's time to charge I just uh, I just flip it on like that And uh, it immediately starts charging And I don't have to worry about trying to Line up the micro usb With the port at again four in the morning kind of tough, but this is much more convenient bam anyways So that's uh, we've been up to and more so you'll see lots of content that has something to do with Raising a kiddo in this modern world and probably some neat electronics hacks and more and uh We managed to do a ton of hardware So we have hundreds of new designs because we have 20 minute increments to work on stuff and lady ada has been on a tear um We have live shows We do turns out we just did one turns out we can still see a couple so far. Yeah Maybe like to sleep while we do live shows kind of cool. Um, we just did the show until thanks to the team who've been co-hosting and more Very much appreciated One of the projects that was just on the show until that I thought was really neat was this really Cool, uh, electronic fidget device. Yes with motors. Yeah, and it's in circuit python. I'm just gonna added Yeah, so go to circuit python.org and check it out. We'll put a newsletter and more Um, all the projects are our favorite, but uh, this one was particularly good Uh, let's work my god So next up lady ada, you do a sunday show called desk of lady ada. Yes, we did and here's the really good news We've always done, um Desk of lady ada lady ada clock, which, you know, can vary from, you know, five p.m. To 10 or 11 p.m And that's really convenient because uh, depending on how our sunday is going with baby ada You know, we we do our best to do it earlier, but um, sometimes do a little bit later. So you did Desk of lady ada in two parts. What was part one this week? Okay part one I showed off some designs that um, I'm going to get into the shop. So first is uh, the feather esp 32 um s2 and s3 with reverse mounted tft So you have the version with a tft on the top This version has a tft on the bottom and a couple gpao buttons It's a little more panel mountable and maybe good for projects where you don't want, you know, you want to have the tft Um, without any either usb in the way and like stuff can stick out the back So this is the s2 model and then um, I'll also make a version with the s3 I like both esp and then I might also do version with the classic esp 32 pico or mini. I really like um the classic esp 32 as well And then I also showed off some cowbells and uh, we had the great search. Yes Where we use a digi site to find stuff. I'm designing um more cowbells. It's a bit Ada logger cowbell, which I showed in the beginning there. Um, I am I have on it a little tactile switch And I realized that we use this little mini They're called I call them like three by five or whatever 2.8 by five and a half four and a half tactile switches and First up, I wanted to show how you could get those tactile switches on digikey because I use them on like every single project Um, and I also wanted to find a version with a larger oval actuator I thought it would be like a kind of a nice look. Ironically the ion mpi also has one of these oval tactile switches And the good news is the same footprint Um, and it just has a nice larger Like thing to press and it's available in white or black or blue Somebody asked for does it come in other colors and the answer is yes, you can also get them in a blue tinted shade so kicking back with Um, the great search and if folks have parts that they want me a source for them Uh, post them in the chat here. Yeah, I can also tag us on social media Or you can even email me ptdita brod and we'll try to find it on Yes, we do take user requests. I do I do my own stuff Well, once I want people like hey, I'm trying to find a replacement part or a pair part or I you know This one out of stock or it's end of line or get discontinued. Um, those are my favorites to send those over All right, and every single week we do jp's product pick of the week This is a live broadcast from inside a product page where the discount is automatically a prior jp This highlight is coming right up It is the five port stemma qt hub It is a passive hub It allows you to create a bunch of i2c devices plugged into a single microcontroller board without needing to run From sensor to sensor to sensor and create a humongous chain of them, which is pretty darn cool So here you can see I've taken the hub and then I have these four sensors plugged into it And then the fifth item plugged into the hub is my qt pi right there So here I've got an accelerometer a pressure sensor a temperature and humidity sensor and a magnetometer So I can read the values on all of those over a single i2c bus. They all have their own unique addresses But as far as uh the actual wiring of the thing, it's really nice and neat with that little hub Right in the middle there So i'm just using some nylon standoffs and screws and nuts there to to hook that all together It is the stemma qt and quick five port hub Okay time travel looking around in the world. What's happening in the past? What's happening in the future? What can happen? What are some new all sorts of things? Um, so space and time. Yeah, so first up, um, We've been a fan of Updating currency for a while. We even did our own project where we had a Harriet Tubman stamp and we put it on $20 bills some people love it a couple people didn't You check out maybe learn guide on how to make your own stamps for money turns out You can stamp currency sometimes. It's legal. It all depends on the reason Yes, but a lot of the things that we were waiting for was the currency updates in the us and it's happened And since we put a quarter in our product photos Some folks have noticed here is some of