 and welcome to Lady Aida. Hey everybody and welcome to Desk of Lady Aida. We've got a couple things to show off today. We've got a little bit of mail bag and we've got this funky thing that Mr. Lady Aida got for me. But first up, is there any news or updates you want to let people know? Nope, full speed ahead. Take it away, Desk of Lady Aida. Okay, let's go to the overhead. Okay, so first up you've got this like. Yeah, it was some weird like. Yeah, I collect pink PCBs and this is one that arrived in the mail. Yeah. And it's an open source hardware logo. It's called RGB Duino Uno. I wonder if the files are actually happening. Well, I don't believe so. Yeah. And it shows up as like an Arduino and Arduino IDE. Yeah, it's got like a standard USB serial converter. It's also, it got some extras. It's got like an on off switch or like some switch. It's got an extra button. It's got, looks like, you know, pin protection on some GPIO or something. It's wider than most Arduinos. That's something to watch out for. Two neopixels, it looks like an old buzzer. So. Yeah, this one's going in the Arduino museum that I have of all sorts of weird Arduinos. This is like the demo, so it kind of does some stuff. That's cool. Oh, it looks like there's LEDs over here. Yeah, look at that. Yeah, I don't know what's up with that. And then this is, this is, you know, looks like it's got a demo. Anyways, funky. I like, you know, the silkscreen's interesting. It's like, how do you, how do you do this kind of detailed silkscreen is kind of neat. So, I don't know. So that'll be part of the Arduino museum. Yeah. It is now added to the collection. You like to collect the weird ones, for sure. All right, next up is, you got this baseball 2001. What's the story with this? So this is when we were on a good track on what the internet was gonna be and what computing could be. So this was an input device that you often use for like 3D modeling and more. I saw this probably in a lot of like 90s movies, but this was, it's haptic-ish. So, you know, when you hold the ball and move it around, that would rotate models in space and more. And then you had these like quick keys up the top and you know, turn it over to the side, if you want. You know, it's beautiful. Like this is definitely when you're doing things like the Lawnmower Man, you know, prop crew. It definitely looks like something out of that. So, we took some photos of it because we wanted to have our gallery of interesting input devices. But then I said, hey, Lady Aida, could you get this to work with like a regular computer, like a modern computer? Yeah. And we were testing some samples and doing some other things. And you said, yeah, a matter of fact, I can. Yeah, cause I had this sample that I got. This is a, this is a D9, this is a serial cause mice used to be serial only. And so I had a sample that's a USB-C to serial adapter cable and I was like, I'll have to test it anyways. And so, you know, why not test it with this? So this adapter plugs into the computer and it gives you a serial port, but then the output voltage is plus or minus six to 10 volts instead of like zero to three volts. Like most people are used to, you know, console cables like this. And this kind of console cable, you know, has power ground RX-TX and the voltage on the RX and TX lines is about three volts. Whereas the voltage, you know, the power is maybe, you know, three or five. Whereas on RS-232 serial, it's plus or minus and it's inverted. So it's like what would normally be, you know, a high level like 3.3 volts is actually negative six. So it's like inverted and it's also this, this, you know, wide voltage swing. And that's because, you know, this is a non-differential signal and this was meant to go long distances. And so to deal with the resistance of the cables, they would just have a really wide voltage range. And so like, you know, as the cable got farther and farther, it would shrink down, but it would still be, you know, plus or minus some voltage. And then, you know, there are people who made the, you know, they've sort of turned these, I guess there's a modern version. So this is the 2003, even though this was like a 1990s thing. And the 2003 version, like I said, it doesn't have USB, it has serial. And there's people who have written code that will convert this into like an HID device, but the code looks very complicated. So I want to start with just, can I read the data and what's the data format? So let's go to the computer. And then this is a nice document written by Labtech, I guess it's published by them or I don't know, I'm clear. And they published the protocol. And so it's RS232C, 9,600 BOD, 8, and 1. There is X on, X off flow control, but luckily I haven't seen it. I, you know, there's, I guess data's coming through the USB serial port fast enough because I, well, maybe it did happen but I just ended up dropping the data that doesn't pass the structure. And then there's packets and then there's like request packets. And basically you send data back and forth, binary data and there's a little bit of encoding. And for the most part you can, there's some data that's sent asynchronously. So when you press a button, a packet is sent. So it's actually a good way to test it as you press the little buttons at the top, data packet is sent. And then, you know, the other thing you can do is query it. You could ask it, which buttons are pressed and what is the location of the ball? And it will send you a packet in response. So, you know, it's, you kind of want to do both. I like to pull for the ball location and then I listen for asynchronous data to get the button presses. So I kind of went through, I didn't really read through all of this because this is kind of