 IMPI, on N-P-I. I-N-M-P-I, brought to you by Digi-Key and Aida Frithing. Digi-Key, every single week we show the latest, the greatest, the I-N-P-I on new product introductions this week. It's from TDK, Lady Aida. What is this week's N-P-I? Okay, this week's I-N-P-I, like we mentioned, is from TDK. We had them for their little sensor bugs. So this is their, they're coming back. Do have one of the coolest logos. We see it in Times Square. The TDK sign is pretty sweet. This is, I want to just make sure you get the part number right, the BCS4430B6. This is a series of ultra-thin, ultra-flexible solar cells for use with indoor electronics to power your IOT, your portable or wearable electronics. I would get some hot stuff. From lights inside a building. So, just what it looks like. These are amorphous cells. And this one is, I think like 44 millimeters by 30 millimeters. That's the name. And it's got six cells. You can even see all six cells, you know, one by one in this picture. And then it's super flexible. And I'll show it on the overhead. Maybe I'll do that now before I get into it. Let's do it now. Okay, so this is the solar cell. So it's amorphous. So it's ultra-flexible. And it's incredibly thin. It's 0.2 millimeters. It's basically a thin piece of paper. And it feels about as thin as like a thin piece of plastic or paper. And on the back are, you know, these two points that you can connect to to make electrical contact. And even indoors, just with the fluorescent lights here, you can see it's lighting up this LED quite nicely. So this is extremely, extremely skinny and extremely flexible, you know, paper-like solar cell. And it can be easily bonded or soldered into your project to give yourself some power, even from indoors. I mean, of course, it'll work great outdoors, but it's designed even to work with indoor lighting, which is not that bright, to be honest. So this is the VCS series. They can make them in custom sizes and shapes. But the goal of this one is just to make it ultra-thin, ultra-light. You know, one of the, you know, suggested use cases is like a credit card type thing, something so thin that could go into, you know, a wallet or it goes into a wearable, something that has to move around a lot so you can't use a fixed monocrystalline cell. This one will give you about, you know, 4.2 volts open circuits around 2.6 volts, you know, running circuit and operating current about 30 microamps of current. So, yes, these are, you know, very, very small and thin. They don't give you a lot of current, but depending on your circuit, you might be able to either charge up, you know, a super cap or use a, you know, a buck-boost converter or whatever to convert that ultra-low amount of current into something usable. You can get these in custom sizes, even in a circular size, a customizable number of cells. So, you know, for your product, if you need a lot and you don't want to cut it down to size, of course, you can cut this with scissors, but let's say you're like, I want to come with, you know, a particular size, you can get them customized. And so what this reminded me of was, you know, when you had a solar calculator and, you know, you would, I had one of these and they were great. I actually preferred the battery one because the battery would always die. But with the solar one, you know, you sometimes would have to hold it up to light for a few seconds to kind of get the internal capacitor charged. But I found that they worked quite well. And that's the same idea here, is that this is for, you know, ultra-low power electronics. It's going to have to be designed to use a solar panel. But of all the energy harvesting techniques that I've heard of, like, you know, piezoelectric or thermal, solar is kind of the most, like, inexpensive, reliable and well understood. People who are always like, oh, I want to charge something based off of the motion of a person. It's like, that's actually really hard to do. And piezoelectric, usually you have to press a lot harder than you think. It's not very comfortable with a solar. You know, it's trickle charging. But there's always going to be light around. So, you know, if you can work within the constraints of the low current, you're good to go. For people who've never used solar panels, they're kind of weird because they're diodes running in reverse, basically. You know, instead of, you know, an IV curve going the opposite way, they go the positive way because there's positive power going out, not going in. And the operating curve does change with light levels. So, this is a diagram from a linear tech and PPT controller. And it's not for this panel, but you can see the green line as you get more sunlight or ambient light. You see the curve gets taller and taller and taller and how much current you can get out. And then the blue line is the max power. And so you notice that there's kind of a sweet spot called the max power point, which is kind of at the tip of the curve just as it starts to sink down. So, you know, using a solar panel, you can't just treat it as a voltage source or a current source, it's kind of in the middle. You want to, it'll give you a voltage, but as you draw more and more current, the voltage will start to collapse. So, what you want to do is use just enough current that the voltage has started to collapse a little bit. That'll give you the max power. And so, one thing to say is if you're going to use these little solar cells, you do have to design your circuitry and your power supply to take advantage of this and use it intelligently. This is the, you know, the curves for this particular panel. You can see the different illumination levels based on lux and the voltage and current you can get and get out. You know, one thing you can do is, one, just design your circuit to use, you know, under 30 microamps of current, depending on what your circuit is, like as a calculator, you can design an ASIC to use less than that much power. Second thing is you can have a trickle charge, a super cap or a primary, or sorry, secondary battery or a chargeable battery. It slowly, slowly trickle charges the battery capacitor when it gets to a certain voltage, it turns on your circuit. And then it runs, that can be good for IoT where, you know, a little sensor or something lives in a room. It only has to send the temperature or humidity data every 10, 15 minutes. So it slowly, slowly charges, you know, 30 microamps at a time, charges up the super cap, super cap gets to 3 volts or 3.5 volts, whatever. The circuit turns on, depletes the capacitor while it's submitting that data or sending that data over a radio and then turns back off. Third option is to use something like this. A specialized chip. It's going to cost a little bit more, but this is designed specifically for energy harvesting and is designed to use these ultra-small, ultra-thin solar panels. You can't just use an everyday LiPoly charger chip. It has to be something that knows how to deal with, again, this IV curve where the max power point is as the voltage starts to collapse. And usually you set the max current or the max, you know, the cutoff voltage using resistors or capacitors on these chips and then they can charge up a battery for you or a super cap for you. And they'll do it in a way that's a lot more efficient than just a plain triple charger. Okay, end of stock. And good news, there's 32 of these in stock and they're available on Digikey. Here's a short URL. Sorry, there you go. But very neat, I do see, I will say, you know, people who want to use, who want to do IoT projects, they want to make smart rooms. Solar panels really, you know, they're designed for it. They last decades, they're very reliable. They are, you know, they just work off of whatever light they've got. Just be aware that they'll give you a lot less current than you think. Whatever amount of current you think you're going to get, it's about a tenth of that. But as long as you can work with that, you're good to go. You sound like an advocate for Big Sun. I am. The lobbyist. Big Solar. Big Lux. Okay, so that's IONMPI. I'm going to do a couple questions immediately afterwards. There's a couple questions that have something to do with this. We'll see you on the other side of this, and that is this week's IONMPI. IONMPI.