the latest Quarters, uh that the us mince doing and you can see this. Yeah, you can see these in our product pages and as we get more of them Including some of the ones tonight and here's the condition. I happen to be revising so many of our board designs with uh Penguin which is philip be script to make beautiful silk screens really easy And so we have to reshoot the boards anyways. It's perfect timing because we're reshooting them with these Awesome quarter shots. Yeah, and so if you want to see you can search oops you can search online for the um I don't think I put the right image in for this, but there's the us mint Web page and you can see what quarters are coming out. Um, if you want to support, uh, woman owned companies We just got our certificates updated. Um, it doesn't really do anything for us other than we just want to show that It's possible to be a woman owned company. You can check these out on aterfruit.com slash about and uh, we're now Uh, just renewed across the board. They just make sure is there a woman who really owns this company? Are you a minority? Business, are you interviewing me like on a video and they're like prove it? Yeah, so there's so we're official. Um, and you can Support us and uh, we're really pleased to see women on quarters first time um, at least for Many of them Yeah, this is for the the very circulated uh coin. Yeah, okay. Um, some other news that we got going on aterfruits on mastodon So we've had an account since 2017. Lots of folks are joining the fediverse. It's a way to Uh, keep all your contacts and followers and not have one single place You know, basically twitter where your social media stuff is we're in all the places Um, you could check out our footer on the bottom of the page if you want to look at it. Um, I have a little Video that I quickly made like here's where you scroll down. You can click it and then you can see where Um, our pages and what we've done is we made it clear here's whose authoring Might not be a great idea for brands and companies to do social media But if they do they should say who's behind it who's writing it. So we put that on on ours The other thing that we did and we thought that was pretty important is um We are a patreon. Um, I think silver sponsor for Mastodon Yeah We give them money to make sure that they can keep this a cool great place. Maybe they can keep it a non-profit. Maybe they can Um, keep it so it just doesn't turn into uh, what's we're trying to do? Um, because there's a lot of great connections that people made but sometimes things get a little out of hand So anyways, we're there Hell won't end. Um, could you go to the jobs board on your computer? I can't but I have to sneeze first Okay, and then sneezing go to jobs.atafruit.com. So we have a jobs board. Let's second. Okay job And uh, if you're in the new york area and I have to say new york area specifically, um You can uh go to jobs.atafruit.com and we have a We're growing expanding and we just updated our payroll systems and we need someone who is really interested in how do you do the best type of bookkeeping and administration and we have great benefits and pay time off And we're looking for another person to join the team. So check it out. Um, you can go to jobs.atafruit.com if you're in new york area Please consider applying. Um, we might do some remote stuff, but we're starting out, you know Obviously training and stuff like that and we're we're high touch as they say so we we like to meet with you and meet people um Python on hardware time Okay, so much has happened Python on hardware time. Um, we do a yearly post and this year I'm going to do the same thing I did last year is Lady Aida After you've read the post it's on Adafruit's blog and on the socials and probably other places. What do you want to see in circuit python 2023? What do you want to see in circuit python 2023? You're asking me now. Yeah, okay. No pressure. Uh, no pressure So, um, so a lot of such going to happen first off We're going to finish releasing 8.00 because we've done so much stuff with wi-fi Adding pico w support, which is really great. Um, and you know pico w is also going to be adding bluetooth support soon So we're going to do some bluetooth work. Uh, we'd like to add ble for esp 32 um series chips And uh the pico w we're going to see how they're doing it and so maybe we can like have some that work overlap um The chip shortage not completely completely over but it's like way less Unover than it was before if that makes sense Um, so one of the things I want to revisit is the imx chipset I basically we were like about to release a bunch of boards with it and then Could not get those chips at all now. They're all available again Um, so it's a cortex m7. It's a really nice chip and it's it's not too expensive Um, it's uh used that family chips is used in the teensy for those who are familiar with it Um, I also have some fun project hacks. I want to do Um, we're going to add some camera support Um, maybe some more graphic support Um, you know, I think those are the the core things. So basically ble imx chipset usb host which we added to the rp 2040 Um in arduino We're going to try to port that over and maybe to circuit python have that be like a fun Fun hack you need to give up a core and all the pios, but like it's really neat to have usb host As a secondary interface on the rp 2040. I think that could make for some very cool projects. Okay um for mine mine is more project based but it's um Would it be possible to start someone first you make um The most simplest thing with circuit python. Yeah, and then you build up to oh, I want to have like, you know We have the ruler project. Yeah, it says pcb ruler and then the next