 Live from New York it's us this engineer. Hey everybody welcome to ask an engineer or this engineer Whatever the show is called. It's me a lady a to the engineer with me is mr. Lady a broadcasting live from downtown Manhattan We're here for about an hour telling you all about the latest news in the making engineering hacking community We have a lot of stuff going on including some new chips that arrived. I'll show you some sneak peeks of that Let's get right into it because we had a lot to cover this week. All right on tonight's show We'll have some reminders talk about shipping and all the good stuff our team. Thanks you for placing orders You can support an independent woman owned electronics company Manufacturing in USA by just ordering something on it for Show until people around the world will show and share the project lady It'll talk about who's on the show and tell what they shared and more time travel. We're going to Look around the world maker makers hackers artists and engineers and cover some current news and more It for jobs or jobs at eight fruit comm you can post your skills if you want to get your Resume out there and more if you want to work for a company and if you're a company you can hire makers right from the community We'll do some Python on hardware news some main New York City factory footage some 3d printing Did you key and ate a fruit? We'll do I an MPI this week is Remcom do some new products will answer your questions. We'll do all that and more On ask an engineer and don't forget we answer your questions over data fruit that IT Ask an engineer that's right All right, well, let's first give through a couple things We had some snow and there's parts of the country that are still experiencing some weather So you can see packages start to get delayed throughout the country system. I have packages that are in Ohio They're hanging out in Ohio for weeks now I would really like them to come here and if I'm having that issue and I ship a lot of stuff Then you know, you're gonna be seeing the same thing. There's snow and weather all over the United States. It's winter This is also, you know, partially why we tell people for holiday sales. Don't wait till the last minute We're doing our best to get stuff out as quickly as possible there may be delays if timing is important to try to you know, not wait to the last moment and Ship overnight if you need it within the next couple days, but we are Working fast and furious. Yeah, okay other things We're doing the hundred days of masking about like probably 50 something days left When you place an order on the Adafruit site Not only do you get all these things that we're just gonna talk about in a second But if we toss in the mask USA only at this time, okay, Lady data one They place an order on our site and they hit certain tears. What does it get? I'm glad you asked at $99 or more you get a free promo proto half size breadboard perfect We're taking your sidles breadboard project soldering on it to make it permanent 149 or more You get a free stem IQ T board. We have like a 25 different boards We will choose from to give you one will pick a random one each time if you have an account You'll get a different one. Otherwise. It's really like random like we call Random and whatever number comes in. That's the one you get So I collect them all all sorts of sensors and controllers and devices and more Free BS ground shipping at $199 or more in the content of the United States and $299 or more You get a free second playground express our all-in-one development board That's perfect for people who want to learn electronics Coating without needing to do any soldering alligator clip on or use the built-in sensors buttons and LEDs Okay So tell people around the world show and show in their stuff Lady data who's on the show until this week and what did they share glad you asked Sean Came by for digikey talking about his Free our toss tutorial that he's been posting up on their YouTube check out YouTube check YouTube Channel go to YouTube YouTube comm slash digikey to take a look and watch I think he's going to do 12 episodes and they're up to seven this week doing a serial port UI while also reading a microphone input and calculating The volume so you have multiple things happening at once and using You know not using DMA DMA of course is great, but in this case Using our toss threads instead. We had Trev come by doing a lot more BLM Sorry doing a lot more circuit board AR stuff in the 8 fruit AR app This week was the BLM badge our workshop PCB that has a black lives matter logo and All sorts of cool circuitry. It's great for people want to learn electronics and you can also wear it Thanks to the AR app. It'll show you what the components are and also give you like a cool yellow Like circular text surrounding it that moves with the circuit board. It's incredible. How good the AR technology is these days I mean like it tracks the objects so well And thankfully our circuit boards are really high contrast. Maybe that's why they do such a good job More AR stuff coming from Trev next week some some exciting new boards are going to drop into the AR recognizer JP publishes mag tag sports guide You know, it's one of the projects that we wanted to do for the mag tag. We finally were able to do it We have enough software support and datetime management You can use the ESPN Jason free Jason feeds to get sports scores and upcoming games So you will always be up to date put on your fridge and you'll be notified when your favorite Team is playing or if you want to follow a particular sports league, you can have it just telling which games are up next and next up is did a Keyboard project using a Raspberry Pi Pico how to make your very first PCB using fritzing really easy You don't need to be electrical engineer. I don't need to be a programmer going to be on JP's workshop tomorrow. Also, he'll be ready a guide No impaito published. They're animatronic wings tutorial. We have a guide up for that and I think we have a video will show later Scott also worked on some microphone projects He's got a PDM in demo for the RP 2040 added support for that So you can add PDM microphones and get audio input into your project using digital microphones And then from the community sigh Built a non-contact thermometer with a Billy module from STM that Takes a thermometer data and I think sends it to his phone He's he has to take his temperature every day for work And so this was kind of a cool project to do that was inspired from one of our iron MPIs Joey has been hacking a PCB replacement for a Cassia watch and he got something going with a Sam L 21 ultra-low-power microcontroller with seven sorry with segmented LCD display controller And he's trying to add teeny USB support So maybe circuit Python can one in your cast your watch would be like super sweet Finally Liz has been playing around with Euro rack panels 3d printing them with all sorts of different like filament swaps to create textures and colors and overlays for really beautiful artistic Panels that are 3d printed All right part of our intro live series of shows if you're watching this right now you are Watch an ask an engineer 8 p.m. Eastern time. That's right We just wrapped up show until 7 30 p.m. That's a two shows and on Sunday. We have desk of Lady Eda On Sunday of this week some of the things you showed were okay, so boy I don't remember so I had some samples. I think it was a sample Sunday We got a lot of samples from expressive. I got ESP 32 s3 chips I got ESP 32 c3 modules and dev boards. I think I even got some ESP 32 s2 Flash embedded chips, so like a lot of stuff. I was working on a Qt pie with the ESP 32 s2 and I