 Live from New York, it's Ask an Engineer. Hey, everybody, and welcome to Ask Engineer. It's another Wednesday night, and that means it's time for you, the viewer, me, Lady Aida, the engineer, and Mr. Lady Aida. It's at your clock, too, and I must. Ding, ding. I must. On camera control and doing behind-the-scenes chat and coupon code generation is, we're all here at the 8 Fruit factories, where we do all the designing, testing, manufacturing, kidding, videoing, coding, and more. Right now, the factory is silent because everyone's at home, except for us. And that's because for the next hour, we're gonna be doing Ask Engineer, your most-favoritest one hour of live engineering chat, news, videos, demos, guides, products, coupon codes, top secrets, and more. Mr. Lady Aida, let's kick it off. Tell them what's on tonight's show. On tonight's show, the code is Rambo-Allen, or Rambo-Wallen. Either way, it works. A rain-bow-allen. Yeah, 10% of the 8 Fruit star all the way up to 11.59 p.m. Eastern time, or when I remember to turn the code off, gets you 10% off. All the things we have in stock. Talk about our 8 Fruit live shows, including the ones that you maybe just saw. Show and tell. A bunch of cool people on there. Time travel, look around the World Makers, Hackers, Artists, and Engineers. We got some special retro tech this week. Special guest, Jeff, we're gonna show off something he's been working on. From the mail bag, your letters to us. Some, New York City factory footage, advanced manufacturing, and more. Some 3D printing. We have INMPI this week, it's TDK. Brought to you by DigiKey. We've got new products, top secret. We're gonna answer your questions. We do that over on Discord, datafruit.it slash discord, where you can join all 35,000 of us. All that and more on, you guessed it, Ask an Engineer. Bam. So, in addition to the Rainbow Allen. Yes. You can get free stuff. What are they at? We've got so many freebies, $99 or more. You get a Promo Proto, half-sized breadboard, our classic freebie. People love this one, because it's so useful for making your breadboard projects permanent. $149 or more, you get our favorite, well, oh, we love all of our dev boards equally, but one of our favorite, Pink PCB, KB2040, an RP20 dev board with cast-related pads, GPIO, lots of memory, Semicut and USB-C. $199 or more, you get free UPS ground shipping in the content of the United States. It's tracked, it's shipped, it's brown, it's UPS. And $299 or more, you get a free Circuit Playground Bluefruit. It's an all-in-one dev board with LEDs and buttons and sensors, Bluetooth low energy. It's a great way to get started with Arduino or Circuit Python. It's a little bit of make-code support as well. Okay, and don't forget we're still doing the best possible job. I think anyone can with how the online world works, so don't forget to verify your account, put two-step authentication on your account, which we offer at Adafruit. You can use just about anything to do to factor authentication, from the hardware keys to authenticator apps. Apps to mobile phones, to desktop applications. And if you do that, do that on every other website because every single computer likes making copies of everything and sending it to everyone you know. So that's what we make computers for, and Jeannie is out of the bottle, as they say. So it's a good idea, and it's good computing hygiene. Adafruit Live Series of Shows. So we've got a bunch of live shows that we do every single week. We recently just did Show and Tell. Melissa was a special guest. Thank you, Melissa. And you could see some of the projects that were on there. Gonna say it, apparently there was an amazing cube. There's a cube, there's also a guide for the cube. Yeah. Talk about that shortly. So apparently. It is an adorable cube. Apparently that was on there, and do check it out. People love a cube. Next up. We do Desk of Lady Eda every Sunday. It's usually at like hacker o'clock. We've been trying to do it a little earlier than like midnight. So folks, more folks than watching than we have been. And I get rest. So we have part one and part two. What was part one this week? Okay, so this week I did, we had a little bit of time this weekend. And so I finally dug into why the WCH, CP-2010, no, sorry, CH-9102, which is the CP-20104 replacement. I didn't have flow control working in the Linux kernel. Turns out you can load an out of tree kernel module that fixes the broken driver. So I showed people how to use that. Also I did a demo of the Bluefruit Easy Key for the new ESP32 version that I'm getting. I'm trying to revive this old product that was based on a CSR chipset. Pored it to the ESP32. So far so good. I showed it working. I wirelessly uploaded code to an Arduino Uno. I'm using Bluetooth SPP, very exciting. Okay. And then we do the great search where we all try to find parts on digikey.com together. And sometimes we're successful because there's a lot of things to find. And sometimes things aren't in stock, but now it's starting to lead up a little bit. It is, I'm actually noticing it's a little bit easier to find some parts, not complicated parts, but some simple parts, transistors, level shifters and diodes. I mean, I remember I couldn't get diodes for a bit or NPM transistors and it was a little bit like, really guys? Yeah, we're also seeing our inboxes filled with, I'm not gonna say failed startups, but some are startups that didn't work out. And they're like, we bought all these parts, but we're growing out of business. Well, you buy these parts. And on one hand, it sounds interesting for some things. On the other hand, they wanna charge way more than we could just buy them now. So we're passing on a lot of these. I know, it's a little annoying. There's some parts that, and this is a distraction, but it's a little bit of a chip short. There's parts that we ordered, we get the parts, and then immediately we see that they're available everywhere for cheaper than we paid, but we had booked. It's okay, because we got stuff back in 2021 or 2020. And this is what the deal is. Anyways, but things are loosening up. Anyways. I'd rather have that happen than sending random emails saying, I have all these parts, can I sell them to you? Because things didn't work out. So if you have to choose, I guess. I thought you'd get a choice, but yeah. All right, so what did you try to find this week? Okay, so this week, the Nina U-Blocks module that we use on the Itsy Bitsy Air Lift, like a bitsy wing, is discontinued. And also I wanted to, for the Blue Fruit Easy Link, I designed it with the ESP32 Pico Mini, which is a wonderful little module, but it has four megabytes, sorry, eight megabytes of flash and two megabytes of PSRAM. And I thought, I don't need the PSRAM, I don't need that much flash, so maybe there's a smaller or less expensive module. And so I showed how to use the expressive part selector to identify different sizes and models of ESP32 modules and kind of talked about the different standard-ish sizes that they've got, which are a little bit confusing because there's the Pico, there's the Mini, there's Wroom, there's the Wrover, and there's the C3 Mini, which is the same size as the Pico Mini. Okay, anyways, we go through all that. I showed them