 from New York. It's a special edition of Ask an Engineer, Friday, 8 p.m. Circuit Python Day Engineer. It's the snakiest day, August 18th. There's multiple snakes in there. We're celebrating Circuit Python Day, a company-paid holiday. It's a paid day offer, everyone I ate a fruit today, in addition to this day-long celebration that we have online. We've done some physical things in the past. Maybe we'll do a physical event at some point, but today was a bunch of video chats and more that you can see at any time, but there was a bunch of lots of stuff going on. All right, we got a kick in show. We still got all the stuff normally that we cover, like new products and videos. Yeah, we're going to do a regular show. And guys, but we all have a little bit of a Circuit Python theme. Yeah, we get some Circuit Python stuff. We're like, oh, the flavor of Blinka, you know. Yeah, well, the intro had Blinka overseeing the pipe portal creation that we have a data for it. So that was good. All right. Well, let's kick it. Let's see what's up today. Tonight's show, don't forget, it's Circuit Python Day. So there's code, Circuit Python Day. You can use it. I'm supposed to say, you know, use it before midnight tonight. However, what does, I'm letting this go over the weekend. So if you just can't get to it, it's okay. We have a lot of Circuit Python boards. There's a lot. Yeah, sometimes people see these shows. And then on the weekend is when they do their purchasing of things. And they put it in the cart. So this will work over the weekend. So, you know, Circuit Python Day, 10% off native food store for anything we have in stock. We'll talk about some of our live shows, including Show and Tell, which we just did. We got some Desk of Lady Aida, which we just did on Sunday. So we're going to have another one this Sunday. But we do Desk of Lady Aida, including Great Search. JP's part of Pick of the Week and JP's Workshop. That was during the week. I'm going to do some time travel, some news around the web and more. A little bit of recap of what we did today. We have some Minor City Factory footage, some 3D printing. We have IonMPI this week. It's 3M. Those are brought to you by DJI. Thank you, DJI. Top secret. That's where we have a bunch of Circuit Python related stuff. If you like displays, stick around. We've got a bunch. We have some new products. We're going to answer your questions. We do that on Discord, aida4.it, slash discord. All on this very special Ask an Engineer Circuit Python Day edition. Okay. So in addition to that, Desk of Lady Aida, our freebies are now updated. You promised and you delivered. I did. Sorry. Promise made. Promise delivered. It took a couple of weeks, but it's worth it. First off, we had to wait till we re-enabled UPS to have the UPS free shipping. But we also have a new freebie. So if you have plenty of permaprotos and you're like, I want something different, we now have these beautiful gold coat PCB coasters. And they come with bumpers as well. So don't worry. You know, won't scratch up your table. We use these here at House of Lady Aida. You can also get some. And here's a good thing about coasters. If you have four coasters or six coasters, you're not like, man, I have too many coasters. You're like, I have exactly the right number. So $99 or more, you'll get one of these beautiful PCB coasters with bumpers. $149 or more. We still have the KB2040. So you can take this board and turn it into a Circuit Python project or MicroPython or Arduino. It's got an RP2040 and all sorts of extra cool peripherals. And it's pro micro pinout compatible. So that's a great upgrade from an 8-bit micro. Back. UPS. Ground shipping in the content of United States for orders $200 or more. You wanted it. You missed it. Yeah. Now have UPS re-enabled. So we've got it. Yeah. So let me do a little bit of... Break it down. Yeah. We'll tell you the... Well, actually, why don't you do the last freebie and then we'll talk about UPS. All right. And then we still have Circuit Playground Expresses in stock. So $299 or more. Get a free Circuit Playground Express, our favorite all-in-one development board that's perfect for use with all sorts of programming languages. Code.org, CS Discoveries, MakeCode, Arduino, Circuit Python, MicroPython, tons of built-ins. Lots of really great freebies. I'm glad that we're... The QuadFecta is back. So use the code. Get the free stuff. You know, your... Discounts. Yeah. Your discount and your purchase supports, I think, one of the biggest open source projects for education and hardware. It pays our staff and more. So we don't have any loans of venture capital. We don't do ads. Any of that stuff. It's just how your purchases get used is how we make this thing go. So anyways, UPS. So there was going to be a UPS strike. And we had consolidated a bunch of our shipping on UPS for almost the last 10 years because we got good rates. And we also have Pistol. We also have DHL for International. And as it was looming, because it looks like it was really going to happen, we said, well, let's make sure we have an option for our customers in case it does. So we have FedEx. And FedEx came in with pretty competitive rates. We, you know, no dunk on FedEx. We like FedEx. But then we had the chance to negotiate. So here's when I would normally put on like, here's the MakerBiz hat section of the show. But I'll just go over this for maybe people who are in business. So in the past, we've told UPS, we're like, hey, we know that there's better rates out there with FedEx if we were to switch. But we're going to be straight up with you. We don't like to negotiate, unless we're really going to follow through on the thing. And the thing is we're going to leave or these max rates. So we never said, hey, max the rates or else because we weren't willing to leave. We liked UPS. We liked all the things that they were doing. But we weren't, we in negotiation, I guess it doesn't matter if you lie or not for some entities, but we weren't willing to walk because we didn't have FedEx in place. But we did. And for the folks who are wondering, well, what did you do this time? We're like, well, we can, we can stick with FedEx. We actually don't need to go back to UPS. So we said to UPS, I'd really like to go back to you. We can flip the switch and now we're back. But we can you at least match the rates that FedEx gave us because they really want our business. It's a million dollars a year and shipping. And we just do a pass through. So, and we're very chill. We're an easy customer. This is like cash money for whatever carrier. And we seem to be shipping more each year too. Then we do aida box. There's a lot of stuff that we have going first. I also think we're pretty good company. So they matched the rates and made it better. So for the first time in a really long time, our