have to pick an antenna for the board I want to make a little teeny antenna so we can do Wi-Fi on the Qt pie And that's what led into the great search, which was the second half of our stream all right, and then Speak up That's right. So we looked at all sorts of antennas for the great search This one I think is like a Towel glass one. I don't remember we ended up picking one from Johansson, but there's a lot of options I'm going to grab a couple and try out what the RSSI is and and see which antenna works best for the ESP 32 s2 Qt pie board, so hopefully I'll send out those prototypes soon. Yeah, that's right Qt pie with Wi-Fi come in come so you should watch the great like desk lady You're gonna see all the stuff that's like mess around you find out. Okay. Watch and then find out. Yeah So JP's workshop is every single week And then JP's product pick of the week is also each week and this week we have a little bit of a recap for the P117 yeah, very high precision temperature sensor and every week when we do these they're broadcast live from inside of the product page and They get cool. You get a discount. Yeah, let's watch recap TMP 117 it's a high accuracy high precision Temperature sensor right here in the center of the breakout board is the sensor itself and you can see it's got that little cut Out there to lower the thermal mass around it so it doesn't hang on to Temperatures as long watch that display there and I set my little ice pack on from both ambient temperature It was at like around 70 Fahrenheit and now I'm gonna touch it Press my finger up against that there and we should see that climb pretty rapidly So now we're going up to 70 72. You can also do some ill-advised things like stick it in your mouth You shouldn't do this. Okay. It's definitely warmer inside of me than outside of me So that's science in action. It's the science back that you can take to the bank. That's our product pick of the week It's the TMP 117 high accuracy high precision temperature sensor All right, the CPS workshop you can watch that Tomorrow and then also don't forget also our live shows on Friday this week is deep dive It's got in the next week. It's gonna be on Thursday. Yes. That's gonna be still working on RP 2040 It's a good time. I might show up on Friday. So I'm gonna come by show up whatever hardware I'm working on But I think he's gonna be doing the flash rework system or maybe Some other PIO stuff, I don't remember what was all right, let's do some time travel a couple things this week And then we're gonna do eight of your jobs So on our blog if you want to check out the latest video from Natalie and Diana and you can check this out This is the pulse live chat and it was during is for the telephore museums and here Description if you want to see how kids are Learning at home. Yeah, especially of course now Check out the stem chat live on our blog right now with Natalie and Diana This is from the January 28th live broadcast. Here it is now on our site next up Eight of box still coming if don't sign up you like a new box. Well, I think we actually are full up So no, no, we have some yes. Okay. Sorry. I don't believe me. I'm a liar What he says is true when I say the lie and you don't know which one So yes a box in a couple months, you know, check it out Sign up if we do run out And you have not subscribed Do sign up because once in a while people cancel and a spot will open up and will notify you. Okay. All right Next up, let's do the if your jobs board. I just want to mention this one because it just came up today So I put it on the job board and it's featured This is a program coordinator for fuse Northwestern University Few is a steam program for middle and high school students based Northwestern University Seeks program coordinator who is passionate about steam and equitable access access for students who loves tinkering makes 3d Printing joys working with educators. Hope you'll join us or helps read the words to check out the application details and more It's full-time. It's for a nonprofit and it was on a fruit jobs or two jobs dot a fruit dot-com all right next up because it was all over Twitter since last night and You know a million people are talking about it more fries close down all of their physical stores Which was already kind of happening, but then the online site. Yeah as well So, you know and all these different chat rooms, of course, you know share your fries memories But basically here's what they said after 36 years of business So one stop shop for an online resource for high-tech professionals across nine states and 31 stores fries Fries ink fries or company has made difficult decision to shut down its operations include business permanently as a result of changes in the Retail industry and challenges posed by COVID-19 pandemic The company will implement the shutdown through the orderly and wind-down process that it believes will be the best interest of The company you can read the rest of it on fries calm, but basically That's it. So Ones in our lifestyles. I wish I'd I never got to visit. Yeah, so this is the Burbank one and it was like they had like movies Yeah, not the Burbank one, but whatever one was in California. I think it was not too far from it must have been I was living in San Francisco. So somewhere around there. I mean, they don't you know in East Coast We don't have them. We have we have micro sector in you do it, but we never have so Every time this comes up people tweet and I email and they have articles. So Radio Shack They had some comparisons, you know Radio Shack They closed down, but now they're they're back. They're bought up and we did an interview with the new owner. Yeah, but you can watch. Yeah questions I get tough answers and You have Let's see comp USA in the past the whiz Yeah, Circuit City There's Best Buy of course still around now and Micro Center. So so Micro Center is still The retailer that you would go and get some forms of electronics unless maybe some of these Radio Shack Center But fries had some electronic stuff. We used to sell our stuff to fries, but I guess within the last few years The way it worked was they basically wanted to do consignment like we won't pay for anything You don't pay till it's sold. So you basically like, you know, you don't have the inventory Would you ever look I mean like some some companies do consignment. There's nothing wrong. It's a business method but We basically just didn't want to do consignment or like look we're we're just not in that business because You know what happens if we revise something we saw, you know, we sent it to you It gets revised you send it back and I'm like I can't sell it because you know, that's it You know an old Like it, you know, trinket original and we don't sell that anymore. We only have the M zero or worse You know, we fixed something or upgraded something It's just it wasn't something that we were really interested in, you know, every other partner they buy stock outright They can have net 30 terms or whatever, but we do sell it to them Just like when we buy Components from like digickey we we don't pay them when we use the part we pay them when we purchase the part So that's kind of when we stop selling stuff into fries Yeah, I wish I'd gone to I mean like look it's it's tough for retail. It's really tough. Yeah What was COVID there the reason maybe it certainly didn't help it didn't help but it wasn't it wasn't what caught there They had already like pulled merchandise off Shelves in the past and the stores were basically empty. They had an online presence. So we'll see I mean, you know there is The thought about well, everyone just buy stuff from Amazon So I feel like there's a