 Live from New York, it's Ask an Engineer. Hey everybody and welcome to Ask an Engineer. It's me Lady Aida with me, Mr. Lady Aida. Hello. And we're here at the Aidaford Factory in downtown Manhattan where we do all of that manufacturing that you just saw, the advanced manufacturing. It's here, it's happening. We're doing it. Electronics and goodies and more are all tested ship, manufactured ship videos, video tutorialized, coded and packaged and everything here. Some people are at home snoozing safely in their bed while we are going to do one hour of Ask an Engineer, the only and longest running live engineering show with advice at the end. We got tons of stuff including some it's not out yet, products, videos, retro, not quite ship shortage but close and more. Yeah, a little bit of everything tonight. It's like a bento box of delicious electronics and goodies. So let's take it off. What's the code? What's on tonight's show? Tonight's show, the code is... The code. The code. Yeah, it's going to get cold. It's going to get cold if you don't use the code. Multiplexer is the code, 10% off in the Aidaford store, all the way up to 159 p.m. or until I remember to turn off the code. We had some live shows, we'll talk about the show and tell, we just finished that up a few moments ago. We're going to do some time traveling, look around in World Makers, Hackers, Artists and Engineers, News and more, some events coming up, talk about those. Ship shortage, you know, sometimes we have new chip setter not available and then sometimes we have some repeat customers or not customers in our case. Talk about that tonight. Some retro tech, that's right. We have a lot of interesting photos that we're going to share from consumer electronic past, possible futures that never happened. From the mailbox, we'll read your letters to us, some Python on hardware news. Big news around the Pico W and also there's an event coming up, talk about that. We got some Maine New York City factory footage, Maine New York, some footage from around here. We've got some 3D printing, we've got Ion MPI this week. It is Sorkom, it's brought to you by DGQ. We've got new products, we've got Top Secret, we're going to answer your questions. We hang out on Discord, Aidaford.it slash Discord, that's where you want to be to ask questions towards the end. You can join all 35,000 of us any time 24-7, but towards the end of the show is when we answer questions. All that and more on, you guessed it, ask an engineer. Okay, lady Aida, so pay some bills, code is multiplexer, what did they get when they start loading up the car? We have the freebies all back. I know everyone was waiting for all the freebies, but $99 or more, you get a free, per-proto, half-sized breadboard, this lovely white PCB looks just like a breadboard, and it's great for taking your projects and making them permanent. We see them in guides all the time, so people post projects, it's like that's a per-proto. Make your projects permanent-ish. Yeah, and since it's a funnel freebie, put it in your desk drawer, you'll use it eventually. Yes. One 49 or more, you will still get a pink PCB KB2040, an RP2040-based mic controller board with cast-layed pads, USB-C, STEMQT, lots of flash memory, and it's ready to be used for all sorts of projects, not just keyboards, but it does do a very good job at keyboards. Also, a good pro-micro update, if you get pro-micros because there's no at-megas. We'll talk about that soon. We'll talk about that soon. $199 or more, free UPS ground shipping in the Contental United States, very handy if you want to make sure that your stuff gets there and has trackable insured shipping. We have the little... Do you want to go to the overhead? We'll show the little truck. Well, yeah. I was organizing some stuff. Your stuff and your truck. This is what you want. Yeah. This is actually a real... This is like a real... Yeah. If you pull it back. I don't know. You... Yay. Look at this. Okay. Anyways. Thank you. And then $299 or more, you get a circuit playground blue fruit. We're still out of the circuit playground express. See previous note about chip stomping available. We do have the NR-52-840, so this is a Bluetooth low energy circuit playground express. It's great. That's circuit playground shape board. It's got sensors and buttons and BLE works great with circuit python and Arduino. And there's even a little bit of make code support. Okay. And just a reminder, if you're looking to get Raspberry Pies, we usually do a drop on Wednesday, Thursday, sometimes Fridays. Make sure you have two-factor authentication. And I don't know if the folks that have been trying to get around stuff like this so they can sell things on eBay for exorbitant prices. But we found a person who was trying to buy lots of Raspberry Pies. They succeeded a couple of times, but we caught them. And now they can't buy Raspberry Pies, so that means there's... They can't buy nothing from us. So that means there's more Raspberry Pies for others. We're always looking out for you. Yeah. So, you know, we were debating today. Do we tell the person that, hey, you know, we caught what you were trying to do? Good try. Or do we just not tell them and just have them waste a bunch of time and be frustrated? I don't know what I'm going to do yet, but anyways, we're constantly updating our systems and more. There's automated tools. There's bots. There's a little bit of everything in everyone, trying to buy things that are scarce and then sell them for giant prices. We didn't raise our prices. We didn't do anything other than try to make it fair for all the makers out there who need Raspberry Pies for the project and other parts and more. So we will keep at it better luck next time, dude. Live shows. We're doing one right now. This is live. Yeah. It is. We had our live series of shows. Lots of things that we do each week. Show and Tell was just a few moments ago. Super fun. Yeah. Lots of keyboards. Yeah. Pumpkins. Yeah. Melissa showed off. They're all my favorite. But I think this week, the one that, because we're going to show a new Impager's video with the ear and we saw JP's keyboard, Mark had some pumpkin updates. So this week, my pick is Melissa's project. So one of the things that's really hard to convey to folks is like, what is this machine learning thing? Because it's a lot of nonsense. One of the projects and one of the demos that we have shows some of the fun capabilities and there's a lot of projects and it doesn't have to be connected to the internet because sometimes that stuff gets creepy. So this one is using our BrainCraft hat and now it's on Bullseye. Is that the name of the update to Raspberry Pi? Yeah. Basically 64-bit Bullseye is now supported. It's faster. So it's going to be a little faster. Yeah. And it's the latest Raspberry Pi. I mean, it's just, you know, Linux is what it is. Whenever there's an update and there's a lot of updates, things maybe stop working. And so we have to go back