 Here we go. Welcome to Desk of Lady Aida. Hey everybody and welcome to the Desk of Lady Aida. It's me, Lady Aida. With me, Mr. Lady Aida on Camera Control. We got a couple minutes from my desk, all the engineering I'm up to this week. But first up, some news, Mr. Lady Aida. What's going on? Yeah, let's hop over to your computer. Okay. So, if you go to adafruit.com. Adafruit.tumblr.com. Yeah, you can go to adafruit.com. You can also go to adafruit.tumblr.com or tumblr.com slash adafruit. You can see the full month of March and Touch things that we're doing. So, every day there's retro Mac related things and folks really like it. Lots of nostalgia. If you've never heard about it, that's okay too. This is a good chance to learn about a lot of computing past and how we got here. We're posting up photos of our collection of things. I'm not going to show all the photos, but what I will show is a little bit of a, preview of some of the things. Then we also have accessories and things that are in the Mac orbit. So, we have a 25th anniversary Mac. These are beautiful with a big giant Bose speaker and these really weird cables. It's so weird. Yeah, I'm also making a computer for our daughter and here's a very neat Crayola. Hey, it's an ortho keyboard. Yeah. This is plugging into a Mac. I'll talk about that in a future show. Then, we spent a lot of time on Hypercard because it really is one of the reasons I'm here. You have some experience with Hypercard. What did you do back in the day? I loved making games with Hypercard. I loved programming with Hypercard. It's kind of my first programming language. So, you get the demo version and you do like, it was like the control shift M or open Apple M and then you type like magic and it would turn it into the full set. So, that was super cool. Then, I just love making cards and I remember just making a lot of pointing-click games because that was cool to time. It's funny nowadays, people are always like, oh, we should make it easy for people to write games, but I was in grade school and doing stuff with Hypercard. It was really easy to make. It's like mis-made in Hypercard or something like that. It was very... The originator of Mist. Well, oh, God, there was the manhole. What was the name of that game? It was like you went underground. I think the original version of Mist maybe, but there were a lot of puzzle games because you could get input and click where you want and have the cursor change. But yeah, a lot of early games were Hypercard and then it was just a really fast way to script stuff. So, I loved it. So, in addition to the physical things that we're showing, we're also doing a little bit of jogs down memory road and we have some footage from when some of these things were released, so here's a little clip from Computer Chronicles. I thought folks would enjoy this with the creator of Hypercard and just also like a very interesting different time in computing. The idea of having a script on a button was like a big deal. So, we're gonna continue with Desk of Lady Eater, but let's watch this video, see you on the other side. Hypercard, what is it? It's not Hyper. It's not even a card. It's not quite system software. It's not quite application software. Did you tell us what Hypercard's all about though? Well, really simply put, Hypercard is a software erector set that lets non-programmers put together interactive information. Show us how you actually do this, Bill. You use cards that contain graphics and text and buttons. Here, I've got a stack of cards and I can press on this button and it will take me to another card. Okay, that button's particular function is get to the next card. Right, we can have lots of buttons to do different things. Buttons can do things like dialing the phone and taking it to cards and lots of different things. Whatever you tell it to do. Yeah. Okay. The cards are grouped together into stacks that you put on a floppy disk and can share with somebody else. And you can organize it so that any card can jump to any other card. Is this where you get that notion of hypertext and built into the hypercard system? Yeah, it's kind of the freedom to organize the information according to how things are associated with each other, not just according to the next card in the list. Right, okay. The buttons, as I said, can do lots of things. Here's one that makes a noise and sounds. And you can have lots of different kinds of cards. The standard three by five card is a little weak metaphor, but you can include things like an expense report or maybe an appointment book, things like that. Lots of different kinds of things can be on cards. Even little interactions. Here's a little keyboard that you could click on and it makes sounds and moves the note accordingly. So you can do things within a card itself. A card is just not some information. What's real important is that cards contain both information and interaction. Okay, and so we're not done with all the retro stuff. We've been working on some interesting things. There's a lot of computing history out there, including some intersections between pop culture and what was the first time something was distributed on a floppy when someone like Prince was doing something. So Prince changed Prince's name to the artist, formerly known as Prince, and we had to get this new symbol. And so they sent out these to journalists and more and we got one of these. We borrowed it from Anil Dash. Thank you so much, Anil. And we put it on archive.org. Let me go to the computer real quick. Here's where it is. You can go to archive.org, for