 Live from New York, it's Ask an Engineer, special Thursday night edition. Happy, happy Ask an Engineer. It's, yes, it's a special night. Usually we do these on Wednesdays, but we have, we had an event, we went, we're at yesterday, which we'll chat about shortly, but never to keep it Ask an Engineer away from you for a full week. We just decided to just move it over to Thursday. So we're here now, me, Lady Aida, with me, Mr. Lady Aida, here at the Aida Food Factory in downtown Manhattan. Oh, did you know that we're woman-owned manufacturing business in Manhattan? You know, actually, we're going to talk about that today. You don't know this because I was doing a bunch of administrative management things, but we got our certification renewed. Okay. So it's official. And I know everyone's saying, like, boy, that must be great. No, it's actually not. It doesn't really do anything at all, except for make us a target online for mean people who say, oh, you're woman-owned. Okay, I'm going to snark on you. Okay. So anyways, let's talk about all the things that are going to be on the show tonight. That's right. What's on the show tonight, Mr. Lady Aida? On tonight's show, the code is recovery growth. That's right. Recovery growth is the code. And the reason why I set code is because we're going to talk about the new report that just came out supporting NYC Small Business Recovery Growth. It's a little long, but it's fine. Yeah, it's fine. Look, it's worth it for 10% off. It's fine. But that's the code for tonight. And Aida Fruit's in this. And we're going to talk about all that more. To go about our live series of shows, we do a bunch of live shows, including this one, show and tell. We did that yesterday. And you can watch us talk about some of the things that we're going to talk about tonight on the show and tell. I can also watch it anytime. Time travel around the world, makers, actors, artists, engineers, all the things that's going on in the world and more. New York City factory footage glimpse inside of making in New York City, 3D printing. We got eye on MPI. We got some new products. We got some top secret. We're going to answer your questions. We do that on Discord. AidaFruit.it slash Discord where we have a new graphic. Why? 32,000 of us. Join us. There's two different types of people in the world. People that are having a fun in Discord with Aida Fruit and the people that aren't. Be the ones that are. All that and more on, you guessed it, ask an engineer. Let's do this. Let's do this. So one thing I neglected to do was put the new free graphic in because everything's changing really fast with us. So Lady Aida, you're going to have to wing it a little bit here tonight. Whoa. I know. Maybe feather wing it. You're all weak. Okay. So what I'm going to do is go through some of the stuff that we do to pay the bills. Yes. And this time we're just going to show the free section. Thank you for supporting us. Yeah. So, you know, use the code 10% off for all things that we have in stock. And Lady Aida, what do people get for free as they add stuff to their cart? I'm glad you asked. When you order from AidaFruit.com, we give you free stuff. When you order $99 or more, you get a free perma-proto half-sized breadboard. Where'd it go? Huh? Where'd it go? Oh, here it is. It was here. Oh, yeah. Great. Sorry. No, it's fine. It's a little different. Yeah. $149 or more, you get a free STEMA QT board. We have a range of different boards available. You'll get a different one each time if you make an account, because we could keep track of which ones we've sent you. If not, you'll just get a random one. Could be the same as last time. $199 or more, you get free UPS ground shipping in the content to the United States. It's trackable and insured. And we love that shipping. If you have it shipped today, you'll still get it before the holidays. And then very likely. And then $299 or more, do it now. $299 or more, we give you a free circuit playground blue fruit. It's our circuit playground board that can be used with Arduino or circuit Python. And it has BLE built-ins. It's great for making IoT projects and remote controlled stuff and communicating with Bluetooth devices around your house. Okay. And because I want to try some new camera stuff this week, Lady Aida, what is your favorite STEMA QT board if you had to pick one? Oh, my favorite. Which one is it? I think my favorite STEMA QT. I mean, like, it's a QT pie, but I really like the QT pie boards. And I'm designing a new one right now, the ESP QT pie. But I just think that the RP2040 QT pie, I think it's like, oh, it's just so adorable. It's such a cute little board. You heard it here first. Okay. So let's keep going. So we do a live series of shows, including this one. And, you know, for the folks who watch the show all the time. So yesterday, we had a packed day. And in the past, I would try to do everything and then still do the show on Wednesday night. And I'm just like, you know what? In this modern world, you can always watch it anytime you want. And live is special. But, you know, once in a while, people say it'd be great if the show was Thursday nights because I have something I have to do every Wednesday night. And so just once for you. But I think what we're going to try to do is not necessarily cancel the show some weeks when something comes up, which is very rare for us. I think what we'll do is we'll just find a day that makes sense so we can do all the fun things that we'd like to do. I like to spend a lot of time on the show. In fact, it's time to up it on the show. We're going to be reorganizing this area and more. Some of you all saw green screens. Our home setup is changing as well. You know, 18 months of trauma and death will do that to you. But we're crawling out of that. And that's why, by the way, the code is recovered. Okay. So show until was yesterday. 7 30. I talked about the NYC gov event that you went to. We had the cast of characters and more. Thank you. You know, Pedro who took care of the show until next week. JP's going to be doing it. And then I think we're on the next two after that. Just give ladies every Sunday. Lady. What did you show off in part one of Jessica Lady at a reminder? Okay. Um, okay. So we talked about the floppy disk stuff. We showed off the uno mini, which we also have. And then I talked about my feather and four, which I actually didn't get right. So I actually showed off what I didn't get right with it. But my new prototype showed up. So maybe the next desk desk desk of Lady Yoda, I'll show my new fixed up version. I mean, look, you have prototypes. They don't always work out the right way first time. And that's normal. I mean, I've had boards that go through seven, eight revisions. That's uncommon, especially when I'm learning. Um, you know, I my new motto is either we win or we learn something. And in this case, I learned something. Okay. And then we do from the desk of Lady Aida, the great search in this project by Digikey and Ada Free where Lady Aida uses all our power of engineering and years sitting from my computer searching for things online on the digikey.com site. What was the great search this week? Well, in honor of the Uno mini, because we talked about the history of the Uno and one of the things that was neat about that board is it came with a USB to serial converter chip and I've been dealing with an outage of CP 2104 boards. I can't chip. So it's, it's very hard to get them, but I can get CP 2102s. And so I talked