on Digi-Q with the pricing. I'm actually gonna show that the ESP32 Mini is one of the cheapest ESP32 modules you can get, cheaper than the Wroom, I recall. So check that out. Okay, and then we do JP's product pick of the week every Tuesday, and here's this week's highlight. The tactile button assortment. You get 25 different kinds of buttons, 10 each. Nice little smorgasbord of the buttons here and a little parts tray. I also get the different colors on these, but these are, I think, a typical six millimeter. This is one of these right angle ones that has some good support for the board. These, I love, I'm crazy about these. I'm putting these on Jay's MIDI button board. They just have a really nice, it's a 12 by 12 millimeter, but they have a really nice, tall, I think 10 millimeter button. The sounds of these switches, because they are good and clicky, a little contact microphone module. This guy right here, a little tiny one. I'm gonna use some tweezers to click this one, actually. The tactile switch assortment, 25 different kinds of buttons, 10 each. And tomorrow, JP's workshop, Friday, deep dive with Tim. No, I'm paid to go back next week. No, I'm paid to go back next week on 3D Hangouts. Time travel. All right, while I'm gonna do my AidaBox update and the update is, there is no update. We still are awaiting all of the parts and more that we need to ship thousands and thousands of AidaBoxes. So we have four that we try to do per year. This year has been incredibly difficult. So we may have an autumn one. We may have the winter one. We don't know. The second we know for sure, either way, we'll let everyone know. So our update is there is no update. I think what I'm gonna do is add a link to this video on AidaBox and just let folks know we're here. We don't charge AidaBox until we ship it. So you don't have to worry about that. And we do have more people signing up for AidaBox all the time. So ideally, and in ideal world, the parts will come back in stock that we need. And then we can even add more folks to AidaBox and we can even ship more out. So that would be nice. But we shall see. Other things in the world of time travel. There's a AidaFruit.io update. This is, as they say in the biz, a sleeper hit. So AidaFruit.io is, as far as I know right now, the only free end plus IO system that works with all devices has all the ways that you can use it in any way you want. And then we have a no-code version. It's real no-code. Not like a fake no-code what it's like. You're still coding? I mean it. There's no coding. There's no IDE, no command line. So the highlights this week is, and I'll show the blog post in a second, is a bunch of stuff from Whippur Snapper. So servo motor control, Aida will talk about that. Servos are used in our IoT project. So you can see some of the cool things. It's really need to do a real-time thing and then watch a servo use. Ingrates with IO actions. We have a servo component that Lamar talked about. And it works with the ESP32, the ESP8266, the S2, the C3, and this MB51. S3, we found a bug, but we're gonna fix it. Yeah, and so here is kind of an overview with some fun graphics and stuff. But you were working on this with the team. So what's the big deal? And how did they get servos working? Cause this seems almost like magic. It is a little bit magic. And it quite actually a lot of back-end work, which is you can see it in the GitHub public repo where we work on the Arduino core library and code for Whippersnapper. But basically, we've had sensor inputs, which is great. So we've got a lot of sensors and LEDs and buttons and switches and analog inputs. And one of the things that we hand done is PWM and servo outputs. Because they're actually kind of handled a little bit weird. Servos in particular, you need a really steady timer and anyways, there's a lot of the details I will let go. But basically, you wanna create a pulse between 500 microseconds and 2500 microseconds and that corresponds to servo moving. And servos are a really great way of adding motion or motorized control. There's continuous servos that spin continuously rather than having a position. So servos are great. They can push a button with a servo. You can flick a switch. You can point at something. So servos are a really easy way to add robotics and you can put one per pin. So we now have servo support in Adafruit IO Whippersnapper. You can see it here. So basically, you write the value of the pulse. 500 is all the way to the left. 2500 all the way to the right. And that feed will get updated by Whippersnapper and control the servo on the pin. It'll work with any standard servo. You can tweak the min and max. Some want a little bit more or less than 500 to 2500. The default frequency is 50 Hertz if you happen to have a weirdo servo that wants higher frequency updates. That's adjustable as well. But this is really great for a lot of projects where you want to have something trigger a motion or a movement. A servo is, there are a lot of servos with a lot of different strengths and weights and sizes. So controlling the position of a servo via an internet of things service that's free or if you want to pay and you have more stuff to do. We were asked to have a fee version because some folks want to do quite a bit of stuff on it but we'll always have a free version. Yeah, I think you get like 10 feeds and two devices which is like quite a lot on the free version. It's just if you need more of that. But if you want to support it you can always get a plus account. It's a good deal, like 10 bucks a month. So I think this is the only IoT service that allows you to do this. I was looking around. I don't think you can control servos. Look, we got through the link. Oh, you have that. Oh, look, blank. I made something blank. It's like, that's cool, but this is also no code. But you can also look at how it's done and write a bunch of code if you want to. Please shut up. Anyways, try it out. Let us know and have fun with it. I think a lot of folks will be able to do really neat interactive art installations. You'll be able to do things like, well, we had a project where when something moves in one location and moves in another location. So make your own entangled particles. Retro. We have a little bit of retro this week. This was on the show until, but Jeff sent the video, so we're gonna play it. Check it out. Hey, Jepler, what have we got here? Well, this is my friends, Kim1, which we have just gotten running today. And so we've already put in a program in hexadecimal to add two numbers together. So let's see, we are gonna set the numbers to add though. So we're gonna go to address zero and enter some data. And why not add 37? And 12. And then this is the first byte of our program at address two. And so I will hit go. And with any luck, those numbers that I said add together to 49 in hexadecimal. And that is a real program running on a real original Kim1. Okay, letters, we get your letters. This, I wasn't sure if we read this one because it was on Ask an Engineer and then we heard back from the person. So if this is repeat, sorry, but it's worth it. Ask an engineer asked a question about the vinyl record shipping to Florida during the middle of summer. Happy to report Adafruit's album