 Live from New York, it's Ask an Engineer. Hi everybody, welcome to yet another Ask an Engineer. Can't stop, won't stop. It's me, Lady Aida, with me, Mr. Lady Aida. We're broadcasting live from downtown Manhattan. That's where Adafruit lives. That's what we do, Adafruit. We make electronics, open source hardware, tutorials, guides, videos, and more all here in Manhattan. Coming back strong, coming back better, coming back safer. We've got Excite Show for you tonight. I just wrapped up Show and Tell. Thank you, you know, and Pedro, for hosting this week. We'll be back to hosting next week. But for the next hour or so, we've got all the latest news, updates, videos, tutorials, guides, projects, products, and more. Mr. Lady Aida, why don't you tell them what's on tonight's show? On tonight's show, we'll briefly talk about. We're still open, smart, and safe. We'll be talking about what's going on. We are shipping tons of orders out. Thank you so much, everybody, for supporting us in open source hardware company here in New York City. These are some pre-pandemic photos. We are very much looking forward to some post-pandemic photos to replace these out soon. Show and Tell, people around the world showing and sharing their projects. Lady Aida, we'll talk about who is on the show and tell. Thank you, now, and Pedro, for hosting tonight. Time travel, look around the world of Makers, Hackers, Artists, Engineers, some cool videos, some other stuff we're up to, and more. UpWantedJobs.AidaFruit.com has a place where you can post your skills. And if you're an employer, you can post jobs up there. We're going to go over a couple that we just posted up this week. Python on Hardware News, going to look around what's going on with Python on Hardware, including highlights from our newsletter. Main New York City factory footage, look of what's going on at AidaFruit, also some things that Lady Aida built as well on her desk. I know stuff. 3D printing, now Pedro have a 3D printing video and also a sped-up video that we're going to do. Time lapse. Everyone's favorite segment, Digi-Key and AidaFruit present. I am an MPI this week. There's going to be a product from Knowles. We're going to do new products, give you top secret. We're going to answer your questions. We do that over on Discord. AidaFruit.it slash Discord. And that's where you can post your questions up during the show, but we answer all of them towards the end. And I try to sweep the other social media places too, but Discord's the best place. That's where we answer them on the show and outside the show hours. There's people there all the time that want to help you out. All that and more on, you guessed it, Asken Engineer. Yeah. All right. So let's just do some logistic-y stuff. We are still shipping smart, shipping safe, and I'm pleased to announce we've done this many state-of-the-fruits. So our all-company meeting is called State-of-the-Fruit. We do it every single week. Yes. Done it even throughout the entire pandemic. We did virtual ones. So as of today, we're once again hiring. So we have some roles opening and our shipping logistics and our test prep and those departments today this week. And we have a really good interview process where we're still doing virtual stuff, but there's also in-person stuff that we do later and our protocols continue to keep our teams safe. So we're really pleased about this if you're looking for economic indicators or things. So right now, the demand for all of our stuff is higher than we can get to with the amount of people we have. Yay, that's good news. So consider that part of the jobs report that you might see in the US every single week. So that's worked out. Well, we already did a couple of interviews and they went really good. All right, so we're probably, what, like 75% done with 100 days of masking? Yeah. And we're putting a mask in each, A to Fruit Order in the USA, and that's in addition to the freebies, lady, to what freebies did they get when they put stuff in the car? Okay, in addition to getting a free mask, we just about every order, $1 or more is the limit. So just don't order something that's 50 cents and you'll get a free mask, $99 or more, you'll get a free permanent proto half-size breadboard, or PCB for making your bread, Settlers Breadboard Projects permanent. One 49 or more, you'll get a free STEM IQT board. We have a whole bunch of sensors and devices and actuators and digital potentiometers, et cetera. We'll give you a different STEM IQT I squared C board with every order. If you make an account, we'll make sure you don't get the same one you've already gotten for free, you'll get a different one. If not, you'll just get a random one each time you book your order. And we've got I squared C drivers and Arduino and circuit Python and Python for all of them. UPS Gram Chipping at $199 or more and then a free circuit playground express at $299 or more. Still our favorite all-in-one dev board to get started with writing code in Arduino, make code, code.org, CS discoveries, Rust, circuit Python. I think there's even micro Python support now. It's gay, everything's covered it. All the stuff is built in, delicious. And one of the cool things with circuit playground express is maybe you'll start off with circuit Python, maybe you'll move on to Arduino, maybe you'll do make code, maybe you'll have a young person do block stuff with make code and then you'll switch over to Python with circuit Python. Not every bit of electronics is designed for all of these things ours is. So you'll be able to use it for years to come. Show and tell people around the world showing you're on the project. Noam Pedro hosted it this week. Next week we're back. Lady Ado, who was on the show and tell this week would they share? Okay. We had Ken Vujikic come by. He made a QT Pie demo. The QT Pie came in the Oshawa goodie bag. Oshawa's happening I think starting tomorrow. Yeah, we'll show you the bag. We have the bag. And if you got the goodie bag for this year's open source hardware association conference, you'll notice there's free hardware in it and that free hardware is open source. So it's like the snake eating its own tail. You get a QT Pie, a SAMD21 board. They said, don't you want to toss something in a couple of weeks ago? We said, yeah, we got a bunch of these. Toss them in. Free board, SAMD21 on circuit Python or Arduino and that's what Kevin showed off doing some NeoPixels. Bill B has an update. He's out of the hospital. He's feeling better. He told people to get vaccinated. Thankfully, he said he's not on oxygen and he's doing much better. Even got to work on a project, an accessibility project. He said it was like the worst weeks of his life. He's had a really rough time, but he's on the mend. So it's really good. He said thanks to everybody who gave him well wishes. Being in the hospital is really lonely. If you know somebody who's in the hospital, there's still a lot of people getting hospitalized. Let them know that you're thinking about them because it's a lonely, scary place. There's a lot of beeping, a lot of machines. There's like crises happening all around you. It's scary. Don't want to be in the hospital, so. I can't prove that all of the heartwarming messages from the Maker community help Bill, but I can't disprove it either. That's right. No, he said it helped. He does. So thank you everybody who put out so many well wishes and I was talking to Bill over email and it's good to see he's on the mend. Just great. Yay. I'm so glad. It's really tragic. Next up, JP had a Neo Key Shrether Wing demo. He's also playing with the new Fun House board that we released this week. He got an early one and he's gonna be doing some home automation projects. Liz had a Neo Trinky demo. She got right to it. She's making a little capacitive touch in the Neo Pixel Notifier thingy. It says the Neo Trinkies are a new board that you plug into a USB port. I'm still working on the guide for that, but Liz trucked ahead with Resolve. So hopefully maybe she'll also do a project. She also had a guide that went live this week. It was a Sailor Moon Star Locket with the Circuit Playground Bluford. Scott also showed off his goodie bag, talked about some of the Bluetooth stuff he's working on with Circuit Python. Just forget to watch Deep Diver Scott this Friday. Micah made a Python controlled car. It's a car with a little motor controller turns the wheels as a little mini car. So you can now drive with Python and hopefully stay safe with that. Cause you don't want to be debugging your car and accidentally run into a wall. Next up Alvaro had a Laura ESB32 Feather demoed and a couple other projects. Dan came by with a netbook and regaled us with the history of netbooks. And John had, I had to have it on mute because we were getting ready for the show, but it looked like he had a Pico RP2040 keyboard build and also a Neopixel and feather powered clock with a bunch of feather wings. So lots of good folks coming by some folks who haven't seen for a bit or new folks as well as friendly, happy updates. All right, it's all part of our Aid for Life series shows. If you're watching this right now, it's Ask an Engineer at 8 p.m. On Wednesdays at some 30 p.m. We do, show and tell, those are our Wednesday shows. Desk of Lady Aida is what we do every single Sunday. And this week for the highlight reel, what I did is I took the whole show and I have it play in 48 seconds. Okay. So, because we're covering so many things in Desk of Lady Aida. I can't remember them. Yeah, so we have The Great Search with Digikey where you go over the specific part. There's voter potential. Yeah, and then you also have all the stuff you show. So you can narrate this exciting clip. So I've been doing a Neo-Key stuff. I'm also working on Seesaw Neo-Key. So this is a four key I-Squared-C chainable system and I added rotary encoders. I'm also gonna make one with four rotary encoders. This is me demoing that you could have four rotary encoders. I showed off some trinkets, slide trinky, rotary trinky. And then we did The Great Search for Potentiometer that'll match the rotary trinky. Cause I have potentiometers, but I don't know what the part number is. So I go through trim pots, different values, linear, logarithmic, different mounting styles, physical sizes, shaft types. And I finally found a good one. I think this was it, the PTB-09. It's a lot. So I think I'll try to do that each week because it has so much stuff. So this Sunday, we're gonna probably be demoing a new feature, a little bit of a surprise. This isn't the top secret section yet because you can find this on Learn, but we call it the Project Bundle or the Project Bundler and we use