UPS rates are even better than we've had for a while. And we passed through the shipping cost. So yeah, it's better for y'all. You have now lower shipping rates. And it means that you can order more stuff. It means you can order more stuff and pay lower shipping. Shipping is everything expensive. Shipping is expensive no matter what you do. But we have really good rates that are competitive with I think even some of the like larger entities out there. I'll always say if you're going to buy a resistor, buy that from like Digikey. But if you're buying anything else like aida for stuff, you can get it from Digikey. That's fun. But also from aida because we have really good rates, especially UPS crown. So that's the story. And I guess for the maker biz portion of this, if you're going to negotiate, we're known for, if we're negotiating, it's because we have another option and we want to give the chance for the party to match or do better. We don't like playing the game where it's like, okay, we're going to go really, really, really, really, and then you're not. We really like to have something, an alternative if we're going to negotiate that's comfortable. So that worked out. That is our story about, yes. Okay. Advert live series of shows. We do these every single week all the time. We just did this show and tell. We had Ann on who did this really neat Star Trek, a little touchpad device, PCBR. JP did a very neat robotics project that, like very quickly, like showing like a puppetry, almost like mirroring of what you're doing on a joystick, old school joystick. It's kind of like we always say the imaginary in a box. It's like the stuff is going to be really hard. We wanted to do, I know Disney has their own problems, but for a while we're like, wouldn't it be cool if Disney had a way for young people to have a lot of, apparently a lot of people go to Disney. It's like, I want to build stuff like that. I want to be an imagineer and do animatronics. It's not going to be cool to have an animatronic in a box where you would learn how to make all this stuff. I don't think it's ever going to happen. I think Disney is interested in talking about streaming stuff or whatever. They already seem to be embroiled in something. I don't think we'll ever get a chance to talk to the imagineers, but that's okay. You can check out the Circuit Python stuff that JP was showing off and very easily control like a puppet with a joystick, a servo, and you can do all that with Circuit Python really fast. Then Scott showed off a really neat music synth. It was funny because it's normally JP's doing the music and Scott's doing the wheeler stuff. Then we had Seth who showed off this FPGA with Circuit Python. Yeah, it's programming FPGA from Circuit Python, so downloading the mainstream. Yeah, very easily. It's kind of cool. So that was kind of neat. So do check out the Circuit Python edition show and tell. You can check out some of the projects the team showed off. And if I forget everyone, sorry, we'll be back next week, some 30pm Eastern time for show and tell and special thanks to everyone who worked on the programming today and Kenny helped organize it. Thank you, Catney. Thank you, JP, Scott. Everyone who did streams. We also have a thing that we do at 10pm. It's 10pm. Do you know where your engineers are? Sometimes. And this is 10pm. Do you know where your engineer is? This is kind of a new weird video thing that we're doing. Yeah, so what happens is we notice engineers, they have free time and they make stuff at like 10 o'clock at night. And it's like, Hey, it's 10pm. Do you know where your engineers are? Because usually what they're working on is the next cool thing. It's not work related or anything. It's what they're working on. So I thought what I would do is like 10pm, you know, we put our kids to sleep sometimes or she's hanging out with us and Lady eight is doing some engineering. So we have some it's not a one minute video. It's a little bit longer usually. And it's just like a snapshot of what you're doing. So what did you show at the last one? Okay, so I showed off that I have a Docker file. Like I was kept working on the Linux build for ESP 32 s3. And, you know, like last time I did the video, I was like, I didn't quite get it working because, well, I mean, I didn't actually get it working, but I tried compiling it under various Linux E operating systems and didn't succeed. And then I was like, you know what, this is a great opportunity to learn or relearn how to make a Docker file and use Docker. And I thought it would be good because a lot of little engineers often get stuck with this, like, I have to run some weird ass tool for some weird cross compiler. And I'm under Windows or I'm under Mac and like I can't do the cross company for some reason or like there's some yak shaving that has been done. A Docker file is a really easy way to have a miniature fast virtual computer container that you can install the tool chain on and then you don't have to worry about Python 311 versus 39 and curses versus GN curses versus CMake versus CMake two versus like all the 15 billion ways that your tool chain can get messed up. You can have this beautiful crystalline gem of a computer that has all your tool chain. And actually it was only like 20 minutes to compile the Linux build route and kernel. And then you can transfer the file off the Docker to your home computer and burn it. And then we're going to also write up a guide for it. Okay. So stay tuned for more. These are completely random. It really is. If something's going on 10 o'clock and on his turn on the camera. And most of the time it's kind of putting Linux on stuff. So we have the desk lady on Sunday last week. It was a long time ago. So this was in two parts. I think you should something the same stuff. Yeah, this was just the more in depth. I actually show how to make a Docker file, how to use Docker, how to log into it, some of the settings, and then doing the cross compilation, removing the files off and burning it. So it's like, I did the five minute version. And then I kind of use that to do the 20, 20 minute version. But a lot of people said that the stream was really good because they're like, I actually learned how to use Docker and how to make a Docker file. So check it out. It's free software. So you can do it at home. We do the great search. That's related to hope to find things on digikey.com. Lydia, what was the great search this week? Okay. So this week, we were talking about ESP32-S3 Metro because we were saw leaks on it. And somebody asked, what is that connector on there? It's a SWD connector. Well, it's not a SWD, it's a JTAG connector. And so I wanted to show some of the boards that we make have a spot first connector, but it's not soldered in, or you want to add this connector to your ARM Cortex based