 live from New York, it's S.S. Engineer. Hi, I went to my back with her and welcome to Ask Engineer. It's me, Lady Aida, the engineer with me, Mr. Lady Aida on camera control and slapstick humor. We got an exciting show for you tonight filled with beautiful displays, new products, updated products, open source hardware and more. I'm going to kick it right off, Mr. Lady Aida, tell them what's on tonight's show. The code is quality ESP. You can guess why we have an exciting new product. You'll be able to purchase this code. Expires tonight, 1159 p.m. Eastern time user to lose it. You also get free stuff when you add it to your cart. So we'll go over that in a little bit and more. We just did some live shows all throughout the week, including Chantel just a few moments ago on the weekends. We do from the desk of Lady Aida, which also has the great search, GPS, or shop and product pick is during the week to a little bit of time traveling here, some news and stuff around the web, around the maker sphere, have some advanced manufacturing and made New York City factory footage, a little glimpse of what we make and how we do it here at Adafruit. Got some cool videos from William Pedro, some 3D printing and a speedup. We got an INMPI. It's brought to you by Digikey this week. It's analog devices. Lady, it'll show you what's new in the world of electronics and more got some top secret pop off the press. We just filmed some interesting things today. We're going to show those to you. We've got some new products and answer your questions. We do that on Discord. Interpret.it slash Discord. Come over there. You can ask your questions throughout the show and just shows when we get to most of them, but you can of course hang out there 24 seven and of course don't forget we have free stuff. We'll talk about in a second all that and more on you guessed it ask an engineer. Wow. Okay. So codes call us P free stuff at this add things to your cart and it'll be like, Hey, if you had a little bit more, you get a little bit more when you buy from Adafruit.com we give you free stuff. $99 or more. You get this beautiful thick PCB custer with a gold Adafruit logo and some bumpers perfect of keeping your drink off of your desk 149 or more. You get a black Adafruit got KB 2040. It's a pro micro pinout compatible RP 2040 board with usb-c and stomach UT and buttons and neopixels and eight megabytes of flash storage. So it's perfect for all sorts of microcontroller projects. It's like our favorite little board we use for all sorts of stuff around the house. $199 or more. You get free UPS ground shipping in the continental United States. And then we have the 249 or more still doing the digi-key NXP Adafruit collaboration Metro M7 giveaway. Thanks to the key and NXP for sponsoring this giveaway. When you order that much, you'll get this board that's a 500 megahertz monster Cortex M7 with SD card, lots of flash storage SWT SWD debug DC power or USB power and you can even use it with multiple Arduino shields. We'll talk about some of them today got great support for it in circuit Python. So it's a very fast way to get started with, you know, a blazingly fast 500 megahertz Cortex M7 chip with tons of RAM and flash just gets super power machine and a reminder. We have better UPS rates. So we suggest using UPS ground if you're in the U. S. If you get the free tier great you get UPS ground because it's trackable. It's reliable shipping costs something. And so we have a tier that makes sense for us for free, but generally speaking, please consider getting UPS. We were using FedEx, we were able to negotiate to get good rates. We don't add anything. It's just straight up pass through. Here's what we get charged. Here's what you get charged and these rates are pretty much as good as you're going to get. You know, some entities offer free shipping at any level. It's coming from somewhere. So this is how we're doing it. Thanks everyone for the support and helping us get the volume of shipments we need to get good rates. We do live stuff. We just did live stuff. Show and tell just happened. We had some of our team. We do a meeting right before show and tell. So the team at Adafruit we're not we do open source. So we're like, hey, we'll show what we're up to. So we also show some coming soon stuff. So Melissa came by with some cool display stuff. Scott showed the round display. JP showed the color sensor. He'll be showing that on shows during the week. JP's workshop. We have a really cool demo. Well, I'll show this photo again. When we show off the display, but Jepler showed off long cat for our long displays. This meme was made for this display and this display was made for that meme. So you can tell. Yeah, you can check that out after this show. You can read you can watch show and tell and then I know you had a really neat guitar that you can make yourself and then flying things came by really neat circuit playground Express and our circuit playground Bluffer thing wireless controller for eyes with a cosplay costume, beautiful costume with like RGB LEDs and like can do air guitar. You have to see it to believe it and then good stuff came by with this timer that uses MQTT. That was awesome. Yeah. It was a big show to tell so little glimpse of all the things that are going on in the world of electronics and more so come by every Wednesday 7.30 p.m. It's the longest running and only show and tell that's out