frequency survived the Florida summer torture test. Record came in condition to a single band on the cover, plastic wrap nice and tight. I am impressed, big hug to everyone Adafruit for helping make return things into reality. So yeah, we have an album. We still have a lot of these. If you're in California in a heat wave and you want to listen to some tunes while you're- Yeah, it is weather tested. It's okay. Yeah, all right. It's now time for some Python on hardware. All right, this week, we have CircuitPython 733. It is released, minor changes. Please check it out. Working on eight now, beta, alpha, right? We're working on eight alpha, sorry, alpha beta. Working on eight beta, which is a lot of wifi stuff, but as we find bugs, we still back port them to the stable 7XX series, which is what's going on here. So if you want to check out the latest, it is now, I guess, as stable as sevens are gonna be. Yeah, well, I mean, these are a lot of bug fixes and tweaks and updates and keep sending those in. Okay, I'm gonna show a video in a sec. But some neat stuff. If you want to do some e-ink with CircuitPython, this is really neat. These are some really cool map things that you can do, GPS mapping, application for LCD displays and our editor has a note. Everything is kind of back to school time if you're doing projects in schools and you use Python or CircuitPython, just tag us on social media, CircuitPython, MicroPython, Python. We'll get in a newsletter. Back to school means coding in Python for a lot of folks. It seems to be the unofficial national language and many school districts. And internationally, it is a national language or programming language. So I think we're gonna see even more Python this year. Highlights from some live things that we have in the newsletter from the CircuitPython show. So if you wanna see an interview with Radimir, check that out. And then just tons and tons of projects. So if you wanna see a game of life, little keyboards, mini keyboards, here's some digit recognition with CircuitPython, Raspberry Pi Pico. Here is a Amiga 600 keyboard USB adapter with the Raspberry Pi Pico and CircuitPython. It just goes on and on and on. There is a build for the ESP32, S2, N1, 6R8. There is a Pi clone using... Ooh, it's a nice Pi clone. Yeah, there's a lot going on. There's a lot going on. If you wanna have a pet, help, you know. Yeah. This whole dog is like, the electronics weigh more than... It's not just cats, yeah. So what's going on? But by popular request, we have part two of the Raspberry Pi Pico W and CircuitPython. So I'm gonna play that now. Here it is. This is a Raspberry Pi Pico W, also known as the Pi Cal. And what it's got running on it is CircuitPython and behind it, see this code here? Printing on a Mac address, scanning for Wi-Fi networks, connecting to an access point. Let's see if this works. Man, that was pretty fast. So this can actually, in CircuitPython now scan for access points in the area. That's working really well and it can connect and get an IP address. So next up, of course we wanna add sockets and DNS and routes and all that good stuff to get Wi-Fi working on the Raspberry Pi Pico W and CircuitPython. Now make it really easy for people to make their own IoT projects using all the great drivers available in CircuitPython. Delivered to your inbox every single week. Just go to AdafruitDaily.com and sign up there. It's completely separate from your store account. It has nothing to do with anything with your store. Totally new. That's right. Like a fresh world. Yeah, that's interesting. It decided to change the background color pink on that side. Well, yes. That's cool. Good. More pink. Yeah, I think it changed the background color on something, that'll be interesting to see. That's interesting because it's not previewing with that color. Yeah, I wonder, oh, look at this. Whoa. Yeah. It's all pink. There's a lot of pink stuff tonight. Okay, cool. That's cool. All right. That's Python on hardware. We'll fix that later. Yeah, we'll do it. Okay, we are an open source hardware company. To prove it, we have 2,725 guides. Lady Aida, what's on the big board this week? Okay, I'm glad you asked. First off, most important, you want to share nudes. You want to make nudes. We got a nudes guide. The Nudes Uber guide from Phil B is all about how to use our LED flexible noodles, which we nicknamed nudes, how to power them, how to flex them, limitations, tips and tricks. We'll be updating this guide as well, but Phil B is just the master of cosplaying and LED art. And so this is a really great getting started guide. I've also updated the ESP whole ad blocker guide. It's from JP. We've added a page on how to use it with Android phones because we license the people of Android phones. We've also got a fun guide with key presses, sorry, the 808 style step switches, and a Raspberry Pi Pico, just showing how to solder them all onto a perfboard and make PWM LEDs and tactile switches and to make a little mini keyboard with LED feedback. They're very tactile switches. And then kick me to the next... Yeah, we have more guides. There's tons of guides, including everybody's favorite. Well, there's actually a lot of really good guides this week. We've got cosplay hacks from Phil B. So this is like an amazing guide. There is 100 tips for cosplay and it's a lot about sewing and hygiene and design and elements of cosplay and costuming and sewing. There's also some tips on integrating electronics and LEDs. So check out the cosplay hacks. I learned a lot. Like, for example, did you know that spit will auto-set crazy glue? Or like, I'd say there's this weird... There's a lot of weird stuff in there. Anyways, check it out. You'll learn something, no question. A lot of people have already told us it's a great guide. We also got a quick start for the Circuit Python web workflow. Code editor Melissa has been writing this. So there's a built-in uploader, downloader, and then simple repel on Circuit Python web, it's Wi-Fi workflow boards. But if you wanna use the more advanced web editor, you can upload your directories and do a lot more editing and it has a really nice code editor, which you can see even as highlighting. Please try it out. It's very new. It's great for use with ESP32 boards, but any of the boards with Wi-Fi workflow enabled will be able to use the web workflow. We also got a guide from Liz Clark on the new Mac 17 048 LiPoly or Vima Ion Fuel Gauge and battery monitor. It's a really easy low power way to add percentage, voltage, and charge rate, weight of charge change, monitoring to your devices. And we've got Arduino Circuit Python libraries and everyone cheers and loves this new teeny LED Wi-Fi companion cube. It is so adorable. Do not eat. You can display all sorts of animations on it and it also uses Adafruit IO to display text and icons and graphics. And it's pretty amazing how adorable it is. It's got a little battery and a QT pie inside and a battery monitor. And it's like, oh, it's like old managers. It's so cute. So check it out. It was also in the show until if you wanna see some live video of Charlene demoing this most adorable LED companion cube. Okay. Here's some vector footage. And this week for a speedup we have some assembly and