boards or a board that has JTAG, but you don't want the big ass 2x10 connector. These little 0.05 inch pitch 2x5 connectors are very cute. And there's a lot of different varieties of shrouded versions available. I go through the varieties available at Digikey. There are tons of them are in stock and they're only like 50 cents or so. So perfect to add to make it very easier for people to do break point debugging, trace debugging on your dev board. I try to always have, on the Metros at least, I try to always have a debug for available. And it's helpful for circuit Python development, Arduino development, or just IDF, ESP development, you want low level access. Okay. And then JP's product for the week we do every week, JP's workshop. I wanted to play a little highlight from one of the things that JP's working on. It's a neat little music thing. We'll talk about that in the guide section tonight. And then on Fridays, we usually do a deep dive. Scott just did one for circuit Python day, good timing. And sometimes Tim does a deep dive. So let's do some time travel. Gonna go back in time. Gonna go back in time. Python day and we'll get to some of the new products on MPI. I think we're gonna have time for everything. We have a bunch of top secret too. So for time travel, one of the things that we've been doing this week, this week. Well, it's not art. I mean, maybe it's art. Art is not normally associated with electronic engineering yet. You get in trouble for that. And since I've been proving them wrong. Yeah. So we do a PCB of the day. So Lady 8 has been cranking through so many designs that we have enough to show every day. It's like, here's a new PCB design. And then some of this stuff is just really fun to just toss in like a kaleidoscope or like, sometimes like, oh, this would be like a neat pattern on clothing. So you can see some of the daily, we post these across social media. We have lots of different examples of the PCB. If it's a product that's currently out, you could check it out. And then you get to see what it looks like as we panelize it or when we're getting it ready to go. And then some of them are super weird, like this USB-C thing you do. We'll talk about that in top secret. And then there's just like previews of stuff, of new products and more. So any, any social media format that's out there pretty much, we put it up every morning. And it's whatever PCB Lady 8 did, like the previous day or pretty close to, and you can see some of the news. I do the night shift. In the morning, Mr. Lady wakes up and it's like, instead of donuts or fresh bread, it's a circuit board rendering. All right. And then a little bit of recap. Today was Circuit Python Day. We do this every year. This is a, there wasn't a holiday in August. So we made one up for our team. So this is a paid day off for our team at Adafruit. And it's also a worldwide celebration of all the things going on in the world of Circuit Python. So today, if you want to catch up on what videos there are, we kicked it off in the morning. It was Circuit Python Day introduction with John Park. There was a special 3D hangouts with Pedro knowing Liz. They did favorite projects. And let's talk about some coding and some 3D printing. We did beeps and boops with Synthio, a Circuit Python Day panel discussion, hosted by Paul. This had, I think, Todd Vaughn and some other folks. It was really neat. There was the Circuit Python Day game jam with Fummy Guy. Tim, there was the Matrix Portal message board with maker Melissa. There was a Circuit Python Day chat with Jeff. Yeah, Hattney. Then there was a special edition of JP's workshop. There was Deep Dive with Scott. We just did the show and tell, and now we're doing Ask an Engineer. So there's a bunch going on. With Circuit Python. And this is a pretty good way to get a recap. We're also doing this every single week. Circuit Python Day is kind of every week. We have our community meeting every Monday. We have all the videos that we do throughout the week. So there's a lot. We also have our newsletter. And together the latest one. This one, of course, we were talking about Circuit Python Day. But there's a bunch of stuff in addition to what we were doing. If you want to see a neat interview with Noe and Liz, you can check that out on Hackster. There's a neat handheld Linux device. You can probably run Python on that. And then Hackaday has a couple neat things. And then this was a PyScrip. I didn't know Intel was involved with this. Did you know that? Oh, I didn't. But that's neat. That makes sense, right? So if you want to run... Intel, is it? Yeah. So if you want... Is it Bluffin? Yeah. So if you want to... Bluffin-y! If you want to run Python native in your browser, you can check this out. There's a talk Python video chat and more, which is really neat. I think that we'll probably eventually all work together in some way, like running Python in the browser, talking to Python on hardware, Python, Python, Python, Python, Python. So check out the newsletter. This is our weekly celebration of all things. Python from MicroPython to Python on Linux to Circuit Python to even some other... Sometimes we toss in other like scripting languages for microcontrollers because we'd like to keep an eye on that. But this is where you can see like library updates and more. All in the newsletter delivered to you every single week. If your daily is a site that we do, we do that because it's not connected to your store account in any way. It's a completely separate site, which means we don't spam you. We hate going to a website and buying stuff, and then you get spam forever. So we wanted to make it super duper clear your store account is not connected to the newsletters. So, you know, that's how we do it. Okay, open source hardware, we do it. But you know, there's a bunch of guides this week. What is new on the big board? Many Circuit Python themed. Okay, so we have a new guy who saw that video of the Ambient Sound Machine by JP. This is an all Circuit Python build that's running on the RT-1011, which is a super fast Cortex-M7 chip. And I kind of just said, hey, JP, how many WAV files can you play simultaneously? Not an easy thing to do to play audio files all at the same time, polyphonic play. And he was like, I don't know, I'll find out. So we found out. It's at least 10. So he made this box. It's based off of it's inspired by this art project. I don't remember the name of the person who originally did the project, but it's in the guide. And they made an ambient box that had, you know, like birds chirping and like ocean waves. And I was like, oh, that sounds like a fun project to make a little ambient audio playing box. So, you know, JP satisfied my curiosity about polyphonic sound and also built something out of IKEA drawers. Very nice project build. Nine Page Door built