thing maybe you would make is a Um calculator. Yeah, maybe you would make a computer mouse Maybe you make a keyboard and then maybe you would make your full computer running python Yeah, so there's a lot of things that would go into that. You know pure python computer Um, but I like the idea of like getting all the way there without having to really know the how to code But then as you learn more, um It's like an onion, you know, there's multiple layers to it So someone can just get started with electronics and programming and cobble together their own device Like I want to make my own mouse and keyboard and then after they can just continue building that and as they do that They eventually work their way up to like, oh, now I have a full computer that I just you know, you build like a Computer built with rp 2040 chips, but like every peripheral device your display is rp 2040 and like Your main processors rp 2040 in the mouth of the keyboard like yeah Everything is that that'd be funny. Okay open source hardware news Um, happy birthday spark fun spark fun is celebrating their 20th anniversary they have a sale going on And uh, you know us check them out support them, you know us we link to everyone We send everyone to everyone's website that we don't consider folks competitors. Everyone's doing open source hardware. We had, um Nate and alicia on ask an engineer. I looked up because I'm like, oh one was the last time they were on the show Uh about 10 years ago. This is uh when we were Beared the wiker fill. Yeah, this is like wiker fill. There was a transporter accident. Um, but then I was thinking, um, I wonder what, uh open source hardware that Spark fun and a deferred have been doing together like what what percentage are we together a lot? So all together for open source hardware projects Um, there's 1,951 total. Yes, and then Yeah, completely. Yeah. Yeah, and if you look the spark fun has 405. Yeah Inferred has 540 when you do the math These two companies together are about half of all of open source hardware. Here's what I like It's not over half which means the majority of open source hardware is not from us There's other people doing it, which is good because it would be a real I mean it would be the worst thing if we were like 95 But I'm really glad that it isn't just us. It's a community of people working together. We're all um doing the ashua certification online and um It's just working out. So check it out happy anniversary It if it isn't 20 years old will be there eventually and probably sooner than we think But it's cool to see another open source hardware company doing it and also publishing your files and certifying their hardware and Keeping the values going. There's not a lot of us out there. There's only a few left So thank you support all the open source hardware companies Especially this year because a lot of companies really really suffered struggled and suffered struffled Um over the last two years Um, we saw many companies. This has been tough, you know, either they've closed or they've really had to downsize quite a bit because if you can't Ship hardware for two years. Um, your cash flow takes a big hit and uh, it was challenging for Adafruit I'm sure it was challenging for spark fun as well Like I said, I sort of see a glimmer of hope Um, you know parts that have been out of stock and out available for two years are suddenly Becoming available again or our stock in staff numbers are the highest they've been in you know about a year Um, but it's been it was it was a struggle was a slog. We definitely went through the What was it from the princess bride like the forest of tears or something and yeah, it's been it's been really tough on everyone So, um, you know sport opens our software companies, um spark funds one of them Adafruit's one of them Um, the numbers are there. This is two companies that are that are trying to do their best, uh, sharing And helping to get the next generation of engineers out there All right, let's do some advanced manufacturing That's how fast we've been moving since we got chips back. All right next, uh, 3d printing So this week we're going to do something a little different We're going to play the recap because there's a 20 22 recap I'm known Pedro and then we're going to do two speed-ups and then we're going to bounce right into ion mpi So take it away now, Pedro Before we go to ion fbi the code is kick it off 10% off the native fruit store or live 59 p.m. Maybe or root Lady data, what is the latest and greatest product this week? Glad you asked this week's ion npi, uh, is from bridge tech um Shown here Bridge tech is a maker of chips that allow you to interface with hgmi or ttl displays and We're actually going to talk about basically two npi's Because one of them is a little bit on a stock, but one of them is it's the bt817 and the idm 2040 so first up the idm 2040, which is like the original ion npi that we want to talk about It's a seven inch diagonal capacitive touch display Um, you can see the on the left is the front of the display on the back of the display It's a board development board the idm 2040 from dash seven for seven inch from bridge tech Which features their chip the bt817? So, um, what is this dev board? Well, um, as you can see here It's got a whole bunch of features basically due to the fact that it's got three chips in one here You get a really good deal You get a razzmi pi rp 2040 you get the bt817 Which is the video driver connected to the rp 2040 and you also get an ft 2232 Which is like a debugging interface if you want to do more intense programming And debugging of the rp 2040 and the bt817 the display itself is 800 by 480 It's got a capacitive touch display And the board