testing and more. Okay. 3D printing. None of the page were off this week, but we have a speedup and we didn't play the video from the project that Liz did last week. So I was gonna play it and then the speed-up. The speed-up. It's pretty cool. And the speed-up. And then a speed-up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. it, and then the speed up, there is 3D printing involved. So I'm gonna play that and then the speed up, I think it's from more Sandman. So I think that's a popular show that's on right now. Who doesn't? Look, we're all golfed out. Yeah, trying. In this project, you'll set up a 3D object community, the popular game dev engine, and send 9 DoF accelerometer data over a serial connection to rotate the object. The 9 DoF sensor is connected to a dev board running Arduino code. The 9 DoF sensor can be calibrated and that calibration can be stored on the dev board for more accurate readings. In Unity, a C sharp script is applied to the 3D object to parse the incoming serial data into rotational movement. The sensor and dev board can be mounted in a 3D printed cube to keep them steady while you rotate them. This demo could be adapted for other sensors to communicate with Unity too. You could also build custom controllers for your games to create unique interactive experiences. The code along with step-by-step instructions are available now in the learn guide at learn.adafruit.com. And like we said before, 3D Hangouts will be back next week. Currently, data. It's time to do a reminder. Rainbow Allen's the code, 10% off the Native Fruit Store. It all makes sense why it's a code soon, but for now, let's do some IonMPI. Okay, this week's new product introduction of the week is from TDK. This is brought to you by Digikey. Thanks, Digikey. What is the MPI of the week? Okay, this week's IonMPI, I want to get the part number right, so we're reading it off the Digikey bag. It's the TDK WCT38466. It's a patterned coil for wireless power transmission, also known as Qi charging. And this is a popular way to do a wireless charging, and you need to basically have a chip, and antenna and the chips are easy to get, but the antennas have had improvements in design, and so that's what we're talking about this week, because TDK has been making these antennas for a while. So this is the WCT38466. As you can tell, it's got like this loop, you know, these loops of copper that form the antenna coil, that one half of the inductive charging coil, and it's nice and thin and very flat and funky. So it's basically like a custom designed. It comes all ready to go, and I'll show it on the overhead at the end of this. Basically designed to work with anything with Qi charging, and you just wire it up to the battery, sorry, the Qi management charger chip, you know, which usually is, of course, separate than the antenna, and it kind of does everything for you, and you just slip this into the design, the back of your design to add wireless charging. So the thing that's cool about this is it's super, super skinny. So traditionally these charger coils were super chunky, a couple millimeters thick. I think the previous version was like three millimeters. They're now under one millimeter. Ooh, amazing. So skinny, which means it's even easier than ever to add it into, you know, an existing or upcoming design. So what's really nice is that, you know, over the last few years, starting in like about 10 years ago, there were a lot of different wireless charging standards. I like Duracell had one, but the one that's kind of one out thankfully, there is a standard now, is this Qi Qi charging standard, which is what's used in almost like every phone these days, I believe even Apple phones use the standard, and that's really good because it means that, you know, you have to have the charger matching with the charger base, and traditionally if you wanted to, you know, use wireless charging in your device, you'd have to have the two coils. So let me go to the next page. We have two coils, you have a custom charger, and we sell these in the store. You have a transmitter, a custom receiver, and when they enter a line, the magnetic fields, you know, cross-couple, and you get power transmission from one to the other. Basically it's a transformer with an air core in the center, and the air core is like the universe. But the problem is that like they're not very smart, like this, you know, this has no control over what the voltage is going to be or how much current, whereas the Qi charging standard, there's some communication so it like knows that it's the right kind of charger, and it's not going to just like turn on the power, and you know, if you happen to have a 12-volt output coil, it's not going to like blast your electronics. So that's really nice, and they of course come in five watts, and I think 15 watts is the next generation. The problem is that if you wanted to add wireless charging, traditionally like on toothbrushes and other devices, you would have to produce, manufacture both the transmission and the receiving side, you know, using something like this, whereas what's nice with having a standard is you can get off the shelf charging plates, and then like you put your device on the charging plate, and you don't have to worry about that part. You can just worry about the device you're using. So this is what the original Qi charging antenna looked like. So there was three antennas, and they were all like, they would work together, so no matter how you arranged the board on the charging plate, it would work. And I think this is, this is the, you know, what TDK was talking about. This used to be like three millimeters thick. This massive coil, and you see it's like protected with like a fabric, so it doesn't, with vibration, it doesn't short out, which of course would be bad and cause the wireless to stop working. So instead of this tri-coil design, we now have a single pattern design, much, much thinner, much more flexible, but in actually at least as good or better patterning for, you know, where the device is on the plate, sort of maintain charging. Because you're not, when you want to have something like a toothbrush, you know, it fits into a holder, and the holder is like designed with a little nub, and so it fits perfectly with a phone. People sort of slap it down on the charger. You don't want to make sure that it doesn't have to be perfectly aligned to still get a very good charge rate, because that's the experience that users want to have. So now there's also much more even efficiency, like there aren't any cold spots, everything is kind of got this, you know, 80% plus efficiency, which is really great for wireless charging. And all you have to do is you have to match this with, again, a charging chip, which, you know, I just looked and I found, like this one in particular, I'm not recommending this one in specific, but just this is what they look like. And this plugs into the rest of your power management circuitry, connects to the TX coil pads. And then, like, it'll give you an interrupt and tell you like, hey, you know, data's coming in, sorry, power's coming in. That's how much power it can provide, and you can use it to charge your internal battery. You know, it was