and readjust them. But Melissa got the latest version up and running again. Yeah. So one of the things you can do is load it up and you can, one of the things I like to is hold it up to like some Wikipedia pages of like animals will be like zebra and panda. And you can also show it at household objects and it'll recognize it. So watch the video and it's a really neat example of what machine learning can do and it doesn't have to be connected to the internet. That's kind of the whole point on the edge, as they say. And one of the things that we were talking about. I think it'd be kind of neat to put this in like a stuffed animal or something, like a teddy bear, because you can have the text pipe out and talk. And you can even have a little servo. Yeah. Do stuff. So anyways, you can make your own Teddy Rocks pen for those. Yeah. And we designed the BrainCraft. You know, I really thought about it, like what kind of projects would people want to do and make it so it's extensible. And we actually still have some in stock. And that goes with the make robot friend, not robot enemy vibe, which is what we're all about. Okay. So, we're going to start from the desk of Ladiata. On Sundays, we do the desk of Ladiata. We have part one and part two. What did you show off in part one this week? Okay. Oh, great. It was LCD's galore. It's a lot. It was a lot of TFTs. Yes. We got, you know, TFT prices have come back down to be a little bit more reasonable, which means that we got a lot of samples for TFT alternatives and some, like, passive touch versions of TFTs. And so we went through and we showed them off all the different sizes and interfaces and connection methods that are so popular with TFT displays, both small and up to, I think we had a 10-inch display, that's the largest one. Okay. And then we do the great search. And that's where Ladiata uses Repowering Engineering to help you. Yes, you find the parts that you need. What did you help people find this week? You know, it's funny. This was one that I didn't realize. I was like, I can't believe I haven't done this before. You know, all of our Raspberry Pi bonnets and, you know, hats use this standard 2x20 connector. And we really like the SMT version because we don't have to use a selective solder machine. It gets placed by hand or pick in place if it's on tape and reel. And then it goes through the oven. So it's a really great way of making accessories for the Raspberry Pi that are no solder. Like people can get them, they just plug them right in. And so I showed how to find them in stock at Digikey and we found a place, has a whole bunch of them. It does have little nubbins, but otherwise it's a good alternative if you want to make Raspberry Pi hats that are solder-free. And I think that's kind of the future. Like, people only like to solder. Okay. And then on Tuesdays we do GP's product pick of the week. Here is this week's sidelight. It is the TCA8418 keypad matrix driver and GPIO expander. Here's an example of using it with telephone style keypads. I decided to solder the board four columns and two of the row pins. And then the extra two I have running since they're on the other side of the board using wires there. But that gives you this sort of neat little keypad that you can use for different projects. I have it plugged in over I squared C into, this is our Trinkie and plug that into a USB hub. So we can imagine that's the side of your laptop or some other computer that you want to plug into. Now I have immediate access to this cute little keypad. So here I'm just going to put in a comment there and then you can see I can get 123A456B789C star zero pound D. It is the TCA8418 keypad matrix and GPIO breakout. Okay, and you can join JP's workshop tomorrow. Friday is deep dive with Tim, Friday is at 2 p.m. Where you get to learn all about the innards of Circuit Python and Tim's an excellent instructor so do check it out. And it's long form video and when you're learning to code it's very helpful and you can ask questions real time. All right, time travel. Here's when we take a look around past, present, future, we don't have a song for this yet. So there's the new Quantum Leap so maybe, you know, yeah, now you've got competition. You know, I ride or die for Bacula. You're a Bacula guy. No, you know, I think but you don't look enterprise. No, I don't. But you do like Quantum Leap. I did back when it came out when it was Bacula because they had a moral message and it also was trying to writing, writing some wrong. I think the latest Quantum Leap missed a huge opportunity, which is it could have like had 80s themes and 90s themes that could have been like, you know, they downloaded into like one of the quarries or, you know, it could have, it could have been every single like I've downloaded into, you know, any better. Like they could have really popped culture to it. They could have. That would have been neat. But I'm sure it's a nightmare with all the rights that you need. Like there's an old show WKRP in Cincinnati and I don't think they can play anymore because it used to be about radio and records and I don't think they can get clearances. I think not anymore. I think this is they're not valid. This is a problem. Anyways, see, that was like time traveling. So we're going to be figuring out if we're going to just bump Aida box the next round of them to 2023. We still have a little bit more time. We might try to get a holiday box up, but we'll let everyone know and this will be a time that we send an email if we do that. So anyway, we still have everyone signed up. We don't charge until we ship. And one of the things that we would be able to do is get to the ones sooner. So it's getting to the point where we can get like 5,000 of something. It's just hard to get it all at once and Aida box requires it all at once. So stay tuned. We'll know probably by the end of the month ish. But you know, in an ideal world, when we can get more things, we have a Halloween box and a, you know, holiday edition box. So what we're thinking is it might just end up being next year, all four boxes. But we'll see. We'll let you know. That's the update for that. So other time travel. This is kind of like a site update thing, but I don't know what to say. I put in time travel. So back in the day, I used to do vector graphics and our team was like, hey, we have videos on our site. Wouldn't it be cool if we did animated SVGs? So if you go to our website, that's an animated SVG and I zoom into it quite a bit. I wanted to do this as a screen captured it as a video because I just wanted to show like you can see how the the photos are pixelated. But the the animated the animation is and it's not a gift. It's not gigantic and it's not a movie. It's an animated SVG works across all browsers. We tried on a Raspberry Pi, tried on a bunch of different things and it worked. So I thought what I would do is go over and just show you on the website. And this is kind of like us trying to like