slash details, for slash Prince underscore floppy. Yeah. And you can see a gatekeepery comment. So by the way, so by the way, there's a lot of people that do retro and archive-y stuff that do not want people like Lamor or me or our company or our team doing anything around it. So ignore crummy things like that. So anyways, we put up the files. And now I want to give a gift to Anil because this is a piece of history. And the more you use that floppy, the more you access, eventually it's going to deteriorate. But this is a digital version of that. Yes. And it's purple. The original was actually yellow, but for Anil, because purple was Prince's color. And it's just up for the PyPortal project that Anne and Noah and Sandra worked on, except instead of displaying icons, we just put the image loader demo. It's like a four line Python script that just displays that image that was on the Prince floppy. We convert it from the tip to a bitmap and now just displaying it on the top of the floppy display. And then you can put whatever images you want or of course program it to display your custom Mac icons. Or actually now we have a GIF IO support. You can put your favorite animated GIF of Prince on there. So I think Anil's going to really like this. We'll catch up with him shortly here in New York City and hand this off. Yeah. I want to make sure it's okay to give this gift. So do you want this or should I give it as well? Okay. All right, cool. So what's actually on your desk this week in addition to this? Okay. So physically on my desk. I like how this is physically on my desk. Let me unplug this. What's on the physical desk? Okay. So we got our feather bones, boards, and, I know people were looking forward to those. The first one we got is this DVI feather. So let's go to the overhead and I'll show this off. So you've got the RP2040 and the buttons, battery, battery charger, power supply, USB-C for programming and upload, eight megatubites of flash. You've got a STEMI QT port over there. And then on that bones area, the empty space is a big, chunky DVI output connector that can connect to, you can see HDMI displays. And it works. So let's see. Of course I'm going to do a live demo, which is always a little risky, but let's see if this works. So, oh, you know what? I think I accidentally mis-programmed this. So let me unplug everything else. Hold on, live demo. Oh, actually, you don't want to go to the computer because I'll show off the DVI code. So, open recent, it seems to be a bit hello. So this is the example we've got in the Pico DVI library. Let me just select the board. And this example basically makes the DVI output. It kind of like does all the work for you. Philby did this, paint your dragon, so that you just treat it like an Adafruit GFX frame buffer of 320 by 240 or because I have this five inch display that's, oops, that's 800 by 480. It's 400 by 240 P60. And that's because we pixel double. Like if you count the number of pixels you need to do 640 by 480, we literally don't have enough RAM. So what we do is 320 by 240 doubled. And the only thing you have to do is slow down the Q-Spy flash because actually it gets overclocked so much it runs out of, like it can't keep up with it and it hard faults. So let me upload this to the feather. And I just have the example demo that's running on that we have for Adafruit GFX that Philby also redid where it like draws text and it has some charts. And it has a line drawing. And one of the interesting things is normally for Adafruit GFX we're connecting to an SPI display. And so like you have to send that data over SPI when you're using with HDMI, it's like instant because the frame buffer is immediately written out over DBI on that second core. So let's go to the overhead and we can show this off. Okay, so now I've got the demo running. So this is our... I was gonna engineer, I pumped out the video because it's HDMI and I'll show it like, what the video output is, but you can look at it on the screen right now. Yes, this is an 800 by 480 HDMI display. And so when you get in a moment, we're gonna get to, oh, it's doing the rotation. So that's why it's going fast, we'll rotate this. It goes through all the demo and then it rotates everything. So when you get to the speed up text, it actually will add like a frame per second to show. It's like, it's nearly instantaneous. Like it's so fast because the moment it writes to memory, it's immediately output, there's no blocking. So it's, this can be kind of interesting. Like, you know, basically we can have sensor data come in from the I squared C and then immediately displayed. It can have video games. Like you can do... Artificializations. Yeah. This is gonna be great. Cause everyone has a large black rectangle in their homes. It does nothing. They can't program what's on it, not really. There's all sorts of weird things that you could do with this canvas. Yeah. And now you could do it, sort of Python. Yep. This is gonna be great. Yeah, and you can do like a mini computer where you like, you know, you type and then, you know, it displays on the monitor. So the DVI output. And then we have the Util and C and CEC pins. Like in case you want them for something. HPD is hot plug detect. So this pin goes high when something is plugged in. So you can like connect that to something. Cause the eight GPIOs are all used for the DVI output. But it works great. Peter Dragon did a great job getting all the code ready for me. I just plugged it in and ran the demo and it just magically worked. So you see this just needs a little bit of silk screen love