interesting, you just got to watch from like a Kickstarter and they don't even have a USB port on it anymore. It basically uses only, you know, Bluetooth though energy and then you charge it with wireless charging. So this is kind of the future because, you know, the moment you have a charging, you know, if you're using Bluetooth though energy for data, a USB port, all they do is like break or get dust in them or they can crack. It's a major failure point. Even with USB-C, which has, you know, 10,000 or whatever, insertion cycles, they can just break or they can get damaged. And then the whole thing stops working. Whereas with this wireless charging capability, you know, there's less mechanical risk and you can have the whole thing be weatherproof or ruggedized. If you want like a matching transmission, of course, like I said, you can use it off the shelf charger. We also have this charging, you know, plate element that you can integrate. You see, just give a USB-C and it will automatically work with any cheap charging plate. So, you know, here's a demo of it, charging some Android phone quite nicely. And... Available in Digikey. It's in stock. It is in stock. There's 187. Yes. And I wanted to show, we'll show a video, but I can also show it off. It's just interesting. Especially you're getting your watch that doesn't even have a USB port really reminded me that this is kind of the future. Everything's going to have this integrated in. So, this is the pattern quarrel. So, it's protected. It's weatherproofed with this nice rubbery coating, but you can see the patterning. There's a mounting hole in the center. Just, you know, make sure it's centered. And then on the back is this adhesive that's protected. And then you just... This one comes with a little header, like a plain header, but of course, you can remove the header. It's directly to your PCB and it's, you know, instant wireless charging with a standard that you can get off the shelf charging plates. All right, we're going to play the video. But I did want to mention something because someone said in one of the chats, did anyone see the Apple event today? Because they have, you know, AirPods and iPhones. They love wireless charging too. And watches. So, there is a big world out there and we can all watch these keynotes and all these things and we can figure out what we want to buy. But then some of us like to build stuff and, you know, the next thing that people will be wearing or doing 10 years from now, 5 years from now, 15 years from now, is going to be thought up and worked on by someone who's doing electronics maybe early on in their career now or maybe it's something that they're going to work on later. So, you get to see a little glimpse of the future every single week on MPI. It's the new products that are available and a lot of these things are what's going to be in everything later. So, let's watch a video and that'll be this week's IonMPI. Okay. So, I'm going to do one question that goes around with this one and then I'm going to ask you a serious question. Okay. Okay. Do wireless chargers affect the wireless LEDs in any way? I think they don't. I think she actually does a communications before they transmit power. You can't just put that. You can't. I don't believe you can just put the LEDs on there. I used to have a charging plate. Yeah. But it's the whole point is that it's a little smarter than just like two coils that are like coaxial. All right. So, here's my serious question. This is this is one of the things. So, yeah. So, when you look at how people can be energy efficient or sometimes what we're told is earth friendly, you know, a lot of times we're told stuff because, you know, like giant fossil fuel companies make us feel bad that we don't. Yeah. They run an advertising campaign says, like, you should have a green straw. You're the re if you don't have a green straw, yeah, in a paper straw, you're destroying the planet. So, we all feel bad. But meanwhile, you know, there's other big contributors. Yeah. So, is it more efficient to use wireless charging or a wire? And before you answer, there's a lot of things because it's never there's never an easy answer because, like, what if the wire breaks? Now, you got to buy a new wire. And now it's you're the number one thing is it's the the amount of power being used to charge your devices is almost nothing. Yeah. So, it doesn't matter. What takes energy is the manufacturing of the good. Almost almost all of the cost of something is the energy it takes to manufacture it. So, if you're, you know, the amount of and like we do the math for like how much it costs to charge your phone, it's like $1.50 a year. There's almost no energy because the transformer, the you know, the converter for powering whether it's wireless or wired is extremely efficient. So, basically, if using wireless charging means you will use your phone longer and not purchase a new phone or new or a different charger because everyone has a different standard that is whatever saves you the most money is almost oh I mean not universally but in general what keeps you from getting new phones throwing stuff out because almost the stuff's not repairable is more likely to is we'll use more energy. So, it comes down to the manufacturing of the thing. So, with the energy of the manufacturing of the good is way with lifetime overwhelming if you have a wireless charger for a phone that's great because maybe you can always use that forever because it's a standard if you're gonna have to buy a different one if you use it for longer than yes if you if you if you end up saying like I really like this somebody or my connector doesn't my USB didn't break that's required me to buy a new phone that it saves energy because it's you know a lot of these things are counterintuitive when you think about it like using a microwave for food it's very efficient but not a lot of people like microwaves doesn't seem like a green thing it'd be like oh we should like have a campfire it's like nope you know it's very counterintuitive but basically whatever whatever costs less money usually not always but tends to be you have to remember like to charge a device is literally like pennies the amount of energy that you're using to charge devices is very very very little okay I was because I've been looking at all these little charts and a lot of the ways that people are getting told to save the planet it they're not gonna have an impact and there's some things that people can do but they're not getting told that so anyways yeah I thought that was interesting basically don't keep keep things out of the landfill not because the landfill itself but because manufacturing a thing to replace the thing you threw out takes much more energy well thanks goodness we're not forced by new phones every year away we are okay let's do some new products ready yes alright I just have some breaking news the wireless LEDs work with some toothbrush stands good that's important okay anyways what's up first okay first up we've got a perf board and this is a weird perf board this is by request this is a two millimeter pitch perfboard it is not point one inch pitch it will not work with microcontrollers or dip chips unless you happen to have Cold