just I know there's you know some websites have probably probably have done this. But I wanted to show that we're trying to push the boundaries of you know some of these new tech frameworks and more. So this is on our site right now. And you can see it's here and like do it do a page weight of it or just you know poke around and then you know here when you when you when you zoom in zoom in you can see how you can see this gets blurry. But then you know this day sharp and it also it stays the right size. It always re sizes because SVG. It's vector. Yeah I can. So I mean so anyhow check it out. It's kind of cool. We like this stuff. So we're playing around with that. Next up in time travel land Hackaday my old job. I have nothing to do with this right now. But so that's my disclaimer. Other than a different media sponsor for Supercon 6 it's in November. And we're going to be a media sponsor which means like we talk about it. And then we're going to send them some sponsorship money. And then we're going to send them something for the goodie bag I think. So it's the 2022 Hackaday Superconference. There's a lot of folks that we know that are going to be there. So check it out. And then we have a new a different learning system weekly update. And this week so every week when we do something really cool and interesting in the learning system or we pick a guide or something going on especially features we talk about it. So this week our favorite new guide was kind of busting the myth. We got to the bottom of this one on it was it possible to cheat in chess with a haptic device that would Morse code the chess moves to you. So immediately we got blamed for all the chess cheating and poker cheating. And also apparently like 30 hospital visits a month. Yeah. Because people think that. Yeah. So some of the gadget sites are like by the way if you were to insert this in yourself make sure there's a flan just like OK you know what no why do you guys always think about inserting everything. Why is there one a cop. Yeah. Anyways so. Anyhow. Don't insert any electronics in the learning system. Or eat them. Yeah. I don't want to put that as a banner across the entire side on everything. This is why like do you want to do you want to have that not for insertion or consumption. Yeah. So anyways you can check out some of the latest guides from the learning system and then when we add new features this is the the weekly place that you can figure it out. And we do have some cool new features coming on the learn system soon. So OK. Next up is everyone's favorite segment OK. So the current winner the weekly champion of not delivering chips to us is microchip sorry microchip. I mean. I'm not dunking. We are getting some but it is it is. There are some that they're they're they're they're leading the pack on consistently not not leading the pack. So here's the one that we're not going to get for two years. Sambi 51 the Sambi 51 G 19 two year lead time. This is getting a little bit ridiculous. But you know I saw this because I got a notice from them. We do have orders booked but what's interesting is many other chips that we were unable to get are are now available and it's I think interesting that the microchip chips especially like the Sambi 21 and 51 and some other components the lead times are still stretching out you know basically three years total from the beginning. So not sure what's going on there. Here's my question and suggestions. So wait I'm going to make a suggestion then I can ask you a question. So OK it says alternative product inventory I'm going to get to that in a second. But there wasn't any yet. But here's what I think at this point. I think microchip should you know they're on social media. They have all the same tools we all have to say like hey here's here's where the chips are going. Here's why it's two years away. Here's why they want to be really long at this point. So like yeah we all kind of like suffered through the last couple of years. It's coming up on like year three now. But at this point you know we're kind of getting chips from everybody else. So it would be interesting to know is like is it automotive because that's the first thing we heard. Is it something else. What is it. Well I mean there's some chips that have definitely got end of line because they're like look the fab isn't using this process anymore. I could get that. But this I don't I don't completely understand the two year like anything is OK. There's just no information. And so that's it. So just getting back to something it said this is my question for you lady as our public service. If you were designing something that used to use a Sam D what is these 51 50 ones if you're using a Sam D 51 in the past. What would you use instead right now. Well it's not a complete identical you know match up. But the RP 20 40 is the closest thing and it's it's doesn't have as many peripherals I mean the microchip Sam 51 has great peripherals. But this point you know you can pretty much get the ESP 32 and you can get you know family of chips and you can get the RP 20 40 STM 32 is even I'm starting to see I'm starting to see that the STMs are coming in I'm actually starting to see like STM that one. I would have said the STMs were going to be the ones that I thought they would I thought they would be the laggiest. But actually the STM F ones and F fours and F threes I'm starting to I'm starting to see them come back into existence. We're still getting some teensy so XP free scale is able to get some parts. But like you know I'm getting chips from analog. We got you know the ad chips and maximum I'm getting parts in. I mean those are not microcontrollers. Nordic has never had actually Nordic has been able to supply almost consistently throughout this entire if microchips watching this just send us a video we'll play it on chip shortage or you can send us a real and we'll put you on the real world you have a second STM 32 F seven series though you're still screwed and a lot of PJs are screwed. But the I'm actually shocked so I you know the STM if you can use the STM 32 F four series there's a lot that are very compatible with the microchip but yeah unfortunately right now they think the the the thing I'm seeing most people do is just go straight to the RP 2040 reason 137 that we did circuit Python because the core can go across all the different processors because there's a lot of different ones that are out there that are available. I really really love and love the sandwich from the sandwich one came out I was just like this is my favorite chip and we made so much hardware with it and you know I'm just yeah it's a little question so tune in next week maybe we'll do microchip again but whatever is available we do real world and whatever I just wanted to warn people that there is some there's some you know I'm seeing some at Megas but they're still this was still a little shocking I was like two years really and that's your footage okay