bundle fly to help us out. It's a way to just get all the things you need for a Circuit Python project in one zip file while you're looking at the guide. So we'll probably have a live demo of that this weekend. So check that out on Sundays. On Tuesdays, we do JP's product pick of the week. This is the only electronic show that I know of that broadcasts live from a product page where we do a huge discount during the live show. So if you watch the video later, sorry, but you know exactly what it's gonna be on every single week so you can just time it. So here is a recap from this week's. D, which is a mini GPS module in STEMI QT format. They're gonna run this out the door so that it's facing the sky. I have a feather. This is the RP2040 feather, which has this very convenient STEMI QT cable connector to it and I have that running too. One of our lovely little OLED screens. This is telling me my latitude and longitude. I'm actually running this through a bit of a scrambler. This will take you somewhere in Peru. That's not where I live. Then it's telling us our altitude, the fixed quality and then you can see here it's actually telling me that it's getting 11 or 10 satellite that it's seeing right now in the sky. That is my product pick of the week. It's the PA-1010D and it is a mini GPS in STEMI QT format for use with I squared C and UART. All right, the GP workshop is on Thursday. I'm gonna show a couple little clips of things that were on the show recently or previews of what's ahead and then also JP's probably gonna be showing off the project bundler tomorrow as well. So if you wanna see a preview, you'll have that. So I'm gonna show these back to back and we'll see you on the other side. This is a capacitive touch light switch made with the feather RP2040 running circuit Python and connected to the Cricut robotics platform. I've got some copper tape here running to one of the capacitive touch pads on the Cricut and a servo motor inside of a 3D printed housing that will flip the switch on or off when we touch the copper switch. So tomorrow, GP's workshop, you can watch all this and then some time travel. Some of these this week are all, they're part of other parts of the show. So I just put them where I could in order of whatever was in the folder of images I had. So there's a bunch of stuff going on. Okay. You want me to narrow what they are or you don't know? What? No, I'm gonna do it. Okay. So normally in the open source hardware section we do news about open source hardware but there's also, it's time travel so there's events and we also do learn guide stuff. This Friday is the open hardware summit and it's virtual. You can get a ticket for 20 bucks. Yeah, because of COVID, the open hardware summit will be virtual 2021. Join April 9th, 2021 from 10 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. Tickets are available on Eventbrite. The goodie bags sold out and Scott is from 11.55 to 12.10. Interface design and open source hardware and software. Scott's gonna be there eight of four team will be in the chat and all that. So we'll see some of you there. And as far as the goodie bag, so we were in our sponsor. Can you run the duty bag? Yeah. So we're a sponsor of open hardware summit and this year there is, you can see the bag. I'm gonna do a full unboxing and bagging. Just wanted to show just a couple of things. This is another bag, shop bought. This is the Hackaday Circuit Sculpture Calendar 2021 and also the neat thing about that Circuit Python Day is in here. Funny side story, when I started Hackaday, I'm not doing it now, but when I founded the site, I actually did a calendar as well. I was part of the plan. There's bunch of stickers. There's, Sparkfen has a spark thing. We have the only microcontroller in this year. So this is a cutie pie. There is other electronics. This is the lunchbox electronics. This is a stop and go kit. And as you can tell, bunch of stickers. There's a flash drive. There's a lanyard, bottle opener thing. And a pen. A bottle opener is kind of funny. Yeah. So those are the things that are in the duty bag. So you have an idea of what's in there. If you feel like you missed out, you can buy a cutie pie if you want and support open source hardware from Adafruit. And if you want, you can go to open hardware summit site and you buy a ticket to support them or you can just donate and become a member. So that is the open hardware summit on Friday, Scott speaking. Check it out. Say hi. Lots of good talks. All right, Adabox is gonna be shipping late April, May-ish and we have, we're full with the number of Adaboxes, but there will be cancellations and like, you know, credit cards don't work. There's always- You have a shot to get this in your box. Yeah. Sorry, this quarter's box. Yeah. You don't have to refresh the CVS or Walgreen site or write it to get Adabox, but there is limited supplies for Adabox. All right, other parts of time travel. So we kicked off the Collins Notes, Collins Lab Notes series. And each day, around now, we have a new one. And so I'm gonna play these back to back. They're less than a minute. You'll see these on like our TikTok and different social media platforms. Instagram. And they're miniature versions of what a lot of people remember as Collins Lab, but these are Collins Lab Notes. So take it away, Colin. White noise is defined as a random signal having equal intensity at different frequencies. It's used for audio engineering, generating random numbers, and of course, sound synthesis. It's easy to generate white noise using a simple circuit that sort of misuses a transistor. By reverse biasing this NPN transistor, we're essentially pushing current through the opposite way it was intended to flow. To do this, the reverse voltage needs to go above a threshold of six volts. Then the noise is generated and amplified by that second transistor. And it sounds like this. Let's crimp a connector. For these JST-XH pins, I'm using 24 gauge wire, along with wire strippers and a pair of engineer universal crimping pliers. Strip about three millimeters of insulation from a piece of wire and twist the conductor together to keep it from displaying. Each connector has a long set of arms to grip the wire insulation and a shorter pair to grip the wire conductor. Place a connector in the crimper's 1.6 millimeter slot with the longer arms still outside. Insert the wire right up to the insulation so that we're only crimping the conductor and squeeze firmly. Check to make sure the connector has a good grip on the wire. Now place the larger collar arms inside the crimper's 1.9 millimeter slot. Then give it a strong squeeze. Check again to make sure it's all secure and you're good to go. What's the difference between lead and lead-free solder? Well, besides the obvious, compared to 6040 lead solder, lead-free solder has a higher melting point and the joints it produces tend to have a rougher appearance. Lead-free solder also comes in a variety of alloys, such as tin copper, which costs a bit more compared to leaded, or tin silver copper, which costs significantly more but has benefits such as improved joint strength, resistance to corrosion, and improved wetability, which is the tendency of the solder to flow onto a heated surface. Also, the flux used in lead-free solder tends to be more toxic to humans, so be sure to employ a fume extractor. But you already do that, right? Yes, you're nodding? Good. It's a good idea to keep a few types of soldering iron tips on hand over common applications and swap them out as needed. The flat screwdriver tip is probably the most common. It's a good choice for through-hole parts and likely your best bet for everyday use. Fine point tips, as you might have guessed, these are excellent for directing heat to smaller joints and surface-bound parts. And of course, the mighty hoof tip. Great for larger joints and higher power components. The broad flat point transfers heat quickly. Avoid using one of these on anything delicate. A hot hoof can easily trample sensitive parts. Whichever you use, keep it clean and keep it around longer by turning off the power when not in use. Seriously, it's easy to forget. What temperature should you use with your iron? The short answer? For lead-based solder, about 650 degrees Fahrenheit. And for lead-free solder, you can go up to 750 degrees Fahrenheit. And the long answer? Well, it depends on a few different variables. Namely, tip size. A larger iron tip is better at transferring heat, which means you can use lower temperatures. And with a smaller tip that transfers less heat, a higher temperature will work better. On the other side of the equation is a larger solder joint. A large solder joint will require more heat, so a higher temperature setting is appropriate. And a smaller joint that heats up faster can use lower temp. Keep in mind that higher temperature settings will reduce the life of the tip faster than low settings. So when in doubt, start with a lower temp and increase as needed. Soldering surface mount ICs can be surprisingly easy to solder this QFP package to its new home. I'll use some .015 inch solder, an iron with a flat screwdriver, a.k.a. chisel tip, some no-clean flux, and a stick vice. Start by positioning the IC on the board and anchoring it in place by tacking in pins onto opposing corners. Apply flux across the pins to help spread the solder evenly. Melt a few millimeters of solder wire onto the flat side of the iron's tip. Then briefly drag the tip across the pins to distribute the solder and remove any bridges that might appear. Looks pretty good. I could have used a little less solder, but otherwise, good to go. All right, help me want it, you can go to jobs.adoford.com and check out some of the things I have here. This is a passport ink, and this is looking for a Python programmer for one job with Neo Trellis but an LED board. A lot of folks that are good at following our tutorials and writing a little bit of Python code, this might be a role for you. All right, it's Python on Hardware Time. So, I'm going to talk about some of the things in the world and it's a little bit of a tangent, but I think it's a good example of some Python stuff going on. And then a little bit of a success story and then a cautionary tale that maybe we can all work on together. Wow, I feel like I'm just going to like, I'm going to have a whole movie in front of me. It's going to be a little bit like that. It's part of the Marvel comic universe. So, CircuitPython 6.2.0 was released. Released, released. I know we've been doing betas and betas and betas, but we're really done. But we're starting to work on 7. So, a lot of stuff happened in 6. We added RP2040 support. We