and we're gonna order this. So the first bones board was a success, which is great because I know people wanted to get these files. So as soon as the PCBs are in, the silk screen is done. We'll publish the files. And then for folks who want to use the bones board and like change it around to do whatever they want on that space, just delete the DVI connector. And then you can put whatever you like in this spot over here. So first bones board is done, very successful. So the next bones board that we got in, and I'm gonna just take this away and I'll lead into the great search, is I've got the RFM69 bones board. So this, I just haven't hooked it up with an OLED. So it's kind of nice to have a steveqt port because like I wanted to do the OLED demo. I didn't have to solder the feather wing. I just like plugged it right in. So this is an RFM69, but it's pin compatible with the standard like Laura RFM9X9596. And I've got a couple antenna options here. So first one is, I just put a through hole pad so you can have a wire, 13 inch long wire. This isn't 13 inches, but it's kind of close, good enough. And then also a UFL connector. And then we had a little bit of spot for a vertical, not horizontal, I could fit a horizontal STEMIQT. But everything works really great and all the extra IO pads that are on the RFM pad, RFM connector go into the RP2040. So let me autofocus this. And then let me find the other one. The second, it fell on the ground. Let me pick that. So we have two, because you always have to test with two. And then, let me kind of see if I can get both of these into the screen. So when I press the boot button, which is also a GPIL, you can see on the right hand side, it's like, yes, I got a message and it displays the RSSI. And then likewise, if I press this button over here, there's basically sending one button pressed back and forth. That's it, very simple. And just testing that the antenna is working. And one of the nice things I like is that because I had a little bit more space, I was like really crammed everything in. I was able to fit that UFL. And on the previous desk of Lady Eda, sorry, previous great search, we talked about UFL connectors and how to find them on digikey.com. So this weekend, I'm gonna show, if you're gonna use this low cost style, just connect a piece of wire. Wire, quarter wave whip works really well for many, many projects, inexpensive, easy. But let's say you want to connect this to an- Do you want me to roll into the great search with the intro stuff and everything? Just want, almost. Okay. I'm getting everybody excited. You're winding up. I'm winding up. I'm excited. I wanna click the button. I know, you wanna click the button. You have one of these boards and you wanna connect it to a panel mount antenna, like a really large antenna like this one, which looks like a magic wand, but it's not. It's an antenna. It's just really huge. You're gonna need a UFL to SMA adapter and that's this week's great search. So let's now. Where in the world is that part I need with digikey? The highly anticipated great search brought to you every single week by digikey and Aida Fruit. It's so exciting even sitting here. I knew it was gonna happen. I have a full seat, but I only need the edge. Okay. So what is this week's great search where Lady Aida helps you find all the things you need on digikey.com. Okay. Well, let's go to the overhead and I'm gonna show. I'm gonna re-intrure this and get right to it. So on this design for a 900 megahertz radio module, we have a low cost antenna option where you just solder a piece of wire. We have these spring antennas that they're like a couple cents. We solder them into a through hole port, but let's say you want a really big antenna, like you want something panel mounted that you can connect to the outside of the box. It can be waterproof then, and then just the antenna sticking out. For these, you'll want to connect an SMA antenna. That's the most common, like 400 to 800, 900 megahertz antennas almost all use SMA for the connector. They look like this. And you need something that takes this and lets you plug it into this micro-UFL. Now, you might wonder, well, why not just have an SMA connector on your boards? You can. People definitely do. I have deaf boards that have an SMA connector on them. You can plug the antenna directly in, but that sort of means, first off, you need a lot more space. They have to be hand soldered or wave soldered. They're physically large. They can't be pick and placed whereas UFL can. The trade-off is, you know, if you use UFL, they're a little delicate. They only are really meant for about 10 to 50 plugs and unplugged. So you don't have to be careful with them because they're so tiny and delicate. They are good for up to six gigahertz, you know, but you need to have this adapter. You need to have a little adapter cable that'll take you from UFL to SMA. One thing I want to mention, because this has tripped everybody up so many times I've seen. So you can have, you see how this has a little slot in the middle. There's a hole. And this antenna here, this like huge antenna here, has the little pokey part. So the pokey part has to go in and matches up with the whole part. This screws in, the outside is ground. It makes a nice solid connection. The RF signal is actually gone, goes through the center bit, the little coaxial bit. But if you are doing 2.4 gigahertz, Wi-Fi or BLE or ZigBee or anything that uses 2.4 gigahertz, the antennas are RP-SMA, reverse polarity, which means if you notice, there's a hole there. So if you plug this in to an