just a little bit of a reminder before we go off the next segment the code is multiplexer still mailbag right this week this email that came to us says just thank you for quick shipping and awesome maker parts will be back maybe a lot lol keep up the awesome work all of it the products the custom boards the drivers and programming all of it you set the bar and rocket doing it thank you cool next up retro all right so we have a bunch of photography and videos of retro hardware so let's take a journey and before I tell anyone what this is guess what this is in the chats and then at the end I'll tell you what it is you have a few seconds but is this from the future it looks like a rendering is it from the past is this one of those dolly things it says like 90s console that never came out this looks like something that's like is it a cable box it's a rendering from like a 1980s like demo reel from like SIGGRAPH this is like SIGGRAPH 92 no SGI no like it's not the product it's like literally the thing that's rendered yeah look it's got RF output so that does date it yeah so let's see if anyone knows what this is even I don't know what this is but this isn't this is by the way some incredible 80s style I mean this is like lawnmower man kids toy all right I mean it's it's the it's the thing that looks like it's a handheld joystick it's got like these flanges on it like the flanges are totally unnecessary yeah and the grid you know the gridding is like a very all right so here it is this is a future that never happened it's called the view master interact division this was introduced in 1988 and released in USA it came with Sesame Street games and it featured the Muppet Show characters in a Disney game Disney Cartoon Arcade it went on sale for $120 and that was 33 years ago and it came from View Master Group whose View Master these folks these could this could have been our future where View Master and if you think about it why isn't View Master making VR goggles why aren't they doing why aren't they doing you know why aren't they meta so they had games but then was it ever sold sold like people actually bought it at Kermit the Frog the Great Gonzo it actually was a little bit of that what's that robot friend you have 2xl the two said like cuz it's like it's VHS so it's like it's a video 2xl yeah so anyways incredible look at this and that's retro okay Python on our word time by the number we're done my gosh my gosh and my gosh by the number time okay we're gonna do this in two parts lady to first you're gonna talk about what's latest and greatest with Pico W and then I'm gonna talk about an upcoming event okay everybody it's it's that time you've been waiting you've been bugging us and now it's time for you to step up and try out the latest builds for circuit Python we have a couple builds that are after version 8 beta 1 and I know beta beta 2 is being worked on and probably will be released the next couple days we now have TLS support as well as private certificates and price sorry self signing and and private like client side certificate loading support for the Pico W so the only thing that doesn't work is making a HTTPS server but that also doesn't work on the micro Python so we're not too worried about it but if you want to connect to services with TLS which you should if you want to use MQTT if you want to use NTP if you want to use requests if you want to do anything on the internet with the Pico W and circuit Python now is your time a different IO works we got a demo of that tested Liz checked it out and we're working on getting the Azure demo working there's some some typo or something and we're gonna add some documentation but if you have used the ESP 32 series that same code is gonna work on the Pico W and you get all like 320 drivers you get all the example code people should be able to take our projects and works and now it's online it's a yeah that's online all right so please try it and if you have issues please open if you have bug reports open an issue on the circuit Python repo because we are now in like and you know advanced user bug reporting mode like we want people who really know this stuff to try it out and let us know what doesn't work with example code that we can replicate and then we can fix it but Jepler's done an amazing job he's between the keyboards in this you see the kind of alternating one of your past circuit Python sensor projects make it Wi-Fi and send the data to Adafruit IO yeah play around with it all that stuff now can be online so gigantic newsletter and it was on a video cast there's a talking Mac with circuit Python tons of new shows or project yeah there is a bunch going on our G matrices if it blinks if it charges if it lights up it's larger if it talks if it's a skull it's powered by Python so there's also a bunch of events coming up but this week the event that I'm gonna talk about is the one that you're gonna be doing Lady Ada so expressive DevCon 22 I gotta do that you gotta do it it's it's online and it's October 19th to 20th from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. a CST time and they have a bunch of stuff going on you'll be able to ask questions you'll be able to hear speakers it's the first official DevConference made by developers for developers it's a two-day online conference that brings you all the stuff from the expressive you can look at the website and of course the reason we're talking about it well we talked about I'll be talking about you know if circuit Python 8 big part of it is adding support for ESP 32 the Wi-Fi workflow which I'll be demoing we have a guide for it and also just showing off all the different hardware we have why we are using circuit Python some of the benefits of using that for your IOT projects yeah etc etc and then you know I'll just toss in one note here the person who thank you who said the following someone nice getting circuit Python 8 on Pico W is 30 seconds and awesome the hardest part is this is dragging the uf2 over this is so cool I know I'm 30 seconds you're doing like internet all of our and it's like we want to make it so whether you whatever you know using ESP 32 S2 or C3 whatever this is a live stream by the way this is gonna be all live expressive you're gonna be able to to read all and see all this stuff so anyways this is delivered this newsletter to your inbox every single week go to aidfruitdaily.com where you sign up it's completely not related to your Adafruit.com account separate website because we don't like spam either we don't give out any of the email addresses we don't do anything like that that's why the separate site okay open source hardware time it is open source hardware months Lady Ada and on that so ashwa.org they have a list of things if you wanted to have your own event do's and don'ts on open source hardware for the month I was interested to see how we're doing as far as open source hardware projects so there is a total of me zoom in here yeah zoom in here 1,880 