did a lot of USB work. We added a lot more boards. A lot of graphic stuff happened. I mean, these are all the changes since beta 4, but overall, which are a lot of bug effects, but overall we have done a ton of work in 6. And we're excited to do 7. You know, 7 is going to have more M7 MX support. Probably also do a little bit more RP2040 stuff and more. So, thank you to all the contributors. I'm going to talk about how people are contributing in a second. You're something that someone tweeted. They got their first contribution to an open-source project, except it emerged back in the master branch, Driverbug Fixer CircuitPython Driver for the BNO-005. Thank you. In every place that we release CircuitPython, we always think of all the contributors. Thank you so much. Everybody, this is a very good functional, healthy open-source community that is publishing a lot of software and ticking in lots of contributions. So, thanks everybody for making that happen. I'm going to talk about that in a second, and how there are some good success stories in that, because you always don't hear about the success stories. Don't forget, at the hardware summit, it's Friday. It's kind of like a weekend. Early weekend? Yeah, early weekend. We have a series celebrating one year this week. Congratulations, Scott. He's been doing these for one year. If you want to see the building of something like CircuitPython, which is going to be up to 200 boards soon. We have 196 boards. We're getting close. Over 300 libraries. If you want to see a lot of the smarts that went into this, check out DeepDive every single week. The other thing is some emergent trends we're seeing. With CircuitPython being able to show up as a USB drive and it being so easy to do things like a keyboard and people having more access to things like PCB design software, or something like the Pico, which runs CircuitPython, or having all these keyboards that they've always wanted to build, and being able to kind of, you know, put these together in lots of different ways. We're seeing tons and tons of keyboards. I think with all of the work that you're doing now, with getting more keyboard stuff into the shop, ease of use for something like CircuitPython, and then the accessibility for all of the resources to figure out how to make this, and then being able to do it, there's a lot of people that making their own keyboards is going to be their very first project. It was very hard for them to do before. Now it's going to be really easy. Now hold that thought, because not everyone likes things easy. What? How? But we're seeing more keyboards ever in the entire, like, for me, starting Hackaday, covering stuff at Meg, I'm seeing more keyboard projects now that people, that people who, this is like one of the first projects they're doing, publishing and getting out there and sharing with others. So it's kind of cool. So MacroPads more. I also think because of stream decks and stuff like that, people are using more than just a keyboard control. Everyone has their computers constantly. They want to make cool interface with them. This is the Dazzler and Game Boono CircuitPython to create sprite animations. Those are really neat. How to use CircuitPython with GPIO on a PC. That's the FT232 thing. MacroPads. This is the Ambient Temperature Reactor Orb. A Raspberry Pi Pico with MicroPython Example. MicroPython 3D Printed Drawing Robot Example. A Pico CO2 based carrier board with display. A Pi Keyboard that uses CircuitPython. Keyboard, keyboard. Audio Matrix, LEDs, Cats. MicroPython to produce audio with a meowbit and has a cat. If you want to see or experience the pulse of what's going on on MicroPython, check out the slides and all the notes from the Melbourne MicroPython. They've got great nuts, great community. We added... There's a book that just came out in French that's CircuitPython. We added that to awesome CircuitPython. So if you check out you can see all of the resources, boards, links, news articles and more. We keep it on GitHub. Feel free to do a pull request if you find anything. Other odds and ends. We have a video that shows you how to use Feather 2040. This is someone else made it but the new chip is out so a lot of folks are exploring it. We have an oldie but a goodie. These are CircuitPython powered sneakers. These are like the... Lil Nas X Devil shoes but this is like what if you want to just use your existing shoes and 3D print a little Adafruit logo. Don't worry Nike, he's not going to sue you. And you don't have to get a special edition 1 out of 666. You can just 3D print these yourself. Yeah. This is flexible PCBs with CircuitPython and a whole bunch more. Macro pads, macro pads, macro pads, Pico's USB 32's shoes so... I also wanted to mention if you want to check out the Pico Pycorder, this is using the Pico and making a... it was just like first contact day for Star Trek. So you can check out this Raspberry Pi Pico running CircuitPython for this Elkar's like interface. This is kind of neat. This is a mag tag. Moon Crescent Margek so it shows the phases of the moon and so much more. So I wanted to talk about two things. I'll get to the contributions and open source and how to get them but I did want to mention something. So today was like, if you're into particle physics... Yeah, so the moon was spun around and the standard model we still might need new physics, we still might have new physics, there's mysterious particles out there, there's a mysterious matter that we don't know about yet. And that was the news today and I watched a video about this interesting possible discovery. Apparently you need a little bit more for it to be official discovery. It's like five Sigma than it's a discovery but basically an experiment from a long time ago showed that this wobbling particle wobbled a little bit more than maybe it should so it's probably hitting these antiparticles as it runs around of what they are. Who knows? And there's a particle zoo at the moment that it is what it is. There's quantum mechanics and then there's relativity and we don't have something that works with gravity so this is neat. And one of the things that I always like to figure out is what tools did they use? Yeah. What tools did they use? A million years ago I interviewed Brian Green, string theorist for Make and I said do y'all use like instant message and it was like 10 years ago now and he's like this is the first time someone ever asked me, I'm like because it can't all be chalkboards. I want to know like what are the tools you use every day? Discord, what's good? Do you gossip about particles? How does it work out? So anyways if you watch the video and I put it on our blog post about this it's Python. They're using Jupyter notebooks. This is there's a series of numbers that they wanted to get down to a certain amount of precision and so if you're and it's like I was like oh my gosh The numbers are just green and there's pink and there's blue and they're... Yeah but you can check it out on the video it goes by pretty fast. But here's a Jupyter notebook and it's like that's cool it's not Python. Yeah here it is and this is how they're figuring out based on the results from running this based on the supercomputers that are popping out the numbers. They're like here's the theory and here's what actually happened and it's like four sigma three sigma out alright from from a standard the deviation of what they're expecting. Yeah so too many particles. So the good news is if you're in the particle physics and you're a physicist you have a bunch of work to do because it looks like there's other mysterious things dark matter dark energy and this so you got a lot of discovery ahead. Now the thing that I was talking about before which was how are we doing this like circuit Python thing and the the reason why circuit Python and I think Python is working out because everyone gets to contribute. Yes. So if you are interested in physics and science at some point someone had to learn Python and eventually they used it to interact with this particle accelerator. Yeah. It's not some like unknown language that only the particle physicists know. No it's Python. Yeah. And so when you start doing computer science or if you start doing electronics I think it's really intimidating and this was like when we see this type of tweet we're just like this is great. So this is the person tweeted aspiring roboticist it's kind of cool what's their name I bet they're interested in robotics and their their contribution is now part of a high profile open source project it's merged in and it's for circuit Python and every single circuit Python release we have tons of contributors we have our core team that's how we ultimately even hire people and do stuff and we didn't seek this person out they did it they found that this community was really good and really accepting to beginners and no matter what their contribution is. So I normally don't do this because I try to not only focus on the positive stuff but all of us can collectively work on something so this was a comment I saw and I'm just going to summarize it this person basically said the maker movement is lowering standards the maker movement is making it so anyone who wants to put an LED on a bike can do it and they're just interested in that hello world in that project and they're not really learning anything it's lowering standards and I think this is one of the worst things that maybe that wasn't their intention but I think this is one of the worst things you can say online to someone. Because who's standards what standard is it who came up with the standard. Yeah and what is about these people that are coming into this tech world that you don't like is there something specific about them like what's wrong with them what is it so you know some people call this gatekeeping I remember when you were posting on AVR Freaks like 15 years ago and they did 20 years ago 15 or 20 years ago and these engineers with 50 years of experience they saw your name Lady Aida and they're like get out of here lady just get out of here yeah they were angry I wouldn't contribute to their wiki and I said I don't like wikis and I still don't like wikis but they didn't like the idea that you were making electronics so much easier for people because that meant the face of electronics was going to change that meant different people were going to come in so when you all see these things about like standards or lower or more people are going to get in that I know it hurts because at first I was angry it's actually a little bit when people say oh it's a toy I used to hate it but I actually love it whenever you hear somebody say oh that's a