 And welcome to Soladieta. Hey everybody and welcome to my desk. It's been beautiful weather here in New York City. We've been enjoying the outdoors and we've also been doing some electronics and we also had some events last week. Mr.Ladieta, what can people check out on the YouTubes? Yeah, on YouTube and pretty much all the places we broadcast to from Meta Facebook to Twitter X. You kind of have to remember all these terms now. LinkedIn, Twitch, all the places. We have our Circuit Python Day video series. We did a bunch of events on Friday at 8.18. And we did a special show and tell. We did a special Ask an Engineer. So it's our yearly celebration of all things. Circuit Python, Python on hardware, MicroPython, all these things together making it easy to do electronics. Some would say too easy, but they say that and then they say that by themselves alone. So yeah, so that was what we were doing this week. A bunch of new products, top secret. You know, a lot of stuff going on this week. The last stuff. Let's kick it off. What's on your desk this week? Okay, so let's talk about my desk. A couple things going on, a lot of displays and kind of like blasting different display stuff going on. Just go over here and I'll show a couple of updates. So I'll try to weave this all together in a way that makes sense. I got the update to my prototype for the resistive touch shield revision. So for those of y'all who watched the show before, this originally used the STMPE 610 and then 811, I squared C to resistive touch controller chip. And then that got discontinued, didn't make it to the part shortage. And I kind of like dilly dally it around and then eventually it's like, okay, I really have to revise this. So it's been revised with a TSC 2007 I squared C driver. And then, you know, I got my prototypes in and I had actually a little bit of problems because it turns out that this has a little bit of a power on reset issue thing where it's like it really needs a good strong power reset. You can't like just kind of reset it quickly. It has to be off for, you know, 200 milliseconds or so. So I've put on a second regulator and connected it up to, I already had a power on reset chip that would reset the TFT display because the TFT display also, you know, does not, it likes to have a solid reset after powering up to reset the registers and take it out of whatever weird mode it might be in. So the addition of that secondary regulator, I think solved the issue. It also moved the IRQ pin to pin two. And but I think this is otherwise pretty good to go. You can set the address if you want. And now it seems to be doing a lot better. You know, I can, before, if you remember, like I had this issue where if I like I powered it on, the I squared C didn't come up. Like it didn't recognize the I squared C sensor this time. I mean, it goes to that long reset because it's a, it's a SAMD, I'm sorry, a at mega 328. And, you know, it takes a while for it to reset when you plug in the USB. But actually maybe I'll plug in to power. It'll start faster. There you go. And still starts up and works just fine. So a nice improvement. I think this design is ready to go. And some people, people would ask me like, what's happened between resistive and capacitive touch? And I actually had both versions here for reasons I'll explain in a minute. This is the resistive touch. And you can tell it's got this silver outline and it's got like a kind of a cloudy coat on it. You can sort of see it's not quite as sharp. The black is a little bit cloudier. Let's do the resistive touch overlay. You can also, you know, see again that silver outline. Here it's a black outline, it's just plain glass. This silver outline is that conductive resistive coating where it bonds to the flex connector. And resistive touch is a lot less expensive. You know, if people go to Palm Pilot, you might remember resistive touch screens. I used to have stylus. You can use a fingernail. If you have fingernail, stylus works very well as well. But you definitely, it doesn't do like the pad of your finger. Like you need to press down because the way resistive touch works is that there's actually, and it feels a little softer because there's two very thin layers of conductive plastic. And when you press down, you're basically touching them together and you turn it into a resistor divider because you have like one sheet and then another sheet. And then you pass current through the two sheets and when you touch, they make contact and then you can tell where it's touching. So you do have to like, you have to kind of point it with your little fingernail or a stylus. You know, you need either a biological stylus or a plastic stylus. And they can only do one touch. And they're inexpensive, but you know, they're not as elegant because again, you can't use the pad of your finger, you have to use a nail. The passive touch is more expensive. This is by the way, resistive touch is essentially free. Like it costs almost nothing. That's like 50 cents, maybe a dollar at max for the overlay. A chip is like 20, 30 cents. The TSC 2007 or the TSC 2046, an SPI version, or you could just use two analog pins and two digital pins and just read it by hand. We have the library to do that's how we used to do it. Although these days I just use a chip because the chips are so inexpensive. It's easier than giving up the pins. The passive touch is