War Russian two millimeter pitch dips which is if you do that's really cool they're very rare but this is useful for modules like XBs and like once a while there's other Wi-Fi modules or dev boards that use two millimeter pitch and you're like I want to prototype with them this dev board will do it if you need point one inch pitch do not buy this we have ones in point one inch pitch but these are again two millimeter pitch okay next up okay next up we've got from Pimaroni a Pico lipo charger add-on for the Raspberry Pi Pico which adds a lipo battery and charging circuits you can charge through the micro USB on the Pico once this is soldered on and there's a cute off switch and I have a little demo I thought I would show yeah okay so this is the the Pico shim so again it goes on the back of the board that's clever and in this case we soldered it through but you can also solder it like directly on and then grab my just not correct yeah gravity is still working here I know it's anyone's wondering you charge it it turns red and then that turns off and then there's this cute push button switch with a like an SR latch and you push it to turn on the circuit and when you see the white LED it's on so it's just an adorable little way to you know you can still plug this into whatever you know well maybe you want a little extension cable look extension headers but you can also you can turn on and off charge the battery great I think it will work especially good with the Pico W so you can make wireless projects rainbow Alan's rainbow Alan's no you were asking about these you really liked these rainbow it's ironic is apparently Adam Savage also highlighted great minds think alike just coincidence we ordered these many it's really good validation it's it's when you know someone and you see that they're going to listen to a band or a concert that you like to and you're like that's cool that's cool so we were testing these and then we wanted to make sure they would work out great and we do a lot of stuff before we put it in the store yes and then he's actually really nice Alan yeah these are great you should get these and the rainbow a the beautiful they come with a little like handle if you want to get a little bit more torque on them their metric but honestly we kind of use these for everything and they wonderfully they've got a shiny chrome finish who doesn't love that and of course they are super rainbow-y yep except okay next up okay this is an interesting weird thing so I actually got this from my laptop and then because I you know I have a Mac laptop that you you gave me and it's the one of the modern and one ones and so it has a USB C port it doesn't have a mag jack and if you people know me I'm clumsy things fall things break think you know whatever that's why I learned to be an engineer to fix all stuff I broke so what's neat about this is I'll show this also on the overhead it's a USB C right angle adapter that's also like a mag jack type of mag mag safe adapter type thingy the end comes off so this you plug this into your device and then it magnetically flies on and of course this USB C also good for a little dev boards and stuff like that you can you can do a lot of things anything with USB C speaking of so for example and one like is it also has a little indicator to let you know it's charging if you wanted to you know of course you don't have to use it with I use it with a laptop but of course you can use it with your dev board and then you can easily connect it disconnect it to turn on and off your electronics you can see it turn on and then bam disconnect it so this is all this does is turn a USB into a right angle with a little magnetic jack it doesn't have any smarts in it it has an LED and it can do 120 watts it works well for laptops that I got it for but you can use it with dev boards as well okay next up okay speaking of power this is also by request we have a panel mount 2.1 millimeter 5.5 millimeter jack it uses the panel mount system that I really like it's just around one inch hole it means it's very easy to drill or cut into any material because it's like some panel mounts require rectangular or round or oval holes and it's like who has time for that round is best so go the overhead I can show this real quickly you know by the way folks were saying that these these magnetic things are great for the USB so USB-C soldering irons oh yeah okay so this again you just cut a hole again in this case we have if you can cut in these little notches it just means it'll be less likely to rotate a little bit I think if you line it up perfectly because there is a little bit of a grooving to it but basically you you know cut a hole and then what's nice is this lip is 30 millimeters and this round part is like 23 so it covers up any rough edges on the cutouts I remember like I was you making a arcade machine and it's like if you cut the holes and then there's a little bit of a lip to it it makes for a very super pro super pro and then it's just an extension cord doesn't do anything special it's just 2.5 sorry 5.5 outer diameter 2.1 millimeter inner diameter so standard DC jack okay next up we've got more cables similarly to that right angle jack I'm kind of like the the magnetic cables have gotten better they now do power and data and they're kind of advanced so this is a cable that it's both USB type a and type c you can shoot you know you can cut this thing off or you can keep it on to make it one or the other and on the other end is also a magnetic tip which you can see on the next image and also here so like that right angle adapter this is a cable where this end plugs into your computer you have windows or PC use the type a you have type C Mac type C whatever either one and then on the end here that the magnetic tip comes off so it makes it easy for you to you know have this power your dev board and then here I'll even plug this in there you go there's a little indicator light and then turn this on this is lit and then and then with this dev board or I want to disconnect it without having to unplug or I wanted to just have a safety release so that doesn't the USB C doesn't get yanked off the board just release it and replace it of course it's USB C so you can put an upside down so very nice just magnetic cable it's kind of your standard USB C cable but it's got a magnetic tip except and also have just the tips so if you're like okay I want to have different boards with USB C and I want to have one cable and then I can connect from you know one to the other we have just the magnetic tip part okay and started show tonight besides you lady our team our community our customers all the folks who make this thing go is the TCA 8418 breakout board which I'm really excited about because we started this design in 2020 and the chip was completely unavailable and then it became available so we are able to finally stock this really interesting GPIO expander and keypad matrix driver so it is an 18 GPIO expander if you want to just have like 18 inputs outputs with pull-ups you know and interrupt output then you can do that but what's interesting about this chip is it also does keypad scanning so it has 10 columns 8 rows so it can do up to 180 keys and here I'm just demoing it