toy that's when alarm bells should be going off because that means that it's a disruptive technology anything that's a toy is the next generation of technology that you just don't understand yeah so it's like when people are like oh it's a toy language or this is like toy hardware or like this whole like scientific endeavor is a toy a toy is a play thing that is creative and fun and that's what usually ends up being the disruptive technology that takes over from whatever is happening now the Raspberry Pi was a toy and now it's like half of the industry uses it for single board computing so I've seen this phrase used a lot and a million years ago I wrote an article about Arduino and like how it won in getting so many more people to get into electronics and anything that came along later would be Arduino like and so I see this phrase used so when we all see this let's you know celebrate the successes continue to get people in but let's make sure because this grows and it becomes dangerous and cancerous and I'll tell you why I've seen people and we've deleted this when they've tried to do this oh my team must have lowered the standards to let you in you for like we've gotten like from emails so yeah and so this is one of the things that people say and they're like yeah they did like they were like I just totally cheated and lied and stole and whatever makes you feel better so but this is this is the thing what we want to do is what we want to do is continue to do this but but as bad as painful as I saw that on another website that said the maker movement and all these Arduino things are lowering the standard for everyone I knew that we're being successful I knew the successes here because when they see that they're seeing new people different people from them and it's freaking them out oh no oh no I'm not going to have people like me only in engineering and so this is it's a good thing and we want to move more towards this and contribute and grow and do stuff we all started out somewhere as a beginner and if I can I'm going to try to go back and see if I can have this person see my note I'm going to say like surely someone cared about you and wanted you to learn something when you were younger everyone was a beginner at one time so don't say it's lowering standards when we're just getting more people in this is so anyways one day I'll do a talk about helping to build good communities but this idea that they're standards people should be allowed in and some people shouldn't that is not the way to get to a healthy open source community that contributes where you want to be in this spot where people can see their successes and maybe this will bring them on to an entire new career and I'm happy to see that they didn't feel that there was some barrier or standard they're just like oh I put the code out there got merged in yay anyways that's python on harmonies this week next up open source hardware news I have two things before we get to the guides Lady Aida so we put this up on the blog this is like I said there's a bunch of stuff going on this week so this is neat Google Versorical has been going on for 10 years Google used the Java APIs to do stuff in Android and Oracle said you are infringing the copyright even the API itself is copyright even though you re-implemented all of the Java back end framework and what's neat is they said it isn't and this is very good because and you know languages are now APIs the thing about Java was not just the language it was the standard API that was used to interact with the language because there was so much stuff built in with Java there was string management and hash tables and everything and all that being built in it's good that a language isn't and its API isn't copyrightable because it means first off people can't control languages people's code can remain free compilers can remain free and it can be re-implemented in a black box manner so like as computing goes I think this is good to have you know we don't have to worry about like somebody saying like this I don't think anyone would do it but we don't want somebody to invent a language that becomes popular and say okay I own it the compiler's mind you cannot implement your own version of this language you cannot implement your own compiler of this language so I sent a note to a friend and I said because I was just trying to catch up after a year of all of us just being survivor mode and I'm like yeah I would love to write about how this is going to help open source hardware so this is the first round for software and APIs what are our instruction sets copyrighted I'm sure it's gone to court ship plans are in a different category recipes are in a different category there's all sorts of things I'm sure AMD fought this with Intel I gotta look it up everyone wants to be a test case no that's not true the lawyers want to defend a test case the people themselves do not want to be the test case there's a debate about Google's a giant company and they can afford to do this for a decade but this is also very helpful there's a lot of things book scanning I like that Google made sure that was possible the way you can publish a video on YouTube it's possible to publish a video almost anywhere there's DMCA it is possible to do it there's fair use things I think again if I had time to do journalizing put on my journalizer hat I would try to show that this is going to be something that comes up in hardware and software APIs this is a good thing excellent news for all of us and the transformative nature and the artistic thing and what a programmer does with an API was upheld of what programmers think it's like oh yeah I would use the API that's not copyrighted, that's not protected I'm interacting with it in a way it obviously wasn't it's not code is copyright in this particular instance it has to go to court I'm glad it went to court if it was really obvious it went to court but I'm glad it came out this way next up in the news I thought this was neat so this is Kevin Scott, this is the CTO Microsoft and did a very nice tweet about our lobes machine learning kit with Adafruit, it uses our braincraft hat and it has all the cool open source stuff from Microsoft and it has all of the neat things from Adafruit so this was really neat, I thought it was a really good example of open source hardware and software for machine learning in AI which I think that's the next other thing for all of us to think about algorithms can easily be blamed for lots of stuff that happens with AI and machine learning, but a human wrote those so we could just have more people, more diverse people writing the algorithms more people using these things and it'll get better so this is yet another example of maybe making it too easy imagine that, AI and machine learning being too easy the standards are getting lowered every day around here so I thought that was neat and just went in with my theme just making things easier for everyone and nothing can ever be too easy, I don't know why anyone think that we did have some guides this week 2,451, what have we got on the big board this week we've got the LED snowboard from Erin, she and her snowboard made a cool snowboard some waterproofing techniques and this one, neopixel techniques and also it's motion activated it's when you tricks, it lights up with different things I know Pedro and we'll have a video for that a guardian robot and I can't remember this is from the new Zelda game the fighting one anyways, you have this little guardian robot companion it's on your shoulder they made a little autonomous robot and it's adorable and it kind of looks around and then it blinks its little eye it's all 3D printed and it uses circuit python to program it we've also got Sailor Moon Star Locket by Liz Clark she wanted some cool cosplay technology, so this has a little swirling moon that mimics the Sailor Moon Star Locket it's 3D printed and you can of course wear it and it has a circuit playground inside with a TFT gizmo and then last but not least we've got the analog knobs for Raspberry Pi 400 project we want to do a cyber deck project and show off the semi-QT connector JP took one of our quad analog digital converters connected up to the Raspberry Pi 400 through the cyber deck and made like a cool 4 knob input to OSC which is an audio control software system so you can use it to control synthesizers or other audio devices over OSC, so it's like a nice audio cyber deck project I love the cyber deck, so I think we should put some in stock too, so you're looking for one go check it out in the next video about the snowboard project build your own LED snowboard with neopixel animated lights add motion reactive animations using circuit python's LED animations library the feather M4 and prop maker wing fit neatly inside a GoPro camera case keeping your electronics safe and dry while you hit the slopes see the full build tutorial at learn.adafruit.com and remember to subscribe for more fun project ideas in New York City factory footage we have a time lapse and then some other videos and we'll narrate these and see on the other side we have some of the cutie pie rp24 that's right we made them this week we made a batch we're going to be making more I know we did not have a lot please sign up if you didn't get any we always do a small run to start to get our testing and yield working out and we have some things to learn but then we're going to make tens more there is a build it's a test we have to put in the pogo pens solder them in and then we have some code that tests each board here is one of the testers this is uh yeah we're now programming our nr51s directly from a metro which is super neat then you see only that this is a cool word clock it is 10 to noon it is Wednesday it's the 7th of April yeah well you know when this video is taking okay this is a little co2 sensor I think we uh this must be uh somebody on our team testing out co2 levels in various places so this is uh underground this is upside down this is upside down in the it's in the subway or it's in Australia no it's kidding it's in the subway it's about 650 stuff and then uh here's another here's a sideways video uh this is receiving right now um if you're wondering where all the parts on planet earth are we have them haha no no and it wouldn't be New York City factory footage without the time lapse of all the construction of the disney building that's across the street you can tell the weather is getting nicer yeah alright 3d printing we've got two videos we're gonna do we're gonna play this back to back one is this little bot the zelda the zelda universe and then a speedup okay in this project we're building a shoulder