 And welcome to Desk of Lady Aida. Hey everybody, and welcome to Desk of Lady Aida. Thanks for hanging out with us. Last week we had a long weekend, so we took a little break. We just did the great search later, but we're back at our desk and we're doing electronics and I still have a little bit of allergies. So if I sniffled, I apologize ahead of time. Okay, so let's see what's going on my desk. Well, I thought we would, first off, we have a bunch of samples, it's Sample Sunday. So I thought we could, well first off, we went, we did do some fun stuff. On Saturday morning, we went to this event by the New York Transit Museum. They run a 100 plus old train around a loop in Manhattan. So we went on that, we're gonna post some photos pretty soon. These are the low voltage cars. Low voltage, 32 volts, which is quite low compared to what it used to be, 600 volts. Could you imagine the entire control inside the car is running at 600 volts? So if one wire comes loose, well, it was nice knowing ya. Get in the conductor. So these were running between 1917 and 1964 and there was old advertisements inside there during post pandemic for part of it, prohibition, other parts, so definitely really neat if you like trains and transportation tech from back in the day. And they ran this thing fast. It went faster than a regular subway. Yeah, it was fast. We went on the express track and we went all the way up to, the Bronx think we went up to 210th Street or so and then the train turned around back and came back. It was very relaxing. It was so calming. It sounded, like I like the sound of the train. He said that the train itself was very, it wasn't as squeaky. It was kind of like this little wobbling. Well, it's a different sound. Like if you take this, you know, we're New Yorkers who are in the subway and it has a different sound than like kind of like hollow aluminum. It's more like solid steel. The whole thing is different. It's a different scream. Heavy as hell, made by the Pullman company. It is definitely like everything is steel, right? There's no plastic, obviously. It's steel and the seats are woven. Maybe the seats were plastic, but you know, the woven plastic, but everything else was... Bakelite. Bakelite and steel. Okay, so let's do some samples and some research. All right, so maybe people can help me decide if this stuff is cool. No, I mean, it's all cool. This is from Elkai. They make a really, really beautiful cat lamp. So they have great silkscreen design. So here's, I think, the two people who run it. And recently we booked an order for their cat lamps and they're like, oh, can we send you some samples? So I thought that these were really cool. I mean, this silkscreen work, the PCB work is beautiful. I always love to see people make kits that are just, there's something you want to keep after you make it, you want to show it off. So this one, just look at that beautiful coloring. The blue and the purple and the gold. This is a DIY solder kit. So on the back, it's got a battery holder switch and it looks like probably an RGB LED for this space person, soldering kit. And it comes with the battery, the switch, the battery holder and the LED space girl. Sorry, this is, this is space girl. What do you think? What do the people think? You think this is something we should stock? Well, of course. Yes, space girl passes. I mean, this is very cool. Okay, next up is biology girl. And this one has more green and blue. I really love the green and blue. It's cool that they figured out how to get multiple colors of solder mask on there. It's not easy. Looks like they have a good friend in their manufacturing house. You can see like the leaves of this plant are green, but the background of the sky with the stars is blue. So this is biology girl also. Got the same schematic, two LEDs, battery. Looks like the LEDs are for the stars, battery and switch and a badge pin. So what do you think? Do you want to stock biology? Yes, again. Yes. Cool. All right, that's how we do it here. We don't have a legal or marketing department. It's just us. Yes, the community is our team of influencers. Hit like, subscribe, smash that button. All right, so hopefully people like these kits and now you know we're going to stock these. So we're going to contact Elkai to get these in the store. I'm going to put these back. I have to be a little careful because we want to photograph these. One of the things that we really like doing is we photograph the products and kits and then oftentimes the maker gets to use those photos and images and animations. That's our policy. Yep, we love doing that. So they also sent us some cool stickers. Looks like they've got an Etsy shop. So don't wait if you want to carry this stuff or sorry if you want to order this stuff. You can book it there. Don't know if I would carry the sticker sheets. Sticker sheets are really cool. I think I'm going to stick to the soldering stuff for now. So that's some, and then here's the real secret of how I run my life. When I approve samples, they go on the floor next to my desk. That's right. Floor of Lady Eight is a new show that we're going to be doing soon. Okay, next up you wanted us to get some samples of these cool, I mean it wasn't for Pride Month but heck it's Pride Month. Why not get rainbow-y? These really cool Hex Ranch kits that have rainbow colors. So this one's a little bit more expensive and nicer but it's also heavier and it has the ball ends and it's chromed. This one is more compact. They're both pretty nice. They're both metric which is pretty standard. You're going to get your metric. Maybe I can get Imperial later. I don't know, which one did you say you like the most? Do you like the silver one a little bit more? Yep. Yeah, okay, all right. So this one wins. You know, we