lot of nostalgia that happens when something closes down But people really aren't willing to place orders or order from someplace else. I mean, we're Kind of living proof that it you have to work really hard to be Amazon like we have our stuff on Amazon through one of our distributors but If folks want to support businesses outside of Amazon You know if you like the idea of going to a microcenter once in a while Check out their online store when you're not when instead of ordering from Amazon when you would order stuff Yeah, I mean one of the joys of like some store like Micro Center is you know, you walk around and you're like Oh, I didn't even know that existed and here's something I forgot I needed You know like you can buy bedding on Amazon, but people still go to You know bed bath me on another other stores even big box stores to to get stuff So I think that it's tough I think especially if fries stopped having a lot of stuff in stock I think it you know becomes a self-fulfilling Loop of people are like well if I go there and they don't have it What's like I just I just drove all the way out there and they don't have what I want And then if you're new that you might just order online So, you know if they don't if they don't keep stuff in stock But it's hard to keep stuff and stuff because you have to have all this inventory Yeah, it's really hard really hard And there's a reason why like I don't want to have an eight-foot retail store. Yeah We're not doing a retail store, but we will of course How all of our stuff in like Micro Center and this worked out really well for Micro Center worked out great for you for totally different skills and then you know depending on how the radio shops come back That'll be one of the next things. Yeah, will they stock? Electronics will they have other things and what will they have a very specific thing that makes sense for physical stores? And then how will the online store be different than just Getting it from Amazon. Yeah, it's tough. I mean these are really cool I mean they looked really cool, but I think you know, we've also seen a lot of closures of Surplus shops, you know, there's a lot of cool surplus shops, especially you know sort of in the Silicon Valley like post You know military industrial complex computing corridors You know Boston also had a couple of those, you know from from academia or from from industry and They're cool, but that's not it's it's it's a tough business, right? Like you're you're selling junk people need to have space for this junk It's totally cool. I bought tons of stuff from surplus shops, but it's it's it's tough when you have a small apartment Like okay, I'm gonna buy a like a backstation. What am I gonna do with it? Yeah So we'll say so interesting chapter a lot of folks fun memories of fries my suggestion is Yeah, you're You're we're all gonna look back and say wow, there's only like One or two places you buy things from You you have like your Amazon Prime account and you get your TV through it You get your household goods through it Whole Foods is part of that. There's You know your audio audiobooks come from it. Yeah any durable goods any appliances Or maybe there's other things and so you know as if Amazon continues to have Low prices which is pretty much it convenience. Yeah Do people care about quality? Well, maybe We'll see. Yeah, I think they care about community. There's also quality things on Amazon, too Yeah, so it'll be interesting to see what happens, you know next 10-15 years the pandemic probably didn't Cause anything new to happen, but certainly accelerated things. I mean, yeah This first thing was I was when you told me I was like they were still around like I was surprised because I remember hearing that They were basically kind of you know on their way out a couple years ago you know people could tell but You know, I think this is this is a challenge of retail. It's not easy But yeah people if you like a retail store Visit it, you know, we we definitely like we have retail stores in our neighborhood and you get delivery from them Or we you know when we were able to go to store if you would go to stores and we would purchase even though It's like, yeah, you know, can I get a cheaper Amazon? Yeah, but like I really like this chocolate. I'm gonna go in You know, we walk by and they go let's go in and like to buy a bar chocolate electronics There is there's a you can search on lots of sites that people will order something on Aliexpress takes four weeks But you're okay with waiting then there's eBay and then there's Taobao Alibaba and then of course you can buy stuff from Adafruit by stuff from spark fun polo Digi-key Mouser arrow. So you have to figure out like what what you want to see in the world like one single customer can't Change the fate of your business But one single customer can talk to another customer and talk to another person talk to another person and those things all together Yeah, can help out. So I think it's a good reminder like if you want to see something, you know support Support them the best you can it's not all on your shoulders, but you know if you're like Adafruit for example buy something for Adafruit Thanks. Okay, so let's do that's on a hardware. Okay It's blink of time. We have a look at shot. We're having chunky Newsletters because there's so much stuff happening with Python with libraries and with the RP 2040 number one big thing 300 libraries is community bundle plus release libraries from Adafruit that we support We reached exactly 302, but like, you know got a couple extra in 300 which walk in I mean one of the things that I've seen people say about circuit Python They really like is that they don't have to worry about finding a driver For sensors displays e-inks chips, whatever we have the driver ready for you to go It's tested even comes with the example code so Relish in that wonder. All right. I think there's a theme Python turns 30. Yeah, three threes and zeros Yeah, 30 years ago is the first release. We don't tweet it about it And then they have a stable long release cycle and now we're on Python 3 so 10 years per Per major release. All right. We have the circuit Python 2020 roundup You can read the roundup of all the circuit Python responses received from the community. That's on our blog If you want to see some of the high cascades Coverage the talks videos are going up and we'll continue this week. You check that on YouTube You can look at a review of the overview of scott's deep dive Declare stuff by and talked about the RP 2040 PIO and circuit Python audio We have a new email for newsletter submissions because there's a lot of stuff you can email it to us CP news at Adafrit.com and you can also do any type of pull request or whatever in the get-hub repo Here is a cat outside reminder the cat is outside The cat's inside the cat is out the cat is in cat is out cat is in so as usual more electronics for cats All right. This is a USB C plug tester. This uses circuit Python people loving keyboard capability of circuit Python so making little pranks with Pico's are making four by four key pads. It's a little bit like a neo-trellis keypad thing going on there You know using circuit Python to make cool interfaces with Playdale capacitive tap chan bet is going on there and adding making two keyboard messages You know like your matrix using circuit Python more pico stuff people digging that yeah What we're seeing is a lot of folks who want to you know make something quickly and Use one of the 300 or more libraries. It's a good companion to pico Well one thing that circuit Python does which is actually one of the first you know when we brought Dan on as part of the engineering