about USB to serial converters and some things that I have learned in my like two decades of using USB serial converters. They're not all the same. They don't all work the same. There's a couple of things to watch out for. So we chatted about USB serial converters, a great tool in the engineer's toolbox to take non USB native chips and connect them to computers. Okay. JP's product pick of the week. We do that every Tuesday. We have a highlight. This was a doozy. This is a doozy and a little reminder to all your friends because there's a lot of companies that aren't, electronic companies aren't open source, aren't doing anything like that, but they're getting into what we're doing, which is you broadcast live from a product page showing off all the cool things. And then if you just hit the buy button right there, automatic discount, you don't have to do anything at all whatsoever. So, you know, it's contagious. And that's a word that's, that's used a lot, but in this particular case, it's true because it works. And I think if people think about what good information is, good information basically is advertising and that's what our jam is. So take it away JP. See you on the other side. Macro pad starter kit comes with the board, enclosure, keys, keycaps and knob, as well as some extras like bumpers and screws to put it all together. I'll go ahead and plug this in with USB-C. When I'm clicking it right now, I'm just doing a brightening of all of the NeoPixels. You can see it's really fast and responsive. I've got some of these keys hooked up to my software's camera controls, so or layer controls inside of the broadcast software. So this will switch things around as I press it, which is a really nice use for this, which is as a as a camera switcher. I have the code that's running on the board and I also have a little separate file, which is my keymap file. Here I say what color the key is. If you see here the example of key number nine here, it sends shift eight, which is the star. So you can layer up your macros with this. The macro pad RP2040 starter kit. Okay, JP's workshop was earlier today because you know it's Thursday and next week on our show we'll have the parsec segment that just happened today. This is the one that happened last week. So it's a little bit of a highlight if you can get if you didn't catch it. Take it away, JP. For the circuit Python parsec today, I wanted to talk about how to do a very simple but important thing, which is serial printing without the new line. So if you're used to using serial print to the USB REPL for your debugging or printing to a screen, one thing you'll often encounter is when you're printing out values, maybe it's sensor values or timings, the numbers kind of whip past real fast and you can't really go back and look at stuff. You can't really scroll that easily. It's a bit of a pain. So if you want to print values, but not have the print statement be automatically a print, including a new line where it goes to the next line, all you have to do is this change your print statement to include comma and equals and then some quotes with either a space or some characters in it. If I hit save right here, you'll see now I have numbers moving across the screen and it'll still wrap. So it doesn't kind of go off to the right forever. But it means you can keep track of things for a lot longer. So I never knew this until recently. This was a tip and trick from the Todd Bot GitHub page, Todd Bot's Tips and Tricks for Circuit Python. Really helpful because now you can go in and take that default behavior of the new line, remove that and even add in something. Let's say a little comma now. Now when I start that, I get these little commas between them to delimit things. So that is a really simple but effective trick for helping your serial output. And that is how you can do serial printing without the new line. And that is your Circuit Python parsec. Okay. And Friday, which is tomorrow, join Scott for DeepDive Fridays at 2pm Pacific. Scott's working on a bunch of that bare metal type things for Raspberry Pi, running Circuit Python on it. It's looking pretty good. It's so cool and so weird. Love it. Yeah, we made a promise to keep Aida for it weird and we have to. All right, time travel. Where we're going, we're not going to need roads because the infrastructure collapsed. Okay. So time travel, let's look around in the world of this week. So this week was a big week, Lady Aida. I know. Big week. And the reason why it was a big week was because we got an email that said, hey, the mayor of New York and Janelle Dorre's commissioner for small business wants you to, wants to invite you and recognize you for all the stuff that you did in partnership and resiliency through the pandemic. So I'll pop to me for a second. So what did we do? We had to close down Aida fruit. Oh, you want me to put you on the chair? No, it's funny. Sorry, sorry, I could help it. Oh, hi. You want to take over? No. Sorry. Well, I thought, you know, so sometimes, you know, we were, you know, we're kind of far away. So I thought we would try this. I don't know. Look, I had a little bit of time. This is very serious. Is it? Yeah. You know what? Here's the thing though, it's actually not very serious. If we can't laugh and we can't find some joy at this point after surviving the worst that happened. So you got invited to this event and it was a Gracie mansion. And the last time we were there was Bloomberg was mayor and I was doing some stuff with Meg magazine and came along. And it was really neat. And one of the things was Bloomberg was in the corner with his Blackberry at the time. He was addicted to it. And he was like, and he was doing a bunch of work. But you could tell that he that he was really on top of the game. As far as what he was talking about that day. Yeah. And when we went there, it was a really neat thing. You know, we had to make sure we were Vax and Mass and all that stuff. And here is the little plaque. This is a Gracie mansion. And the neat thing was the speakers who we knew from the Zoom calls over the last few months. So Janelle Doris is commissioner and department of the department of small businesses. Kicked it off. Did an amazing job. Thank you, Janelle. It was pointed by the mayor and the co-chair of the small business task force. He was the director of the minority and women owned business enterprises. We're one of these. And really inspiring, really great speech. Talked about a lot of things that had happened in the last 18 months. And then Phil, who I like because, you know, us feels got to stick together. J. Phil Thompson, deputy mayor for strategic policy initiatives, gave a great talk. We're at we're heading and where we're going. And was a former professor in MIT. And then Blasio came on and talked about kind of big news, I guess, is during the pandemic, there was a census on population. And it was really hard to pull off. And usually the numbers are under counting because all the stuff. But it turns out New York City grew despite what many mainstream news channels say. So we're coming back bigger, coming back bolder, and better than before. So with that, you could check out some photos of Lady Aida. And this is where the mayor lives. And the report that came out is supporting small businesses, recovery and growth. And if you look at it, there is a different mention in there because of all the stuff we did. So what we did was face shields. We did medical devices. We paid our team to