long. I just wanted to get like the basics going. There's also a buzzer inside that you can beep and there's like help and data packets and error packets. But basically they put together a quick script with PyCereal, which is like a great, you know, it's Python I find is really good for this kind of stuff where you're sending and receiving data and it can be binary if to pack it and unpack it. This is the binary mask for each button. So each button, you know, it sends back 16 bits of data and each pin, each bit indicates one button. There's nine buttons. There's eight at the top and there's one in the ball itself, which is kind of weird. There's like a little belly button on it. And I keep the track of the states and then I got a serial port. Lines are read all data packets and with a slash R or slash N. So that's really easy. You would knit by just telling it, hey, send me binary data. And then I just have a loop where I look for K packets, which is the button data or D packets. So I can, I'll uncomment the part where I actually show what is being read. And I can, is that readable? Yeah. Okay, yeah. So when you press a button, you see I'm getting these packets to start with K and the bits, the two characters afterwards are affected by which buttons I'm pressed. You know, I'm pressing, so if I press more buttons, oops, and I touched the ball, sorry. So if it's just the buttons, you get a K packet and then D packets are when you move the ball around so you can see it starts with a D and then it has two bytes of like timestamped data and then six sets of inch 16, two, two byte per data point for X, Y and Z. Oops, sorry, when I click, I forget that that pauses the output. And then you can see, you know, I'm parsing the data into the X, Y and Z and it always ends up with zero, zero. Like if you release it, always go back to zero, zero. So like that's another way you can test that you're getting the data right. But as I'm moving the ball, let me hold this up. As I'm moving it, data comes through and then I press buttons, I get button presses. So that's it. And pretty much it's the code's done. I mean, it's, again, there's existing projects out there that interface with the Spaceball 2003, but they're more complicated and they use like USB IP and it was like, it was kind of like a big thing and they try to implement the HID interface that can act as an HID device. But I think it'd be more interesting if this was connected to like a feather wing or something because we can make a Bluetooth version of this. The only other thing to watch out for is the, you know, there's this cable, which is serial and power and the power needs a 2.5 millimeter jack, not 2.1 millimeter FYI. All right. All right. Any questions or? No, I think we might put up a little video or if you want to toss the code up or something like that, we can do a little video. Yeah, I can toss the code up on a GIST or something. Okay. It's not like a whole thing, right? Yeah, yeah, let's do it. Let's do GIST so they can get the GIST of it. Okay. And then what's the, great search this question. So the great search is I wanted to make a feather wing that would connect to this. And so, oh wait, let's do a song and then we'll do it. Yeah. The great search retro by Lady Aida, Aida Rudidjiki, thank you so much Rudidjiki for supporting the great search. Lady Aida, use your powers of engineering every single week to show people how they can find things. Sometimes it's stuff in the middle of a project and you're like, oh, this would be a good great search. So this week is what? Okay, so this week, I'm working on integrating this Spaceball 2003, this 3D mouse thing. And it comes with a DE9 which has RS232 serial on it. And I realized that we don't have a breakout in the Adafruit shop where I don't have one that will convert TTL serial, like from an Arduino or circuit pipeline board, whatever, into RS232. So I thought, let's go to didjiki and see if we can find one that does that. So this is, just quickly, this is the protocol for the Spaceball 2003. And at the bottom, I think there's even a little pinout diagram. Maybe I'm confused. Maybe it was another document. Sorry, so this was only the protocol. But there is a pinout. Basically, it's plus minus six volts on the data line. And so I need to convert zero to three volts to negative six to six. So let's go to didjiki. And so what I want is an RS232, they're called transceivers, which I always misspell, since if I got it right. Yeah, not I before E. I guess it's except after C, that's true. So it's C-E-I-V-E-R-S. And so these are chips that will convert logic level to RS232 standard. And one of the nice things about these, I've been, you know, it's one of the first chips I actually used in school is that they'll also not only do the level conversion for you, but they'll do the level generation for you. So you don't have to provide them with that negative plus minus six to 10 volts. They'll generate that for you using a switch cap converter. So let's go to an active. And then we only want a transceiver. We don't want a driver receiver. We want both receiving and transmitting. Wow, there's an Apple talk converter, Tandy. Let's go with stuff that's only in stock and only sold by didjiki. Next question is how many drivers, receivers? So you'll see it's a transceiver, so it's positive. You know, in general, you want two, two. So you have RX and TX, that's one set. And then you have RTS and DTR both ways. So it's four total signals. But you know, I'm okay with more. So I'll go up to four, four driver transceivers. And then let's see. I want only surface mount because I want to be able to pick and place this. And next up is the voltage supply. Again, you know, some, there are some