team Dan Willie was excited about adding HID support because he wanted to do accessibility projects where people create keyboard interfaces for their computer with like big buttons or switches or whatever and For a friend of his and so he came on did HID and now of course like so many people are using HID All right Super stocks back in the news games game stop stonk is back in the news today So this this would have been handy if you built it in the past. I think I want to 100 today It's a matrix portal movie theaters They're called meme stocks now. Yeah, so watch your meme stocks. Yeah, okay. Here's some more stuff crystal ball predicts the weather using circuit Python a different pie portal and if you want to set up my Python for the pipe pico you pixel Firefly jars with raspberry by pico micropython. Here is a pico alarm clock Cool graphics more pico hacking Just So check that out. It's just cool the F sharp. So this is a Python Like open source flight controller that like has support for like software and hardware It's all open sources on github. So I think it's this it's the software. That's running the helicopter. That's on Mars The book quadcopter. Yeah, they use a framework. I guess for all the there's no More open source computers on Two planets. Yeah, so Mars and earth I can't wait till we have circuit Python on Mars Yeah, we might we still we find out of these things later too because our stuff is in satellites CubeSats So who knows, you know, you find out later but You'll be able to tell when that happens because it'll be a newsletter Check out the latest boards that we have in there. It's an easy way to keep track of stuff Yeah, a lot more boards coming because all the RP 2040 chips are arriving So you're gonna see a bunch of new boards Get added probably like 10 or 12 new And Check this out on a different daily. This is where you sign up for this newsletter. It's spam free It's on a separate website Never spam. We don't harvest your emails. We don't have pop-ups or all those things to make it terrible And that's Python on hardware news this week. Thank you Blinka Okay, we're an open source hardware company to prove it. We have 2424 guides lady to what was the big board this week Okay So first off I got a couple things that I want to let you know about the learn system that I Updated first up when you go to the new guide section now Shows you the last 90 days of guides not 30 days. So you have even three times more inspiration And second now and we make like significant changes to a guide Like really update it for like a new package or a new chipset Like it's something that makes it worthwhile for you to check it out again Not just typo fixes, but like real changes We update the guide and the up the guide comes back up to new guides So we'll probably call this new and updated guides maybe but Okay, we got the mag tech sports schedule viewer from JP using the ESPN Jason feed we can show you the latest Most up-to-date scores for sports. You can pick What type of sports you want to follow so like, you know men's basketball or hockey or football? Whatever whatever season it is and you can even select the different Sports or seasons or leagues with buttons Catties updated the Adafruit BMP 388 and 390 guide. We have now stemmy Qtified that sensor So it's been bumped up. We've got these cool new animatronic cosplay wings. No Pedro and Aaron We want a video, but check it out. It's you can make any wings animatronic It's it's a harness that you wear with two middle-year servos of 10 shiometer. You can use to change the speed It's all in circuit Python. We try to make it as easy as possible for cosplayers to get started and Build their own animatronic wings to make their costume more lifelike Yon or Jen, uh, sorry, I don't know how you pronounce it. We got a guide. This is a really cool guy This is on how to Analyze motors to know the right PWM speed to get the most torque out of them because Motors do have you know, you want to have Lower frequencies I think give you more torque, but higher frequencies Reduce like the the rattle or maybe the the sound effect. There's some reason why you want higher frequency I think like maybe you get more precision and stepping. I don't know But check out this guy that goes into in detail Also, thanks to this guide. We had a couple pull requests and improvements to our libraries To let you change the frequency We've also done update to the tri-color e-gizmo guide because the we have a secondary gizmo now We'll show up in the new product section, which is high density which at 200 by 200 pixels instead of 150 by 150 Trevor has updated the Bluetooth app to Swift 5 Swift it's swiftly changing constantly. So we're gonna be updating this guide as new versions of Swift come out This shows you basically if you have one of our Bluetooth hardware devices You want to build a Swift app to interface with that hardware? You don't want to necessarily use our big app and then pull it apart You can use this basic chat app that will just take you to the basics of like pairing and connecting and just transmitting a Little bit of data back and forth and then you can build on that to make your UI We've also got again another update to the 1.4 inch ink display like the gizmo This is now 200 by 200 instead of 150 by 150 pixels So he's add to a guide making sure people know which one to use we have a guide just on our 1.54 inch breakouts and then Jumper wrote a cool guide Called Neo PIO. This is really interesting. So the PIO Controller in the RP2040 because there's a little state machine thing that you can push pixels around and I always want to do this project Where we drive eight new pixel strips, but not from 8 GPIO pins Instead we use a shift register use three pins and you clock out eight bits at a time And you clock it at the exact right rate to be able to drive in the O pixels and like Jumper got it working. He said he like kind of got it working like first try, which is cool But what's neat about this is of course, you can add more shift registers, right? You can add as many as you want so you can drive, you know 24 by adding You know to shift registers as long as you can clock the peripheral fast enough That was a kind of a cool hack So that's the and then we got more guides from last week check out lots of a really great inspiration For your next build in the learning system. Yeah, 90 days worth Next up we have some factory footage first up some select summer Love it. It's a fondue pot, but for metal Thank you, we're doing some grand centrals. Yes, the forbidden fondue These are like drops of solder. Yep. I don't know what these are for. It's just cool art Okay, this is us testing Seven seconds back back one two three four There's a back of diodes. Yeah, this is a day on the machine line. I think you see Andy and Hector. Yeah, they're very fendana. They're working. They're very fast cleaning off the stencil squeegee and For the folks who are asking when we were gonna have the RP 2040 chips in guess what? Boom, here's a trick. How do we know it's the RP 2040 though? Oh Close par Near yeah, there you go beautiful logo on there So we're gonna get those feather RP 2040 PCBs. They're on the way get stencil on order I'm working on the tester and we're going to start jamming out We got the feather and the it's you can sign up for and the cutie pie as well So we'll talk about that soon. All right, let's affect your footage and of course we have some footage from the This is a Disney building across the street from us another pouring concrete and a building this retaining wall looks like Okay, like Hummingbird and it feeds the other birds. Yeah, and then we had some snow Kind of cool to