 Welcome to Lady Aida, Merry Christmas! Hey, Merry Christmas! It's me, Lady Aida, here at my desk. We're not officially back, but we're just doing a quick stream today. I don't know, I look kind of like we're back. We never left. Yeah, I kind of think, yeah, I'm back. Me, Lady Aida, Mr. Lady on Camera Control, Baby Aida, resting peacefully, hopefully for the next 15 minutes. We bought this thing, I think it's called a Mogwai, we can't get it wet, can't feed it after midnight, no sunlight. So far so good! Okay, so let's see what's on my desk, because I have done some electronics. First up, the Scorpio board, which somehow took a year for me to wrap up, is in the shop. We are finishing testing them up, but they are going to be available next week, so if you want to get your own 8-channel PIO Scorpio board, it's the RP2040 with the feather format, and then it's got a STEMIQT connector over here, and an 8-channel level shifter, to level shift from 3 volts up to 5 volts, and 8 channels of PIO output where the pins are consecutive on like a byte boundary. So it's really great for, we designed it specifically to run Neopixel 8, but anytime you need, you know, 8 channels of buffered output to control LEV strips, or I don't know, like you know, DIY Ethernet controller, HDMI, whatever. If you want extra 8 extra PIO outputs on your feather board, you can do it here, and then, yeah, like I said, we designed it for Neopixels, but you can also change the direction and level from 5 volts to 3 volts, and from output to input, so if you want to turn it into a logic level, sorry, a logic analyzer with 8 channels input, so you can like pump it to I'm trying to think what's the name of that logic analyzer that people used to use. No, Staley, it's like logic pump or something. Anyways, there's a couple of open source ones, I can't remember the name of it off the top of my head, because I didn't sleep a lot last night, but you could probably program it to do that as well. So, we'll be in the shop next week, so one of our final products of the week. It's also, I don't know, you wanted me to bring out this mask. Oh yeah, we had some projects and stuff, so yeah. I can't really see them. Yeah, so this is the eyes that we make. This is the hallowing and fours, two of them. You know, I was reading this thing online, it's probably not true, that the reindeer that actually would have pulled the sled were all female reindeer, because those are the only ones that have the antlers that are something like that, so that kind of changes the mythos, I think, but anyways, this is a cool project that you can make. I think the batteries are not well, I don't know, I mean there you go, look, Rudolph's going okay. Yeah, but they're supposed to be blinking. Oh yeah. They're creepy, they're just staring. Whoa, quietly judging. You know what, I think that the wires came loose, these have been sitting on a shelf for like ever. Oh yeah, the ground wire was all loose. Let me see if that helps. Oh yeah. There you go. Oh yeah, that's cute. Yeah, this is the Monster Mask M4s with two glass overlays and shoved into a mask for wear on Christmas Eve or something, I don't know. Anyways, you wanted me to bring this out, so I got that. Yeah, because it's, you know, there's so many things throughout the year that have eyes, and you can make almost anything come to life. This is just an off-the-shelf mask, and then we added an LED and we added the eyes. Yeah. You know, lots of stuff. Alright, so I'm going to put this away now. No, it's cool. We're going to scare the baby later. Okay, let's go to my overhead now. We can actually look at some electronics. So one of the projects I've been working on is a lot of the TFT boards that we've been putting into the store during the chip shortage, I couldn't get TFTs, and then I found a TFT supplier that was different, and then we're like, while I got the TFT supplier, there's different, some TFTs changed, and I was like, if I'm changing them, I'm going to provide the board. My connectors to a lot of displays. Oh, she don't have... I don't think I have a display on my desk right now, but in the shop you'll notice a lot of the older TFT displays that we've had, the breakouts, have been updated to add an eyes by connector, and then for some of the smaller displays like this is a 1.14 inch 240 by 135 TFT, which I really like using in my feathers, because it actually kind of fits perfectly onto a feather. The other thing that's annoying about this TFT is it's designed to be hot bar or hand soldered like this, you know, you paste it on, and you very carefully either use a solder tip either a fine one or a really wide one or a hoof style, sometimes that works well, and you sort of drag solder it, or if you have a hot bar machine you can hot bar it on. It's very inexpensive, and what's nice is of course it's very flat after you solder it, you can tape it down, and then put the screen on top and the back is completely available. The only problem is it requires a bit of hand labor, and it's kind of easy to mess up like a lot of people, we train people how to do it, but it's like if they don't do it for a while or new folks need to be trained up and it's kind of annoying, you know, it takes a while to do it, it's annoying skill, and so I thought it would be good to revise these boards to instead use instead of the hand solder version to use let me see this TFT, so I got some samples again from a new TFT supplier for the TFT that instead of hand soldering has a FPC connector so you have to re-design the board of course, and the FPC connector can't be on the same side because it wouldn't sit flat so it has to go on the opposite side which means it's a little bit more complicated layout so let me see if I have the design here so for example this design got shifted around so you'll see the level shifter went from SYC to TESOP so that gives me a little bit more space and then the SD card slot changed somewhat significantly so it used to be a push-pull design sorry, a push-push design so you would