there. It's it's hard to to coordinate something like this is hard to plan, but we've been doing it for so long. People now like oh yeah, I'll just I'll stop by Wednesday nights and show my projects. So if you have like retro hardware or if you have ongoing projects you've been working on, there's folks that they showed projects in high school and then show projects when they were in school and now they're in industry and they're showing stuff. So we've been doing it this long that you could set your time traveler watch to like one of my doing on Wednesday somewhere on planet Earth. If it's 7.30 p.m. Eastern time come by and show and share your project Sundays. We do just Lady Aida. It's in two parts. What did you show in your distance week? Okay. So first part I talked about playground. The different playground are new. Anyone can write guides website. So check that out. All you need is an adafruit.com account and go to adafruit-playground.com. It's a totally separate site too. So it's like you have no cross mixing. You don't have to worry about data leaking from one site to the other. And so I showed off a project I posted. Also showed off how we're you know finishing up the you were finishing up the quality at ESP32S3. It's now in the shop and just showing the demos that I got for that as getting merged in. And then I showed how I test new feather wings by looking into every single feather that we make and verifying that it works. Yeah. And then we do the great search. That's where Lady Aida is your powers of engineering to help you find things on digikey.com. Now that things are kind of back in stock and there's not a chip shortage in the same way. What do you look for this weekend? Well I was revising this Raspberry Pi Hat. That's next on my list after the TFT board. And one of the e-proms that I usually get is no longer available. And so I showed how to get generic iSquared CE e-proms. The difference between iSquared CE e-proms and FRAMs and SRAMs and NOR flashes and they all look and have very similar pinouts, but they're very different. And I think I talked about the hat standard as well. So you know a lot of people they need iSquared CE e-proms for their devices configuration or max or to store code or you know FPGA whatever. It's very common to need to place them on boards for small amounts like under four kilobytes of permanent storage but digikey has bazillions of different ones in stock. So check them out. Okay and then you can check out the latest videos wherever you watch our videos, whatever platform. It's everywhere. We put them everywhere. JP's product pick of the week. There's also JP's workshop coming up. There is no deep dive this week. It'll be returning next week. So thank you Tim and Scott. They've been doing amazing deep dives. I think both of them have other stuff going on. So have a good Friday off. It's time for some Python on hard work. All right. This week the newsletter. It's big. It's beefy. It has a ton of projects. Still going back. People are getting back into doing electronics. Yeah, it's they can get boards. They're like, oh, I have this idea. Yeah. And so thanks everyone who sends in news every week. Anne is the editor of this. It's, I think the biggest, best resource for Python on hardware, but we also cover a lot of stuff. So Hectober Fest is going on. We celebrate this is a 10th anniversary of Hectober Fest. So basically there's virtual and in person events. You can learn new skills. You can check out what's going on in other programming languages. We happen to, you know, like doing a lot of Python circuit Python is participating in Hectober Fest making simple requests is Hectober eligible. So keep an eye on our blog for details and more. And the reward system is shifting from t-shirts to virtual rewards. So you can check out their rewards and more. You also have the award of feeling good about contributing to open store software. Yeah, you know, I'm waiting to get started. Yeah. I'll, I'll have a little bit of a little bit of a ransom, but you know, there are communities online that aren't dividing people that aren't making you like, I hate this. I hate them. There's ones that bring people together and Hectober Fest is a really good one because it has a beginning middle and end and you just, you just get to choose your stuff. I want to do, you could pick an open source project and you can do something that's useful for it. This is like really wholesome and really good. This is, yeah, you know, part of, part of our job, we have to like wade through a lot of stuff. Some of it's not great and some of the things that are online isn't that fun to look at, but this is so, you know, since 2014 they have 147,000 participants. If you want to feel good about technology because sometimes it's not so fun. This is one to and we have community members that will help you with your PR. There's a lot. There's something for everything. You know, if you're a beginner, somebody who wants to help with documentation, somebody who wants to write examples, somebody who wants to do core development. Yeah, there's something for everybody live. Get your feet wet. First, good first issues. Lots of them. Like I said, we cover lots of things. So here's an interview with MN Raspberry Pi founder. You know, lots of things you can imagine has been going on in the world of Raspberry Pi. Lots ahead too. But if you want to get caught up in like, do they