robot with circuit pythons and electronics from adafruit it's 3d printed to look just like terraco from the legend of zelda age of calamity our companion robot sits on your shoulder with a magnetic plate and metal backing hidden underneath terraco is a tiny guardian robot who's traveled from the future to save zelda it's got an LED for the eye that randomly flashes making it look like it's autonomous the robot is programmed with circuit python and the code was written by philip progess with circuit python boards from adafruit they work just like a usb drive so the code is easy to update the new pixel and motor libraries make it easy to code projects with servos and leds the demo code for this project is available on github you can get the parts to build this project links are in the description the head was 3d printed upside down with support material using pla filament a brim was added to improve bed adhesion the parts were 3d printed using marble gray and gold colored filaments the lipo backpack is wired to an itzy bitzy board to allow the battery to be charged over usb you can use flush diagonal snips to easily cut the trace to enable the pins for an on off switch be sure to check out the learn guide for full step-by-step tutorial on building this project these molex cables are wired to the itzy bitzy to make the assembly much easier the boards are connected together using silicone wires the itzy bitzy is fitted into the case and held down with built-in clips the lipo backpack is secured inside the case with a machine screw this metal geared servo is wired to a 3 pin molex cable the servo is installed with the wiring fitted through the cut-out the cable fits through a hole and is pulled through the other side screws are used to secure the servo to the enclosure a jst extension cable is connected to this lipo battery the jst cable is fitted through the hole in the enclosure and plugs into the lipo backpack the slide switch is fitted into the holder with the actuator accessible on the other side the neopixel ring is wired up to another molex cable the PCB fits over the servo and press fits over the ring the battery can then be nestled inside the neopixel ring plugs into the itzy bitzy a 3d printed attachment ring is secured to the servo horn with a screw the feet are made from these 3d printed pyramids that feature ball socket joints they snap fit together to form the limbs and are press fitted to the bottom cover a magnetic plate is installed and has two very strong neodymium magnets fits into the recess with the magnetic discs fitted through the holes with everything installed the bottom cover can then be snap fitted onto the enclosure to diffuse the neopixels the eye is 3d printed using clear PLA inside the head are these clips that grab onto the frame of the servo horn attachment the head is placed over the case with the clips fitting into the ring attachment you can use mctallic acrylic paint to add textured features over the head and legs and there you have it welcome home so if you're looking to build a companion bot we hope you're inspired to check this out and check out 3d hangouts every single one day now Pedro sure you had to make all this stuff and more it is time did you key and aid fruit present this week's iron ampina MPI is from nulls that's right this is from nulls they do a lot of audio and microphone stuff and I thought I saw this microphone and I was like oh this is going to be just another i2s or pdm mic but this is a really interesting microphone the ia611 so this is like an all in one voice recognition system that lives inside of a td microphone chip so let's show what it looks like so this thing is basically the size of your standard pdm or i2s microphone you can see even the top port this is about 3 by 4 millimeters or so and here's the problem that this is trying to solve so you know everyone now has these like ear pods or iot devices and they all have voice activation or voice command system do you ask you know your your pods to do something you ask your voice assistant to do something you wake up your phone with it and you know audio interfaces are really neat because first off they're really accessible they're really configurable you don't need buttons you don't need me near it they you know you can use them even if you're busy doing something that the ads always have people like cooking and they're like you know getting recipes or whatever like you know telling their phone to call their mom so you know a lot of people want to add voice control to their products but adding voice control is really challenging why because voice recognition is actually computationally very difficult and also you have to be listening all the time so like compared to you know bluetooth radios or a button press where you know a button press it's a mechanical thing you can use the button press to send an IRQ to wake up your chip so you know it's we have that capability built in or you know something like wireless it wakes up every 20 or 100 milliseconds and looks for data being sent and you know the data is being sent continuously so as long as you wake up and you listen for long enough to catch the preamble of this RF message you're good with voice you're not going to tell people to repeat themselves because they're not going to tell you the same thing but you know if humans have this annoying habit of like speaking whenever they want like in the middle of the night they'll ask for you know a horoscope or you know while they're driving like the car is doing something and they'll ask for directions there's no way to predict when humans are going to speak so you have to be constantly listening and you can't miss any of it because if you do your voice recognition algorithm is going to mess up you really have to capture the entire utterance and often times there's even cloud based back ends that do the full command recognition but to get started you won't have a wake word right and that's why you say things like okay Google or okay Alexa or okay Siri or whatnot and so if you can at least get the wake word stuff to happen automatically you can then boot up the rest of the system and then do the cloud competition for the rest so this chip this microphone is designed to be embedded into systems where like for example mobile or you know headphones or whatever and it can do some basic commands or it can do wake word activation man it's like the wake word is the key here it doesn't do more than that but if you can do the wake word activation it can kick you back into the main processor which does the rest of the audio processing so the IA 611 there's also apparently the IA 610 but we're going to talk about this IA 611 so you can see it on the right again it's PDM microphone shaped but it's got some extra pins it's 4x3 millimeters and it acts as an I2S or PDM microphone but in addition it's got this DSP inside so if you like look on the left there it has kind of a cool CAD image the two green dots in the middle are the MEMS microphone elements there's the dual mic elements and then there's a wire bonded chip which is the DSP chip which you can program with a voice wake word model it comes with a couple apparently already or you can program your own and download it into the firmware and then it will kind of constantly be listening and do your wake word detection for you so um but can you extend? oh yeah okay so you've got the IA 611 so it's got like the Sysonics MEMS which we've actually covered some MEMS microphones inside it's got a chip with the always on acoustic detector so the always on acoustic detector is what detects if there's any audio at all so it doesn't make sense to be running your wake word processor when there's no data coming in so there's some basic like is there audio signal coming in from the analog section and then that will trigger and interrupt to do the voice wake processing and then once it wakes it then will um you know tell the application processor over I2C or UART or even SPI and then inside is this you know 42 MHz 32 bit you know Cortex M0 I don't know Cortex M3 with the DSP sub processor and lots of RAM these are lots of RAM because it actually buffers a lot of audio for you and we'll chat about that in a moment okay so the DSP sub system it uses this Hemi Delta processor which does all of the you know it's optimized basically to be able to do the audio processing what is the actual algorithm inside I don't know because I'm sure it's under NDA and even if I did know I wouldn't be able to tell you um you know go and register over the nulls website um you'll probably have to get permission to get access to the DSP um but once you're cleared you could probably write code directly for the DSP you could at least um you know optimize your code for the DSP but that's the processor that's literally inside the microphone um so then there's the pads on the bottom on the bottom it has a bunch of different audio ports so once it does the wake word activation right and it sends an IRQ back to the main processor it goes into a pass through mode and the pass through mode um can be an I2S or PDM so you know no matter what your sub system is expecting for basic microphone detection um I2S or PDM you basically can configure the mic to give you either and then the control messages which is you know how you configure it download firmware download models that's an I2C UART or SPI um and then here's here's how the the basic works so there's the ultra low power mode it's under a milliamp I think it's like 200 microamps or something is the ultra low power mode yeah sitting around waiting for any signal at all any audio signal and then when it gets some audio signal you see at the top it goes into stage one uh stage one is where it will um look for the keyword it will start to try to do that keyword detection um you want to pick a good keyword something that's very unique because you need to pick it out of general conversation um when it detects the keyword it sends an interrupt to the host the host wakes up in a few seconds and then can take over and gets the rest of the um the ASR command that's like the rest of the command right so it's like you'd say like hey cue audio you know turn the audio up so the hey cue audio is the wake word and turn the audio up is the command the the command is taken care of by your host processor which has like intense computational abilities the keyword is taken care of by the microphone by itself um and then what's kind of neat which I thought was a it was a cute hack is after it wakes up and it does the IRQ to tell the main processor okay I detected the wake word it will then um it has a circular audio buffer where it will