on the back, which you know, it can be actually used with almost any ttl display Um, you know, it can do uh gesture can do audio can do video All this graphic acceleration all controlled over spi. So if you're interested in talking to uh ttl type displays This chip is for you. So it's a ttl type display Well, the these are displays that you know, we stock all our displays that are like One inch or three inch or you know 2.4 2.8 and they use spi Four wire interfaces to communicate you can send uh, you you set the window and you can draw graphics to them But if you want to do stuff like widgets or interfacing or video or graphics You have to use a subsystem like lvgl and also you can't use larger displays like 800 by 480 or you know Even um, larger displays 10 24 by 600 or 10 24 by 800 displays Those require 24 gpao pins on the right eight red eight green eight blue plus clock Uh hsync and vsync It's just kind of an older style display And you need to have a processor that can handle that and a lot of processors can't like usually you have to go with an stm Seven series or some imx high-endor processors have enough gpao You have to have like, you know 35 gpao And you have to have the ability to have a frame buffer that is bulleted to the display Very hard to find in a smaller microcontroller pretty much impossible again. Usually you just spend 10 20 bucks To do that and then maybe you know You'd have to learn that chip as well because it's tightly coupled to that microcontroller So what you can do is instead have a co-processor and if you're familiar with The game do you know from x camera labs that uses the bt8 1 5 which is a slightly earlier version of this chip that Can control ttl displays? And then there's this version that has hdmi output It takes a ttl and then converts it to hdmi Which is again something that microcontrollers tend not to have interfaces for hdmi is a really advanced Interface usually you need to have like a linux computer To have a dvi or hdmi Encoder so this chip is a kind of graphics co-processor That does a lot of the heavy lifting that would be required for you to use these large displays To use hdmi displays. So there's uh, you know a family of different chips in the bridge tech uh, you know Collection um to talk about the 817 today, but you can see from this table Different amounts of flash and memory and capabilities um And resolutions with the 817 is kind of the latest and greatest and you can do You know pretty big displays up to one megapixel Um, and it has a lot of uh, you know built-in capabilities to decode wave files and such Um, next up. Oh, can you uh enlarge it for me so I can see one second programming that oh wonderful um, so this is the the block diagram for the 817 818 so On the right hand side is the ttl and and touch control interface so it can do resistive touch So all the displays do resistive or can do capacitive touch Um, there's only a couple different capacitive touch chip families And so, you know, you can program it to interface with them But the important part is that top right area where you see hsync vsync and the 24 rgb pins That's the output and then on the left hand side. Um, is how you communicate with it. So when you Talk to so it has flash interface. That's for memory storage or like internal program control like it has its own firmware But the way you talk to it is through spi Which is great because like almost every microcontroller can communicate with spi And using their sdk you send commands and you can like create widgets or tell it like play this audio file Or display this animation or like we'll take this 3d shape And the commands are all done over spi. So it's it, you know, I like that. It's not your Inside is the eve engine. So eve is a embedded video engine and that's what actually does the human interface design so You know, again, if if you're if you're making a lot of something you might eventually want to go with You know, a small embedded latest computer But if you're just making a couple hundred or something you need to have an interface you want to use a large display Um, you could use whatever processor you know and love even something as simple as an 8 bit arduino Or an stm rp 2040 is a popular one And I think especially now that people as engineers have lived through what if I can't get that chip, you know, you you want to use the stm 32 h7 because it has you know a ttl display, but you can't get that chip It's completely unavailable or there's people selling it for like 73 a piece Um, what do you do instead? You could use a more common available processor And then this and then offload all that graphics and audio stuff to The eve 8 xx whichever one best suits you So this is a dev board for the you know, this is basically a dev kit to show off This chip so you can see in the center there is The 40 pin ttl display connector and then underneath that is the eve micro sd slot What's interesting is they have an rg45 in the top right corner for dmx control There's a dcdc converter so you can power it however you want. There's a speaker output On the bottom right what I thought was kind of neat is um, first off the usbc's are vertical mount I'll show that on the overhead later And there's also stemmy qt ports and those are connected to the rp 2040 which is in the middle left Kind of to the left of the 40 pin connector those are some gpio available So if you know, you can run code on the rp 2040 that controls the graphic display I'll show that in a moment And also connects with external hardware and you can use the huge library of Existing arduino or circuit python libraries To interface with the hardware and sensors So this is just a gigantic list of all the things that it's got