projects are certified open source hardware close to 2000 and if you look at Adafruit type Adafruit type Adafruit we have 522 a little over 27% of all of the open source hardware projects are from Adafruit and so even though we get mean emails from dudes who say I don't think you're open source at all I've heard that you've you've used windows or something so there's there's dudes like that but if you want to certify your hardware and demonstrate show your intention you can do things like certify it so that's what we do so every single one of these that we've submitted has all the files a little source code all those things we're currently in the number one position of companies so if you want to support companies that do open source hardware you can buy stuff from Adafruit that is you could say any more every week yeah you could say I'm gonna support companies that do open source software and hardware and then you can go to the Oshawa site and say well which ones do that and then you can look up us you can look up others and see who does I guess he doesn't too okay next up speaking of we have over 2,745 guides laid out what's on the big board this week okay a lot of updates are doing a circuit python guide Liz spent a day and went through all the feedbacks fixed a bunch of typos and reviewed the guide and updated it for some recent circuit python improvements the 220 by 64 OLED feather wing guide so we keep telling people it's a feather wing you use it with a feather you put it on top of a feather that's what it's for and then people don't listen to us and they're like anyways I'm gonna use this as like on a breadboard or as a semi-QT accessory and it's really not designed for that and it wasn't it was really not meant for that but people do it anyways and so we wanted to update the guide to tell people how you could do it if you wanted to you do have to wire up the reset button it's not it's not optional but people don't realize they don't realize it like the semi-QT it's a client side it's not the you know it's meant to go out should not go in but you can use it we'll just tell you how to do it Liz wrote a she's writing a couple of pie leap clue projects for a clue pack that's coming out shortly and for workshops and this one is how to make a custom badge and then uses this is pie leap and glider so what you do is pie leap is how you download the project but then of course you want to customize the badge right you want to have it have your name you know where you work maybe it's a description of you your pronouns you would then use file glider to connect and then like live edit over bluetooth your code so it's kind of neat because it's using two apps next up we also got an update to the I shootout guide Philby every year looks at all the digital eyeball projects available and this year I think he looked at the werewolf there's like a werewolf with LED eye or TFT eyes these sort of showed how they did it and how it's not nearly as good as his code basically so check that out and then using servos with circuit python and we know this guide got whippered it got snapped you can now use servos within whipper snapper and Eva kindly added a new page to this guide on how you can use servos with a per snapper so there's no coding at all and you can control the servo and automate it with whipper snapper actions on a different IO so great internet connected motor and yet two new guides the in addition to that clue guide that Liz did human ear iPhone case from knowing Pedro we always do weird creepy projects every year we'll show the video and Matt D who is a contributor wrote up a feather freezer door alarm Matt works at a networks volunteer well I don't know volunteers or and or works at a food pantry and made them a freezer door alarm in case the door actually didn't get closed which could ruin all the food inside just showed how to do that with sensors and electronics made a fruit I'm gonna say that ears are not creepy and weird because you know there's billions of them no no but on your phone it's a little but ever but you see people on their phone they have ears yeah it looks like that mouse that has the ear growing out of it that's what it looks like you're right I was you know what that's what yeah that's what looks like they're like we like we've grown in here on a mouse yeah okay terrible let's do some factory footage it's 3d printing time so we're gonna do two videos back to back we're gonna show you that um that not creepy ear ear and someone in the chat just meant you know it's handy because you put a spare earring that's right and then we'll do a ghostly speed up this Halloween season you can 3d print a weird yet functional accessory for your mobile phone turn some heads and raise some eyebrows with this 3d printed ear phone case this is actually a useful add-on for pop sockets so this provides a better grip that's both ergonomic and slightly creepy pop sockets allow you to rotate your phone while holding on to it and it doubles as a kickstand the ear add-on can be attached using your favorite adhesive like double-sided tape this flexible filament is designed for prosthetics and comes in a variety of skin tones the ear and phone case are 3d printed separately so there's no need for support material our pop socket came with a sticky backing that adheres really well to the tpu filament you can get the files for free by heading over to the Adafruit learning system an additional cover goes over the base of the pop socket to make it match the rest of the phone then the handle can be press-fitted on top now we can add a piece of double-sided tape to attach the ear because it's flexible you can add some personality by accessorizing the earlobe with an earring the phone case features a cutout for the camera array and the edges grip over the screen to provide protection we hope this inspires you to get creative with flexible filaments to make weirdly practical projects yeah and just one little note this is that onion article I was talked about so that that phone pairs well with this this is when Tim Cook first took the helm of Apple and everyone's like what is gonna happen they're gonna like ruin Apple and it was like interim Apple chief under fire after revealing grotesque new MacBook and it says says you can regularly douse it with lye to keep the odor down and then you could you could feed this the hideous new device and you could feed it CDs at the time and so yeah it's sweating yeah has its own digestive system so anyways that's how we roll in here don't forget you can learn how to make all this stuff and more including ears for your phone every Wednesday and 11 with no Pedro 3D Hangouts okay let's do Ion MPI bright this week's Ion MPI is Surcom yeah you know what is the new product of the week okay introduced by you yeah so um you know we're you know back during the weekly Ion MPI did two last week this one we're back to doing just one but I really like this one this is from Surcom and I