buffer uh two to three seconds it says three seconds at the bottom two seconds at the top it buffers audio so that the host has a few seconds to wake up because sometimes it's like it's going to take a while sleep mode and like it's you know get the memory ready and get the processor ready and so it has three seconds in which to wake up and then it can read all of that um stored data from the microphone the microphone is acting like a little taper corner it can read that and then do um the processing and then it can of course then tell the microphone once it's all done with the processing everything can go back to sleep um if you want to you know it comes with a built in training word uh I think it was like voice queue but if you want to uh do your own keyword they have an android app and it's interesting it's like you can actually train your own keyword and you can take like lots of uh I don't know if it's meant for end users or like developers but you can use this to collect all the data because you have to collect a lot of data when you're doing wake word detection because of course you want it to detect all sorts of accents and people have like different voice timbers and they have different pronunciations so you have to get a lot of that data but they have an app that you can use to collect all that data um and then the model file you actually can use um atmel studio which I thought was interesting they have a dev kit that you can use with a samd21 processor and you take that um wave file and then it converts it to a trained model where it does the computation to convert it into whatever machine learning model that's used for the utterance you don't upload the wave you combine all the waves together basically and you kind of take the averages of them to create the binary model and then that binary model is downloaded into the microphone on boot so you can you know that iSquare is seeing you are SPI interface that's what you use to download the audio model into it so you do have to set up the microphone it's not like a trivial thing but there is example code for all of this and there's a dev board as well of course um pick up the dev kit and what's nice is you know folks who watch the show are probably familiar with the samd21 and atmel start and atmel studio it's pretty easy they have an example that goes with it and so you can use the built-in default model um they have a couple examples like you know turn on the lights and pause the music and all you know three or four commands and then you can practice with programming your own commands and burning it in so remember this is good for wakeword and then maybe very short basic commands it's designed for headphones but I think anything that is battery powered right because this is really good for low power usage where you want to have you don't want to be listening all the time like if you're plugged into the wall you don't need this because you can just run your DSP constantly it doesn't matter you're just constantly listening because it's a very high power activity it's for battery powered things or like things that are headphones or cellular phones or mobile devices radios whatever where you want to have voice control but you don't want to spend all of your power seeing their wing for audio to come out this is like a very turnkey solution right it's actually kind of neat that they shoved all of that into this little microphone and the price is not that much more than a normal microphone so you can save like six months of development time by picking up one of these it's on DigiGate because this is IonMPI with DigiGate so you can look for it with you can type in spk261 1HM7H that's the actual microphone itself yeah or theshoreyearldgq.com for it's not short for it's not short T7AQ8N44 yes so there you go so I think this is neat because we always talk about machine learning on the edge so this is like the perfect example of ultra edge computing yeah and we have a little one minute video from them that we're going to play the Knowles Intelligent Audio the IA611 software development kit is an industry leading solution that accelerates time to market with it's combined hardware software and firmware package featuring the world's first smart microphone the IA611 smart mic is a high performance top port MEMS microphone with an integrated DSP it's ideal for ultra low power always on devices for the mobile ear and IOT markets the onboard open DSP can be used by algorithm developers to create unique and exciting voice UI experiences for devices such as bluetooth headphones and speakers wearables, mobile phones and voice controlled smart home solutions the Knowles IA611 SDK provides a comprehensive set of tools for developing DSP algorithms on the smart mic and that's this week's high on MPI on MPI alright before we jump into new products are you going to do any products with that mic you think you're going to do like a stem or a feather wing I'm interested you know I got the dev kit I still have to play a little bit with it I want to make sure that if we do make a breakout or a board for it that it's something that people can use without having to sign an NDA because if you do it's like it's very limiting to people and then I would just say hey just buy the deval board instead alright let's jump right into the new products alright so here is this little holder here yes this is a battery holder I actually got these by accident but I was like these are kind of cool these are used in like little toys or like wearable jewelry this is a coin cell holder with that little button and a little bit of circuitry and it goes through flashing modes so even though it's like a coin cell holder it provides 3 volts to whatever you've got when you press the button it goes through 3 different modes fast flash, slow flash and then count it on and then of course you press again and it goes off so I think yes it's used for LEDs and little LED decorations but I think there could be also projects where you want something to not be on all the time or you want to maybe make some you know I'm thinking like folks who do squishy circuits or other basic electronic circuits where you don't want to have a microcontroller blinking an LED you could just use this instead so let's go to the overhead and I can show off the demo so actually have it with the other LED product I'm going to show off this is a gigantic LED with a diffuser I press it once and turns on flashing press it again hold on my camera is like so upset hold on okay so you press it off fast flashing slow flashing click again on constantly and then press one more time to turn off so I think still pretty handy comes with bear wires I've started them on or you can use alligator clips to connect to whatever you wish okay next up we've got mechanical keys multiple different mechanical keys we've got these are reds so these are kale box reds so you can see there's a box on the top and that's what your keycap plugs into so these are you can plug them into our NeoKey our NeoKey breakout boards they are all equivalent to Cherry MX's so if you have something that's like Cherry MX Cherry MX compatible you can use these so there's four different colors I'll go through all of them but they're all the same size they just have different feelings to them which I'll have to try to be evocative so the reds are linear and they're kind of the most popular so we'll start with those the next one are the bottom yeah you can see they plug in next up are the kale box blacks they're also linear they don't have any sound they're a little bit stiffer than the reds some people like the blacks they're equivalent to Cherry MX blacks again they're the same size and shape they plug into our sockets whatever then there's the browns and the browns are tactile what does that mean it's like there's a little bit of a bump to them it's not an audio click like it isn't sound loud but there is like a little bit of a bump so you can feel that's been pressed and these are equivalent to Cherry MX browns and then finally there's the kale box whites and these are actually clicky so if you want loud clicky buttons these are the clickiest by far maybe I'll even take one out and I'll demonstrate the clickiness clicking it's clicky so these are the clickiest and then you can feel the clicky I want to focus on yeah it's tough because it's it's white no love contrast there the browns again these are they have they I can just feel like ooh there's a little bit it's hard to tell you gotta just feel them there's a little bit of a bump to them so you can really feel that you're pressing them and then the blacks which are a little bit stiffer than the reds and then of course the reds which I think I stole for a project so I'll have them here and then you can get keycaps and anything that has this X top two you can see there's a little X to it snaps onto the box to make for a keycap so you know you want a keycap again anything that's Cherry MX compatible is within this family it'll work just fine you click here clicks content okay and then you had shown this little have circle light up thing yeah this is an LED I mean we have these like strip LED backlights these are hemisphere ones I think these are used for like car gauges or something with LCD car gauges but not sure exactly not cool if you want like a unique shape they have two LEDs in parallel in them so provide them with like 30 or so milliamps they just look like a white LED so give them like 3.3 volts put a resistor in line there's more than 3.3 volts going into them PWM them again it's just an LED with a gigantic diffuser next up I squared C mini this is a little I squared C helper buddy from X camera labs so they make the I squared C driver the SPI driver so this is a little mini board that has firmware that can communicate with your computer they have Python 2 and Python 3 libraries and some other libraries that let you send and receive commands from I squared C devices so the larger one has like a TFT screen and like debug info and all that good stuff this one's meant to be small and inexpensive it's got an FT sorry a CP 2104 USB serial converter chip so there's drivers available and then it just sends commands back and forth over serial and this one what I like about it is it has a stem acute compatible port on it you can also plug in spark from quick boards and they come with a cable so you just plug in any board with header on it if you'd like next up we've got these NeoPixel dots and these are funky I gotta explain these because they are not what they seem so most NeoPixels what we call NeoPixels are basically shift registers when you send them data the data you know you send