put the microSD card in and you'd push it to eject it and this ejects and flies across the room and you lose it this is a molex it even has the part number 220823D it's a molex sorry, molex connector and it's a pull-pull so you push it sorry, yeah, you push it's not a push-push, it's a push-pull so you push it in and you pull it out so it doesn't fly across the room but it doesn't have that nice like you can eject it very easily you do have to yank it out with this FPC connector and then you can see there's a slot through the board to the other side so this tester let me see, this is the tester we use and let me see the SD card so the good news is that the screen actually works perfectly as is it's like the same screen I have to tweak the orientation a little bit, like the FPC it's very hard to get the math right for getting it to line up perfectly such as push the display footprint down about a millimeter but it otherwise works it's reading an image off the SD card and then it's pulsing the backlight so you can see it's working very nicely here and then another screen that I wanted to do is actually a revision 1.4 inch TFT so I'm just going to put that away these all look so similar so the other display is a let's see this is the 1.14, sorry they all look so similar as I mentioned this is the 1.14 1.14 okay so the other one is the 0.96 inch display which is very similar this display actually I can't get anymore it became discontinued and this was also a hot bar designs you can see on the back it's got the SD card, it's got the level shifter but unfortunately again like I said this display I can't get anymore so this is what it looked like originally and then it was like it got revised and the TFT like tripled in price and the company didn't have them and they did have them and then the lead time was 30 weeks and so I said like fuck it, I'll deal with this later and again now I'm like okay now the TFT prices are reasonable and I can get them maybe with an FBC connector I have to redesign the board anyways let's also make it so you don't have to hand solder it so this is what the screen looked like before and this is the test you can see it's displaying this adorable little adabot and so the display replacement unfortunately well there's a couple things going on so the display replacement does have an FPC so that's nice right no hand soldering it's a little bit thinner so you can kind of see it's the same resolution but doesn't have it's a couple millimeters thinner and it just doesn't have as much like a black bar at the top and the bottom and the other thing and like I said you know like the other one I don't have enough space for a big push push card so I use a push pull the Molex one and then this one I also have to like change the outline like I realized was totally different the only thing is I don't know if you can tell but the display first up it's flipped upside down and also the green and red are swapped so that's the mad control register there's MAD like which is the orientation and also the color order control register it's kind of the register that sort of does like all of the like oh is it flipped is it upside down is it red green blue swapped whatever so that's different I mean luckily that's a very hardware wise it works but the software is going to have to update so we'll have to document how to select if you happen to have the old display versus this new one because again I can't get the old display even if I wanted to so this will be a bit of a bigger revision this display the 1.14 thankfully is the same physical shape and also the same mad control the same orientation and color order which makes things easier these are all ST 7789's I think yeah which is you know a very popular chipset again it's very easy to control and configure and we have a good library for it in Arduino CircuitPython and we also have a Linux kernel driver for it but you know especially the 1.14 inch display would be great to just not have to do all the other hand soldering anymore we saw a lot of these and I don't know if I'll be able to update it for the feathers but the feather wing I'll be able to update it to use FPC connector and I want to do the same thing for the OLED I got a sample of it OLED with I squared C FPC connector instead of you can see the hot bar soldering so again I'll have to tweak the design but there's a lot of space that can be like you can see there's a lot of empty space I can shove things down and use an FPC connector instead of hot bar the cost of the PCV will be a little higher but the overall labor cost will be a lot lower so that's what I'm doing on the FPC anything about that any questions before I move let me know that only one of the audio channels was coming in but I fixed it so that was good and then folks are happy to see us back we never left we just wanted broadcasting we just had to do a couple of things first and then in the meantime while we've been taking care of a baby TAC did a lot of work on the RP2040 host so if you recall a couple months ago a bunch of Japanese folks wrote a PIO, USB host driver for the RP2040 it normally only has one USB port which you would use for programming it uploading it this port can't act like USB host but I can't stand it when people have USB host projects that use the main USB port you can't debug it you have to unplug it to reprogram it you just make sure your power goes the right way it's pain so what's nice about this USB BitBang is you can use any two pins they are just consecutive now it does use every PIO and it does use an entire core but that's not actually such a big deal often times you'll use only one core for your main program anyways and it's not super bulletproof it retries and stuff and maybe just don't drive neopixels when you need PIO at the same time so we got that working and it's also been integrated into the Teen USB Arduino library so that this RP2040 can connect to mass storage and CDC USB and HID as well devices over USB this USB BitBang host and I'm using that because I talked