don't sell a ton of tools but we did like the cool look of this rainbow kit. So what's neat is the rejected sample, this one I'll just use here at my desk literally for when I have to take apart stuff. It's always good to have an extra kit or I'll bring it to the office and folks in facilities can use it. So that's another sample. Look at us, let me do the samples. Okay. Next up, you also requested this. You sent me a link to something similar. This is a kit that is like an adapter pack but it's like all of the adapters. Every adapter. And they adapt from the standard 5.5 slash 2.1 millimeter. And the reason this is useful is that we got those samples of the USB-C PD cables that can generate like 20 volts, 12 volts, whatever. So it'd be handy to have like all the different adapters that could go with it as well. So this is, you know, a couple of bucks. But it's got all the weird ones. Like, you know, this is like the Dell laptop, whatever. So what's interesting is that with a really good USB PD power supply, which I think we should also stock, you know, now that we can probably get one that's USB-C, you know, you have a USB-C plug-in, you can plug in, you know, any cable to it, can generate up to 20 volts, three amps and then you can have it charge your laptop, especially if you can't get old laptop adapters anymore. Like I know that I'm sure there's a market for them but why not just upgrade to USB-C? So you have the USB-C PD cable that goes to 2.5 millimeter and then you, you know, plug in this weird ass thing and then like your old ThinkPad or whatever. Or, you know, you have like these also, like these teeny adapters. And this is of course terrifying. You should, I don't, I don't really believe that, I'm a strong believer in like, if you have a connector, that connector should indicate the use case of the connector. So like this means audio. This does not mean a microphone, it does not mean power but I know that there are some products that have used 2.5 millimeter or 3.5 millimeter mono audio jacks as power. Anyways, total nightmare. I don't think it's a good idea but I understand that we live in a world where that's happened. So what do people think? You think this is something we should stock? Okay. All right, cool. This also got this weird ass. Look at this like nightmare. It's like rectangular but there's a pin in the middle. Let's go just break right off. All right. So this is also approved. That can be handy. It's like you have to repair something and you can USB-Cify it. Or you can use it with, you know, one of our, we also have those adjustable DC power supplies. Here. Okay. And then last but not least, God, I don't know. I've been trying to get these samples for like literally two years and the sales rep at top up. This is the company that makes these parts. Finally got back to us. So this is neat. This is a translucent rotary encoder. So you can actually see the knob itself is translucent but it's got a D-shaft that's your standard D-shaft and it's got in, you know, the D-tents. So it's got 24 D-tents and what I wanted was the ones you can get ones that have the RGB LED built in but I actually don't like that. I prefer this because then we can use our reverse Mount Neopixel underneath and you can use that to light it up because it's gonna be a lot brighter than the built in LED. I've noticed a lot of people say like, oh, you know, the rotary encoders that have the built in RGB LED. First off, there's a shit ton of pans. And second, you know, now you have to PWM it when you could just use a Neopixel which, you know, almost everything supports these days. Anyways, if you have PWM3 channel support you probably have a Neopixel support. And third, Neopixels are bright as heck. Like you're gonna get much better color in my opinion than the built in especially if you're running off of 3.3 volts. So these are finally, I got these samples but they seem good. I like that they have the D-tents and I like that they use a D-shaft and then I got a matching sample of knobs and they said, oh, you know, we don't have the translucent knobs and these knobs are black so you're probably like, this doesn't make a lot of sense and it doesn't but it's only for fit. But yeah, nice fit, nice feel. Here, why don't you, why don't you twist? What do you think? That's nice. That's nice, right? That's nice. That's nice. It's, you know, the knob fits on solidly, doesn't interfere. And a nice twist, I like the D-tent feel. I'm very picky about my rotary encoder D-tent feel. Note that it doesn't have a switch. That's the one thing. If you get the translucent type, it doesn't have a switch but still I think worth it, you know, put this on a stem of board and then you've got your RGB rotary encoder. So I think these are also a go and I'll get these with the translucent plastic. There is a silicone shortage but you know, you can still get rotary encoders. So that's my sample set so far. That's all my samples. Hopefully people like that. Okay, let's hop off to the grid search. Oh, let's do some questions real quick. Yeah, and they can also be true of that. Yeah, so here is, are we gonna carry clear knobs too? Yes, the sample is just not clear because they're like, this is the sample we have. If only parts are available for popular boards ended up being BGA, would you figure out how to re-spin boards to use them? Yeah, we actually do use a couple parts that are BGA now. The LC 709, which we originally liked in a very fun DFN format, only available in BGA or CSP. And we use it. You know, I'm not a huge fan of BGA because it's harder to rework obviously but our picking plays can absolutely do it. Obviously, it's not that hard to design with BGA. And there's especially ones that are wide pin pitch, 0.6, 0.8 millimeter BGA is actually, in some cases a