a strand of data down into the first NeoPixel the first NeoPixel will take the first three bytes off of the data that's coming through and pass the rest along kind of bucket brigade the data over and that's what lets you basically chain as many NeoPixels as you want together you just keep chaining them and you just send more data each one only you know grabs the data it needs and passes the rest along and that's why NeoPixels have inputs and outputs because the data comes on the input gets reduced and then send out the output and these are not these are prefixed address LEDs so what's interesting about these LEDs is they are NeoPixel protocol compatible but they don't have an input and output there's a data line and the LEDs are 100 of them 0 through 99 they are considered uniquely addressed and if you cut the strip and we wire it it doesn't matter which pixel comes first in the strip they all will respond as if they were in that long strand this is a little bit of a mind twist right because we're used to like oh the first LED is the first LED in this case the first LED is pre-programmed to be first and no matter where it is physically on the strand it will act as the first one so if you chop out 50 to 60 it will still act like 50 to 60 even if you put it at the beginning that's good to know so you're like why would I ever want this because here's the thing you can't have more than 100 these are pre-addressed you can't get another strand like if you get multiple strands and tie them all together they'll all act the same one will act like one, two will act like two if you chain them at the end you don't get to extend it however there are situations where maybe you have a costume or you have a build where you don't want to have you won't have addressable strips but they have to be like in a tree like they branch out from a central point but you still want to address them uniquely this is what it would be good for because even though they're all connected to the same input they act as individual LEDs or you know if you want to have another nice thing is if one pixel breaks it doesn't break the rest of the strip where that's another nice thing about these because again that one data line it's not a bucket brigade it's all shared so if one gets cut out one gets damaged one gets smashed it doesn't matter the rest of the strip still works so kind of interesting a little bit weird but kind of cool I think that there are some situations where people would want them but just be aware you don't want to mix these with like normal neopixels unless you really know what you're doing because if you think about it it's counterintuitive to how most people are used to now using neopixels for like the last 10 years this is like okay now it's hard coded it's hard coded and you're probably wondering hey can I change the hard coded address and the answer is no we don't know how to do it there might be I have no idea how you would do it all right next up we have an update another version of the lobe kit yeah so this lobe kit is now available with the router pie for 2GB as a pack however we've got a stock on those too we have sold out of all of our raspberry pies at the moment of this broadcast that said we have the pack without the raspberry pie so if you have a raspberry pie 4 check it out and you can experiment with the free microsoft lobe system for programming your own custom ai models next up this sht31 is a popular temperature and humidity sensor from syrian and we now have it in stem acute format same as before but now in our standard pinout order and physical shape we also have a little cut out to keep it isolated we've been going through and stem acute tfying all of our old sensors so the sht31 you know and love a great little sensor still has that protective cover on it the teflon cover is a good sensor and we have python arduino circuit python code for it and now you plug in play it and we have two starters show tonight besides you lady at our community and all of our team first one up first up is the cutie pie okay cutie pie rp2040 is finally here we previewed this it's now live it's the same cutie pie that is so adorable that you know and love now you can see on the bottom it's like super power because people are like how could you make a cutie pie in 4 and I kind of forgot to it but this is kind of the same it's going to be as fast as a samdy51 it's got 8 megabytes of flash memory it's got that 130 ish megahertz dual core cortex m0 runs circuit python there's going to be an arduino core runs micropython it's got usb c all the goodies so let's maybe let me show it off we are fast on the overhead and I can even tour hold on I've got to find my plug my magical plug here you go magical plug let's actually have it potentially some of these neopixel dots okay so usb c little fella here so it's got power pins so over here you've got your 5 volts ground 3 volts pin you've got the spi pins in the same location clock data in data out hardware uart rx and tx you've got i squared c data and clock and then here's something different than the original qt pi for the samdy21 this is a different i squared c port there's two ports available on the rp2040 so this is the second port so you actually get two extra pins because these don't conflict with these sda pins and then you've got the four analog inputs because there's four analog inputs on the rp2040 you've got the boot button and you've got the reset button and the boot button after you've loaded your program you can use this as a gpio pin input so you can use this as a user button as well after you've booted and then on the bottom you've got the rp2040 a crystal again 8 megabytes flash memory capacitors and all that good stuff and then this little jumper this is for bill benka who always wanted to have a way to have when this is really has usb host capability published and documented you can use this for usb host as well so it's super adorable and small it's basically pin compatible as the samdy21 qt pi but of course tons more powerful and of course it has all the support circuitry oh there's also a neopixel on the front forgot to mention so you can blink to your heart's content you know i would like it i think this is going to be a fun and popular board it's really powerful it's got you know 11 ios available for very tiny projects where you don't need all the stuff that the feather has you know battery charging lots of gpio pins this will do the job it's it's very cute and it's also got cast lated pads if you'd like to use those so i think this could be a good little engine when you need something very small very portable and that usb c is you know it's a wonderful connector goes either way it's nice and strong um but easy to use all right one of our new boards funhouse okay also we have it double double the goodies this week so funhouse is our home automation board based on the esp32 s2 which is now circuit python compatible and recently i saw 2.0 expressive arduino support added for the esp32 s2 which is great so we were thinking about doing home automation projects and what we want in a platform that's really just for home automation we did a couple projects with the metro esp32 s2 to do home automation but we're like well wouldn't it be great if i had all these sensors built in and i had a tft built in and there's so much stuff that we were like oh hey can you have this built in that we're like you know we should just we should just make a board that is really designed specifically for home automation um and hopefully we'll even have um home assistance support for it as well so let's look at it on the overhead so i'll turn on the tft in a moment okay zoom out this is so big you're using doubt now we are you might want to show the uh here you go okay so uh this is the i'll turn on the moment just want to show things off move the protector that's good uh you should but you know also show the amazing silkscreen lamp silkscreen by philby did a wonderful job here uh i just said okay it's like you know it's like a triangle top board but he uh he took it a step further and made it really got which is great um so on the front here we've got 3g payo buttons you get button input so it's great this is the reset button and there's also a little doorbell it's a piezo buzzer now this is the on off switch so we can plug this in now and uh we always like it so you can turn off things especially stuff where it's sensing so let's uh turn this off turn it back on quite nice and then uh we've got the buttons so if i press this button you can see this lights up uh up and down and when i press it it's gonna go beep beep beep that little piezo so good for notifying doing audio projects there's a little red led here just for indication and of course there's five dot star leds at the top which is wonderful i like it's it's like a little christmas tree lights on your house um a light sensor if you need one and this is kind of neat uh you know the s2 has native capacitive touch support so we added uh here is when you touch the crows the little goth crows when you touch them you can see the cap touch number goes up so you can detect uh capacitive touch as well and then there's also a slider here although this code example doesn't have it but this is a five element uh slider so you can use this to you know dim your lights or raise volume or lower it so um touch the tree to to change the volume or or just use a slider control with capacitive touch and then down here we have a humidity and temperature environmental pressure sensor and people are always asking me to add cut out so it's not affected by the heat of the the wi-fi or power supply so there's a little cut out that's why there's these slots here to keep it as isolated as possible um you can see the temperature and environmental pressure and humidity here um and over here is a PIR sensor slot and of course I forgot to bring it but you can plug in a PIR sensor into it on the front and it points out um to do uh uh motion detection because it's a common thing for home automation and then on the back um you've got the ESP32 S2 with four two megabytes of PSRAM or four can't remember I think it's two megabytes of PSRAM four megabytes of flash memory um ESP32 S2 which is great for circuit python and got good support for it it's got Arduino support for it as well um it's basically like your ESP32 that people know and love but it's got USB support um which makes it great for circuit python shows up in the disk drive uh there's a reset button sorry a boot button over here for putting it into boot loader mode and then um we put extra STEMA ports over here so these are analog input ports that you can connect uh