a project for themselves. It's an overhead camera. They're constantly making things that require overhead camera shots. Why not 3D print brackets to make a cool overhead rig using 8020? So check that out. It's an easy build and good for anybody doing photography or build documentation. And then Liz did a guide for the PC joystick to seesaw adapter. As you saw, JP made this cool little robot with it. And then we had a couple other guide updates. Okay, we're going to do some factory footage and then three printing. And we're going to roll all the way through to INMPI. See you on the other side. Here is factory footage. Okay, time for a couple 3D printing videos. See you on the other side. You can build an overhead camera rig using 8020 extrusion, some hardware and 3D printed parts. This modular system lets you mount a camera for getting overhead shots. We think it's perfect for documenting projects. The framing is made from 2020 aluminum extrusion and it uses T plates and corner braces to secure everything together. We design and 3D printed cross connections that allow you to adjust the overall length and height of the system. Because it's modular, you can use it to hold up photography backdrops for getting glamour shots. Just add some spring clamps and a 3D printed adapter to hold up a backdrop, poster board or fabric. To find out how to build your own, check out the guide at learn.adafruit.com. We designed the system to be expandable so you can create your own mounting plates and adapters for attaching all sorts of equipment. Whether you're using it as an overhead camera rig or backdrop holder for photography, we hope this inspires you to create your own system. Before we go to INMPI, buy some cert pi day. Make sure you put C-I-R-C pi day. I saw someone say the code didn't work. They tried cert pi day on accident, but it's cert pi day and I think they're fine. Yeah. Now, okay, let's kick in. INMPI brought to you by DigiKey and Interferent. They keep DigiKey this week. It is 3M, Lidiator. What is INMPI this week? Okay, I love 3M stuff because of course, it's everywhere. American company, Minnesota Mining Incorporation, but now officially 3M. They make really good quality tools and products, even if we don't necessarily buy electronic components from them, you're going to use their stuff. This week, I was really psyched to see that DigiKey is highlighting VHB tape from 3M, which might be familiar to you, that red overlay plastic. If you've done electronics or assembly or manufacturing, that looks really familiar. VHB tape, very high bond tape. Apparently, it's been around since the 1980s. It was invented at 3M and they have a wide variety of different types and shapes, sizes. Just because it's called VHB tape doesn't mean they're all the same. There are a couple variations to it. DigiKey stocks all the different types. I thought it's a good time to cover this product and then you can go over DigiKey and buy a reel or a sheet. VHB tape, I think it was originally designed to replace rivets in architectural or automotive applications where you have a panel and you want to attach a panel onto a frame substrate, like up there up our right for an automotive trailer. You have these panels that you may want to remove and adjust eventually, but riveting is actually going to give you a rackety TikTok sound because the rivets eventually get loose and the whole thing rattles. Whereas if you bond it with VHB tape, it's going to be a nice strong bond. Then it was used for architectural uses, so you see on the left there, I think that's the MIT computer science building. That's any kind of funky style building with these panels over it. Architectural panels, those can also be VHB bonded on. Then for white goods, you see a washing machine and also for the signage that's also really common, but now it's also really used often for electronics. If you are attaching screens or panels or you want to have a battery on one side bonded onto an enclosure, I remember I got a cable holder and I had VHB tape and that's how you would attach it onto your desk. It's been 10 years and it's still there even though I bump into it almost every day and I yank on it with cords in it. This tape is used in a lot of different functions and electronics is kind of, even though a lot of people might be used to using something like hot glue, which is very fast and easy, but of course 3M makes hot glue guns and hot glue sticks. Good for quick bonding, but not very strong, peels very easily. Epoxy is okay, but it's very messy. I've used epoxy a lot to bond different components together in build. You have the enclosure and then you have to have the PCB and the display and buttons and sensors. I've used epoxy before. Epoxy is really good, but it's very messy to use and it's very easy to mess it up if you don't mix well enough and you don't know. It's like two days later you check and it didn't harden. It's very annoying. Also, if you don't pick the exact right epoxy, it can crack off. You do have to prime the surfaces really well. It's one of the nice things about the VHB tape is that you can do prep, but you have to get away with not a lot of prep. Another option is foam tape. We've used foam tape. This sort of stuff is often engineered. See this on the back of breadboards is that white foam, kind of thick foam tapes, a couple of millimeters thick and it's good for attachment, but it does eventually dry out and it's not meant for high temperature or cold temperature uses, whereas VHB tape, this is much cheaper, but VHT tape, you saw it's used for automotive, for architectural. It can be weatherproof and temperature, hot and cold, resistant. It doesn't dry out and crack off. So I checked out the VHB design guide and they talk about all the different variations in some use cases. One thing they didn't realize is that first up, there are some, there are some preparation steps you want to take to get the best bonding and there are different varieties of VHB tape. So first up, you can actually get stronger than rated bonding if you do surface cleaning. So for glass, for example, you want to use sign lane and then for other materials, those different solvents, they actually have in the design guide a list of all like you're using wood or using metal or using aluminum or using glass. Here's what you do to surface prep. Next, you can abrade and abrading, especially for smooth surfaces, will let the glue seep in a little bit better. It's not essential, but if you do it, you're going to get much better bonding grip at the end of the three-day curing cycle. Priming is another thing I didn't realize that you can prime it. Again, I think it's going to be for outdoor uses where you really want to have the best bond possible, but you can actually skip these if your things are clean and you don't need it to stand up