different in that you can use the pad of your finger. Oh, the lines is because of a speedup thing on the ESP32S3, it's not part of the display. It's a bug I'm fixing right now. You can't use the nail because the nail is not conductive, CC, it's not touching but it can use the pad of your finger. The pad of your finger works great to touch. And they use an I-squared C chip that's built in. Like here you see it. So there's actually like a dozen by two dozen contacts that you can't see they're in this glass overlay. So we have a very clear crisp view. They're less likely to fail. Resistive touch displays can fail eventually they can get brittle. Capacitive touch don't really seem to fail. They're pretty, I mean, if you crack the glass they will, but otherwise they're pretty reliable. I-squared C and IRQ that come out of here and you read them in this case it's an FT6206 chip. Focal Touch is the name of the company. It's a Taiwanese company I think or Chinese company and they're very popular in the market of making these capacitive touch chips. There's like the 62 series, the 53. They have like different sizes and number of contacts for your different size screens but you're gonna see pretty much the Focal Tech, the FT5 or six series and everything. So that's the difference but capacitive touch is more expensive. A capacitive touch overlay is gonna cost you $5 to $10 depending on how big it is, or at least two. It's basically gonna be about 10 times more expensive than resistive. So that's why you, you know, on one hand it's like everyone's like, wow, capacitive touch it's so nice, but it's like, well, I get a pay for it. This is, you know, another $10, $15 because of that capacitive touch overlay. It looks great though. I mean, in person it looks even, you know, it looks quite nice. The overhead is, you know, a little blown out but capacitive touch is quite nice. So the reason I'm bringing this up is because, you know I found, we mentioned, I think two or three weeks ago we were clearing out Adafruit because we're gonna do this big move in a year. And so we're sort of starting to like look at things like do we wanna move this, do we wanna throw it out? What is this thing that's been in storage? And we found four or five bins of 3.5 inch capacitive touch displays. And they are using the HX57, sorry, 8357D and I've got a resistive touch version of this display in the shop. And I actually ordered the capacitive touch right afterwards but I had some issues with it. I think actually what happened is I had this was delaminating off of a few displays but I grabbed some from a different batch and they actually seemed okay. I think I went back and forth with the company and then like, I don't know, I never really got resolved. They're like, there's no issue. And I was like, there's an issue and it was like failing but anyways, it seems like I put, you know this quick board together and maybe my code's better or maybe they just, the glue needed to set. I don't know. Anyways, I've been sitting there for like almost a decade but now they're fine and they're still quite nice displays. And so I did a little bit of update also. I added a iSpy connector. You can see I got two pins swapped by accident, the DC and clock pin. That's because on these displays with 8080, the SPI pins are shared with the 8-bit pins and sometimes it's one way, sometimes the other way. So what's nice about this is I can test this display without doing a lot of wiring. I was testing the SD card and then I'll test the 8-bit display part later but that I'm not too concerned about it. It was, you know, that's, I didn't change anything on the design from the resistive touch version. So in the capacitive touch version, you see, you know, you've got the card, chip select and detect and then this is the mode set and then clock data IRQ and this is the I squared C for the touchscreen controller. And what's interesting is this is an FT5336 which is again a focal touch display and this one has multi-touch. So you can do like one and then you can do two and you can do three touches, although it's better if I don't have my hand kind of dangling. So there you go. So you can do three touches. I think actually, I think I might technically support five but it's a little bit like you have to, you can't have them overlap. So there you go. You can see as I drew the touch chip knew that each finger touch was separate. And so you can do gestures like, you know, pinch and zoom and drag and two finger swipe. However, the gestures need to be done by the operating system. They're not, the data sheet for the chip, the FT25336 says it has gesture support. But when I try to read gestures over I squared C there's nothing there. Another thing about these chips, these focal tech chips is that they're actually microcontrollers. They're 8051 cores on the inside that implement an I squared C peripheral and then do this like capacitive touch scanning and averaging. And so the microcontroller is programmed and it has to be programmed at the factory to match the resolution of the display. So where's resistive touch, you get like zero to 4,000 and then you have to convert that into what your resolution is. So if you go to the overhead I can show this, aside of that computer, I'll show this. What I mean by this. So the resistive touch for the TSC2007, right? That's the resistive touch screen controller. The raw value I