watch it while it's snowing Very peaceful No, okay 3d printing. We have a couple videos. We're gonna do them back-to-back the first one is the Animatronic wings. Yes, and then the next one is a speed print. Okay. Do those back-to-back see on the other side Hey, what's up folks in this project? We're building a set of animatronic wings These wings are motorized and controlled with a potentiometer so you can adjust the speed 3d printed parts hold everything together and can be customized to fit your cosplay We designed this to be a DIY kit that folks can make with electronics from Adafruit The wings are powered by an Adafruit feather along with the servo feather wing The two are fitted on a feather wing doubler and secured to a 3d printed back plate The wings are attached to 3d printed brackets that are secured to metal gear servos These are strong enough to support medium weight wings with ball bearings as counterweight Elastic straps allow you to wear them like a backpack so you can easily put them on You can detach the wings and swap them out So if you want to drag in an angel or fairy you can use this project as a platform for your cosplay The back plate has everything nicely secured in a compact kit that's small enough for young makers You can integrate the back plate into your costume or add extra padding for more comfort and wearability With the doubler feather wing you can swap out the feather and add a new one with Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connectivity You can control up to eight different servos. So it's great if you want to add more appendages Adafruit's Circuit Python makes these projects great for folks who are just getting started The code was written by Aaron Stainblane and uses the servo kit library The number of flutters and pauses are randomized to make it appear more organic We think this is a great example for server-controlled animatronics The code is open source and available to download on GitHub We designed the CAD in Fusion 360 and modeled parts for the parametric and adjustable Our layer-by-layer tutorial walks through the design and how the parts work together The 3D printed parts are designed to print without any support material Be sure to check out the learn guide for full step-by-step tutorial on building this project Links are in the description. We hope this inspires you to try Adafruit's Circuit Python for your projects Thanks so much for watching and don't forget to subscribe for more projects from Adafruit This is a cool, powerful new NPI. I actually saw this on Reddit I was not necessarily going there for stonks, but they have a nice chipped Reddit and somebody mentioned this paramodule. They're like, hey, check out this new product that just came out from RECOM that's available on Digikey. And I was like, this is really cool. I definitely want to show this on iNMPI. So this is the RAC 05 SK Slash C14. And this is such a cool idea that I kind of was wondering like really are they the only ones who came up with this? It's an AC to DC converter, but it's in a panel mount IEC like module format. So how most people do AC to DC conversion, you know, well, I mean a lot of makers do at least or hobbyists is they'll use something like this. It's a wall work adapter you plug it into the wall and it gives you 2.1 millimeter output DC and then you have a DC power jack in your product like you know an Arduino or maybe it has a micro USB or USB-C end you plug it into your USB input for your Raspberry Pi or whatnot. And now you've got power. So if you're building a product which has an enclosure you might use an enclosed power supply you still have to do the wiring to connect an IEC jack but if you need something with about the same wattage as a wall adapter and but you want the you know finish and professionalism of having it be a panel mounted internal enclosed power supply this will do the job. So why not just have a DC jack? Well number one there's no standard for DC power supplies I mean like they tend to be center positive but not always I have encountered many in my life that are negative. Another thing is you don't necessarily know what the voltage or the current capability of each one is and you know if you have a standard jack like this is a you know drawer I have of all these power adapters what do they go to? Half the time I don't even know but I'm scared to throw them out in case I need them one day. You can get them in 5 volt, 3 volt, 9 volt, 12, 24 they come in gigantic bricks and small and people can mix and match the wrong one and so you know having a 2.1 millimeter you know 5.5 millimeter DC you know panel jack you know you have to have a lot of you know you have a regulated input but then you still have to regulate it again because you don't know for sure that what you're going to get is 5 volts or 9 volts it could be positive or negative you have to add extra protection circuitry whereas with this the RICOM module you do not. So what's nice is that you know it's an all-in-one very durable metal case and like I said it has an IEC connector at the end it has very nice little panel mount ears with the panel mount holes everything is dimensioned nicely. There's multiple variations they all come in the same size and they all use this standard IEC power cable which you're probably familiar from your computer or maybe you know your oscilloscope or other benchtop supplies these are standardized unlike DC jacks when you get one of these cables it's always going to give you you know mains power you can get 100 to 240 volts AC at 50 or 60 hertz which is exactly what this module can take so it's it's quite convenient and if this cable gets lost or you have to ship your product from the country unlike the the wall wart adapters you don't have to worry about like a universal cable these cables are available in every country in every hardware store they're very inexpensive and you just get the one that matches for the country whether it's Australia or Europe or the UK and so you don't have to you know it's easier to internationalize your product because you don't have to have people like swap out or you don't have different wall adapters you just have a different $1 cable which is a lot easier and again these are completely standardized and you don't have to worry about weird polarities or like you're not going to get 400 volts out of this or 12 volts you're only going to get standard mains another thing you know this is like a you know a screenshot but you can go to the datasheet if you want to see it in detail is they have all the you know EMC and safety and FCC and C and all those certifications are all taken care of so if you're using in other countries and you're like oh I need you know you are or you well or CE um taking care for you this is you know they very calm the thing that they do really well is make sure that it's you get really clean power you're not going to have to worry about EMI from this so if you're trying to get a product to market especially um this can really speed it up because the power supply is you know can be a big source of noise um having something that's fully enclosed like this that gives you clean power is a beautiful thing each module is rated for five watts but you can get different voltages in this case you can see I have it hooked up to my electronic load even though this is rated for one amp at five volts I could pull 1.8 amps just fine now it's rated for one amp but I'm saying if you're going to go a little bit higher you know when you transmit wi-fi from your uh you know single board computer connected to this or what not um you know you don't have to worry about that one nice thing that I didn't notice is that you