to automotive or industrial use cases. And then finally, you can apply it. And they do actually talk a little bit about automatic application like using robotics or laminators and they have like fixed laminators, or you can do manually. You can actually just like by hand cut a piece of tape, put it on, and then you do want to use a roller to attach it. And I think we covered like 3M rollers before. Do you want to roll it on with the one side of the adhesive and then, you know, let the acrylic glue seep in and then you can pull the wet plastic cover off and then attach to the other side and then apply pressure again. So it looks like you need about 15 PSI, which is, you know, again a human can easily apply it. And then another thing I noticed is that they mentioned you can heat up the bond up to 38C. So it's just a little bit hotter than room temperature. Like maybe a light heat gun and you'll also get much better bonding if you do that. I guess the heat activates the glue a lot better. And then within 20 minutes, I think you get 50% bond strength and 90% bond strength at 24 hours. And after three days, it's 100%. And they do have tutorials on how to remove it, but it's kind of not meant to be removable. Like once you glue it on, you're supposed to keep it on. Hot temperatures will make it bond better. Cold temperatures don't bond as well. But, you know, as long as you over-spec the hold strength you need for the cold temperatures, you know, just make sure that you have enough tape to hold your thing on, even if it's, you know, gets down to like zero or negative 20 degrees C. Um, okay. So I mentioned that there's families. So there's more than one kind of VHB tape, which I did not realize. So some of them have different adhesives on one or the other side. Some of them have thicker or thinner foam. You know, your shear strength is not going to be as good if you have a thick foam because the thick foam itself is not going to have a lot, you know, it's going to move back and forth. There are ones that are good for high temperature, low temperature, general purpose, different colors. They do have, I thought this graphic was really handy if it's in one of the design guides. They tell you based on your, the surface energy of your, one of your substrates, you know, basically like, will the glue be able to seep into the surface? That'll affect which kind of adhesive you want. But the night, you know, the 4950 is kind of a standard issue. Kind of like everyone uses that. And then on the bottom, it has which materials. So if you're connecting, trying to attach something to silicone, right, which is very low surface energy, it's very hard to stick stuff to use the LSC family. You're probably going to have to pay more if you're using metal, especially metal or glass, that you can abrade lightly. The 4951 will do the good job. So, and then of course, Primer will help. It seems if you have these, especially silicone, I'm kind of surprised if you wouldn't stick anything to it. It's usually so inert. And they also have a, you know, more interactive selector at the 3M site. If you're just like Google 3M, VHB, it'll take you to the selector and you can tell it what you want and what sizes. And of course, you can get customized sizes and shapes if you need. So they come in reels normally and Digi-Key stocks all the different reels. I'll say that sometimes there's an image of a reel, but the image is like, it's a generic image. So look at the number. So for example, there's one, the top one is six inches by 18 yards. And the one below it is three quarters of an inch by 18 yards, but the image is the same. But obviously the six inch one is going to be like way thicker. So I weigh fatter at six inches wide. You're going to pay a little bit more for the wide ones too. You can also get sheets by the way that you can die cut. And they do mention that as one of the services that you can get, you know, if you have an unusual shape and you want like curves and cutouts, you can buy it by the sheet, get it die cut, you know, it's going to be more expensive than just strip, but you'll get, you know, perfect shaped outlines. VHB take. Available on Digi-Key. We also have a video. Yes, Digi-Key did this video and they say, do not try this at home. But every video I looked, because I was like, I want to find like a video about VHB tape. Every video is kind of the same. People just love sticking things you're not supposed to stick together. And then doing a video. It's like, here's something that makes things stick, but by the way, never do this. But we have to demonstrate it anyways. So a lady just sent me this video and she's like, oh, here, get these two clips. So from the beginning in the end and then in the middle, they have how to use the VHB tape. But let's just get to the full part. So I smooched it together. I glued it together. The VHB tape. Hi and welcome to another geek moment. Today we'd like to feature 3M's VHB or very high bond dual-sided adhesive products. We have a couple of demos set up to show you some of its attributes. But remember, safety first. Now I'd like to show you just how easy it is to use VHB by assembling these two sheets of aluminum. First thing we need to do is clean both of them with a mixture of 50% isopropyl alcohol and 50% water, which can be found in most stores. Now that those are both prepped, we need to adhere our tape to both to this. Roll that pressure. Now our second chunk of VHB, cut that. We'll roll that out. Now I just take the backing off here. Now we'll put the top plate on, roll pressure on both pieces of VHB under there. Now we're complete. After 20 minutes, this will be 50% adhered. After one day, it'll be 90%. After three days, 100% adhesion. As I mentioned, VHB is great at handling dynamic loads. We decided to test it under a static load condition as well. While filming this portion of the video, I've been suspended by the plates I assembled earlier. The VHB has been enough to suspend my 250 pounds of body weight. Next time you need adhesives in your product, think of 3M's VHB. Thanks for watching. Okay, and don't forget to code the insert pi day. Let's roll right into new products. Okay, this is a bracket for the Elite Motion 2 sensor that we put the store a couple weeks ago. If you want to mount it to something like 3D printed, maybe this allows you to mount it to like your head. So you can make it to like a VR goggles type thing to your robot. What have you? This is like a handy little clippy adapter to take your 3D sensor and make it portable. Okay, next up. Next up. These look a lot like our FSRs that we've been stocking for a long time. And they are kind of the same as the FSRs we've been stocking for a long time. These round four sensitive resistors can detect pressure when you press the round part at the top. It's a four sensitive