stay home. And then we had a small team that was working on site and we're trying to keep everything going. And then we brought people back. And we didn't need to do mandates or exemptions for vaccinations. Everyone did it right now. Only Lady Aida and I are here right now. So we're not wearing masks and we live together. But when we're here during the day and the night, if anyone else is around, we're wearing masks still. Because like whatever, it's no big deal. Keep everybody safe. So anyways, this report's really good. And one of the things I really like is when they were working on this, they said, let's make sure the women and minority-owned businesses have a shot because they were the hardest hit. Those are the ones that closed the first, closed the most, and had the hardest recovery. And so the equality that they've added into the recovery and growth, it was really neat. We met people that we've only known on Zoom talks because there was this council that Lady Aida was part of. And then, of course, you know us. So we got this thing for the team. So this is going on our shelf of things for the team because this is everybody at Adafruit. And I also want to say this is everybody out there watching because you got us here. You're stuck with us. We broadcasted from home some nights. Here we couldn't because I was in like a hazmat suit when we were starting to spray down everything. That was some of the things that, you know, in April that you do because no one knew anything. And thank you, everybody. Most of all, thank you to our team at Adafruit. Thank you to our community. Thank you to our customers. And thank you, New York City for, you know, you're a harsh mistress. But you embrace us. And thank you so much for being that city that energized us and kept us going. So then one of the things that we decided to do is explore Gracie Mansion. And there is a pay phone in the basement. We found it and we immediately tried to use it, but it was disconnected. I was totally excited to red box. Yeah. And, you know, I think when they, so we definitely are different and we're weirder than most of the people there. And I think they were just like, Hey, what are you doing there? And then on the walk back, I was taking some photos. I guess I should tell folks, if you like art and electronics and you want to see some of the behind the scenes things at Adafruit and you're okay with weird is, you know, one of my hobbies is taking photos a little more. I feel like footage is more. Check out my, my Twitter. It's twitter.com forward slash peach round. Maybe someone could put it in the chats. And here's some artwork I posted today. How did you draw that? Yes, I drew this. When did you draw that? Recently. Yeah. I have an iPad. You were messing with the, the, the, I was thinking today about you, you were playing with them tripod. Yeah. I like to draw things. And then this is when we were in Boston. This is all Saints Way on Battery Street. And then, you know, little sketches here and there. This is Antonio. He works at Adafruit. Well, the Adafruit building, I should say. He's one of my friends. And then here's a little more outside of Greasy Mansion. And then you just fill the deputy mayor. And, you know, I have a lot of stuff. Like I said, I like taking photos a little more. This is like a thing. So I feel like this stuff, that's what we're doing there. I put it over there because I don't want to fill up the Adafruit stuff. Then I have a sketchbook. I had to tell someone who was like, oh, look at your, you're doing GAN stuff. No, these are actually on paper that I send in. Yeah, I get accused of that all the time. Oh, this must be GAN generated. And so then I also made a Max-Hedrim thing. I think I showed this on the show last week. Anyway, so that's what's going on there. So it's time travel. So like I said, today we got news that our re-certification, it's really hard to get certified. It's so hard. You know, there's no upside on the other side of this. In all seriousness, one of the reasons we do this is because we want to show that it is possible to be a woman-owned business in New York City doing manufacturing. If we don't do this, people will say, well, obviously no one wants to do it. No one can do it. So we do it. Join forces succeed together as a motto. If you check out our blog, STEMChat, Natalie and Diana did the latest one where they go over all sorts of fun things and more STEM learning for kids. So they go through a bunch of stuff that you might want to look at for this holiday season for young learners. Eight of Box. For Eight of Box reminder, it's seasonal. So we have to do Winter Edition. And this is going to be probably the most memorable one yet. And that's all I can say about it. It's a little bit of a clue. If you're looking for something to give someone, go to Eight of Box.com now, because we will run out of gift Eight of Boxes that start in the winter time. If you sign up now and do it now, you'll probably get in. But if you don't, that will be it. And I'm not sure if we're going to expand the slots. Probably not, because chip shortages and all that. We like to under promise and over deliver. All right. Python on Hardware News. Blink, blink, blink. So this week in the newsletter, we got a bunch of stuff going on. So we're still in 7.1.0, beta one. I think you went over this stuff the last time. But there is like a couple of other things. We're still putting in little bug fixes. I know we just fixed SD card IO was not working quite well for some cards. And we fixed some temperature monitor and something else on the 751. So yeah, lots of little bug fixes. We're on a little bit bug hunt right now. We're in between adding new features and new chipsets, although the S3 is also kind of happening slowly but surely. Okay. Then News, 32,000 people in our Discord. In the very beginning of this Discord, it was a smaller thing and we had joined Discord. And they were definitely pushing like, oh cool, like open source communities and all this stuff. Basically now it's gigantic. But our server and all the people we have, 32,000 is a lot no matter what. And so like right now, we have almost 5,000 people online doing stuff. The risk five summit was going around. Check it out. This is really neat. This was combining this maker's interest, Adafruit Electronics and the want to pick blue bombers and CFO football. So check that out. All Circuit Python, all using our eyeglasses and more. And then this when I was scrolling by, I thought this was interesting. So this is a young person showing how to get Circuit Python with the WIO terminal. Yeah. And then like, here's this picture of Scott. Oh, you think it's mini Scott? Well, you know, the same hair. I'm obsessed with foundation and specifically Lea Pace. You think that's a clown? I think this might be one of the things. I'm going to talk to Scott later. If there's an older Scott that that's doing something else. And then this is Empire Scott. You think there's like a 60 year old Scott? And this is early a.m. Don Scott. Don Scott. Anyways. Okay. Yeah, I'm going to ask him about that later. And so anyways, check out the newsletter AdafruitDaily.com sign up. I think I get to steer the newsletter in a couple of weeks. I promise it'll be weird. Yeah. And there's two bits in highlights. I like to highlight things each week. We have on CircuitPython.org 258 boards. Hooray. I know. We passed eight bits. Hooray. And the thing that I really like this week is we have the pie leap learning