get from the ADC is zero to 4,095. And you see there's a little bit of calibration here where it's like, look, you know the resistive display goes beyond the outline of the TFT. So you have to add in these numbers and these numbers are rough enough and they'll work pretty much every time. There's a little bit of variation. You know, like sometimes you'd have to do that touch, tap touch to calibrate. Again, you don't have to tap touch, calibrate capacitive touch. That's one nice thing about them because they're pre-programmed for the glass shape. But on the resistive touch, you have to scale to the TFT width and the height depending on the zero to 4,000 gets converted to zero to 240, zero to 320. Whereas with the capacitive touch, the data that comes out, let's see, the data that comes out is like the raw, like you can see here, I've got like one touch or if I've got like two touches. The value comes out and it's pre-calibrated for the display. It's on the TFT factory does that for you. So if you get a display that's in this case, 320 by 480, this data will go from, sorry, zero to, where's zero? Yeah, it's like zero or like, you know, very close to zero. And then if I drag diagonally, you see it makes it to about 320 by 480 on the other corner. So, you know, they're kind of like totally different even though like people think of them as the same, like interface the same, calibration the same. The way, you know, you detect touches is different. Everything is, nothing is the same, that's okay. But this seems to be good to go. So I'm gonna fix that one mistake, close my email. I fixed that one mistake. I'm also going to make it so that by default it's an SPI mode so that you can plug it into that iSpy connector and immediately like get going and have, you know, it work with your QDPI board or your Arduino or father or whatever. So, oh, see like it just did that thing. See, maybe, I think it just gets loose. Hold on, interesting. I think this was the failure I was seeing before on this. I wonder if it's these components on the back getting shorter. Okay, so that's my capacitive touch screen adventure. All right, now it's back to normal, whatever. Okay, so next up, let's go to the overhead and I'll show off these weird displays. Okay, so I had that 3.5 inch TFT display, super funky, but it is iSquared C or for the capacitive touch or SPI for the display. And then I got these funky displays because, you know, we've been doing the ICN 6211 experimentation where this is going to go to a Raspberry Pi over the DSI display. And then there's a little mic controller to program the SPI configuration. And then this goes to like funky weird shaped displays that you want to connect to your Raspberry Pi. And I, you know, I'm working with Timon who I've hired to like help do this because I'm not just not gonna have time to go through every display. And, you know, we got it kind of working with your standard 800 or 480, but then I want to get it working with this, you know, capacitive touch, square display. And you can see that focal touch driver here. And this is actually, this is like the hardest in the world to read. I can't see it, but I think it's a focal tech FT55536. I got, you know, a small and large square display. This is like a four inch square display with the capacitive touch overlay. These days, you know, these nice displays are not gonna come with the resistive. Like most people, you know, they want capacitive touch displays for their products. And so it comes with either nothing or capacitive. So, you know, I've got one that doesn't have an overlay because that's, you know, possible. Some people don't need an overlay. And then I've also got round displays. So this is like a huge round display. I mean, I just think this is hilarious. Like, I don't even know what this would be for, but this is like a beautiful, like a gigantic watch. I don't know. Like clock, like it's a home automation, maybe? I don't know. So this is a, I think this does not have a capacitive touch overlay. I thought it did, but it's not, there's nothing connected here. So this is like a 720 by 720 round. And then I've got this like tiny 480 by 480 round with a nice bezel on it. And this does have capacitive touch. You see it here. And then this is kind of fun. This is like a half round display. Well, it's like, I say it's half round, but it's not three quarters. And this is for like a car gauge, you know? So it has like a line that goes back and forth. They can display whatever you like. Or Mickey Mouse ears, I don't know, could be. And then I got some bar displays. So these are long, long displays. And I've seen these used for, you know, consoles or like, you know, they fit onto products that normally wouldn't have, they do normally have like a 16 by two LCD, right? Or a 20 by four. Instead, now you can have a really high resolution TFT. And despite these not being very large, they all have the same 40 pin connector, which is an RGB TTL display. This one has, this is the only one I got that has capacitive touch on it. You can see the cap touch and the bezel. This one is nice and big. Phil and I were chatting about how this is the same size almost as your standard floppy drive. So you could have like a five and a quarter inch May display. But these displays, they don't have a SPI controller inside for drawing. You have to draw them over the RGB interface. And so there's only