know as I crank this up to two amps or so that's kind of want to cut out um it didn't just droop it actually just completely cut power which I really liked it didn't it didn't give me this nonsense like 3.2 volts or two and a half volts it just it was either a purified clean or nothing which is also really sweet um like I mentioned this comes in multiple different voltage outputs you know preset and fully regulated from 3.3 up to about 15 each one is five watts so just do the math you know you can get much more current at 3.3 volts in the 15 but so this is you don't have to have a separate regulator right the regulator is built in so this can go straight into your board and without worry about like oh am I going to get over voltages or under voltages or you know too much noise or negative polarity so it's it's very elegant another nice thing I'd like and I'll um maybe I'll show this on the overhead uh real fast is uh you get fully isolated output so another nice thing is this is earth grounded and DC wall adapters of course are not they're too prompt at least in the US um whereas this you get an earth ground in addition to the um you know hot neutral and um on the opposite side you get an earth ground tab so that you can see this is completely um you know metal tied earth ground and you get isolated um here it's labeled you get isolated negative and positive and it is completely isolated like I put this on connected my oscilloscope to it and it's like no you're floating this negative is not connected to um earth at all so that could be really useful again you know wall adapters I most of them I think might be isolated but it's not guaranteed they they might not be so um all of these things make it I think for somebody developing a product if you want to put it in enclosure you want to just like not have to worry about people messing things up um you can't mess it up this is standard right this is a standard power adapter cable connector there's no you know there's no way somebody's going to put something in this that will get you a voltage other than the voltage that you're asking for so um very reliable very durable the whole thing is like metal enclosed I was going to open this up and then I kind of realized like I actually kind of couldn't like it's really sealed I was hoping like oh maybe I could unscrew it but no it's actually like a full bent it's like a it's a pressed metal sheet I mean like maybe if I had like a really powerful saw I could cut here but yeah you can't really open this this is this is pretty much a permanent module so quite nice I think the body also acts as a heat sink for the the internal converter so that these the um RAC 05 05 SK slash C14 yeah did you guys tell them in stock again if you need other voltages check those out uh but uh I really like it I think if I ever have to you know like sometimes I have to make um really nice um testers and I need to have some panel mount um you know IEC connector and I kind of like didn't want to have to deal with wiring a panel mount IEC jack to a power supply because then you have like these high voltage wires hanging out um I'll just kind of use one of these right like super easy super safe yeah it looks like as long as your product is bigger than this that would be like that's the cut that's the thing it's like this is really small and you know I think if you can do this instead of a wall or it does one thing and it does it really well so I think this is really cute it's a it's a really brilliant idea good job from Recom all right and that's on MPI for this week all right we're gonna do new products now that's right new new new new new new new new so new the first one is coming soon coming soon you asked for it uh you probably saw me showing this off on a couple desk lady adas and it's not out yet uh the QT Pi 2040 uh I put one together and it all kind of worked which is weird but that sometimes does happen um so it's coming soon it won't be green it will be like this black and white it might look a little bit different it's got a stomach qt connector it's got 13 gpio um rp 2040 I think it's probably gonna have four megabytes of flash but if people really want I can make another version with uh 16 um got neopixel stomach qt connector buttons for reset and boot uh you know nice strong power supply big capacitor so it should be really good and stable it's got castellated pads you could theoretically mount this onto a PCB but you'd have to have a cut out in the center maybe we'll design an eagle cat object with the right size cutouts you can um you know mount this usbc and all that good stuff so it's you know a great upgrade for the QT Pi if you want something even more powerful this is going to be like a super powerhouse okay next up this book is um back so uh this was a uh voluntary recall there were a couple typos in this book um but luckily they're very easy to fix we uh got new versions of the book from the raspberry pi foundation if you have a pico and you want to use micro python and you want to be entertained and educated at the same time uh this book is really wonderful and um I think we're sold out but we're getting more uh there's also a pdf you can download if you just want to read it on your computer screen but it's a really cute book in a great way to learn electronics programming and micro python all at once next up okay so you've got this really adorable little fingerprint sensor um very very slim it's not as cheap as others but it's like definitely the slimmest one we've got it's uh got a molex connector that plugs in the back it's got a plastic piece that lets you panel mount it uh pretty easily and it's basically like the thickness of like a nickel so aren't you going to be overhead and I can show this off and also demo it so this is the thickness of it so this is this plastic piece can come off but you can see it's a little panel mount assistant um this is the actual sensor itself and uh I've got it wired up here to my feather with an OLED so let me plug it in I can do a quick demo oops um there are blue leds on the bottom you can see that they sort of shine through um the only reason this is um flashing is because I do a timeout you don't have to have it flash you can have it just be solid on whatever it's waiting for a fingerprint put the fingerprint on and I pre-programmed it with my fingerprints so it knows about three different fingers ID three so there you go it can detect fingers pretty well um this is definitely the slimmest one we've got so if you're looking for something really compact we have ones that are less expensive but they're chunkier um but this one is a very svelte cute fingerprint sensor okay next up okay next up we have updated the ink gizmo you love the ink gizmo you're wondering oh no I got discontinued what happened um what happened is the tricolor 1.5 inch displays we were using were discontinued the display itself I couldn't buy any more so we upgraded it the new display has more pixels it's 200 by 200 pixels tricolor um it does use a different driver so if you have existing code you'll have to change the one line of code where it picks what driver it uses um to use the ssd 1681 um and otherwise it's pretty much the same it it does look a little different when it updates it flashes in a different way but it still takes about 15 seconds um it still uses the same overall library code so if you're you know familiar with circuit python or um Arduino we have code for both so I thought maybe we showed on the the overhead um just one thing to watch for these inks you see they take a wild update this is normal this is a little flickery flashy thing that's it slowly bringing the red in and then adding um