resistor. So the more you press it, the lower the resistance is. Normally there was this open like there's no connection between the two contacts. You press it and the resistance goes down, down, down. So you can use it to detect force. And the FSR that we've already stopped is up to, is like basically 0.1 to 10 newtons of force. And this one is 10 to 100 newtons. So it's 10 times less sensitive. So it's good for when you have high pressures. Like some people are using the other FSRs for detecting when people were walking, but you couldn't, you're the force that somebody exerts with their heel when they walk was so high that it was kind of like blowing out the range of the other sensor. This one has 10 times as much range. It's not good for detecting soft presses, but very good for detecting stomps. But it looks the same and works the same. You picked up as a resistor divider and then feed it into an analog digital converter to read the resistance. Next up. Next up, we have a revision for the RA8875. People have been asking for like almost a decade to, hey, can you please put a tri-state buffer on the output pin because that you can't share it with an other ice group, other SPI devices on the same bus. We finally had to revise this board for other reasons. The backlight driver chip got discontinued. We're like, oh yeah, let's also update it. So what's cool about this chip is that it can do SPI to a 800 by 480 max TTL display. These displays are usually very hard to drive from microcontroller. You know, we were showing some off the ESP32 S3 is a wear micro that can actually drive those displays. Normally you need a micro computer like a Raspberry Pi to do it. But this way you can do it from microcontroller. It's not cheap, but it has like built-in fonts and built-in shape creation. We've got Arduino circuit Python drivers for it. And now it's been updated with this new backlight driver and the SPI port can now be shared. Based on the same price, basic same functionality, electrical and mechanical, just a little bit better and also an Aida Fruit Black. All right, the start of this episode to you, Lady Aida, our team, our customers, our community is... It's the iSpy beret for Raspberry Pi. We had this in the shop and we finally finished the tester jig. So if you want to add a quick plug-and-play hardware to a Raspberry Pi, I actually made this mostly so I could test and debug displays and, you know, E-Inks and TFTs and STEMI QT connectors with a couple buttons. But I was like, yeah, it can be handy. It's very slim. It doesn't take up a lot of space. We'll work with any Raspberry Pi with a 2x20 connector. So your Pi 3, 2, 0, whatever, your I-O board with the CM4 module. And it's got a couple things. It's got two tactile buttons and one switch. So just good for like you want to have a little bit of physical interface. There's also a STEMI QT connector on the left that connects to the iSquared C ports. You can plug and play all of our sensors very easily. So you add accelerometers or some OLEDs if you want or, you know, light sensors, temperature, motion, all that good stuff. Just plug and play a cable on. And then the iSpy connector in the middle is for connecting our displays. So many of our displays now have an iSpy port on them, which means you can use a cable, much like STEMI QT, but it's got a lot more pins so you can connect a display. So I've got a demo. I can show off. This is my Raspberry Pi 4. And then I've got the iSpy board. This is green because I keep the prototype for myself. And this is one of our displays. You look for the iSpy logo on the back. You know that you can use one of these plug cables. And then these cables come in various lengths. And then, you know, there's no soldering. There's no difficult wiring. You just plug it in here, plug it in there. And then, you know, this is a little GIF player demo we have that's written in Python. So this is thematic. It's Python. Yeah, I made that on 4th of July. That's too bad. Like, that was the demo. And now it's five months later. Yeah, five months later. So from one month of, you know, doing that demo to it's in the shop. But, you know, very, very useful for you want to connect different displays. So good for any of our SPI displays up to 240 by 320. But also many of e-ink displays, our e-ink displays have this connector as well. So also, if you just happen to want to bring those pins out and then connect them to some other device for some reason, we have a breakout for this cable. So you can have it onto the breakout and then have the GPIO far away. So this is just mixed from very tidy wiring, much nicer. You also, of course, have the kernel console show up here if you wanted like a terminal display or you wanted X to display on it. Very low resolution, but you could do it. You know, a lot of people want to use our displays, but not necessarily have them mounted directly on the Raspberry Pi. They want them elsewhere. And this makes it very easy to do so. So you just mount it wherever you like. And that is new products for this week. Okay. Don't forget the coupon, Cirque Pi Day. Post your questions up in Discord. I have a few lined up, but we're going to do top secret now and then we're going to bounce the questions. Let's go to what's secret in you. Okay. So we're going to play one, two videos, and then we're going to talk about a couple of them on the other side. The top secret has even more top secret. Get even more secret. It's a word now. Okay. Pearlie, what is this? I'm fixing a tester. I got notice from the test prep team that this tester wasn't passing. This should be beeping. If you look at the test output, it says it couldn't find the HTT 20, even though it finds the I squared C address or something's wrong with the code. Something changed in the chip, which happens once in a while. But what's neat is my driver uses bus IO, which means that I have a layer for I squared C. If I want to debug what's going on instead of like going to the driver and adding all these printfs and like, I don't know, hooking up stuff, I don't have to. I just recompile and upload. I just give it a second. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. And then once it uploads, it gives me debug output. Let me scroll it. So on the serial port, it'll not tell me where it failed to send. So there's a new, there's a Calibri command that is, if you look to the right here, it doesn't succeed in sending this I squared C command. So this is kind of a secret command. Something must have changed into it. So I'll probably just comment it out for now so you can pass test at the library and look at the documentation to see what's different. What happens with sensors that don't have amazing documentation? These are my two ICN 6211 DSI to TTL display breakouts. This is the Rev V. Even though it says A on it, ignore that. It's Rev V. DSI connector in and then you've got the TFT display out. This is square and this says TTL. That's because there are actually kind of two standards-ish for displays. So this is like your standard TTL display. You know, it always kind of looks like this with this little like L-shaped connector over here. But I've got some other cool displays and these all weird shape displays have a different 40 pins to standard. So this is a 2.1 inch with capacitive and you can see on the back. It's got like a bezel. This big one is a, this is interesting. I'll have you back up a little bit. There's a 4 inch round, a nice big 4 inch round and then this is a half round. It's like a car gauge or something. This one doesn't have a touch and this one does have touch and then 4 inch square with touch, 4 inch square without touch. I think this is 3.4 inch square with touch screen. Let's see the touch screen over here and then these kind of funky bar displays. So like these are 960 by 120 or 960 by 300 or so. This one has capacitive touch. You can see this one is the same size but without the capacitive touch. Yeah, there you go. And this one, and you're wondering like, wow, you know, this looks so familiar. What shape does this remind you of? Yeah, that's right. It's a five and a quarter inch floppy, almost exactly the same size, same height. So some cool funky displays and big stepper motor there. Yeah. So we're going to do it. It's coming. Yeah. Well, the other fun thing is you could have this, the screen come out of the drive too. So you, so when we thought of this but then also someone mentioned this on the socials, they're like, oh, you can have the screen sticking out and show what floppy you're in. Yeah, we did that floppy disk, the 3D printed floppy disk, but it can make it for real. For all those screens, this is something we just showed off on. I just designed this today. While we were watching the screen, hot off the press. Yeah. So what is this? So I have to, the thing about these displays is that you need to program them over SPI to configure them and then you can do the TTL. And so there is a little bit of this like fast iteration that you need to do. Each display has slightly different, I'm sure, slightly different configurations. And so to test it out and or maybe have this as a product, the ESP32 S3 can drive these displays natively and then with a peripheral and then Jepler I've tasked him to add a circuit python. So then I can use circuit python to quickly like program in the display and test the configurations and then draw onto it and then have it be in display and then we'll also backport it to Arduino. It's just tough because there's not a lot of spare pins, 16 color GPIO and then four control pins and then two for the crutch and then one for the IRQ and then the backlight adds it very quickly. So I have a couple ideas, maybe I can save a couple pins. I have the original dev board too, I can show what this looks like. Yeah, this is the official dev board from Expressif with the ESP32 S3 and then this is a square display and then this plugs in. What I actually kind of like, the reason I got this dev board is I can actually, I might be able to use it, except for it uses a GPIO expander, which is kind of weird but like this. So this is the connector here. You see the capacitive touch bonded on like these. It's, this is all pin compatible pretty much and then this goes to this 2x20 connector that goes here and this is your ESP32 S3, the TFT driver, there's I2S amplifier and microphone here and I think this is the GPIO expander. So they use a GPIO expander to do the SPI programming. So it's a little more complicated than I thought. I was kind of hoping that they would have just the pins available but no. So I'll figure out how to do that. But this is a kind of a neat demo. What's nice is that I can still use this for hardware and I probably should support the TCA955 as the expander. So this is their touch demo, which is kind of nice and then this is like a little neopixel selector here. It can select the color and then you can do the brightness. Bright, not so bright. Bright, not so bright. And then there's this other configuration and then you can, this is I think it's LVGL. Yeah. It does make a configuration so you can set up the Wi-Fi. It has a clock and it uses Wi-Fi to get the type. Hey, that's the type. Anyway, so that's the, that's some stuff. I just got this today. So I might get this programming and then I'll order these PCBs. This will be like without the expander, very much easier. I mentioned this before and not going to name and shame or anything but there's websites that sell all sorts of weird different displays and they just don't work and people get them and they're angry and they don't, they don't, you know, like we couldn't do that and we wouldn't do that. So we wanted to, what like, why has it made fruit out around this place? We want to do it right. But last up, let's talk about something wrong. So this is a fun, this is a fun board that I think the folks who don't know why this is needed got unnecessarily angry because it's like why are there two USB-C's touching each other? It's like the mashed potatoes and the mashable touches. Yeah, well it's like why, like it's like on a plate, like why are these two things touching? But what is it, what is this and why does it freak people out to say it? Well, I mean, like it's weird. You're not supposed to, you are not supposed to only do this, but this is just a problem that already exists. Nobody called me out for my working for a dream joke. So this solves the problem of some devices. Someone, someone did the gift that says I understand the reference. There's a gift for that. Okay. Who knows? So the USB-C has these resistors that are on the CC lines. And you're supposed to have these 5.1K resistors that tell the power delivery, the laptop or the power supply to give it five volts, one amp. And some devices don't look for the resistor. They just always put out five volts. And so there's no like configuration and they're like, hey, it's five volts out and you're happy. But some devices that we have don't have those resistors. And so when you plug them into a proper USB PD device, such as a MacBook or a Mac power supply or good quality, this USB power supply you have here, this is like a proper PD power supply. They don't, they just doesn't work. And you're like, is my cable bad? And it's like, no, people like to save 0.004 cents. Congratulations. And then put their resistors on. But you can't do anything about that. And the reason they didn't, we noticed it didn't work because they used a USB A to C adapter. And inside that, the USB PD isn't used because it just gets five volts from the USB A, which doesn't have power delivery negotiation. And so this basically has the two USB