it's got the you know ft 232 it's got connectors adc's spi swd um You know lots of usbc's Etc etc To make it very easy for you to want all their examples and develop your interface Which is then once you're done you can take that eave control code and port it to whatever microcontroller you want using their sdk um Thanks to the work of uh, james bowman who did the uh, he'll be dazzler The game. Do we know dazzler? We have in circuit python the eave bindings, which means that if you want to You know one of these the cool things when I grab this board is the default demo that you load onto it Is circuit python and you load python code. Um, and so you can actually go in and edit and hack the code and um Because you know basically kickstart your interface design all Using python so you know definitely one of the things i've noticed when you're Working on graphics interfaces Interface projects the code can get really big and so like you're constantly reloading This massive amount of firmware whereas with python that quick dynamic loading You know only execute when you need to Means you don't have to reupload the firmware every time when you make small tweaks like I want to move the button Or I want to change the font There's also their own tool sets. This is like a firmware loader, which I use to you know You can load files and assets onto the flash memory This is the Example code so they do have uh some example code for micro python pico stk and of course circuit python as well Um, you know a lot of people there's also eave code. I looked if you look on github There's eave binding code for um arduino because as you saw game. Duino has example code and other platforms as well Available on digikey That's right So the we did buy the last dev kit. Uh, there were a bunch and we there was one left and I grabbed it So they're out of secondly dev kit. However, the chip the bt817 they have a ton in stock um, so the schematics for this dev board are available In their data in their data sheet they have the schematics for how to use it So you can still use all their code, but I'll show on the overhead So this is the yeah, this is a cool demo idea of 2040. So, um So on the back usb c's So there's three usb c's one for the fd232 one for I think the eave directly And then one for the rp2040. So i'm connecting to the rp2040 This is the display and i'm just powering the whole thing off of Here and then this is actually circuit python code. So, um, what's neat is You know pretty advanced projects like, you know, rotating a 3d shape having a button I don't have a speaker connected to the Audio because I didn't know what it was gonna play But you know, if you the widgets like having a little scroll wheel that's all built in so you you don't have to like Hand draw the thing as it rotates um, you know, you can have various fonts you can have You know interface things and different text and colors graphs in the background um Another thing it can do is it can the graphics engine can do that's nice rotation and overlay and alpha blending and stuff So you can see this is one graphic that's rotated tiled and moved around. This is from james bowman's uh demo that he he wrote for the original eave um Bindings the video playback I didn't load a video And then image viewer this is actually neat. I don't have the hardware But it turns out that this actually has um the example code uses an apds and you can put your hand over it to Swipe it forward and back and then I realized I do not have an apds 9 9 60 with me But um, you can see just you can display graphics Um that are either loaded over spi or you can of course load them on the flash or sd card on the back so you know It's powerful And um, this this dev board is a great demo. You could use this dev board as is Um, but I think what's really nice is that just take the schematic remove what you don't want keep the rp20 40 is Very cheap processor and the bt8 17. You don't need the speaker driver. Remove it You don't need the dmx remove it and then use that to base your next design on All right, and that's this week's ion api All right, lady before we go over to new products the code is kick it off Tempers off in a different store lady. It is time. Yes. We are back It feels good to be back in the new product biz All right, first up we got some revisions. Okay, it's been a revision party So um, a lot of our tft displays have been revised As we ran out of uh previous versions. I decided to Respin them. So this is like an old classic the 1.8 inch tft Sounds to respin by the quarter and super nice fonts new super nice fonts. Thanks to ping win Sometimes we have done slight tweaks like for example I think on this design to added some pull-up resistors on the reset cspin lines I turned some 0805 components to 0603 and some So I see is turning to t-self to the most important thing is on the bottom is that iSpy connector and that's you know Let people um like that we've redone all of our sensors with stem iqt port to make plug and play i squared c But what about spi? I mean like especially wiring displays often the display is not right next to the dev board You want a panel mounted and then like you have all these wires hanging off of it Well, the iSpy connector is designed to make that easy It's a standardized flex connector with spi and power and backlight and you know touch Interface control and irq all the pins that you expect that you would want for a display Um or e-ink or o-light or whatever all on a flex cable to make it very easy for you to be able to have the display Far away. We have 200 millimeter cables. They work fine. I mean you're gonna have to experiment with speed versus cable distance Um, but it solves a problem of like I want