black as well but you can see it's a really beautiful um 200 by 200 pixels that you know it's got a great high density resolution and of course when I pull the power uh it's still on and I really like the the red is nice and vivid the black is you know very dark high contrast and the resolution is very good so um you know as e-paper goes uh the quality is improving and improving and as new panels come out uh we'll keep updating our products to use the latest technology all right next up we've updated the BMP 388 uh like many other sensors this got a stem acutification same chip uh great temperature and pressure sensor from bosh um very high precision now with stem acut connectors for plug and play um otherwise the code and schematic are the same all right let's start the show tonight so i do you believe that our community of customers and everybody out there on the e-differ team is this is okay i gotta get the part number right it's the tps 62 62 827 um i put the x on there because you know the part number we could release a version that has different chip um this is our new product for the week it's kind of a little basic breakout but if you need you know up to three amp peak of three volt power from five volts which i do for a couple products that are coming out um this breakout will get it for you so you have a couple alkalines or lithium polymer battery or maybe of usb power and you just need a lot of power at three volts um this is our most powerful buck converter it's not the widest range we have so a couple that do wider range but none of them are going to be able to give you up to three amps peak this one will do two amps continuous no problem um there you can probably do three amps as well but you know it starts to it does start to overheat a little bit also you have to make sure that your cables are nice and thick this is a uh two ounce copper pcb so that should help a little bit with the current transfer it uses this really nice uh ti buck converter that we found um and has even a little power good led that lights up as long as the input voltage is in the right range so um if you're like me you need a lot of three volt power check out this uh buck converter all right all right do you not think we have a tough secret this week right um no i do not okay good so i have some questions lined up yeah i'm gonna get to those right away and um if you haven't already go to a different dot at slash discord and we will get to them let's do some questions okay lined up already i'll hit him okay tell me first up um if you could start over how a different evolve what would be the most significant thing you would change wow i don't know i mean like it's always a journey um geez i don't know so if we were to start it over that means we would be in present timeline i think yeah if you know everything you know now yeah but in the past but we would be starting it now so i wouldn't let people tell me not to make hardware i mean like i think that was my the only regret i really had is there's people who told me not to make hard when i listened to them and that was briefly briefly yeah yeah i was there on the yeah yeah these are people in companies we know we wish she just wouldn't make hardware yeah do other things like write code for us or something yeah um i would say if we're starting a hardware company now and this is for a lot of you out there yeah um we built our web store on open-source software yeah and obviously now we would use something like a Shopify or we wouldn't we wouldn't be built it's a technology company and it's a hardware company yeah at the time there was not any like there was no Shopify it was like you install Zencom yeah and the thing is not because we would permanently be on something else but you get started a lot but you get started a lot faster and focus on hardware a lot faster in fact you know there's a lot of things like you could start selling your stuff on tindi and then you can move into your own store or you can find um a cool partner like us and we'll sell it on our store yeah um and then we have thousands of distributors who sell our stuff um you know like digikian mauser in particular microcenter is a physical retail so i would say i would i would probably um because i know how long things take it i know where the ultimate destination is and at the time there was nothing available to really jumpstart your web store you just had to build something from scratch with like a paypal buy button yeah that's what you did so i think that would be the things is like there's more if you could do it over now there's there's more things that get you going faster you still have to say like i want to do hardware all the time you still have to there's still a lot of things and you learn so much and you can control so many things but that's one of the advantages right now yeah okay uh yeah someone summarized it nice like focus on your core business delegate what you can it's like that with software now because if you wanted to start a web store 15 years ago you also have to make the web store yeah okay um you also give up a lot of control with that and you know things aren't as things aren't as easy um to do custom stuff with eventually you do have to you do you do you do eventually have to move there but you can delay it for a bit yeah all right give me more questions okay next up um could you make an rp2040 board that the same form factor of a stem of qt sensor that's pretty much the the qt pie 2040 um i couldn't you know you can't really make it any smaller than that um because you need to have so much supporting circuitry and like all these capacitors and the external flash so i think that i think the qt pie is kind of as small as i can get it and still have it you know have all the hardware and and buttons that you need to to do things and a stem of qt connector okay uh do you do you know when the matrix portal will be back in stock or if there's another suitable yeah display controller combat we're waiting for um we're waiting for wi-fi modules which hopefully we'll ship soon now that chinese new year's over um check if digikey hasn't been stock you know we have a blind digikey button um the code could be easily adapted to um you know the clue for example that's one of the things we originally wanted to do it for or matrix portal um sorry or or a pie portal or a pie portal titano so if you're willing to do a little bit of circuit python code you could probably easily adapt the code over because it's just using display io you would just change the font to be bigger yeah okay uh do usb see female ports exist that you could just solder on to the footprint of a micro usb for converting things to usb c no not at all it's totally different okay uh for handwriting recognition on small screen raspberry pi or would something smaller work handwriting recognition is extremely hard only a raspberry pi is going to be able to do it fast enough that people would not hate it what do you think our price range is going to be for the feather 20 40 once it comes out it's it's definitely between 10 and 15 bucks but i actually don't know off time it's under 20 it's under 20 there you go is rp 20 40 faster than other micro controller platforms or is this hype over this micro controller because of the raspberry pi brand name it's definitely fast right it's clocked at 120 to 130 megahertz which is which is very fast for cortex m0 because you know if you compare it to like the cortex m0 from the sam d 21 that's running at 48 megahertz if you're comparing it to stm that's 72 which is still quite fast um but not as fast as 125 or 133 it's dual core just kind of nice um it's got these cool pios which i think is is mixed