really two chips or methods. You can, well, there's like three ways you can do it. Now you can use four. Sorry, I keep coming in with new ways. You can use this ICN 6211, which will take DSI and convert it to TFT. And you have to like program this chip and configure it all that. And it only works on Raspberry Pi computers. You can use DPI and a Raspberry Pi where you bit bang all the GPIO to get it to display to a TFT, which uses all the pins, but it does work. And I showed the wiring, which I'm getting close to being able to take this apart. The wiring here for this is what it looks like when you want to bit bang. There's like, you know, 20, 30 wires. Or you can use a HDMI to TTL converter. And those look a little bit like this. They usually have a Toshiba chip on there that does the DVI or HDMI conversion. And then, you know, on this side you have, this is actually for a camera, but you'd have a 40-pin connector. And then the last way is if you have a very good microcontroller that was a lot of memory, you need a lot of memory, you need like at least a megabyte of RAM in order to buffer the display image because you have to redraw it constantly. You can drive these directly. And I think the IMX RT 10, 6, 10, 5 series do have a TTL driver. You need a lot of pins, but they can do it and they have the memory and you can also wire up external RAM to do it, which is the thing, it's you can do that external RAM. We're gonna get to the, you know, we're adding support to Circuit Python, but there's a really Arduino support for them other than through TNC. And I don't think, I don't know that TNC added RGB display support. But the other option is to use an ESP32 S3. So this is a dev board. I just got this yesterday. And this has an ESP32 S3, I think with eight megabytes of PS RAM. Let's see, yeah, 16 megs of flash, eight megabytes of PS RAM. And this is the GPIO expander that lets you connect different displays. In this case, it's got that 40 pin connector, the same connector here, 40 pin, 40 pin. And you can see this is a square display with capacitive touch. And this will use just about all of the pins on the ESP32 S3. It uses like 20 pins, it's quite a bit. You do have like four pins left over, but you have to start playing expander games. But this does work. And I was thinking this would be a good way for me to kind of, you know, verify the functionality. So you can see it's running this expressive demo. And then it's got, you know, this touch screen demo. Hold on, let me see if I can get it to be less blown out, tough. You know, you've got this little touch interface. I think it's using LVGL, but it's got the capacitive overlay and it's got like the full high resolution imagery going on there. And I'm having Jumplur maybe added to CircuitPython. So, you know, there's a couple of different ways to get all these displays going, depending on what you want to use it with. If you want it with a simple Wi-Fi mic controller, you don't need a lot of extra GPIO, ESP32-S3. You want to use it with your computer or a single board computer that's not a Raspberry Pi. You could use one of these Tachiba chips or Lontium chips also. Do you want to use it with a Raspberry Pi and not use a lot of pins? And it has to be non-zero DSI adapter. Don't mind using all your pins on your Raspberry Pi. Use the DPI interface. So, a lot of different ways to do it. So, what we're gonna get, we need all of them. And to inspire me, I have all these displays on my desk. So, I could be like, yeah, I want to get this going. I want to get gigantic eyeballs. So, that's what I've been doing. Oh my God, so much stuff. But that was, that's my update. All right, Mr. Lady, you want to go to the Great Search? Go to the Great Search. Let's do the Great Search. Where? The Great Search brought to you by Digikeena, you've heard every single week that you do as a part of engineering. I hope you guess you. Find things on digikeena.com. Lady, what is the Great Search of the week this week? Okay, well, we had actually, this has come up before. People have asked me, where do I find these chip clips? Not the things that go on your Doritos, but things that clip on to DIP or SOIC chips for analysis or simulation or programming. So, let's go to my computer and I'll show what I'm talking about. These are quite handy. So, this was a post. I guess I don't call tweets anymore. And they're like, oh yeah, I found this on Digikeena. Somebody was like, hey, what's the part? They asked me, what's the part number for this? Cause it looks really handy. This is somebody who does retro repairs for arcade stuff. So, you might have times where you want to clip on to one of these chips and you want to probe all the pins. Like maybe you want to do logic analysis on it. Another thing that's very common is that there might be an eight pin SOIC flash chip on a router and you want to dump it or you want to program it. Sometimes, you know, the programming interface is done through the chip. You don't really have access to it or you want to go around. And you just want to go right onto it. Now, of course, you can always solder on, but what's nice about these clips is that like, or you know, you can use sometimes a little, like micrograbbers, micrograbbers, like sometimes they fly off and this is really nice and satisfying. You just clip on, you get access to all the pins. So, Digikey does stock these in a variety of