guide. The thing about that is it will be in the Adafruit section of the app store soon. Very soon. And let me just pop over to it real quick. Trevor's doing a great job with this. And coming into the iOS app store, we're about to put it in there. And let me just get this out of the way right now so I can like send a link. I see this is why I want to do that zoom in thing. Go for it. Look, we do Android versions of apps. Okay. But what happens is no one uses them. And there's one download. And there's like one person. But that person was very loud all the time constantly in every comment. So we're probably going to do an Android version. Just let us get this one out. And then when we do have an Android version, make sure people download and use it. We have hundreds of thousands of downloads on our other apps. But when everyone demands Android stuff and they're mean about it and makes it really hard on our team, please stop doing that. Okay. I don't know. Maybe this camera thing doesn't work out. No, I think it's funny because it's just like. Do you like how there's like a hand It's just so you. Yeah. See this is what I'm talking about. Hello. Okay. All right. Look, man. Recovery and growth. Good. 10% off. We're loopy. Okay. So it's been a week. Yeah. What that is Python hardware news this week. All right. Lady, we're an open source hardware company. It's true. And I'll tell you why I know for sure. Well, I do know for sure. Because I emailed a company that says they do open source and they do. But asking the mere question I got called fake news. But that very same company links to all my articles. Fake news, Phil. Yeah. And I just, it was a polite question. I CC others and I said, Hey, I'm just making sure I get something right. And they said fake news and they're they're getting harassed and how dare I. So anyways, that's how I know we're an open source hardware company because when we ask people, they kind of feel bad when they're trying to be a little tricky. Fake news, Phil. So don't call something open source. It's not. But anyways, to prove it, we have 2,592 guides. Ooh, getting closer to 2,600. You're getting there. It's a nice number for you. You like that number. Maybe on 2,600 I'll do a guide about 2,600 magazine. That can be cool. How to submit an article. No. How to send your photo of a pay phone from Gracie Manchin to 2,600 because they'll put it in there. So what's on the big board this week, Aladieta? Okay, this week we had a whole bunch of board guides and some updates. You see some updates for Itzy Bitsy and Metro and Metro Express. And that's because Ann and Catney have been going through and adding templated pages for Circuit Python. One of the things that we have in the learning system is the ability to make templates so that when we have a guide on controlling Neopixels or LEDs or buttons or I2C, we can have different images but the text is the same or it's very close. So we can have very similar content because blinking LED is very similar on every board but customized to the board itself. So like if you look at multiple guides for different boards but you look at their blink tutorials, you'll see what we mean. It's like most of text is the same but the little gif of what it looks like when the LED is blinking is different. And that means that it's a lot easier for us to maintain our content. Also got the KB2040 guide. Thank you Catney for giving that out. We got that pie leap guide you talked about. And from Carter, we have a little true random number generator Trinky and this guide is actually a little bit more about, you know, let's say you have, you want a custom Trinky, a custom little board that you plug in and it does something but we don't make it. You can take our RP2040 Trinky and then plug in one of our R2C sensors on top to make a custom one. So for example, this is a chip that uses a true random number generating, you know, trusted computing chip from Infineon and it will stream out 8-bit numbers that are truly random and that could be useful for cryptography or gaming or just science experimentation and stuff. So I think we'll do a couple more little quick guides on how to make custom Trinkies. Now we also have these because we have this from last week too. So we still have all these. Oh yeah, so Melissa made a really fun Nunchuck controlled laser cat toy. We have an update to our display text guide. Now Pedro made super huge key switches and you have a couple other more updated guides that we've added templated tutorials to. Okay, so let's do some New York City factory footage. Take it away, Adafruit Factory. And it wouldn't be Adafruit Factory footage unless you could see the Disney building being built across the street from Adafruit now. What you can't experience is the unending noise. It just goes on forever and ever and ever. And it just never stops. So I'm going to save you and just describe it. It's loud all the time. And all that Disney plus money is used to find loud things to bang them together. Okay, let's do some 3D printing stuff, Lady Eda. Yeah. All right, so we have two things this week. We're going to show the giant keys. Yes. And then we're going to show a 3D printed Stargate. You love that. I do like me some Stargate. You are a big Stargate fan. I liked Stargate Universe, the idea, but then that kind of ended abruptly. Is there a new Stargate coming out? Yeah, there's always rumors. Yeah, it's like Terminator. You can always do a new Terminator movie because you could just keep going back in time over and over and over. Yeah. Sarah Connor, watch out. Yeah, Sarah Connor's daughter. Sarah Connor's clod. Yeah, Jerry. Can I always do another one? It's okay. Okay, play it. No, Pedro. Hey, what's up, folks? In this project, we're making a giant macropad with big key switches. Regular key switches are fairly small in size, but these novelty ones are about 64 times as big. We designed a 3D printed case that allows you to daisy chain them together. This is powered by the KB2040 running Circuit Python. It's an Arduino Pro MicroShape board that's perfect for keyboard projects. It features the RP2040 with 8 megabytes of flash, 20 GPIO, and STEMA QT. It's also got a non-board NeoPixel and a USB C-type connector. You can set this up with your favorite macros and make yourself a Jumbo keypad that's super chunky and really fun to use. Circuit Python makes it really easy to make USB, HID projects like a macropad or even a full-sized keyboard. You can modify the code to assign key commands and light up an LED when the keys are pressed. Be sure to check out the learn guide for full tutorial on building this project. The cast-related pads make it easy to share multiple connections when soldering wires. The KB2040 snap fits into the bottom cover and is held in place with these little tabs. Cables are routed through the holes on the side of the case so they can be connected together. The bottom snap fits to the case with a cutout for access to the board's USB C port. With the cables installed, the big key switches can then be press-fitted into the top of the case. Additional switches can be chained together with the T-slot connectors on the side of the case. The cables can then be routed through the case and plug into the terminals with these quick connects. You can optionally wire up a 10 millimeter LED that fits right into the switch's built-in LED holder. We had a lot of fun making this and hope it inspires you to check out Adafruit's KB2040 and Circuit Python. Thanks for