up for you know you can do custom peripheral stuff i think what's particularly interesting about this chip is it's very affordable um now the price of the chip is in public and to be honest i haven't actually i don't actually know what it is because the chips i've gotten so far were were sent gratis um but it's going to be from from my discussions with the pi team it's going to be um significantly affordable and it's got a ton of ram uh much more ram than most cortex m0 boards right 250 k is 264 k is a lot of s ram uh and if you're doing stuff like machine learning or embedded python or you know you know data analysis where you need a lot of buffer memory um s you know nothing really beats s ram for for speed and access and it's got tons of it okay um is rp 2040 with esp 32 on it for connectivity feasible yes you could absolutely do it in fact i i tried up the rp 2040 feather with our airlift feathering and it worked just fine okay okay um how do you decide if the radio performance of the qt pi esp 32 s2 is good enough for what you're designing the antennas um 50 feet you know 50 to 100 feet is is my goal i mean we did the circuit playground blue fruit which like you know is is a total crime scene of bluetooth layout design it's a two-layer board not a four layer the antenna is in the middle uh totally not supposed to do that at all but you know we we went out to a park and we got like 50 foot range right we got very good range um line of sight indoors and outdoors uh good enough that i said this is a good experience right you and that's part of the the agreement when you do wireless it's like you can always get something better but you have to decide what's good enough um so i'm gonna try 50 feet okay uh next up uh would oh is there anything that prevents two cdc endpoints like the feathers like the m4 or since like you said this week was possible with rp 2040 we have now uh two cdc endpoints for circuit python and in td usb you definitely if you're if you're doing low level code you can just write the code yourself yeah as many as you want next up can we drop the pi zero purchase limit no where that's the limit we agree to so that's what we're gonna continue to do um the next one could you have a rp 2040 with a phone alt t open that ship on it go for it it's got a ur connected to whatever you want right you it's just like a microcontroller okay um i think have you ever used a rage bridge version sorry v2 pid 3567 in a project if so what is it i'm gonna press you about the rage bridge to put in uh and later for a store um the developer is really cool he's a really good engineer um and anything he designs i know is going to be the best possible thing you can get and that's why we stock it okay and i think that might be let me just check other places i'm here to answer questions oh consider getting a used pick in places there's some place i could get trained that type of machine before committing don't get a used pick in place that's my recommendation i have never seen anyone who got a used pick in place and said wow that was a great idea so yeah i i would rather i'd get a cheaper one new with a service contract than get a used one um even if that means getting something like a neo dan or whatever just like a beginner i just i mean i even having gotten multiple new pick in places um it's a struggle right it's bad enough one to do and you have support i can't even comprehend if you don't have a service contract and you don't have tech support for these additionally um trying to find a company that has the same one that you're going to be getting working and then saying hey can you stop production and train me on this machine just bringing a person in from the outside now with covet is hard um however workplace training has to happen it's like that's a tough one to figure out like how would you how would you get trained on a machine that you might be buying from someone else you so i think when you buy a machine um or you can like work with a contract manufacturer and have them run the machines you buy one though that's usually when you get the training and you can get a service contract and we've needed to use it for all of our machines um it's one of the great things about them is like part breaks overnight part they're beasts of machine you really you can't really fix them yourself um yeah people i know with part with who got used machines it took them a very long time to get them up and running i i don't think it's worth it that's why i can you know okay uh pierce esp 32 8266 has taken off a much faster rate than laura do you see the same trends as laura reach the peak it now these are pretty different things yeah i mean they're like you know cellular is also popular like yeah but people i mean like it is what people want to use if you if you want to use wi-fi then those are good wi-fi chips but i don't think it's i don't think you can really compare different wireless protocols yeah it's kind of like there's bluetooth chips that we use and then there's wi-fi and it's uh it's not that one's taken off faster than the other it's just like a lot of it depends on those are closer because they're like there's but they're so different i mean like i can't you can't compare it there there's i don't see any situation where you use them interchangeably they they solve different problems yeah you can watch our uh iot video series to learn about when you'd want to use each one yeah but that being said i mean i we see a lot of projects and there's always laura projects and there's always you know esp32 products all right i think that is going to be the questions that we got there tonight two two two two two two two two that's it okay oh one more sorry yeah there was uh does a different make a usb charging module that passes the data data lines either over another usb or some pin yeah i think the the latest solar charger like the bq 24 something it bring i bring out the d plus and d minus pins okay that's our questions okay great thanks everybody all right that's our show for this week thank you so much everybody for tuning in we'll be here next week special thanks it's like a good like a fidget fidget spinner too by the way this work comes yeah it's nice to hold it does remind me of like futuristic things like every time you're messing around with like the power supply in the enterprise next generation they're always like power supply pink and it's like okay it's like plugs in nice all this needs to be as a crystal and then glowing glowing pink and then like it comes out of data's head or something yeah something like that but it's it's very futuristic that it does all that in that compact module um we'll be here next week thanks for um behind the scenes stuff jesse may okay thanks and thank you all over eight of our team members that are in the chat and thank you all the community members don't forget um we are shipping smart and safe our entire team thanks you here's some pre covid photos when you buy something from made for you are supporting a usa manufacturing company that's trying to get through this just like all of you are so uh we can help each other we'll make cool stuff do shows release open source software and hardware um all you gotta do is buy something once in a while yeah not a bad deal think of all the stuff that we do for you not about yeah but think of all the stuff that uh uh the community does with and for us and our team so it's a neat partnership let's keep it up um let's uh we lasted longer than fries not in terms of the number of years but just where we're out on the timeline so not bad yeah hanging in there so all right we'll see everybody next week thanks so much here's your moment of zener