setups. You can see this one is from 3M. So, let's check out what they've got. I'll show you two versions, both the DIP version and the SOIC version, as well as a mistake that I made that you will not make after you see me find the right SOIC chip clip. So, these are called chip clips. I'm pretty sure our chip, let's see, IC clip. Yeah, they're called IC clips. So, let's go to the category. This is the category and just stacking. So, a lot of options available here. You know, Adafruit and Sparkphone, we resell some models, but we're gonna probably go with the 3M one because I think neither of us sell the DIP version. So, let's first off go for active because we wanna pick it up today because we wanna do some debugging. Okay, so, next up, let's find the DIP version. So, this is a one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, two by 10 clip. So, let's search for that. And the next thing you wanna watch out for is, well, actually, let's go back. And if you look for 40 pin, this is, or the 28 pin, there's gonna be two sizes. Wait, sorry, I lied. Scratch what I just said. I meant two by 14. Yeah, yeah. Because two by 14, so, small, like eight pin dips are always gonna be 0.3 inch and 40 pin dips are like always gonna be 0.6 inch. But then there's that like in between the 20 and 28 and sometimes they're skinny and sometimes they're wide. And the clips will not work if you have the wrong one. Like this is clearly like fatter. This is the wide 0.6 inch. And this is, you can see how the teeth are closer together, wide, close. 0.3 inch, 0.6 inch. You're not gonna be able to swap the two. You have to pick the size that matches your dip. These are 0.3 inch here. And if you actually look in the background, see this one, this fat chip, this is a 0.6 inch. So you'll need a different clip depending on which one you're going for. So in this case, we want 0.3 inch spacing. And there's a couple of versions. You know, they're not inexpensive. I'll say the thing you're gonna pay for is whether it's gold plated or not. If you don't really care about gold plating, this one will do the job quite nicely. You can connect your logic analyzer directly to these clips. Not cheap, but they do do the job very well. So I would, you know, if you're dealing a lot with reprogramming or debugging these chips in situ, I strongly do recommend them. Okay, so that's the dip chip. And then a more common one that people ask me about is they want SOIC. So let's clear the number of positions out. So they want SOIC two by four, eight pin to clip onto, it's like your W25Q. You know, you've got this kind of SOIC chip on, like I said, a router motherboard, dev board, FPGA, whatever, usually storing EEPROM or SPI flash program. You wanna either program it or you want to dump the data off or you wanna analyze it because you're having timing issues. So you want a two by four, these are eight pin, EEPROMs and SPI are almost all eight pin. And then we want SOIC version. So here's the next thing. There are these test clips and they look very similar, but one thing I have absolutely learned is that the body of the SOIC chip is not always gonna be this. They look similar, but they're different widths. This kind of squarish one is called a 0.208, I think, a 0.2 inch body, SOIC, whereas, I think, yes. This one, chunky, 0.2 inch. This version, not chunky, 0.15 inch. And also this one, see how it's like less, it doesn't go all the way to the end of the pads. This is 0.5 inch, chunky, 0.2 inch. The most popular clip, this Pomona, sorry, this 3M one is not gonna work on your 0.2 inch. It's only gonna work on the narrower version of the chip and no matter how much you squeeze it, it will never clip onto the 0.2 inch. So don't get this one if you wanna clip onto wide SOIC chips. The one you want is this one because whatever, it's just got a little bit more opening and it can clip onto up to 0.35 inch wide SOIC clips. So this is the one you want for your debugging. So check it out. They also have a couple other versions, but just one is kind of what you want. So this is my pick for the great search, this and that dip clip. And that's a great search. All right, thanks so much everybody for joining us this week. We will see everybody all throughout the week. This week, lots of engineering, unending. It's an unending and my desk is just covered with electronics. Unending, I was saying we're the only entity that I know of that posts a PCB, a design, every single day. Every day. And let me tell you, sometimes it's not fun. Why not? Because people are mean. Oh. And they wanna stop you, Lady Aida, from designing electronics. They shouldn't do that, they wanna stop the electronics. They wanna stop you, but they don't realize it just makes you stronger. That's right. They wanna do more. Anyways, we're gonna do that right now. We're gonna post more online. I'm actually gonna send off. More office or hardware is gonna be posted online. Yeah, I'm gonna send off this field and this breakout and they'll be in the store in a couple of weeks. I'm psyched. It's so embarrassing to find a pile of like 500 TFT displays. Be more embarrassing to find them like 10 years from now. I know that would be even worse. I think people still want them. I think they can still sell them. It'll be nice. And we won't have to move them to the new factory location. Okay, goodnight everybody. Bye everybody, have a great week.