here you see that require you to provide it with that plus or minus seven volts or whatever, five volts. I don't want to do that. I want to run this off of three-volt logic. So I'm going to select only this and below. So only these because they will have support for three-volt power supply and logic like on the feather wings. Okay, so lots of options here, but let's do it by, you know, price. Cause why not? So let's put in, you know, quantity of 250. And then let's see what we've got. So the max to max three, two, three, two. So originally this was called the max two, 32, which is a classic transceiver. The max three, two, three, two, I think is the three-volt version. And you can see they're not very expensive and they come in a lot of different makers. So you see TI makes a max 32, 32, and so does max linear. They make an SB 32, 32. So, and there's a lot that are very similar. Like you'll see the SP and then there's another max. You know, Renaissance has an ICL 32, 32. So, and they're all pin compatible too. There's like 16 TSOP and 20 SOIC. So I have a couple options. So basically anytime you see the 32, 32, like, you know, down here there's one, these are good to go. So let's look at this one because this is nice and inexpensive. It's only 67 cents. We can look up the data sheet here, which I already pulled up. So this is a three-volt to 5.5 volt multi-channel RS232 driver and receiver. So yeah, it's got, you know, these simple buffers except there's two of each. So you get each direction, two sets. So RX and TX and then RTS and CTS. So flow control basically as well as data. And then it comes in a couple of different packages, all 16, you know, pins. And then there's this charge pump built in, which is quite handy. And so they mentioned it, you know, you'll need to add a couple of capacitors. There was one maximum chip I remember that I really liked using in school, back when I didn't have to worry about the price of things because the lab paid for chips. And I would use the one that had the built-in capacitors and it was like literally they would, it would just be a dip chip and inside they had the capacitors bonded into the chip. But, you know, for surface mount, if I'm gonna be pick and placing it, it's, you know, the chip was much, much more expensive. It was like $5. So again, you know, I have this one chip that would take with me from project to project because I didn't have to wire up these caps. But if you're making a product, you're probably happy to put the capacitors on and they even give you a little layout here. So you see there's two sets of, there's actually four capacitors you need or five if you include the VCC bypass. One doubles the voltage from three to six or from five to 10. And then the other one is an inverter. You can use a switch cap as an inverter and that gives you the negative voltage. And then the buffer is just powered by these, by these switch cap rail generators. As you can see here, what it looks like, you know, there's data in and then it gets converted from these little zero to three volt lines to this plus or minus red line. But these are, you know, these are very handy. This is going to a bread and butter chip. It's in stock. You know, if this particular model isn't available, there's always others. So while I haven't used this particular one, I have used the 232 series and they work really, really well for the job. So this is my pick for the great search. That's a great search. Okay, let's go to a few questions. Sure. First up, the question I'm curious about supervisor, I see how important is the threshold voltage I was using 2.5 volt one, but can't seem to find any, but I did order some 2.2 volt ones for a TFT controller without effect, things badly. I don't know. I mean, you're gonna have to try it and find out. Shouldn't matter too much. You know, a lot of supervisors have pretty long delays. As long as your power supply comes up pretty fast, you know, any cutoff is good. Okay. How does one use circuit pythons? You are to transmit with even parity. I can't seem to find what value to use in the parity argument for bus IO. Don't you work? Yeah, for that you might want to post in a circuit python discord, so I don't have it off. I don't know the top of my head. I don't know that we support even in every build. You know, we kind of focus on the one that, you know, what everyone uses, which is eight and one. I know seven E N comes up once in a while, but I haven't used it myself. Any plans for digital signal processing? You can't get DSP chips now. I don't know if you wanted them. There is that. That's true. Okay. Yeah, that's right. I'll do the great search, finding FPGAs. People keep asking me to find them FPGAs and I'm like, you can't. Yeah. So lots of folks seem to have had the space ball, and they were saying it'd be good for a space program controller, air traffic controller, simulations. Yeah, these are adorable. And then I guess how much, you know, was the version with the serial port cheaper than the USB version? I mean, originally these were very expensive. They were like over a thousand dollars. Yeah, this wasn't. This was just like an eBay fine. Yeah. I think I had a... I think I had a... Like a couple hundred bucks or something. I mean, you can still use them. Yeah. I think I had a RSS eBay feed and I just found one for like, here's a bunch of junk in a box. And I think it was one of them. Yeah. I don't know, it works, now we know. Yep. Okay. They're kind of indestructible to be honest. Yeah. So we'll put up a little video and probably the gist of someone to check out how we did that. Okay. We'll do that soon. And that is tonight's disk of data. All right, thanks everybody. Thanks everybody. We'll see you next week.