to have a display and I don't want to have long You know one inch stranded cables and they just come loose. So the one point inch display It's otherwise the same shape size code everything We've just added this connector. So that should make it much easier for people to interface with next rev Other rev is the 1.3 inch Uh tft display this also got updated also if you notice the little graphics on there That's phil b's new graphics demo that he wrote from gfx a nice little test Demo that does, you know, um all the shapes and fonts and stuff. So this is the 1.3 inch display We have the 1.5 inch a couple weeks ago This is uh the also the tft display and then finally is the o-lead display which is This one so they all look very similar. No, this is one point. Yeah 1.3 1.3 next one Keep going OLED so the 1.5 inch 128 by 120 RGB OLED also got the iSpy treatment Um, it now has a easy connector that you can Plug into obviously does not have a backlight but all the other pins do stuff and um, you can easily wire it up Especially for people who want to make little eyes people like to use the OLED for mask projects. You remember They would use the phil b monster mask icode And so now you can use You can wire them up a lot easier without I mean you can use breadboarding, but you can use a cable instead for Distance OLED and then it's got the old demo and this is this is a nice fancy demo Graphics text buffering buttery smooth buttery smooth graphics. So that's the updated OLED So it's the same size shape everything A couple small little tweaks. It's now black instead of blue, but I wanted to show the original As well in case people were like, hey, what's the original Alrighty next up Next up. Um, I love joysticks. This is a dual potentiometer joystick and it has a button in the center. This is Not the joystick in an Nintendo switch, but it's basically this looks and feels the same at the same size But instead of using a magnetic encoder, which is really hard to interface with I don't think it's open sourced or whatever This one just has simple Two millimeter pitch connector. So it's much much easier to use in a project. It's not breadboard friendly But you could make a custom pcb Or you could kind of bend the pins back and forth and maybe sort of make it kind of fit in a board And here you can see it's got a dual pots like, you know Dual pots are not going to last as long as a magnetic connector So a magnetic sensor just why it's not used in the Nintendo switch But if you like the feeling of that joystick that's kind of flicky center button pressy Joystick this is an inexpensive way to add that kind of connector to your Project or interface. Okay next up. I got rails and gyps It's time for the real world. This is the rp20 40 edition. So we've got lots of rp20 40s You know during the ship shortage just was always available And people have asked us. Hey, you know, there's we want to Get chips from you and you sell them in sets of one and ten But we need more than that and I was like, oh, yeah one this many Well, we do have reels and they're a good deal because we have a couple extra reels You can get them the chips for like 74 cents a piece if you buy a wheel of 3400 or 75 cents a piece if you get them in packs of 100 If you get the impacts of 100 they come in a cut tape strip if you get a wheel it comes in a wheel This is a cut tape strip, which you'll You know, you'll have to load it into your pick-and-play so you can peel the this strip off But it's they're protected in a covered Tape piece. So both versions we also of course have them in singles and in packs of 10 But if you're making a lot of boards, which we are You might want to get them in packs of 100 or 3400 Next up Next up from scout mix. We have a tda chip fm Transmitter so this is sorry This is a receiver I think Yeah, it's fm radio. So this is you can listen to fm Stations and after you solder in a piece of wire as an antenna you plug in your headphones And it's an it got digital iScore c control. So you can scan for stations. You can like scan to the next station that has good fm signal You can have volume up and down. It's kind of like a very low cost simple fm chip But it's on a stomach ut port connector here for easy use and Scout makes even even wrote a circuit python library to use it with so if you want to kind of make your own little digital radio fm receiver Especially one that's all ready to go plug and play and do solder required Uh, the tda is is a pretty popular one and it works well to make your own radio with circuit pythons. So cool Yes, you can do it listen to free music. Yeah, you don't have to pay spotify There's music all around you. All right. So the stars of the show. We have two things Um, I'm just gonna go for it. Yeah, um, are you ready to do it? Yeah Okay I think those are the rp 2040 this is rp 2040 stuff one more. Yeah, these are the rp 2040 things But uh, it's sort of shows that you ladyanna is Okay, we've got two and the first one is the iot bff So this is i've been creating a lot of little add-on boards for Stem aqt or sorry, it's a qt pie or show boards You'll get the esp 32 and s2 s3 and c3 and Samd 21 rp 2040 and then from seed they've got the show with nrf and samd and some other chips And there are adorable little boards and one of the things we thought would be fun is to make little iot button projects Like you just press a button and something happens on You know some iot circuits or whatever. It's very simple Interface you just press a button and we wanted a nice big button. So this iot bff. It's very simple It's a very low cost board all it does is give you a really big button and a neopixel because You know, it's you want to flip over so you couldn't see the