watching and be sure to subscribe for more keyboard projects from Adafruit. I picked up one of my favorite electronics, mechatronic and electronic control stuff. It's interesting we haven't yet put a PLC on an API because usually they're massive and they're expensive and they're complicated and I'm like, what would I use this for? But I saw these adorable slim-style PLCs and I was like, this is so cute and I'm a sucker for anything cute and electronic. I picked one up. These are the tiniest. They're like a fuse holder basically. It's a tiny little logic controller with four inputs and four outputs. You can run off of 24 volts or 120 or AC voltage or 240 AC voltage. Insight is logic that you can program. What's interesting about PLCs is when you first, especially if you come from microcontrollers and you look at a PLC and you're kind of like, well, why don't I just use a microcontroller for this? What's the big deal if it's just taking two inputs and ending them and then counting them? Why am I buying a thing for $100? Why am I not using something that's a $5 microcontroller board? And this is the reason. So all of these certifications that there are so many of them that they don't even fit on the screen legibly. This has them. It's UL certified. It's IP rated. It's tested. It's assured. It's reliable electronics and for automation, you really need something that is reliable and will run continuously forever without even a little bit of dust getting it damaged or misprogrammed, bootloader, brownout, erasing all the flash. So these are meant for automation, but I think they could also be used at this size and cost for other robotics and home automation and robotic automation type projects. So one thing that is neat about this one is it's Bluetooth programmable, which is interesting. I remember seeing PLCs that were, you are programmable, but this one actually uses a Bluetooth dongle. Now, I looked up the VID. It's actually a blue giga, which means that it's the Bluetooth dongle. Yes, it's Bluetooth, but it's like Bluetooth, like you're basically like you connect to it over USB, but it presents itself as a COM port. And that's actually really good because native USB is like a real pain to program on every platform. And by using basically UART to Bluetooth, it'll work under emulation. It'll work like under Windows 7. It'll work under Windows XP. It'll work under Windows 10, 11, whatever. You don't have to worry about, you know, weird sign drivers or native Bluetooth implementations. You're literally just sending UART data through the program they give you. So I think that was actually pretty wise. I've noticed, you know, a lot of companies that have Bluetooth programmability, they just go with these blue giga dongles because they are very simple. So when you program it, first off, you know, I tried this myself. I downloaded their programming software for the PLC, plugged in the dongle and it just worked. It detected the COM port just fine. It detected the device just fine. And then when you connect to it, you get this kind of like, again, I'm never really used these. So it's kind of interesting because it's like, it's like flow programming, but like everything happens at once. So it's kind of like a cross between FPGAs, CPLDs and, you know, block based programming. So at the top, you can see it says like logic and, you know, you know, math and whatever at the top. You can select different tools. So like here, I selected logics. You can see there's like AND gates and NOR gates and inverters and whatever. And then I think I can click on control and you can see there's like counters and analog inputs and filters and, you know, some of these are very simple. They're like basic logic converters and some of them are a lot more complicated. Like you can have timers and, you know, PID loops and incrementers and dividers. And, you know, you can have fairly good, complex user interfaces. And again, one of the nice things about PLCs is that everything kind of runs at the same time. So you don't have to worry about logic flow control as much because it's all kind of like instantaneous. It's not meant for complicated programming situations. You know, there's like no Wi-Fi interface here, JSON parsing, but it's really good for like, take some inputs, process them and then give you outputs without having to worry about, you know, cross-contamination of logic streams. Okay, so after you, you know, design your program, you can save it, you can compile it, and then you upload it over Bluetooth. And yeah, it worked. It works just fine. It's kind of cool. So if you, you know, you can program it and debug it all over BLE whenever you, you know, want to upload new code and you can also password protect it so people can't download it or reprogram it. Another thing that was interesting is because this PLC does not have a LCD or TFT display, you're going to be wondering, okay, what if I want to get debug output or I want to like, you know, if there's a count output and I want to see the count or I want to do another analysis, well, again, over Bluetooth, which is really nice, you can use an app to do the debugging interface, debugging and user interface when needed, right? Because a lot of PLCs, you're not constantly pressing the buttons and reading the output. It's only for like when you're doing the analysis and debugging. And so you can basically download the app for iOS or Android, install it on your computer and then you can see like this simulated LCD output and you have button inputs as well. So you can do diagnostic checking and download data logs and stuff like that. So I think what I thought was really neat about this is like, I've never really done anything with PLCs, but I was actually able to get going and get it working quite quickly. And it was kind of shocking to me how easy it was. So I think that even though this is a very cute, adorable little PLC, it could be also really handy for anyone who's doing either advanced stuff and just doesn't need a lot of inputs and outputs, only four inputs, four outputs. But if you're also just like, hey, I want to learn about PLCs and build something at home, just practice with a PLC to get that kind of training, which again, when I went to college, there was no course for it. So if I want to learn this stuff, I would DIY it, pick up the BLE dongle and the PLC and you can just play around at home, just like automating stuff in your room, right, to play around with the wheel a inputs and outputs and long inputs and PWM and just see what it's like. And then you can see the the debug output diagnostic output on your phone available on Digikey. And it's in stock, which is the thing that's great. Digikey.com slash short slash ZT78W55V. And you can also search for it by typing in 96689 sorry, 88983301ND. And you can also just type in the words. Cusay CB8R, which is the name of this. Maybe I'll show it really fast. Show it really fast and we have a two minute and 45 second video that you wanted me to play. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'll just show it just to show how this sizing. So this is it. And these are the four inputs. This is power, you power it from 24 volts. But yeah, you can see it's like, you know, a lot of people are like, oh, I need I need it to be UL certified and I need it to be, you know, certified in every country. It's made in France. It's got the BLE Mac on the outside. And then here's the relay outputs, six amps a piece. It looked like six or eight amps at 25C. And then there's LEDs for power and Bluetooth. And it's just like so cute. You can panel mount it with these two bolts or you can din rail mount it. So you can see the din rail slots here. So a very elegant and beautiful little controller. All right, we're gonna play the video and then we'll wrap up by MPI and we're gonna go to new products up for that. Hi, I'm Robert and welcome to the Cusay Tech Lab. Today, I have the opportunity to introduce you to one of the most exciting and revolutionary products in the small scale automation market. It's Cusay's Millennium Slim. So simply put, a logic controller is the brain of your application. It takes inputs, which are wired here. And within the logic controller, they're going to process instructions and send those instructions in the terms of a signal to an output. Cusay specializes in making logic controllers that are easy to use, easy to program and are favored by both experts and beginners. And Millennium Slim represents the latest in Cusay's innovative line of Millennium controllers. Millennium Slim is the only internationally recognized industrial grade logic controller in such a narrow package size. In fact, it's 17.5 millimeters narrow. It's the same as a timer relay in its profile and it literally can fit in your pocket. This means you can put logic control in almost any application anywhere. And it's easy to mount too. You have two options. There's a din rail mounting feature. You can see those features here or you can see screw holes here. And that allows you to panel mount it in your application. Millennium Slim is in a compact profile, but it packs a lot of functionality. It's got four convertible inputs. Two of them are high speed digital, which is ideal for encoders or tachometers. And two are PWM or pulse width modulation. On the output side, the four outputs can either be relay or solid state. Solid state gives you the option of having PWM, which is ideal when you've got an application that's frequently turning on and off. It has Bluetooth wireless communication already integrated. So one Millennium Slim can easily communicate with another up to 20 meters away. This gives you the opportunity to control a number of different applications that interact with each other. The product is designed for use with Kruse's Virtual Display app. You see it demonstrated here on this smartphone. Kruse Virtual Display is a way to view or modify the program either on a smartphone or on your laptop or PC. You can also download the data log on your smartphone using Kruse's Virtual Display. All right, let's get into it. Yes, it's time for new products. Here we go. All right, so since we didn't get a chance to do a little bit of a recap because of the show thing, so I'm just going to play a very short thing. Here's the things that were on last week and then we're going to roll right in. So that's last week and those are still available on Adafruit.com. So this week, new products. Good news, bad news, everybody. So we got these limited edition Arduino's and I have mine that I brought from home. We had only a few and they're numbered individually. We didn't know which numbers we would get and this thing is tiny. It's so cute. So this is the Uno Mini Limited Edition and this is how small it is. So small. And I'm going to show a couple quick photos of it. Well, that's my what? Oh, that's the breakout. Yeah. Yeah. Well, but you know what? It was so small. I know it looks the same as gold and black. Yeah. Sorry. You're not going to sell it on me. You get only the Uno Mini. Yeah. But you do get a signed. That's the packaging and like they, you know, they went above and beyond. Missing from the list of the folks there is Gianluca because they had a split a long time ago, but they added Fabio, the new CEO of Arduino. I think that was smart. Get USB-C. USB-C. And then I thought I'd do a little bit of a mini unboxing here. Okay. So this one's mine. This is in and it's lucky number 13. You got to slide it. And you can see, and this is going in my Arduino Museum. We have probably 100 boards of the past for Arduino and weird ones. What are you looking for? Well, I'm just doing this nice glossy. This is mine because it's 13. So I just grabbed this one out and the news is we had them. Yeah. And I had to buy them as a regular person. And so we sold these just at cost because I wanted to get these to folks out there. And we have lots of emails out to Arduino. We would love to resell these. These sold instantly. We'd like to, I mean, it seems like folks like these, or it might just just been the collector of folks, like kind of like me. Yes. Who's like, oh, I should collect this because I have one of every Arduino and I have an Arduino Museum here at Adafruit. I'm glad we have one of each. Okay, next up. Okay, next up we've got, we actually found a bag of these. Speaking of 0.5, 0.01, 0.05 inch pitch connectors, because that's the connectors on the Uno Mini. This is a two by five, 0.05 inch pitch. So it's half the pitch that you're used to with headers. We actually got a bag of these to use with our SMT PMS 50031, I think the iSquad C plug in air quality sensor. And we surface mount the connector on the reel so we don't need these loose ones. But I figured like maybe somebody has some use from them either to connect to air quality sensors or you have some other device. They're, you know, sometimes these are called like JTAG connectors. These are through hole, as you can tell, but hey, you can turn them into surface mount by just bending the pins out. It's basically the same thing because they're nice flat pins. Okay, next up. Simon Monk has a new book, Programming the Pico, Learn Coding and Electronics with the Raspberry Pi Pico. Here's some inside pages and Simon Monk is an author. Lots of Thani in there, MicroPython. We like him. And that's why we're stocking this book, Support Authors. And the other thing is we have a parts pack that goes with it. That's right. It's a parts pack and it's hard to tell from this image, but if you zoom in, the breadboard has actually special markings where the part number of the Pico, like the pin numbers for all the Pico pins, are labeled on the breadboard. It's like so genius. I didn't think of it and it's so smart because then when you plug in the Pico, because it doesn't have pin markings, maybe on the bottom it does, but it doesn't have, yeah, I think on the bottom it does, but not on the top. And so when you plug it onto the breadboard and you line up pin one with pin one on the breadboard, when you line up at the edge, all the pins will be labeled on the breadboard for making easy soldering and projects. And you get like servos and LEDs and piezas and buttons and all that good stuff. So a some morgue is bored of components. All right, if you look for the next product, you won't find it, but maybe it'll find you. This is referred to as a boot-a-box. It is a little tiny thing that's been around for a while. There's a big hacking community. It has Buddhist chants and more. It's very peaceful. I've plugged in high-quality headphones to it. I've plugged in crummy headphones to it. It has a very simple interface. You just turn it on. And it just repeats. And it starts repeating over and over and over again. You can plug it in if you want, thanks. And then Johnny, who is one of our lead shippers, took it for a spin. So check it out and more. So Zen. Yeah, I think I may have not put the one with the audio in it. But you know what? That made it even