 Hey, welcome to the show, it's me, JP. It's time for another JP's product pick of the week. Thank you for stopping by. I was out of town last week, so we didn't have the show, but I'm so excited to be back right here with you. And where's here? Well, not only on this, your internet, but also this product page. If you go to that, I'll never get that right. If you go to that QR code or this URL, you will find our product page for this week's product pick. Don't go there if you want the surprise of the reveal in a moment, but do go there if you wanna get a jumpstart on getting a 50% off discount on this week's product pick. And that's a maximum of 10 per customer, no resellers allowed. And I think we've got plenty of stock, but I'm never quite sure. So if it looks like something you're into, then go grab it. So before we go any further, what I'll do is, this is a product pick that has a revision, but it actually goes back to I think 2017 or so. So I'm gonna play you a little video that shows LeMore's original product release, as well as some info about the update, and then we'll take it from there. So please take it away, Lady Aida. Yay, it's the Pi UART. So this is our new product for the week. This is a little add on board that plugs into any Raspberry Pi. I show it with a Pi zero, but you can actually use it with a Pi three or a Pi two or a Pi one. And it adds a USB serial chip. So you got that PsyLabs 2104, which is a USB serial converter chip. And there's a little bit of extra space left over because I had to make it a certain width to fit all the pins. So add enough space to add an on-off switch. So there's an on-off switch with a transistor. That was nice of you. And this means it's kind of an all-in-one, a powering and interface. So it just plugs into, it comes fully assembled. So I have a double-sided design. So it comes with this socket header that is nice and slim. So it plugs into any Pi just in this corner. And then it has a green on LED. And then I have it connected through my, whoops, my laptop. When I type, you can see the RX and TX LEDs down here light up. So let's run DMessage and you'll see it'll print a bunch of data transmits through. So this is kind of nice when you also want to debug. Like is data coming in and out from the Pi? So if you want to shut down, you can shut down your Pi, but then you want to still cut power to it. So after it's done shutting down and shut down now, you can then switch it off. You can see it's blinking, so it's off. You can turn it off off by flicking that switch. So it's just kind of nice. You can power it from the switch directly, which I think is kind of handy. So it's kind of an all-in-one. If you're doing headless setups especially, you can now power it and have an on-off. So you don't have to unplug and we plug the USB cable all the time. Question from the chat before we wrap up here. Can you put an OLED on here still? You can. What you would do is you would use a stacking header and these would slide on and the header pops through. I designed it so that you can, even though it has pre-assaulted headers on it, there can kind of see their trends. You probably thought about this. I thought about this. The hole goes all the way through. There you go. So you can see the holes on the other side. So if you have long stacking headers, you can stack a bunch of these little mini boards on top of each other and they don't interfere. They're calling them pie slices. A slice of pie. Yeah, and all like mini helper. So it's just low cost and easy. What's nice about it is I just like to pop it on the pie. I set up the Raspberry Pi, set up Wi-Fi and then I can remove it. But it's just an easy way to really quickly get set up. So I think I find this really handy for debugging. I like the console because unlike Wi-Fi, it doesn't get disconnected once you're on the console. It's there for life. Another revision. Similarly, the Pi UART. Also the CP-2104-based board. I really like the CP-2104. Quite sad that it got discontinued. But we revised this for the CP-2102. It's a little board that goes onto your Raspberry Pi. Gives you a UART connection, plug and play. And of course you could also power the board and now it's got a USB-C connection. Upgraded it. One of those things, if I'm gonna revise a board, I might as well revise the whole thing. So updated it from Micro-B to USB-C. Here's just showing the previous version on a Pi Zero. I just found this really handy for like, I want to power and send and receive data from the serial console on a Pi, this board will do the job. Yes it will indeed. So let's go ahead and take a look at one that I've got right here and then we'll do a little bit of a demo. So let me jump to the little down shooter here and you can see how tiny this is because I have it in a little jewelry box. Hey, look there it is. That right there, let me swap cameras. That's the product pick of the week this week. It is the Pi UART USB console and power add-on. This is really cool. So this one is the update and this one uses the CP-2102N, I think is its name from SyLabs. What this gives you is a serial connection that you can use with your Raspberry Pi which is often a lot easier than trying to get onto a network with both the Pi and another computer. So this is great for remote types of things. And I'll show you how it works. So let's first of all, let me actually get a console up here as well. Okay, so this is just a terminal console that I've got and first of all, connection. So this connects right onto these first headers of the Raspberry Pi. Fit that on there and just press down. There it goes. It's nice and slim and let me see that focus. I can fix that just a little bit. Oh, that's a little bit better. So you can see this now has the USB-C connection on it. It has the toggle switch on off. I'm gonna put that in the off position and then you have the option if you're in the off position or even by cutting a trace, you can power this by its normal USB power which means you could just come along and plug this in without disrupting anything without