neopixel on the other side Um, and when you press the button, you know, it just shorts That a pin a2 low and then the neopixel is on the gpio. So I can I can just show really quickly A little demo Let's see if I can get this demo running Live demo Yeah So many filming you guys over here or we can just we have nice pictures. We do have nice pictures, but I don't know why this is not Long for working Well, I've been unplugging and plugging things. I think we may have unplugged Yeah Uh-oh, oh well Okay, well, we'll show maybe we'll show a demo later. We'll do a separate video And once again, sorry to emphasize you ladies or our team our customers or community everybody who hopes a to fruit girl is All right. Next up is the sht 45. This was by uh, Customer request we've stuck the sht 40 for a bit, which is a Fairly good quality like 1.8 or 2 percent relative humidity precise sensor This is the sht 45, which is the same Code interface as the sht 40. So if you've got firmware Um or driver for the sht 40 the 45 is the same, but it's much Higher quality. So these are the ones that passed like the much better sensor test They are 1 percent humidity and 0.1 1.1 degrees Centigrade accurate humidity and temperature sensors Uh, they're very simple. They only have you know, i-squared c interface But we've got arduino and circuit python code. You can't change the i-squared c interface Address are only 0x44. That's the only thing that comes in if you need to connect multiple of these You could use our i-squared c multiplexer. We have the pca 95 48 and pca 95 46 is in the store. So you could plug and play those if you need to have a bunch of them But they're a little more expensive because they're higher quality But if you really want like this is really one of the most accurate and precise temperature humidity sensors That we've got in our pcb has a nice little cut out. So there's a little bit of thermal isolation Um, they're a really wonderful sensor and we do have whippersnapper support as well for the sht 4x series So again plug and play no code required Uh to make an iot project with this sensor or you know, use your existing arduino or circuit python code To add this very lovely sensor to your temperature and humidity monitoring or longing Just a product Okay, um go and post your questions over on uh discord as we answer questions. We'll try to get to them and uh Let's do some top secret lady. Yeah We got two things. Um We'll actually know more than two things So for top secret, let's uh, let's talk about what we're going to show So first up we have a video of the esp2 feather with tft. Then we have a design And you can talk about that and then you're going to show some stuff on the up top. Yeah, I can just be ready to go Yeah, go for it All right, lady. What is this? Hey happy new year We're just wrapping up a couple last projects for the new year gets hung in This is an esp32 s2 or later on probably s3 Feather, um, it's got all the stuff you expect from a feather battery usb c Um, stemmy qt port with a separate ldo for battery monitoring. I'm using the max 17 048 There's an optional bme 280 neopixel and like I said the s2 with ps ram And then this is a reversed mount tft feather. So it's got that 240 by 135 color tft And then I've got a couple buttons with the gpio that I've got a couple buttons on the gpio that are not used And a reset button and it seems to be working All right Next up, what's this lady? Um, so, you know designing more bffs And I was working this on the other project is ate a logger, which I'll show in a moment and Realize that the micro sd card was the holder was slim enough that it could fit on the back of The shaw or cutie pie and so I designed this little bff that's just uses the spi pins and you can configure the sd Pin as well the sd chip select So you got a lot of storage that could be really fun too for like big datalon projects Or maybe like audio playback or or something on a qt pie All right, and then you have your demo that you yes, well first of all, and then we'll do the top I changed the usb port now. This is working. So this is um I was plugging and i'm plugging so many things. I think maybe I bumped something earlier today Oh, no. Yeah, this is now. It's not working. Yeah, come on There's so many cables This is you know that scene in indian jones where he's like, I don't like snakes and like snakes are all over them It's like that with cables here. So yeah, so here you go I just it's also it's not soldered and it's going to press fit But this is the the button and then when I press the button I'm just that's more demo code does Well, we should just demo maybe this weekend. I'll show it off and we can add to the product page Um, but just like I thought we we could come for the project It's like, okay, it's like press the button something happens and then the led tells you it's green when the thing occurred So the other thing I got is I'm designing more cowbells. This is the next design is the Adelagher cowbell which has micro sd slot um rtc a Battery backup for the rtc and a 7qt port so you could fit this underneath your pico or pico w um, if you use stacking headers Which this this does let me remove it also Not soldered in You know your stacking headers you can have this on a board and then you could still Connect to gpio on your board and then plug your pico or pico w on top To get data logging and then you can you know remove your sd card Or insert it pretty easily and that's that ultra slim Micro sd card that would fit between the two headers Okay, that's what I got And that is this week's top secret Lady data super secret super secret. It's top secret Okay, well, we're gonna go right into questions. Okay. I've got a couple minutes. Yeah, we got a couple minutes and uh, I'm going to Do the ones that were queued up I'll answer your questions All right, so first up question. I want to control a small five-volt two amp PWM fan from a pin on a metro m zero board I know the output can't provide that full power But if I use something like a new age fruit MOSFET driver is a PWM signal still passed through To the fan or is a single smooth it lost? It's not smooth. So your PWM will work just fine. Okay. It's a great way to drive A little fast what's next design for a psp 32 variants one of the most popular boards available Not all the all of them have dachs and i2s seems like the better way to go It could I could also see a use for sd card or spi chip for storage or audio clips Question mark. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, I don't know what the question is, but I agree Yeah So maybe that's You're working on more boards. Yes We had a feather weighing if you want to add like all that stuff. Yeah What is um I squared c devices have single addresses, but some have like four or five Whatever the designer decided you got to bring it up with them Talk to the talk to the maker Sometimes you get a hamburger and sometimes they're like you can have cheese on it or like lettuce and tomato And sometimes we're like no you just get a burger in a bun. There's one place. They're like, we just won't put ketchup on burgers They won't put lettuce in the place. I was like, we don't do less tomato in any and I'm like, well, yeah The burger is good, but it was like but they don't eat it anymore Um, does fm board do um rds and the answer is yes, uh, so you answer their own question rga Five yes I will say that I was not that successful that one time I tried to use rds. It was not awesome Um, but it does have rds support okay, um Adafruit instead of the pi pico feather wings have you considered a double a triple or type board that has one slot for the pico and One two feather wing compatible one for the other um, we have but it's it the thing we have to figure out is like Which direction because with the pico add-ons sometimes they go from the bottom So well, we'll get a get to all of these things. All right. Um, and then um, nice comment from someone No question, but wishing the new parents And baby ate a happy healthy 2023. Thank you very much. We appreciate that. We're so many nice people. Um, What is rds? It's the it's the text that comes over that tells you what's playing on the radio. Yeah, so I swear to you the address offering is on the maker. So maybe space constraints Is there their comment? Um, what capacity of the micro sd card do they support? Um, most most sd card interface for my controllers could support up to uh, I think uh 64 gig cards, okay Uh Does scott radio do emergency weather bands? Not sure if that's am or just fm. Yeah, it's fm only All right, going to the other chance and making sure. Uh, someone discount code discount code kick it off That's how you could support us 10% off a certified. Um, woman-owned business. That's us. There's not that many In fact, I think we're like the only electronic one by the way. Yeah, um Yeah, so Thanks one of the few, uh, but yeah, use the code and uh, you get all this free stuff And then don't forget the um, the nudes come with us now Free nudes with every order. Yeah All right, let's just see if there's anything else. I think we're wrapping up Do you have any tips or secret techniques for designing a pcb board? Oh, you still it, you know Be okay with revising I have a lot of my boards have been revised three four or five times Nope, not not uncommon. So just do a revision. It's better to get it right than to uh, oh Here's an interesting idea. Is there a chance that you can add a button on the website They would say buy it now. So you might have stuff in your car, but you want to buy that thing right now That's an interesting idea because that's a fun logistic key problem with how you would uh Separate that from the car, but that's a neat idea. Like if you're watching jp's product page, there could be a special thing like All I want is this yeah Ignore my cart Uh, that's an interesting idea. Yeah, we don't have this. I know what you mean We don't have this separate cart save for later. I mean we have we do have save for later You can save it to your wish list So maybe you wanted to have your wish list have all your stuff not your car could do it that way Yeah, okay, and I think that is Okay, all right, that's our show for tonight. Thank you so much everybody Um, I once again wanted to say thank you to everyone for sporting us And all the things that we've been trying to do over the last decade Or so um and all your support and orders all of our team and everything And uh it helped us uh bring a new little youngling into the world. I'm looking forward to uh What she's gonna do one day, so it should be a lot of fun So, uh, we have to go and take care of baby right now. So we'll see everybody. It's been two hours Yeah remarkably quiet sometimes With the the comments if you plan things out, you know, they they sleep and they eat and you can have like chunks of time We're really lucky. She sleeps like eight hours at the time. It's really nice So anyways, we'll see everybody next week. Thanks so much. We're gonna continue to do the shows We'll probably like continue to rearrange things around here If you saw what was going on behind the scenes thing Here the scene from someone mentioned the movie brazil kind of looks like that behind here With lots of cable tomorrow. We'll see everybody next week. Thank you so much And I'm just gonna belt right right to this has been a native reproduction No moment of zener tonight Bye everybody