have Raspberry Pi's now? What's ahead? What's going on? What are they doing with Pico? We're switch gears a little bit. We're getting all of our pieces ready for version 9. That just means a lot of merging with MicroPython and CircuitPython and kind of keep an eye on our progress and more. There is like expressive stuff we got to do. And then there's MicroPython 1.20 things to do. So we want to get the latest. Yeah, we want to get the latest stuff in there. You can check out the EuroPython talks and videos and then just tons and tons of projects. This one was just on Hackaday. You know, one button press keyboard and you could check out just Friday projects. Seeing some clock projects. I love the clock. It's beautiful. It's a good idea. Inspired. Yeah, a brand. So if you want to like, oh cool. Like I have some hardware. I know I can run some stuff on it. If you want to get ideas for projects, we have a good smattering of this with a lot of Python focused. If that's your jam. But we also cover a lot of other stuff too. Sometimes if we see like, oh, there's a scripting language for a microcontroller. Yeah, it's good like this is more than just. Yeah, big tent. You know, we kind of like, oh, like, you know, scripting languages on microcontrollers would also be a fair description of what we think about our newsletter. So that's our newsletter this week. You can get this delivered every single week. Go to Adaforddaily.com. It's a separate website. We do that. So you don't ever think that your store experience, your Adaford.com customer account is in any way tied to emails and newsletters. We don't like spam even more than you. Open source hardware. It's open source hardware month in October. So I will go to the website is ohm.oshwa.org. October is open hardware month. I, you know, I used to do like a post a day, but then I covered kind of everything. So if you want to see like open source hardware month pass, like I covered the history of the logos. I'm speaking of. Oshawa has a new logo. I got an email that says, hey, we have a new logo. So I think I'll have to replace this graphic. This is our new logo here. Yeah, it's like, oh, like things, you know, explode. Yeah. I'm like, I may have messed up because I, it was, it was, I had, it was transparent, but I, I needed it to be, the letters were black. So I made them white. So I'm wondering if this is the right way it's supposed to look on black, but I don't know. I'll check. Maybe there's a brain guide. But anyways, for open the hardware month, you can do things like hold an event. You can become a member. You can certify your hardware. We are up to 695 projects will be up to probably 700 during the month of October. I think we will. I think we just submit it. Yeah. So we'll be up to 700. They're also doing, Asha was also doing a board, not board like hardware board, but a, if you want to be on the open source hardware board, I think the nominations are open board of directors. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll never be on anything like this because I think that's a conflict of interest. And I'll speak for a little more. So there's more because if we were on an open hardware nonprofit, we work at a non, we work at a hardware company. So I think it's really hard to separate that. It'd be probably useful. We write about open source hardware and licensing. We talk about it. We do it. We're the number one certified company at the moment. But as much as I think we could probably be useful and, you know, we're really good about documenting things and disclosures and crediting and all that. I personally think it's hard to separate yourself if, if you, if that's what you do. There's ways to do it, I guess, but we just decided to stay away from that. So if you aren't running an open source hardware company, but really like open source hardware, nominate yourself. If you like the stuff that Adafruit does, but you're not making hardware and you like seeing companies like Adafruit Thrive, join the board. You can help steer that entity in a direction that's helpful for companies like us. So that's the open source hardware news of the week. This week, we also vote to, but if you remember your vote. Yeah. But I think on the board, you know, you're the one, you know, you can nominate and then I think they vote. I haven't, I'm a member. I haven't, I haven't been asked about anything. We do open source hardware and we have a bunch of guides. What are the guides on the big board this week, ladies and gentlemen? Okay. This week, we've got a couple updates. I have a new guide for the HUSB, USB power delivery breakout. Thanks to Liz for writing that up. We also have an update for the Teddy Rockspin rebuild. We forgot to add a page for where to get the software. Software was public, but we forgot to link to it. If you had a page adding that, a couple of, I think these, the INA-219, SGP-40 and the ENS-160 were all added to whippersnapper. And that's why those are updated. And then we've got that MX guitar, which we can scroll because I'm covering it, the MX guitar. And we've got a new guide for the Metro M7 with micro SD. That's a collaboration giveaway we're doing. And Aaron did a little project for just making scramble NFC tags. Okay. Hardware news of the week. Let's look at the factory footage, which is all about making open source hardware. That's made in New York City factory footage. One note, because it's in the