with a simple 3 by 4 matrix keypad and it has a 10 element event queue so it can actually like you don't have to pull it constantly if there's key presses it'll record the key matrix presses and releases for you and then you know whenever you get around to ask you over iSquad see hey what key presses did you get it'll it'll admit those key key codes and whether they're pressed or released and then you can use it with Arduino or circuit Python we have drivers for both so you can use it with a microcontroller and then another interesting thing about this chip is it also has a Linux kernel support and so if you happen to be interested in like making a up to 80 key keyboard for a single board computer this driver chip you can load it with into the kernel using a device to overlay you can set up the key map and then you can use it as a native keyboard built into the kernel which I think is kind of cool to try that out so here's the demo just show me overhead fast if I can plug it in I should have gotten this hooked up to my magnetic thing so yeah so here are the columns so there's columns zero through nine and then the rows are down here there's two up here row zero one and then through our seven I know that you cannot change the row and column assignment like you can't make a column into a row like there's ten columns eight rows that's it and then you know I just happened to have a keypad I thought it'd be easy to wire this up I just wrote a little example that maps the key numbers to digits and displays them and there's also a debouncer built in and of course you can mix and match you can have some GPIO and some keypad matrices just again you know rows and columns are fixed you can't change whether a pin is a row or column whatever it's labeled as is what it is but it's a really nice little chip and does something that I haven't seen a lot of other you know GPIO expander that I know of other than like the HT16 K33 does keypads and even that doesn't have a nice event queue like this one and that's new products okay well now you know why the code was because of this and you can buy those and get 10% off I got some questions lined up you can post them again or new ones in our discord yes and while we're looking at the questions coming in we're gonna do some top-secret from the vault let's see what's there yeah we're working on some easy link stuff so take it away us early to what is this this is the desombification of the easy link blue fruit originally I did this with the CSR chipset now we're trying to rebuild this board with an ESP 32 which has bluetooth classic support I haven't wired up here to an Arduino Uno the DTR line is kept through a capacitor you can see data being transmitted blue means it's connected bluetooth and I just uploaded a new pixel sketch so it's interesting about this code is it does the baud rate selection correctly so whatever baud rate you open up the com port over here on the computer at it does that and also it passes through the DTR DSR RTS and CTS lines so it's actually kind of like a transparent serial port over a bluetooth classic so far it's working pretty well so I'm excited to get this design wrapped up and into the food shop that's up secret okay we're gonna roll right into questions really data got some lined up here we go okay I need to get long-term seven-ish hours timing with millisecond precision in circuit python is timed on monotonic NS going to be sufficient with say an RP 2040 there is nothing that's going to get you seven-ish hour timing with millisecond precision that's just not even Arduino I wouldn't necessarily trust it there's going to be some drift it's really hard actually millisecond precision is I mean that's like parts per it's part per million it's a it's a lot you'll have to figure out what that the PPM is for that remember one millisecond is one one thousand so then you multiply it by the second hour whatever figure out that precision I don't know of anything offhand that can give you that kind of accuracy again even Arduino crystals are not are I think like 20 or 25 ppm I don't know if they're if they're good enough for what you need yeah this was where atomic clocks come in and even most RTCs they're not they have little drift but they're still not gonna get millisecond precision so basically I it's very hard you might want to have a physicist okay I think I can answer this one yeah what do you is there an easy way to keep track of specific changes in addition to the eight fruit learning guides like track changes feature so for the code you could check on github for any updates it'll say last updated and then any assets will say that but we we have typos and stuff like that so we don't have like the ongoing forever log of like oh we forgot an apostrophe yeah we we tend to only bump it to the top of the you know updated new product guides when there's like a new page or like a very serious serious change we don't have you we don't have we do have records of everything that's changed but we don't have a feed for code stuff you can look at it of course yes a court in the code you can subscribe to the eight fruit get a repo and you can see the nitty-gritty every day okay data sheet question from before from Marcos gonna send that to the team thank you for that can circuit python be used for real time sensing applications it depends on how real time you mean if you mean millisecond per seven hours then no but if you mean just like hey I want to you know control something like a servo a motor and I want to have it have it happen at a regular rate maybe it's it depends again on your your accuracy that you need there's things like pio in the Raspberry Pi they can give you really good real-time timing but often we recommend just using a peripheral or like a coprocessor chip that or coprocessor helper that's really good the specific thing that you need to have done so if you're like generating PWMs or something use a PWM generator that'll you know you can control over I squirts your SPI so it kind of depends on the kind of timing and sensing that you need okay what was the main takeaway for wireless charging is better because it will last longer than a cable yeah I mean it's basically convenience and yes basically you know whatever you're not manufacturing basically for first off sometimes you really want to make your your device weatherproof like very rugged eyes and for it to be rugged eyes it needs to be like IP rated and to be IP rated you can't really have just like a massive port that you just like you can plug in I mean you can get weatherproof USB-C connectors or you know Apple uses lightning but you might be better off with using wireless charging and that's why you know the wireless charging toothbrushes are such that one of the first you know that killer apps for wireless charging is you know bathrooms and toothbrushes are just constantly covered with spit and water and toothpaste and gunk and they're being put under the walk you know water yes they could have had a port but the port has just gotten clogged and rusty and so having wireless charging is is a great use case for that similarly with phones like one of the things that really has always broken on phones first is the USB cable because people don't