digital or analog sensors to um each one of them is analog input or digital I.O. So you got three ports so you know good for water sensors or um uh magnetic relay sensors or relays that you want to control something with or you know if you want external ladder speaker or you know uh other motion type sensors or brake beam sensors so lots of different sensors that we have in the shop that people want to use for home automation or sensing around their house uh you would plug that into here and then of course you'd have the sensor be far away from this board because let's say you want to plug in a water sensor if the water sensor is on the board you're going to destroy the board because it's sensing water and it's like it's going to freak out but if you have the water sensor plugged in here then you can um have the wire go far away it also has STEMA QT connector here so you can of course connect any one of our iSquad C uh devices uh this is a TFT connection and of course our favorite USB-C and then we've got these um SMT nuts and here's uh while we were designing this Philby said hey you know by the way um your design is really close to the same size as a Raspberry Pi mounting holes like I was only a few minutes just by coincidence when laying out this board so we did is we actually made it so it's exactly the same um whole pattern as a Raspberry Pi so you can actually like literally if you had long screws you could just screw it onto a Raspberry Pi computer or use a Raspberry Pi case or accessory um so you can actually kind of act as like a Pi installed and do all the sensing stuff for you that the Raspberry Pi that would maybe go into Home Assistant and this would do your sensing, your Neopixels, your button inputs, analog to digital converter, analog to digital conversions even the DAC, it's got a DAC built in so you can do digital to analog all that stuff, home automation and hat, yeah but I think also you could have it be remote and control you know communicate over wifi so I think like you know we've been playing with Home Assistant a little bit and other home and I think that this is kind of like what would be a really good base for home automation projects using CircuitPython or Arduino or using it with the Adafruit IO so we've got a couple that we've made we're still manufacturing some more um we'll get them into the shop so if you've got ideas for home automation um check this out see if this will do what you want if not let us know what other sensors you want to be able to plug into it to extend and create your own custom home automation projects okay there is a couple questions that I lined up in the chat but why we do that and I'm going to just remind everyone and post your questions over to adafruit.it.discord join all 28,000 of us let's do one quick top secret alright um I'm going to be posting up this one on the socials later but this is the start oh yeah we're doing so we're doing like these C subboards and like you know I did one with NeoKey and this one is Neo Rotary Converter um you could plug and play with CSAW and StemicUT to add four rotary encoders over iSquared C which I think is like neat because I really like rotary encoders and I really hate coding rotary encoders that's the top secret for this week yeah okay so here's the questions that I lined up we're going to get to them alright first up what is the difference between a capacitor and a rechargeable battery this is from an aspiring engineer well like technically nothing right they're kind of the same thing except a capacitor uses an electrical field instead of a chemical process and a battery uses a chemical process but there's still storing energy and releasing it a capacitor is going to be a lot faster like it charges nearly instantly its capacity is much smaller but it's much better at dealing with high frequencies this is in the case of course of using it as a power bypass storage device to help you reduce ripple in your circuit for other purposes like AC blocking of course the battery capacitor is totally different in that one specific case they do act quite similarly but they have different chemical or electrical ways of doing what they do yeah I guess one other thing is usually you can recharge a battery because things are built that way capacitors generally you're not doing that yourself yeah next question along those lines the same person how do we make capacitors where they made or they made there's a couple different ways of making them but capacitors are really at their base there are always two sheets of metallic material to conduct the material and in between they have material that's not conductive and so that means there's no way for there's no way for DC current to pass through which is a very annoying explanation because you're like well obviously power is passing through but you say DC current doesn't pass through what you can do is it's kind of like like if I have like a piece of plastic in between my hands so I've got this piece of plastic so technically I'm not touching myself my hand isn't touching my other hand technically I'm touching the plastic like I'm not touching I'm not touching myself I'm touching the plastic but I can still move my hands I can force one hand over by pushing it with the other so that's kind of how a capacitor works it can push the changes in energy over even though it's technically not conducting it through I don't know this is why I wasn't a lecturer but that's basically how capacitors work you make them by taking two conductive materials to hands and you put a dielectric a non conductive thing in the middle and then you wrap it around you can make a gigantic sheet and wrap it around like a towel or something we have two videos B.S. for battery and C's for capacitors just search for those on YouTube and you can watch a full video of how we talk about each one of these with puppets this person saw you're looking for interface hints to RPI you can't, Raspberry Pi's can't use PDMX you need an I2S mic what projects have you seen people make with Pico that impress you were unexpected I'm going to say everybody wanted to do keyboards didn't realize that I was going to be I didn't think that was the thing but that's the thing keyboards, macropads, it is not expected but I'm glad we had support for it next up what keeps the selective soldering machine from bridging lots of flux and nitrogen I can answer this one is Adafruit's Tiktok a good source of traffic for Adafruit's orders what social media platforms are the best contributors to Adafruit's order funnel, thanks so you can look at it a few ways with social media platforms they're built for advertisers and influencers and they're not really despite sometimes what social media companies say they're not actually built for education they're entertainment and following and all that Tiktok I'd say right now and it's current vibe there's more instructional videos and like on Instagram which is more like here's something I have and I'm showing you, where Tiktok is like here's something I've learned and making or at least a lot of the ones that we're part of YouTube, longer form and live Twitch definitely more of a gaming audience LinkedIn more of a business audience and Facebook I would say it's more of the folks who now use it as a little bit of a newsfeed just connecting with others so as far as where people are ready to do the click to purchase that's always going to be YouTube probably there's like two big search engines in the world Google and YouTube and they're the same company different divisions in alphabet with Tiktok one of the bets that we've made is there's a lot of people that are new that are beginners and never seen electronics and this might be the first time they see it so that's why we make specific videos for that format also it's pretty common format across social media platforms and what we're seeing is people are like oh yeah I saw this light up shoe thing I saw this bike that I wanted to do LEDs but I didn't know where to start and this kind of goes back to what I was talking about earlier in the show thank goodness there's no standards for doing art and doing stuff with your bike and doing computer programming because they can see this they can imagine themselves doing it and so while Tiktok is not a direct like if we have a thousand views there's 100 orders what we do see is people email us or they'll even comment on a Tiktok and say I saw this and I went and got my first electronic kit so it's working for the way that we want it to there's more beginners out there than experts and there's more beginners on those types of platforms so YouTube conversion rate high other platforms so so next up I don't think I saw a GSTPH battery connector on the Funhouse that uses USBs that's the only way to power it correct it's not meant to be battery powered it's not a low powered device could you add a ZigBee slash thread module to Funhouse so what you would probably want to do is use this with Home Assistant and Home Assistant you would plug in a USB ZigBee or thread module like you wouldn't want to write that code on the ESP32 alright would we ever make a MIDI controller kit we used to one way to box subscriptions open again just sign up and as soon as there's openings you'll get an email right now it's full so you just have to wait until someone pops out of the queue as they say there's a 2640 camera that is IR ready without a filter for Arduino I still can't find one I don't know if these are good or if they're solid demand for one but I want one I think these cameras for Arduino are tough you're probably best off using a Raspberry Pi and the IR camera yup and a question about the NeoPixel E like strands could you address two of them in parallel yes if you connect them they'll all act the same though if you have two in parallel you're just connecting two in parallel they will act the same okay the new CR2032 battery holder with three flash settings do you know if the clip if the chip sorry right near the blue button is an AT984 or 85 it's some unknown chip it's not a microcontroller does the ESP32 S2 have a reset button need a reset button or is it just for the UI it's people like to reset their staff you know it's always good to have a reset button while you're developing alright let's wrap it up all of them I think we did this is your show everyone tonight special thanks to our team that's over on Discord helping out our team in Slack behind the scenes at Adafruit thank you Jessie Mae all of our Adafruit customers thanks so much please continue to stay safe everyone things are getting better there's light there's tunnels there's more see you next week here is your moment of zener