more peaceful. Yeah, maybe. Okay, anyways, it's on our website. There's a YouTube video. You can check it out. Next up, start the show besides you, Lady Aida, and our entire team, our community, our customers is. This is a new accelerometer, the MSA311. This is the upgrade to the MSA301, which is just a low-cost, simple triple-axis accelerometer. It's very small. It's easy to use. It's got tap detection and you can measure tilt and motion with it. It's a lovely all-around good triple-axis accelerometer. And the most important thing about the MSA311 is it's available to purchase. That's right. It's actually in stock and I could get some. So we made a breakout to it. The MSA311 has been discontinued. The MSA311 is 99% identical for use cases, but the iSquad C address has changed from 026 to 062. So your code isn't going to be dropping compatible. You will have to recompile to use a slightly different library update just to change that iSquad C address. But the range and the resolution is otherwise the same. We put on a STEMI QT connector board so you can plug and play it with our boards. And of course, we have Arduino and Circuit Python code for this chip. Just use our MSA311 library. All right, folks, did they hear the audio? Okay, so the audio was from the inside. Yeah. So we're going to do some questions soon, but we're going to do a top secret. So go over to Discord. I have one lined up, but go over to Discord. Put your questions in. I'll tour me 32,000 of us are hanging out. I'll answer your question. Let's do top secret while they're putting in some questions. Okay, top secret this way. Okay, first up, this is that speed up. What is this speed up of? I don't remember. I have to watch it to, it was some break up board. Yeah, I'll tell you which one. Sorry, I don't like I make, you know, so much electronics. You don't even know what electronics you do anymore. Oh, the AVXL. That's right. Yes. So, you know, we're revising old accelerometers, speaking of the MSA311. So the 8XL345 and the 343 are actually two different breakout boards that are both non-stemic UT compatible. And so we're going to merge the two into a QT compatible board. The 8XL345 is one of the oldest accelerometers we stop. It's like a very early product, but well loved, well trusted accelerometer. So this is me putting together a two breakout to one of the 343 and one of the 345. We're so fast she is. And there's music. Okay, so the next top secret has a little bit of a story. And first up, Adafruit doesn't do NFTs. We don't have any ETH. We've never minted an NFT. We've never brought NFTs. We have had to have people remove our content because they stole it and tried to make NFTs out of it. When LeMort does things like events and stuff, we put in a clause that says you can't use her as NFTs because someone tried to do that. But despite all of that, because once we had an author on our site that really, really wrote about here's a brand that's doing some NFT things. And we edited the post still was a good enough. And then we had stalkers and harassers. Someone put pictures of not only me, but our staff up. So anyways, we have a thing Adafruit.com slash NFTs where we say we don't do NFTs. Still not good enough. That's okay. So our little message on the site says Adafruit does not endorse or do NFTs. There's nothing on Adafruit about NFTs. We don't have any ETH. Never purchase NFTs or ETH. We have never minted NFT zero. Adafruit hasn't asked many times to participate in NFTs. We've always said no. Yeah, that's the other thing. We've been asked to participate and do NFTs every single day. Pretty much every day. And I'm not even getting to the point of if we even like them or not. This is what we've done. This is our statement. There's a lot of people that are being really shitty to each other online. And so what we decided to do is be really clear what we're about. So this is a shirt that'll start in the Adafruit store. It's from the share zone. Women's only size is start. That's our policy. And the shirt says I don't collect NFTs unless you're talking about nice fucking t-shirts. So Lady Aida, can you please, please, please, debut the shirt tonight? Yeah. So it's a beautiful shirt with rainbow. It's a really nice shirt. Yeah, it's a really nice shirt. And it's got like a rainbow skeleton. Would you say it's a nice fucking shirt? It's a nice fucking shirt. So anyways, and then we're going to have something special. So I'm going to go to the overhead. So we contacted the share zone and they sent us a bunch of stuff that I think we're going to include because we have to get these shirts kind of at cost. And so what we're going to do is have like a little thing. So this is legalized jaywalking. It's very important to share zone. And then if you don't like things, just walk out. You can walk out of work, social thing, the movies, home, class, dentist, clothes shopping, cops, if you're quick, friendships. If it sucks, hit the bricks. Real winners quit share zone. You can leave. So we're going to do this. It's never too late to quit something that sucks. Yeah, you've said that. I say that all the time. So despite all of this and all these statements, we'll continue to get death threats about NFTs that we don't do. So that's our top secret. We'll have that soon. So many skulls. Oh yeah, by the way, we're still doing not forever trinkets. But you know what? I don't think people can hate two things at once. So I want to keep them on target. Hate the fact that we don't do them, but you think we do? Because there's dudes that say we do. Jason Scott, I'm looking at you. A lot of trinkets use the SAMD 21E18. And I kind of used all of them. We had all these trinkets that were really popular and we kind of blew through our stash. And we ordered a year's worth, but now it's a year later. And so we don't, we're waiting for another shipment. We're going to do questions. Yeah. Okay. So we had some lined up. Thank you, everyone. Oh boy, these are good ones. Okay. First up, question for the Arduino Mini. Have you seen patch wire with 0.05 inch wide Dupont connectors anywhere? Can't use neighboring pins with the standard ones? I think you have to use a stripped solid core wire. But that'll work and then just plug it into your breadboard. Okay. Someone said, is the Arduino mini open source? It is. Yeah, it is. And we asked them about it. The files actually were... I'll have an article about it later. Yeah, the files are available. They're Altium though. Yeah. Just watch out if you want to edit it. You'll have to somehow get an Altium or like get a Traverse Multium. Next up, what technology are you most excited for in the new year? I'd really like to see, you know, like Risk 5 is kind of this promise that I'd like to see happen. And I think I'm kind of excited to see what new RP2040 chips are going to come out of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. You know, they started with one chip. But I think, you know, obviously if you do one chip, you're going to do more chips. So what was the next chip? I don't know. Be cool. I'm going to go real high level. You can say NFTs? No. I'm going to say that any technology that brings people together, because so far as far as I could tell, a lot of technologies are dividing all of us up. It's making people who should otherwise be friends, enemies, people who should be allies, lines are drawn, and knives come out. And so I think more technologies that bring people together, generally speaking. Sorry, I don't think like