actually was going to show like they have it you know a new IoT service but actually maybe I might do that in a couple weeks because I actually really just liked this Onyx USB cellular dongle which is from Surcom and it's actually kind of a co-op cooperation between Surcom and Quectel because inside is a Quectel cellular modem but they made this really nice little dongle it's like really beautifully designed it's got this like cool like angular design this is what it looks like you can kind of see on the back there's this cellular module and on the top there's a couple components power supply a SIM card holder it's actually not like technically that complicated because the modules do come with USB interfacing so there's no micro control you're actually connecting like directly to the cellular module but that said like it's in a really nice case it's got the SIM holder it's got little antenna add-ons it's got a USB plug that just like thunks right into your board so this is the cellular module inside it's the Quectel LTE EG25 again like you know for basically the price of the module you can now get it like with the power supply SIM card holder everything all together ready to go it's LTE Cat4 so it can do like pretty fast upload and download you'll have to have a SIM card that of course has that kind of high speed internet connectivity but it's also good for IoT projects because it's got worldwide LTE UMTS HSPA and it's still got GSM GPR edge coverage so you've got like you know just it isn't got like GSM 2, 2G, 3G, 4G and LTE so it's got like very very wide coverage worldwide and it looks like it's also it doesn't this does not have the GNSS receiver I don't believe but you know maybe they'll make a version that does but again it can go very very fast but it's also very inexpensive and what I thought was interesting about this and what I really liked is like the you know even the the advertising photo for it says like hey you know you just plug this into your single board computer and now you know it's trying integrate cellular into a board is a real pain you can do everything over USB and just use like a USB modem driver now you have a fully cellular connected IoT device and it's like no soldering no design you just plug it in and go so I actually got this setup and working on my computer in like 15 minutes or less was really easy so when I bought it actually came with I also got the SORCOM SIM card which I think is a global SIM card check about you know how many messages and how many megabytes I think it's actually IoT based so it's not like for data streaming video it's for like setting data MQTT you register on SORCOM's website you do have to add a credit card so you don't do that once you've registered you know you you can now activate it within your console and there's this whole control console what I thought was uninteresting in addition to this is that there's also for everything that they do you know there's a web interface but they also provide a back-end CLI interface so if you're using this to like deploy you know five thousand you know whatever soda can dispenser monitoring systems and scooters scooters you know digital signage whatever and you and you want to manage them remotely you don't have to use the console you can actually automate everything using their CLI and it's kind of something I noticed is that there's there's always an easy way to do it like using their web interface and there was also an advanced way to use it that was more powerful using scriptable tools they do have multiple different dongles the only one I you know used is the on X LTE dongle one thing I liked is that they have the device manual which I'll talk about in a bit so you know the cellular modules are not just modems they actually have a lot of stuff built into them like an MQTT peripheral or FTP TCP API or HTTPS so you don't even need to have the stack on the device you can actually use the stack on the cellular module not on the computer and they have all that available just really nice you don't have to sign an NDA which I can really dug and then for Linux it shows up as a comp or it is a composite CDC so on Windows you have to install a driver I'm on Windows yeah installed it it worked and then it shows up as a modem and then you get the three comp ports like again I don't believe this has this one I don't think has the NMEA the GPS it still shows up but you there's no data that comes out of it and you've got the AT port which is the control port and data I think DM is for the data port and then it also shows up as a plain like USB modem and then what's nice is all I had to do is like turn on roaming and then I just selected the sortcom and like I unplugged Wi-Fi and I disconnected Ethernet and I was on the internet through the cellular connection so it's that easy it's really fast very simple and so you know especially with silicon shortages if it's like you want to add cellular connectivity but it's impossible to get cellular modules or they're constantly changing or you know whatever don't make a custom board you may not even need an M3 module just plug in USB it's just it just works and it was plenty fast for Linux what I thought was really nice is they have like a shell script that is for Raspberry Pi and you know you basically you know it's very you know I think they borrowed this like we did from Pimeroni where it's like you know setting up something takes so many steps and it's easier just to give somebody a shell script tell them to pseudo curl it and run it and it will install everything and then you basically have an interface that is basically you know internet connectivity but again through the cellular module it's like the easiest fastest no solder way to add to single board computers if you have a Windows running single board computer you use the other driver Linux single board computer use this either way now you've got worldwide connectivity and I did check the AT port and like you can absolutely use it and you know yes that's the ICC ID but don't worry I'm gonna gonna cut it in half in a moment anyways because I'm done using it and the you can you can use this with they had a really nice tutorial that's linked that'll be linked from the blog post where you know you can use it as a low level modem right so you you have as a modem and then you connect to the internet service and then you have to like have all of your TCP IP packets go through it or what you can do is you can use the built-in say MQTT client and this uses a lot less data because you have this overhead so it's gonna be a little faster a little bit of power but you have to script each command in so for example you know they have their own MQTT demo here they have it sorry MQTT broker on beam.sora.com.io one a through just MQTT port and then you can connect to it log in and also automate it with PySerials this is like a shell script sorry a Python script uses PySerial you can see it connects to the serial port TTY USB2 