little easier to design for than some really tight QFNs. I mean, we've got plenty of 0.4 millimeter QFNs and those are a little irritating. So yeah, but you can't get those chips in BGA either. So it doesn't matter. Is there a circuit Python plan for the new Feather ESP32 S3 board? We do have circuit Python for it. I think we just merged. I mean, you have to get the absolute latest but we have a build for it. S3 support I'll say is a little bit early. There's a couple bugs. I squared C is a little bit flaky but I just tested the Feather 4 megabytes flash, 2 megabyte PSRM and I did a wifi test and connected to A4dio and sensor data and it worked fine. It definitely works. Let's go to the knobs there. Can you change the polarity and do they have a switched version? There's no switched version. Okay. Let's do the grade search, ready? Let's do it. The grade search brought to you by DigiKey. Thanks DigiKey. And Adafruit, every single week, LaData uses their powers of engineering to find the things that you need. That's right, you. On digikey.com, LaData, what is the grade search this week? Okay, so this week I'm experimenting with ultrasonic sensors. I wanted to make a stem of board with a single ultrasonic transceiver on it that can be used for distant sensing. And so let's go to the computer because I'll show you what people got and I'll show you what I want. Okay, so a lot of times when people think about ultrasonic distant sensors, they think of something like this. It has a transmitter, it has a receiver. It sends, you know, a pulse out and then it gets the bounce back ultrasonic signal on the other one. So like usually this is, you can see here there's T and then this is R, transmit, receive. And then on the back, there's a little chip. In this case, it's the RCWL. It's an off the shelf, all in one chip, which is great, but there are some situations where you might want something slightly different. One, you know, you're kind of stuck with whatever transceivers they picked here. So maybe the range and the cone isn't what exactly you want. Second, this chip uses the pulse trigger technique and that's all good and everything. But, you know, if you want something like I squared C, it's gonna be, you know, tough to get out of this. There is an I squared C mode here, but it's not a great I squared C mode. So it would be really cool if we could basically do the ultrasonic transmit, receive all on one microcontroller because there's no reason why like an everyday microcontroller couldn't do that kind of sensing. And second, I do wanna see if I can make it use a single transceiver. It's a little bit more challenging because you have to kind of flip around some pins, but, you know, we, I've seen ultrasonic sensors that have only one transceiver like the Maxbotics and I know that they work quite well. And we've stocked these for easily a decade. So, you know, I know it's possible. I know you don't need like the very latest technology. Like they may have an ASIC, I'm not sure. But, you know, looking around, it seems like there is some code examples as long as your transmitter is okay for transceiving. You know, it can get out of transmit mode and start listening to signals on receive. You know, there's no real reason why you can't do it with one. You know, on the other hand, I know of a backup. You know, if I really absolutely need to, I always have this style as a backup. You know, this is like a very simple schematic on the back. You know, there's really, it's just like one SOIC chip. So, you know, tacking on a microcontroller to do I squared C or, you know, some of the conversion wouldn't be too hard. You can have a little backpack that goes on this. No biggie, basically. So, I always have a backup but I thought it would be interesting to explore. And, you know, I found, you know, there's an app note here on using a pic. In this case, it does, you know, one receiver and one transmitter, but again, I think that, you know, you can switch between the two modes. You know, here's from Carrie Wong. It says 10 years ago, an example of also using a transmitter receiver and doing it with a microcontroller. So, not using a specialty chip. In this case, they just used an H bridge so they could get like a differential, a strong differential signal. And then they used a dual op amp to do some band pass filtering and then, you know, some chunky magnification. Looks like two gain stages with some filtration at the same time to read the signal in and turn it, you know, read it on Arduino and then they made their own ultrasonic sensor. So there's like, oh yeah, you know, we got this working not too badly. And then also, you know, I found this cool teardown. Similar, there's, you know, a transmitter and then there's a receiver with a dual gain amplifier with a little bit of filtering in it. And this one uses a single transceiver as well. So it switches between transmit and receive mode. So, you know, I'm thinking that this design isn't too impossible. So what I need to find now is go to Digikey and find myself a transceiver. Find myself this 40 kilohertz ultrasonic transmitter slash receiver element that then I can purchase and experiment with. And I know that I can, you know, get a good quality reliable transceiver from Digikey to verify my design. Like if I buy something on eBay, it's like, who knows what, you know, you buy components. It's like, they say the transceiver, but it's not. They just took a transmitter and then like just scratched off the tee or something. I don't do that. I wanna get something that's like the real deal. So let's go to Digikey and I'm going to look for ultrasonic. And then I'll look for the, I don't know if it's, it's not actually called a transceiver necessarily. So notice that there's a couple, if you search for