chat. So there's actually like, now there's three different logos, by the way. So if you Google for open source hardware logo history, let me see if I can just pull this up real fast. What, your article that you wrote? Yeah, I wrote this one. So open source hardware logo. See if I can. Yeah, so I'll go to this real quick. So if you're here, here's the open source hardware logo history. It's kind of my fault. So that the ring logo was a logo for that I made and then without the gears. And then later on OSI used it. I know where I know when where when they saw it and they used it and I didn't care. And then when they did the when the open source hardware entities started, they had a contest and someone took the ring logo from OSI and made a gear and I caused some problems but then it got resolved. And so you can go through if you're really interested in seeing like the history. It's cool because there's a lot of variations now. There's even more. I used to keep track of them in my like little like here's every little permutation of a logo. I you know, here's a little. Oh, see, here's my new you keep adding. Yeah. And so it's it's an interesting history and then like open source hardware like got there was a weird thing where someone owned a jewelry company for a while and then eventually weird things happened like people were trying to register the name open source and then there is an open source wine. And this is a jerky. It wasn't actually open. So it's a new Jersey Chardonnay. It's not actually the wine itself is an open source. So anyways, you can see a previous hour. And why is it a map to? Yeah, super cool. It's a thing. Yeah. So there's there's a long history of logos. This is kind of like archaeology for for I don't know people that are into this stuff. Let's do some 3d printing. All right. We're going to play two videos back to back. Take it away and Pedro and then we'll do speed up. You can build a musical instrument with Adafruit's RP 2040 prop maker feather and circuit python. The synth guitar is a 3d printed polyphonic synthesizer featuring new key switches and Stema QT rotary encoders. We think it's a fun and interesting toy instrument that showcases circuit pythons synth IO powered by the RP 2040 prop maker feather. This deaf board has everything you need for building a synthesizer with high quality digital audio. The design is inspired by the iconic SG guitar in a smaller body that's about 20 inches long toggle switches. Let you play different modes and the rotary encoders adjust modulation note octaves and volume inside. The headstock is a 3 watt speaker in the neck features eight backlit new pixel key switches. There's also new pixels that change colors depending on the note being played circuit python synth IO module lets you create small yet powerful polyphonic synthesizers with minimal hardware in the code. You can change the parameters of the envelope or the notes that you want to play. You can also tweak the frequency of the filter in the waveform to sculpt your own sound. There's a whole breakdown of how the code works in the project learn guide along with step by step assembly and the source files. We think this project is a good starting point for folks who want to build their own synthesizers inspired by guitar heroes game controller. You can strum like a guitar player and play notes and chords. You can turn off strum mode and play notes using just the new keys. This becomes handy when playing solos. The accelerometer controls high and low pass filters tilt the guitar up for high pass and down for low pass. The middle encoder lets you adjust the LFO rate of the tremolo effect. You can press the encoder to turn it on and off. Turn the next rotary encoder to just the octave range or the pitch of the notes pressing this encoder switches between triad and diatonic notes. If you mix all of these together, we think you can get really creative with your playing styles. We designed the synth guitar to be 3d printed, but you could modify the parts for other forms of manufacturing and in different materials. You can download our design source file to change the overall design or use our 3d models of the electronics to create your own custom instrument. We had a lot of fun working on this project and hope it inspires you to check out the rp2040 prompt maker in the Synthio module in circuit Python. Okay, good quality ESP and you know, every stuff. Let's jump right over to IonMPI. IonMPI brought you by Digikey. Thank you Digikey for making this thing possible. It's from Analog Devices. Yes. Return IonMPI spotlight. We've done Analog Devices. And well, now, you know, this is actually a maxim part, but Analog Devices and Maxim Burge. So it's Analog Devices slash Maxim, but picked one logo. So this week, we're going to be talking about the Max 777, 89 and 87 chips. There. This is so hot off the press. There aren't even photos of the chip. It's in the middle of this avalboard there. And this is an all-in-one power management chip that can do USB type C power delivery syncing, buck charging of a large battery pack and then boosting back up to 5.1 ish volts. So let's talk about what this is. So in the days before in the Dark Ages, we had power packs that will plug into your wall, wall warts, and you'd have to pick different DC jacks. You see like, you know, there's like six different jack types, 2.1, 1.3, 0.9, and you'd have to get the polarity