which is created when you plug it in and it just sends in like the raw data to publish to a topic and then you know you can then use their their web interface to the MQTT broker to see the data was published so again you know if you don't want to use a full TCP IP stack because you want to save power you want to save bandwidth there's nothing lighter than just sending the raw commands I mean this is like it'll just do the bare minimum to send the data connect send the data and disconnect right afterwards. Available on Digikey as in like you can really actually get it that's why this is MPI. They actually have a lot in stock and the price is very good it's like under a hundred bucks I think and then you want to go to the overhead so this is what it looks like you know it's got this it's got this nice design there's two antenna ports you can connect to if you want to have external antenna and then this is the SIM card that goes in there so you can use any SIM card they have they sell SIM cards indicator modem and then yeah this is just USB so it's you know it's it's a very convenient easy way and you know so many electronic projects now are just a Raspberry Pi you can attach whatever custom hardware controller you want and then it you know with internet connectivity so complicated you want something with that has like a full Linux TCP IP stack to handle connectivity for you and reconnection and your certificates and whatever and you know remote control you just plug in this and now it's cellular connected. Okay I think in a blog post we'll bed that three minute long video so folks can watch there's a really good video but yeah well we'll have a blog post because it's three minutes long and I've rambled enough. No that's all good and that's on an MBI. Okie dokie before we roll into new products to code is multi-blogs are user or lose it let's do new products you ready? That's right new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new. Alright so first up we got a revision. That's right we've been revising a lot of the combo packs. This is a beginner Gemma pack for doing sobo electronics just gives you like one of everything. You can start with alligator clips and then upgrade to sewing with nice stainless steel conductive thread. Historically we sold this with the Gemma V2 which is the ATtiny 85. Sadly you know the bitbanging USB technique is is really not guaranteed to work anymore. So we upgraded this to use the Gemma M0 instead which is a circuit Python compatible, make code compatible. You can use Arduino and has a ton more memory. Alright update. Okay so this was the ultimate GPS bear module which was product number 790 and the company that made this module which was the PA6H was made by Gtop. They got sold or something and they basically stopped making the module and it was sad. But we did find a alternative company that makes a like 99% identical module. It's pin compatible. It's called the PA1616. It's it still uses the MTK3339. It's the same physical size again the same pinouts, same voltages, same firmware. The only difference is that the antenna querying commands are slightly different and we weren't going to keep selling the module but people were like no I used the module. I soldered the module into my designs and so in addition to having this on a breakout board we're going to have the bear modules available as well. Okay next up. Next up we put in some adorable step switches a couple weeks ago. They're like 808 style called the PB86. People love them but they're not breadboard friendly so what we did is I put together a quick breakout board that just kind of rearranges all the pins. It also makes it so it can fit into a breadboard very nicely and I thought I would show on the overhead. They do stack up side by side. It's nice. Half inch a piece and then you can clicky this is one of each color. You have to solder it in but it's very easy. There's only six solder points and then we give you header on both sides so that it sits nice and flat and then you have you know a couple solder sorry breadboard rows available to connect to the the LED negative the LED positive you'll need a resistor as well. The normally closed connection the normally open connection and the common connection so the switch has three contacts the LED has two and then they're just duplicated on the other side so you have two sets to make wiring easy and then yeah they just go side by side if you want. So perfect for prototyping with these adorable step switches. Alright and then the star of the shit tonight besides you Lady Aida our team all of our staff all of our friends all of our community all of our customers and everyone who makes this thing go is this is the PCA 9548 Stem AQT breakout. Yay. So we've we've had a TCA 9548 breakout for a very long time but when Liz was working on the eight channel laser harp or you know she connected up eight distant sensors she was like man I really wish there was a Stem AQT version of this multiplexer that I could just plug everything in. So what this board does as you can see here it's got four VCNL 4040s. If you are trying to connect I squared C sensors you know that every I squared C sensor needs to have a unique address and so sometimes there's an address jumper to you and like you can change the addresses and you still have to make sure none of them collide but there's sometimes there's sensors that don't have a configurable address like I think the VCNL 4040 doesn't and let's say you want to have multiple distant sensors because you're making a laser harp what do you do well this is a special chip it's very inexpensive and you have one port and that's the one on the very left that's the input port and then when you send a special I squared C command to address 70 it tells that chip to route the next I squared C commands over to that port so there's eight ports and so you can select which port you want to route to and that basically lets you you know without any special wiring without any jumper pins or whatever connect to eight different devices with a very little amount of code that just you know has to go in between when you want to select between the different ones it works very well we've got Arduino and circuit Python code examples and Python examples so let's let me show it on the overhead there's a couple other interesting things so that this is your controller so your controller connects to here and this is also the breakout for the controller side and then there's eight ports you know you just have to keep track like this is port zero and this is port five because when you tell the 9548 chip which port you want you have to tell it like port zero one two three four five six seven and in addition what we did is there is show quick demo so if you're using and you know it has LED so you know where everything's lit if you're using a five volt Arduino with you know stem IQT you might want to level shift the output like all of our boards have level shifters