what Facebook's up to is going to help. Next up, are you guys considering to fabricate PCBs in New York City? No. No, it's a very chemical process. It's best done by people who are doing it 24 hours a day. Okay. This is a statement. I need to check my house humidifier. So I put a feather RP2040 OLED feather wing and a HT20 breakout together. Now I can check the relative humidity anywhere in the house. Thanks, Adaford. Thank you, Dexter. There you go. Question. Are terminal strips on the PLC plug-in style? I put it away, but I believe they are. Yeah, they look like they have the sockets. They can be removed. Okay. Do you any of you have a hard time when feeling like you are using a microcontroller that is more powerful than you need and end up with anxiety about a microcontroller using a project because you don't want to have one available if you need it? I think that's what Kyle's is looking for with feather. So you know, you pick the most powerful feather you have, but then when you finish with the project, you can always see will that code fit on a smaller board and you just plug it in and it's physically the same size. Oh, this is a good question. So basically they're asking, could we use non-plastic tape on packaging? The answer is yes, eventually. And so we've tried every form of packaging. Our team is taking classes right now on companies that are growing mushroom-based packaging. We're migrating all of our packaging over the next five years to solutions. Here's the problem. So when we experimented with those different types of non-tape done stuff, the number of returns and the number of times that it fell apart. So the earth is getting wetter and all of those usually use something that has water-based stuff. And so packages get wet, packages get moist, the tape falls off. And then, sorry I hate to say it, but not y'all. Y'all are fine. But occasionally there's jerks that say you have to overnight it to me. I want it right away. You packed it wrong. You used this garbage tape that you, why don't you just use plastic tape. And it's then a next day air package over and over and over again because of entitled jerks. So that's one of the main reasons that we're just like, well let's continue to do what's working but let's migrate and have really good solutions that will be durable. And we're not going to end up just having returns or stuff that falls out. So the next up, any recommendations for good in-stock starter kit for a friend who's been teaching themselves? I'm hoping to find a good non-electronic nerd kit, starter kit, fellow 40-something transitioning to coding career on her own terms. Yeah, we have eight-a-box starter packs in the shop. So those are kind of fun. I think a circuit playground kit, we have a couple of those. Circuit playground, blue fruit kit would be a good one to pick up. Okay, next up, are eight-a-box subscriptions giftable? Yes. 32,000 people in this discord and still has a new discord smell. Thank you, mods. That's right. Here's the thing. We have code of conduct. We have mods. That whole thing, if there's a broken window, everything else starts to like melt down after that. It's true. This is a safe place that everybody is welcome to. And when people are here, they have a good time. And if someone gets out of hand, we warn them, we work with them. Sometimes they have a thousand more days. People really like that we're NFT free. That's cool. Question for the show. It looks like the version of Wi-Fi 7 is going to have a separate sub gigahertz frequency for IoT devices called Halo for increased range. Do you see the new Wi-Fi sub gigahertz devices causing conflict with Laura RM64 devices? Is the ISM band going to be a super crowded data fruit? I don't know. We're going to find out. I mean, the thing about Laura and RFM is they don't transmit continuously. So I think it'll be okay. But I haven't checked out this new version and it's going to be a couple of years at least until it makes it into microcontrollers. Okay. On better metric sensors, I want to set altitude rather than sea level pressure. How can I set a fixed altitude and still record accurate pressure? Well, you can look at the calculation that we use to calculate altitude and just back calculate it to determine what you would enter in if you wanted to do the pressure at a certain altitude. But usually, whether reports give you altitude at sea level, that's why you would use that as your base calculation. It's the easiest thing to find out. The other thing, it's funny is I get to the point where once people start harassing our team and saying things that aren't true, just like, well, why don't I just put up a web page so if someone Googles for something, they'll be able to tell what we do and don't do. So I have this page. So we don't do ULINE packaging back to the packaging thing. Adafruit.com slash ULINE. Adafruit does not use ULINE packaging. We've tried very hard to avoid ULINE packaging. If by chance there's ULINE packaging left over a previous stock or we need to get a small amount during the pandemic, so our suppliers went out of business. We've made sure there's none. Please use it. Visit our multiple ULINE alternative pages and resources we've published for over seven years. Also check out the Refuse ULINE thing. So the main reason, their overpriced, it wasn't that great. They kept showing up. They send us 40 catalogs at a time and I mean, there's other reasons too, but we published the first resource page. There's Holland. They're involved with Holland. Oh, it's a long story. Nothing. We've been doing this for over seven years. So this isn't new. And so like once in a while, someone will be like, you guys, I heard you use ULINE. There's like, we doubt. Stop saying that. You're insane. Please get off Twitter. So next up, let's see what else is going on. Heard of ESP Now? I have not used ESP Now. Okay. And then folks are suggesting the Circuit Playground Bluefruit. It's a good suggestion. And I think, I think, I think, I think that is it. I think we got all of it. Okay, great. All right. I think that's everything. Thank you so much, everybody. That was a good volume of questions. Good work, Lady. Yay. Make my t-shirt? Yeah, we're gonna have to hide you. So we're gonna do a photo shoot with this. We're probably gonna go in like front of, there's NFT museums all over New York and like NFT advertisements everywhere. So I think we'll do that. And we'll take a photo of Lady. We'll put it on the page. There was the NFT NYC and it was like everywhere. Yeah, we'll see how this works out. This is the latest attempt for me to just be like, this is funny. Yeah. No effin talking about NFTs. Yeah. Nice and funny time. Yeah. Nice, nice, nice effin time we're having here. Yeah. Okay. So that's our show for tonight. This has been, oh, I should probably just, you know, this is the code. Good. Good. And thank you New York City Gov for recognizing the Adafruit team and all the things that happened. You know, we've been working really hard. As you can tell, we get exhausted and loopy around this time because we work all day and all night and all day and all night and night all day. But it's only work if you'd rather be doing something else. And I don't want to do anything else. No. We'll see everybody next week. This is an Adafruit production. We'll be back Wednesday at night unless, I don't know, another mayor wants to hang out with you. Yeah, there's a new one. Yeah. Here is your moment of zener. Bye everybody. Good night everybody.