ultrasonic, you can of course just get the sensors themselves. So this is like, you know, they're ready to go sensors and you can see here, here's another example. This is a single ultrasonic, you know, one transceiver, transmit and receive in one. I like the look of these. They're like, they're kind of small. I feel like you can fit them in more places. But there's a lot of examples of, you know, you can see here, there's some two elements. This is short range. So maybe, you know, if you want, because of there's this echo effect that occurs, having two elements might be better for short range sensing. But yeah, it could be good. All right, so we got that, but we don't want the full proximity sensor. What we want is the raw module itself like the, you know, I don't want the board. I want like this thing, the actual like black spherical component, your tubular component. Okay, so here, I got, when I got here, it's actually kind of mixed. You know, there's a bunch of ready to go ultrasonic sensors and individual elements as well. So that's something, you know, that got a little bit mixed up. So what I did here, because you know, you can, you know, there's this parallax sensor. Now this was made in 2010. These are, they've been making parallel, parallax has been making ultrasonic sensors for a while. But what I want is like this. So what I ended up doing, this is unusual, but I actually filtered by manufacturer. So like I took out like Adafruit, me, because I know that we don't sell that module. And I took out parallax because it's like they're selling the ping sensor. And I took out SparkFun and I took out Maxbotics because they're reselling the Maxbotics sensors. And when I did that, I actually got rid of like a lot of parts and I got to only like the individual components, which is what I want. Like I want, I want this stuff, the raw stuff. So now that I've got that, now I can do my standard filtering. So I'm going to look for active and for type. You know, I want transmitter and receiver. And I don't know what this dash is. So I'll just include it cause no harm. And then, yeah, I've got a whole bunch of options. I mean, I think a lot of these are like DFRobot, these are modules as well. So I think I will. Yeah, so there's, they have a bunch of like ultrasonic sensors. So what I'll do is I will likewise filter, filter out DFRobot. Okay, so now we've got 25. Okay, I actually have a shot now of being able to review these. So there's not a ton and like I, some of these are like on wires and some of them are kind of chunky. So let's go by price. And I got some good options here. So it looks like there's some metal ones. All these are called transceiver. So that's really good. And then I want about 40 kilohertz. These are all about 40 kilohertz. Oh, not that a lot of them, you know, they're rated for extremely high voltages. Like you're, you know, you're expected to drive these at easily 10, 20 volts. So oftentimes designs will have a doublers, like voltage doublers, like a max 232 to get the voltage much higher, where you have a boost converter and then use that to drive the transceiver. But all these look good. And I think, you know, all of these ones up here looked pretty reasonable, the Kui ones. And I looked at the, I think the 18 and 15 is the diameter. So I looked at the data sheets and, you know, basically they tell you how far they can do ultrasonic sensing. So this says 15 meters. So that's cool. And then let's look at this one. This one's 18 meters. So it's, I think there's like a trade-off. It's like how sensitive versus the range and also how big it is. So this one I think is, oh, I see the 18 is the 18 meters. Okay, so 15 is 15 meters. So you're gonna pay a little bit more for more range, but that said, I kind of went with the one that they had the most stock of to start, just to get a couple samples of, because I felt like this was promising. And here's another thing. I'm actually kind of tempted to contact CUI and just say, like, do you have an eval board or an eval schematic that I can borrow, take a look at, because for that amplification filter section with the dual off-amp, they might have something that they're like, hey, we've already tuned it for this transceiver. And so we're gonna know like, how loud the signal is gonna be, or like, sorry, the voltage, and then also what, like what resonance it's going to like being at. So I'm gonna order some of these. It's interesting, these are kind of recent. These only made a few years ago, or at least this data sheet was only made a few years ago in 2020. But this looks like perfect. Otherwise, it's exactly what it should look like. And it's designed to be a transmitter receiver and it lands at 40 kilohertz. And it's designed for distant sensing, up to 18 meters. So, check it out. I mean, I'm gonna see if I can get this thing working based on those online schematics and see if I can make it the cutest little transceiver in the world. All right, and that is the great search. Yay. Search with DJ. Okay, so last question, and then we're gonna bounce you over. Yeah. Is there a way to display video on a feather TFT using Circuit Python? You can't do video, but you can do animations, which people do. They usually have sprites. We also have a GIF player that we just did on the feather RP2040 with a attached TFT display. So, it's not a movie, it's an animated GIF, but it's still video-ish. And then I know that the ESP32-S3, somebody did a little demo of playing video, but the video had to be converted into a special format. And it was very tuned and the SD card had to be set up just right. So, it's not like you can play an MP4. For that, you really need to have a full Linux computer. Okay. And that is the desk of lead in. We'll see y'all during the week. Thanks, everybody.