on them but if you're using quick or you made a DIY design you might want to have three volt power and logic so on board there is a three volt regulator with 500 milliamps output level shifter and then down here's a little switch that lets you select the logic output for these eight ports so even if this ports five volts you can select these to be three volts just by flicking the switch back and forth and this is three volts already so you're not going to see any difference but I thought there's like you know we had a little bit of space left over so I thought why not add a level shifter another thing to note is this is the PCA 9548 and a lot of times these are called TCA 9548 and they're actually the same chip as long as you're using three volt or five volt power the TCA can go down to 1.8 volts but it's also very hard to get right now the PCA 9548 is otherwise equivalent it uses exact same code this is like exact same pinout it just only goes down to like 2.3 volts minimum so for this functionality it's the same just in case you're like what's the difference between the PCA and the TCA in this case there is no difference there drop-in compatible so this should make it really easy to make you know projects that use a lot of different boards sorry a lot of different clones of the same board with the same address with one stem and QT port and no soldering and that's a new product for the week all right me yeah played by Chris Pratt so multiplexers the code now you know why use that or lose it by tomorrow we're gonna do some top-secret so go to discord start typing in your questions I got a few lined up but we're gonna do some questions right after that let's do top-secret from the vault yes here's this week's top secret we have a video I'm testing out a little prototype I made I showed this off on the last desk of Lady Aida it's a stemma JSTPH so you can connect like alligator clips or whatever to infrared both right angle you can actually see this camera picks up a little bit of that purple infrared effect and also vertical so you get both directions and then I haven't hooked up here to a Metro mini and you can see when there's a 3 when an IR signal is sent out this LED goes off and you can see it on the scope as well and here's my final silk screen design with penguin and I actually added a little slot you can add an optional extra 5 millimeter LED if you like so this will be handy for making very powerful TV vegan's coming soon to the Adafruit show you want to do more top-secret I can show this yeah we got more top-secret so got that boy I just showed you off it's you know our solderless infrared emitter and it's got like the edge emitter and it's got the top-down emitters that's kind of sweet that just saw some people's infrared projects and then IQ TFI the Psy 51 Psy 53 53 51 a clock generator we'll still sell our breakout because it has three SMA connectors but this ship is no longer unavailable you can now get it yay Psy lab so a good way to celebrate that is to make a stemma QT board this is my green prototype okay that's not for questions all right it lines up we're gonna speed around these lady to a bunch of them go for it okay are there any r a 8 8 7 5 alternatives not really it's a one-on-one kind chip and it's probably gonna be killed off real soon I can tell that they're not gonna be making it much longer are there any waveform acquisition drivers for any of the circuit Python targets I would use an RP 2040 with PIL and and try to funnel it into SRAM waveform acquisition is tough for any platform because you need to have a buffer big enough to store it so if you actually you know you could probably do with PIL a parallel output ADC and a parallel input SRAM chip you could probably like automate the whole thing and have it run you know maybe not a hundred megahertz but maybe 20 or 30 megahertz okay next up comment and an observation can you store extra earrings on the ear project for the phone case yeah that's kind of useful next question how many pins with the 16-pin PCA multiplexer with the new 8 port multiplexer is it 8 by 16 that the math that would well you know you're so you can have three multi I mean you'd have to make sure there's no address questions because you can have up to eight eight port multiplexers and then I think they mean 16 GPIO expander which is not a multiplexer it's a different thing so yeah it would be like 8 times 16 times 3 times 3 no time sorry 8 times 8 times 16 times 8 so fine structure constant okay PIL for Android what is the status oh we're working on it so we usually do the iOS version first because that's what the most people are using and then we get all of the features and things nailed we want to do but we do develop in parallel and we're working in parallel so when it's ready you'll see an announcement on our site and you'll be able to download and play with it and it'll have pretty much feature for feature as the iOS version when you're going to release the KB 2040 Bluetooth I want to untether my split keyboard it's a good um I you know I don't know how I mean there I know there's Bluetooth you know per micros I could design one but I don't I don't have any plans at this time okay I have a project that needs both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi normally the quick connection is for things like sensors can I connect to ESP TFT feather wings with the I squared C quick well I think you can code you can do Bluetooth and Wi-Fi at the same time on the ESP 32 s2 so you may not even need to you may not you might be able to use it I'm pretty I'm sure I think there's one of the ESP boards you can use them at the same time okay and then when can we send more nudes those sold out fast and we have a bunch more on the way so we're doing something very specific with them we have a very high bar for the quality that we like to see there is ones that are available out there they're not called needs of course and they're crummy and is a little bit of a gamble to quote some folks in the chat who've tried so that's why we have to wait because these are pretty good ones yeah we're I mean they're being custom-made they're being custom-made and we have QA and we have a lot of things that we only want the highest quality nudes yeah we yes only we want nudes that we're proud of the best okay let me see if there's other questions got that the multiplexer would be awesome with multiple i-squared co led displays yeah and that is the questions okay we're on time we're at nine yeah pretty much seven okay special thanks to the community here everyone in the chat thanks for asking great great questions and hanging out with us tonight special thanks to the car behind scenes in the Adafruit slack at doing a bunch of stuff and then our entire team who helps put the show together and all the things to make us go this has been an Adafruit production we'll see everybody next week on ask an engineer this is your moment of Xenar good night everybody everybody