needing to turn it on or off and just get an external console on Pi. What I'm gonna do is the other method which is use the onboard power of the little Pi UART. So I'm plugging in USB-C there and then I'm gonna flick on the power switch and let me drop that exposure so you can see the LEDs on there a little bit better. So you can see we have the Pi lighting up and we also have power to the Pi UART displayed right there. So now while it's powering on, I'm gonna give it a second to settle down. You can do things so that you can chat with it during boot. What I have, I don't have it set up that way so I'm just gonna simply wait for this thing to settle down. This probably is fine. So now what I'll do is connect to it using a screen which is a nice serial program on the Mac. And then this one, I think, yeah, so you have a lot of different possible connections. This one's this S-Lab to USB to UART on the Mac. So I'll hit enter and what it's gonna do is make the connection and it's gonna throw us some garbage at first. I think it might even still be booting up. I might have been a little premature on that but once it's ready for us, we'll get a regular prompt just as if you had done a remote SSH into the device, for example, except we don't have any networks to contend with. So here we go. Here's the regular login. So I'll type in my username and password, which it's gonna tell you I haven't changed. It's the default. That's terrible, but there you go. So now I'm communicating with the Pi. You can see this little status LEDs when I send it data and when it receives data there blinking away. Now you can do things from here like adjust configurations. Maybe this is a headless setup. Maybe it's connected somewhere inconvenient to get to for a keyboard but we can get on there and add files, change files and so on. If I go, let's say to the boot folder, you can list the contents of that. I can go ahead and edit something. So let's say, edit the config. And there we go. We can go in with Nano here, go maybe uncomment some of the overscan stuff for HDMI. If you're having HDMI issues, it might be impossible to see it on the plugged in monitor but you could go in here and make your changes, save that, reboot it. If I wanna shut it down from here, we can do that. So you can do pseudo shut down now. And now I'm shutting down the Pi safely, remotely. With my wired USB connection which is really nice, really convenient. If you take a look at some of our web pages here, so here is the product page itself. You can see right now it's on this great discount, 50% off, so it's $3.48 to grab one or two or 10. If you scroll down here, there is a link to a learn guide. I have that pulled up already. So here you go. This has photos of the old one but it works identically other than the different USB. Actually that's the current photo but some of these photos will have the older ones in there. And this will tell you how to get set up. We're really just using the five volt and ground to power it and then the TXRX to send the serial data back and forth. This by the way is a Pi three that I'm using here and it's powering up from, fine from a powered hub. I think that port gives me two amps. You'd probably struggle to power a Raspberry Pi four under strain cause it really wants three amps over a USB connection. So there again you can plug in power right here into the Raspberry Pi's USB and then use this in the off position just for the serial communications. There's a couple of guides talking about headless quick start set up and you can also go and check out the, if you look up that data sheet you can find out a whole bunch more about Sylab's plans for this type of chip. So let's see, if we go back and take a look, this has finished shutting down here. It spit out some serial data that we can't read here and I can get out of this with control A, control K and then say yes. And now I've closed my screen session and that will vary depending on how you're connecting up. Something else by the way, now that it is safely powered down, I can cut power to it, turn it off, unplug it. When Lady Aida mentioned using stacking headers, here's an example of a header that has socket and extra long pins. So you could set this down on top of here with whichever pins you're using. This one actually just uses a single row of them, I can't remember if I have the right row or not but something like, let me go to a full view here and I'm gonna crank up that exposure again. Whoa, not that much. There we go. So you can see right there this would connect into whichever row you need and then you could place another similar type of short header add-on such as the OLED on here because it's using different pins than TXRX. So kind of a neat way to stack up a little bit of extra for your Pi UART. Let's see, any questions in the chats? Let me know. This is also a nice alternative to an FTDI cable or a serial type of cable. Let's see. Todd Boss says, getting a serial console in UnixBox is how I learned to manage systems. It's how I used to set up Raspberry Pi's for sure. Excellent. Oh good, and two, two, three, one, Puppy, let me pop up the Discord by the way, says that they're gonna use this discount as an excuse to resupply the Maker Lab. Great, go and get some. These are really, really useful. All right, so I think that's gonna wrap it up for today. Like I said, head over to the product page where you can get this nice discount, $3.48 for this. That is the URL and the QR code there if you're trying to find that page still. And let's see, I think that's gonna do it. So that's the product pick of the week. This is the Pi UART. It is a console and power add-on for Raspberry Pi. And it works for Raspberry Pi, full size, A size, Pi zero, any of them pretty much, so long as it meets the power requirements. So let's go ahead and hook a little twist tie to there and I'll hang that from the board. There we go, thanks everyone for stopping by for A Different Industries. I'm John Park and this has been another JP's product pick of the week. I will see you next time. Bye-bye.