SMA, notice that there's nothing connect, it won't connect through. And you'll be like, my antenna is broken, my SMA adapter is broken, my board is broken, my radio signal is really bad. You need a different one called an RP-SMA. I'll probably be able to show you that they have UFL to RP-SMA reverse polarity. So just watch out, 2.4 gigahertz and only 2.4 gigahertz, maybe five gigahertz also these days, because five gigahertz is used for Wi-Fi. They'll have RP-SMA connections, see hole in the middle, whereas what we're gonna talk about is 900 megahertz, which is SMA, which has the pokey part on the antenna, not the adapter. I don't wanna talk about days that I've lost, being like, what's wrong with my design until I finally realized opening it up. I'm like, oh my God, it's not connected through because I had 2.4 gigahertz with the wrong connector. Okay, everyone's bumped into this, so I'm gonna try to save you some time. So we want is a little cable that takes UFL here, and this is the UFL connector. And again, on an earlier great search, we covered the UFL connector. It's pick in place. They're almost completely universal. Basically, if it's not SMA, it's almost always UFL. It plugs in like this, and it actually has a little bit of rotation. So just be aware of that. If you need to, you can mechanically stabilize this, but it can rotate a little bit, and then this part you'll notice is bulkhead panel mountable. So you can unscrew this, and you have a very wide panel mount that you can connect to. You've got some locking nuts as well, and then a nice plated hex nut, and you screw it in, you attach it, make sure you have plenty of thread. For you're not RPSMA or SMA, you can then plug this in to make a nice solid connection. You'll note, I mean, maybe if we have time, we'll show it, but basically the DB RSSI goes to negative 20s of negative 60. Okay, so let's go to Digi- Let's go back to the computer. Let's go to the computer, we're finally ready. Okay, so what we're looking for, and again, there's SMA and RPSMA. I don't wanna talk about how many times I messed that up, but also, UFL, there's WFL, and sometimes it's like UFL 2 or UFL 3. There's a lot of different versions, so just be aware. You might wanna check data sheets, use your calipers to make sure what you're looking at is the right width of what you think it is. So UFL, it's, Hirosi is the original makers of the parts, and maybe it's Prentz-Hyros. Hirosi is the original maker of the UFL, but it's now universal, you'll see it everywhere. UFL to SMA. And so you can get the individual connectors. Also, you can get these adapters. So just to show the difference between the cables and the adapters, here's where you would go. If by chance, you have to connect an RPSMA thing to an SMA thing, you have to like, switch which side is the pokey part, which is the plug and which is the socket. You can get adapters that do the changeover for you. So that's available, but let's just try to get the right thing the first time. So coaxial cables. So first off, let's get active only, and then let's make sure, I mean, in my case, we're happened to be using 900 megahertz, but you know, let's just make sure we can do at least 2.4 gigahertz. And then in stock, let's apply. Okay. So we're gonna have at the end, free mount, sorry, panel mount, not free hanging. Free hanging would mean, you know, maybe it's an adapter and then goes to another cable or something, but we want what I showed you, where it has the screw, you know, goes through the panel and you hex mount it on. So panel mount. And then you can check different lengths, you know, they go up basically from two inches, which is a little bit too short of three inches to maybe, you know, 19 or 17 or so. So let's do that. Let's just make sure it's a little longer than two. So UFL sometimes called UMCC note that they do have RP-SMA, which we don't want. We want SMA. And then, and also sometimes they have right angle or not, and you can see there's like tons of these, apply all. You know, and then it's just a matter of like, you know, there's different makers, different lengths. You know, honestly, this one looks like pretty good and it's only, you know, three bucks. Sometimes I look at, you know, what they have the most in stock of. And for now, you know, they make a version. You can see here, it's got, you know, right, UFL connector. This one from TauGlass is good to TE. They're all good. I mean, all of them are going to do what you want. They just have sometimes different cabling, different height, you know, highest frequency. This one comes with an O-ring. You know, this one from TauGlass is perfectly fine. So I'd say, you know, you want just a short cable. Goes down to a couple bucks a piece when you get them in quantity. This one is a good option. I'm going to pick some of these up and then, you know, then you can just attach whatever antenna you want on the other side, maybe next, great search will search for a nice Lora antenna to pair with this feather. That's a great search. Where are you, baby? All right, well, between financial collapse and the Oscars, we got to bounce pretty fast tonight. So we'll answer some questions in the Discord chat if we didn't get to it while we were talking. Lots going on here, including a BreeBree. So we'll see everybody next week. We got a full week of shows and more. Stay safe, be good to one another and never let someone make you feel bad about the things that you love to do. So... And always check for RP-SMA versus SMA on your end. Two life lessons. Two life lessons. See everybody next week.