connectors and everything is connected through except for the CC lines. The CC lines are brought out and connected to separate 5.1K resistors. And so each side is going to see as if there's like USB like 5.1, you know, K resistors on it. And so you'll still need a cable. But then if you put that in line, it'll solve the problem of like, why does it not work? And I wanted to have one be a plug, but I couldn't find any good surface mount, mechanically strong surface mount plug connectors, like they all needed to be in a case. Yeah. So some folks got in an argument in like the YouTube comments, I just turned off the comments on that particular video. That's because they were they were being mean to each other. And then someone's like, well, it's Adafruit's fault. The USB C spec is messed up. It's like, no, it's not. Like, it's really not. So I just people couldn't get along. So I just turn. Wow, really? Like, no, it was like a full on like hate thread. Were they angry at the USB C spec? Yes. They're like, this shouldn't be needed. And it's like, if you know, if they would have the same, like it just went on and on. Look, I mean, I agree that like, they clearly wasn't. Things didn't work out. It didn't really work out. But you even that Nintendo switch to had them wrong the first way. Yeah, I think I may help you things got it right the first time. I think when people think about like USB C and power cables and power supplies, it's because it's such an intimate thing. It's in their homes and they're just reminded every day in some way that it's like that's my thing. You're my alarm clock doesn't work. It's like, oh, and they just want to blame someone. Anyways, that starts off secretly. Okay, we're going to do some questions. I have some lined up. I'll answer this one right away. Yeah, we absolutely were not consulted for the USB C spec. You know, I actually think they should consult more. I think she'd actually be a good person. You know, it's interesting. Actually, every time we post about USB specifications, people lose their shit. Because remember, we would post about the Mindy Boost, yeah, the resistor spec, and we're like, hey, there's a secret resistor ladder that if you connect to the data lines, you can charge iPod iPhone devices at 500 milliamps. And everyone got so mad at me. And I'm like, look, it's like under NDA, but I reverse engineered like, you know, some Griffin, like iPod charger thing. And I was like, oh, this is the, it was like 75 K and 49 K resistors. And if you put those on the data lines, it sets the charge rate because like PD, USB C PD didn't exist yet. And I remember people were like, so mad at me. And they're like, you can't do that. And I'm like, I did not invent this system. I am only documenting that exists. We're the weirdo independent company hacker artists, manufacturers that like to have weird hardware. So we make weird hardware sometimes that kind of solve the problem that someone else made. Anyways, here's some of the questions. Do you by chance know what the wooden box of GP's ambient sound machine is called? I didn't know. But then someone in the chat said it's built around the idea. Mope. Mope. Mope. Mope. Mope. Mope. Mope. Mope. Mope. Mope. Mope. Mope. Mope. For the screens, which ones have touch? It's a top secret. Yeah, I mean, like half, most of them can come with touch. I guess. Both can. With or without. The only one that did not come with touch and had no, no possibility to come with touch was the gauge. That makes sense. Which makes sense. Yeah. It's a car gauge. Why would you? You won't be touching a car gauge. It's only for display. The rest of them all could come with touch. But I'll say that, you know, when you add capacitive touch, it's like an extra couple of blocks. It is not cheap. Resistive touch is basically free, but capacitive touch is not. But I think also this bar display didn't come with touch. But the round ones and the square ones did. Yeah, I'll get to the one question. But someone mentioned with the specs and stuff like NDAs are normally in place and people can't talk about stuff and all that. A little maker biz thing. So Adafruit gets asked to sign NDAs with chip manufacturers and people all the time. And it turns out you can negotiate with those. I think one not too long ago example was Arduino was sending out the new Uno R4 and they sent out there. They got funded by Renaissance, a bigger company. So I think they had chips on there. They had an NDA that went along with it. If you wanted to just get it, it was going to be released anyways. So I just sent back an edit. I'm like, hey, sometimes the time period on these things don't make sense. It'll say like seven years or 10 years. And I know it doesn't really matter, but it kind of does. We should be realistic. We're never going to have something in technology seven years. Like seven years is such a long period away. So what's happened is usually when I write back and I'm like, hey, here's our standard NDA or it's very limited. It's just like, hey, we're working on this. You say it's going to be released in a month. So that's as long as we're going to deal with making sure that nothing leaks out or like whatever. Generally, we don't have to do NDAs because we do open source and everything. When we do, we ask for an edit and so far it's worked out. They're just like, okay, you're right. Like the lawyers on the other side are like, oh yeah, we've had this for 10 years. Anyways, maybe this is the last question I will see. Question regarding the fake deep sleep connected to serial. How do I prevent value error? No, iSquared C device at address 0x52 only happens when updating code between time underscore alarm sleep. Could be a bug. It could be also that your device got depowered and repowered and it takes a few seconds for it to show up on the iSquared C bus. So add a couple delays. And take a look at your SDA and SCL lines. Make sure that they're not getting pulled low. Like maybe in your sleep you're pulling those pins low and you're confusing the iSquared C device. That's kind of the only thing that should cause it. I think it's going to be a bug in Circuit Python. You can post and help with Circuit Python and maybe somebody has some suggestions. And those are our questions for tonight. Thank you so much everybody for joining us. Don't forget to code. Circuit Python. Thank you. Thank you everyone for a fantastic Circuit Python day 2023. We will be doing another one next year in August. We'll try to find the snakiest numbers. We like to have like the 18th. I think this is like the third Friday or something. It's usually 8 or 18. Yeah we like to have snaky numbers. 8 was the first one. Yeah. This has been 8 fruit production. Thank you so much everybody. We'll see everybody next week. Here is your moment of zener. Bye. Bye. Have a great night.