about this a couple of months ago we have this TESTO brains that we use for programming like pretty much all of our microcontroller boards it can do DAP SWD for SAMD21 SAMD51 it can do AVR ISP for ATMEGA and ATITINES and then for the RP2040 it would use the USB host and it would like drag and drop that UF2 file over USB host to program the RP2040 that's great and all when you can get a Teen C-36 you can no longer get Teen C-36s and I won't be able to get them people for 6 months now we had a stash of like 30 boards but first off they do sometimes get broken people misuse them they are testing while they're drinking coffee or something and they spill or they just you know the testers board under device under test does something really horrible and they can maybe backflow current in so you know they're not we do need to have some backup for emergencies but we ran out and we can't get anymore because of this chip shortage is still affecting microchip and NXP so it's really important for me to be able to replace this Brains tester which used the Teen C-36 with an SD card for the file USB host and then this GPIO control and a LCD for debugging with this new Brains board which is also fully surface mount other than the piezo and then of course you have to solder the headers for this and for this but the USB host port and the SD card and the button and all this stuff is pretty much all SMT compared to the old design which had a lot of through hole parts which meant it required a lot more work you know you'd have to actually put it together this I can have you know 30 to 51 on the pick in place pump them out and you know we can quickly update all of our existing testers so if I plug this in you can see it's it can find USB ID it can find the RP2040 I actually forgot that the timing is still being a little bit iffy you can see it has some text with probably go I don't know if it's a PIO or core thing yeah it's a little bit messy but over here you can see it programmed the test code into this macro pad over the USB these are just the reset and boot select pins that it you know toggles to put it into boot mode the test code says please turn on the knobs please push the knob and then it communicates over USB CDC to tell it that it's done but yeah I have to work on I don't know why this is kind of weird why it's a little jiggly-jiggly sometimes it's yeah like see sometimes it's okay it's like okay you know I found the USB HID and then yeah has the text I don't know I got to figure that out the neopixel background color works fine but something about the LCD text it's weird because it seems to be some collision between when I'm using USB that's when it affects it I might have to first off make sure that there's no GPIO collisions like you know accidentally data is being written to some of these other GPIO pins or to the memory I'm using for the LCD or I might just have to slow down the LCD bit toggle like it could be that you know the RP2040 is is fairly fast it's also being run at an odd speed going at 120 megahertz not 133 and I don't know if that's affecting the timing so I might just add some delays to the LCD to make that it does work but again you can see not not every time but the hard part the USB host stuff does work so if you want to check that out it's in the TV USB Arduino library and I think it's in a branch actually no sorry it's in the main branch and there's a couple examples one for mass storage one for one for HID and one for USB enumeration there's no example for CDC yet I think although maybe there is by now because TAC was working on it before Christmas so it's pretty exciting because it's like it's very hard to do USB host on four little microcontrollers again like very few microcontrollers have two USB ports only you know the teensy was one of the few that did but the RP2040 is four bucks so you know it could be cool to have you know HID you know translators or if you want to read files off of mass storage or write files for me I'm just using it for this tester program but other people might have a use for it so I'd like to see what people do with the USB host control on the RP2040 okay so I was looking for a 5GHz Wi-Fi breakout yeah I don't know any I don't know any Wi-Fi chipsets that are 5GHz at this time maybe maybe the Amoeba was 5GHz I don't know if it really was 5GHz I mean like you're not going to be able to transmit data faster you know it's still it's still SPI or whatever as communication okay you got anything else? Nope that's the desk okay so our plan is to resume hosting some of the shows you know our team has been co-hosting and hosting the shows shortly a lot of people are on vacation so we took a bit of a break ourselves so we can get ready for a big giant exciting 2023 together we're going to do some new product videos and we've been posting up lots of little shorts every single day so any social network that's out there we've been on the mastons in 2017 and now you're OOM we've been on the mastons we liked their first album so anywho to boost your tooth? Yeah we're everywhere so we'll keep posting these videos we have a lot of hardware we've been working on so check it out and we'll be doing a bunch of stuff there's a lot of exciting things that we can't wait to show you it'll be super cool check out the scorpion board that's another kind of big deal and then there's something under your tree all the chips that you can maybe all the other chips and you know, supply chain stuff to get a little better Chinese going through their COVID waves so that'll probably have some ripple effects but we'll let everybody know how things are going and I'm looking forward to doing some real worlds where we show products that are back in stock and if there's any chip shortages we'll do a chip shortage thank you very much Lady Aida for guiding our sleigh tonight see everybody next week do rangers make any sounds? I think they scream ahhh and we'll see everybody let's see it'll be next week maybe next week we'll try yes, it'll be New Year's okay bye everybody