realize it's plugged in they yank on it and then you get that strain which just like wrenches the connector off of the PCB same thing with headphones which is you know why wireless headphones are also really good idea in some cases so it's it's mostly an issue of reducing your like outside environmental ingresses and also it's convenience if you have something like a watch or a phone people are gonna be less annoyed with low battery life if they can just put it down on their bedroom you know nightstand and it automatically charges overnight whereas if they have to remember to plug it in that's just like one more thing they have to remember so just here is a prediction you know future is gonna be wireless charging for a lot of things and then much like when you order food and it you click a thing that says do or do not include utensils when we order electronics or we buy things you'll probably not get a USB-C cable with stuff it'll or you'll have to click include utensils include USB-C cable because everyone gets a cable over and over and over again and that's a huge amount of waste that a lot of people don't need a cable yeah might save some cost on devices too you say I don't want a cable anyways next up for the 120 watt charger is it 25 watts or six amps and then then folks were answering in the chat I think it's probably 20 20 volts five I'll tell you here's the thing I actually don't remember when I got it of course I plugged into the USB-C thing and I use it with my you my MacBook Air and it works wonderfully with that and it charges at any any proper rate I would say it's probably 20 20 volt 5 amps I think the rating of each he doesn't have e mark in it in case you're wondering because if it did it would cost more and I would know but it doesn't say that so I'm assuming it doesn't e mark in it it does do PD because otherwise my laptop wouldn't charge and I think the rating is mostly on the cable like that the connector quality and length again it doesn't have any internal circuitry in it it just passes the wires through there's no internal circuitry at all for that adapter we'll speed around these get you out of here we're gonna bounce soon did they make us be mini B magnetic ends they don't we're gonna have lightning and microbe but I couldn't find mini B sorry mini B is just kind of didn't make the next the next generation it got left on the yeah everyone's liking the idea of like don't send utensils don't send USB-C cable like we I think so yeah I think it said of being like shamed about straws like this is actually something that you know manufacturers could do anyways usually use because they use are always like they're not that great like one directional are there any guides on make my own board by scaling back circuit Python to only the sensors I need for my project I never made a board before but considering turning my dream project into a product would it be advisable just use circuit Python as a brain oh sorry maybe that sir playground is brain since it's already so affordable considering a super small run of 20 is this a disrespectful idea since it's development boards and for education I'm learning to code using circuit Python myself so I think they're combining circuit playground and circuit Python our boards are open source if you want to make a remix of a board you can totally take it and pull out anything disrespectful it fulfills the destiny of what we're trying to do I have our little warning you it's hard to get some of those parts which is why we're out of stock right now so if you're able to get those components you have to basically you know yes you can take the design and just yank off whatever you don't want and and make them or please do that factured or you can change it and people have like they'll swap out different sensors that's totally cool too ideally you'd publish your design so no one can learn off that and we can continue this thing going little bummed personally that there seems to be a retraction of the idea of publishing open source hardware for things that people actually want yeah we're the number one open source hardware certified company according to ashua because we have the most certifications and we'll always continue to do that but it is a little bit of a drag that we're seeing some of the open source hardware companies are just basically like nope we're gonna like do like super advanced pro now we you don't need this anymore we're not gonna publish her our files anymore that's okay I'm gonna I'm gonna publish more we're just gonna keep doing what we're doing but that's fine next up how did chip component manufacturers pick those crazy parts names that they use I do not know it's a little bit of a question you know it's like once in a while you see articles about how like drug manufacturers you know pick the names for their drug like you know advanced or whatever I have no idea how at least they're combining two things that try to you know like vivantum it's like okay it's for you can kind of see sometimes you know usually a lot X's and Z's and Y's and V's and they try to make it kind of sound like the thing but Lumigel I do not know I mean like this is that in the WCT 38466 I you know assume there's some internal coding I have no idea look a different product numbers are just monotonically increasing so product number four thousand just was is the one before four thousand one and that's it okay is there a simple way to identify one wire to be s s to devices devices to serial numbers and installation with multiple one wire devices on the same bus sucks huh yeah there's no real easy way to do it you just have to plug in one at a time do a scan to identify the the MAC address of the identifier and then like put some sort of piece of tape with that number on it yeah are we gonna resurrect easy key yeah maybe one day we'll circuit Python be able to drive ink displays using RP 2040 W one day it can do it now it just doesn't can't use Wi-Fi at the same time like RP 2040 definitely supports ink it just doesn't do both we're going to make a screwdriver no but I've seen a lot of the you know electronic when we have rainbow Allen's yeah have you seen my I will say that I got the sample of this during Pride month that's how long it takes to get something into the shop and that does it for questions thank you everybody don't forget the code is and you can see why 10% off in the store all the way to 1.59 p.m. tonight thank you so much everyone for joining us it's very much appreciated special thanks to say behind the scenes here and we'll see everybody next week we're hosting show until next week ask an engineer next week we have lots of videos we're doing there's a lot of head chips are starting to come back in stock so we'll see how things go thanks for hanging in there for the last couple years of all this nonsense well I'm will try to keep doing chips there's always gonna be something but I can't I don't feel bad but in the same chips over well yeah it but you know some of the vendors that are out there have started to reach out to us and they're like oh yeah like things are starting to come back we'll let you know more so you know say okay this has been an aid of fruit production here is your moment of zener our buddy