right. And then you'd select the voltages. Like this is a selectable one, but usually you don't get to select the voltages. And this caused a lot of problems because people would plug in the wrong voltage. So you had to protect against that. And then also you would have the right amount of current available. And basically you ended up lugging around from apartment to apartment gigantic boxes of power bricks because you can never remember which one went to which. And if you threw it out, you're like, I'm never going to get it again. Last few years, we have been working as engineers to try to replace those power bricks with USB type C. So here's a USB type C laptop slash tablet slash phone charger that can charge almost every device. And you see on the output it can do 5, 9, 12, 15, or 20 volts. This is a nice chunky power supply. It can do up to 60, like 65 watts, 20 volts at 3.25 amps. So you can power a small laptop, a big tablet, any kind of phone, any kind of watch. Any device from the house. So ideally people would use this in the USB C cable to charge their devices. And you know, we're trying to see that. I'm starting to see more devices. Here's like a power delivery sync chip that can talk to your power delivery source, the Woolworth and say, hey, I want 12 volts at 2 amps and it will get that voltage. So whether you need a low voltage or high voltage or something in between up to 20 volts, you can get it. And this has been great for, you know, your devices that you're buying from your laptops to GPS's to mobile phones, et cetera. But there's other devices that could benefit from this. Here's say a USB power pack. Probably everyone has one of these. This is a pretty chunky one. There's three ports, two USB A outputs and one micro USB input. In this case, you know, you can charge this pack, it takes a couple hours because you can only draw maybe an amp from the five volt power supply to charge the, I think, 6,000 or 8,000 milliamp hour battery inside. And then you can supply two five volt, one or two amp outputs. But, you know, a lot of stuff these days, even like this overhead that we're, you know, we use has a built-in battery. A lot of devices have very large built-in lithium ion, lithium polymer, you know, lithium comalt batteries. You need to charge them. And once you get to like 2,000 million of hours or larger, it's very hard to charge them over a five volt power supply because, you know, let's say you first off, most five volt power supplies are going to give you two plus amps. USB is only going to max out at one amp. But even if you did want to draw that much current, let's say you had a power supply that did five volt two and a half amps, the two and a half amps across the cable is going to give you a drop that might make your charger not be able to sync the full amount of current because you sync to point five amps, you know, you have a point one ohm resistance to your cable, both directions. Now you've dropped about point two volts, you know, maybe the power supply droops also. So now you're getting close to 4.5 volts, not enough headroom to charge your LiPoly battery, considering all the other dropouts you might have with your transistors and your chips and, you know, sensors, sisters, etc. And so if you want to charge really big battery packs, ones in tablets, ones in phones, large phones, laptops and other big devices, you're going to want something that can charge at three amps and get you higher voltages. But again, you don't want to have a special power pack with a special DC plug that gets lost. Thus, the analog devices slash Maxim, Max 77789 and its friend the 77787, they're like sisters, they're fraternal twins. This one is the standalone version can do three amp charging over USB type C. So it will request from the USB type C power delivery source up to 12 volts, which is nice because then again if you're drawing three amps, if you droop from 15, you know, 12 volts, okay, now droops one amp or whatever, you still have 12 volts to buck down to charge your battery. Three amps, you can easily quick charge in an hour to a very, very chunky battery. And then it also has a boost converter. So it can generate reverse boost from that battery. It can generate 5.1 volts up to 1.5 amps. So handy if you're making those battery packs or if you're just using a device and it needs a boost converter as well. So this is the standalone version, the 89. There's also the 87 looks very similar but this one has I squared C control. So use whichever one makes more sense for your setup. They're both pretty autonomous, but then you can configure them for how much current, the floating voltage, whether you want the boost converter on, et cetera. So this is the block diagram. This is the standalone version. So the standalone version, you see it connects over USB-C. It uses the CC pins and those are used for power delivery. It also connects to DP and D and the differential data pins and the reason it does that is there's three USB-C. There are some power supplies that use the data pins to communicate how to configure and get the higher voltages. I think it's called BC 1.2. So it's pre-USB-C. You have the one inductor that's used for both buck from the USB-C down to charging the battery up to three amps and that inductor is also used to boost up to V-System which can be up to 5.1 volts, 1.5 amps out. There's also, yes, for the configuration, there's a bunch of pins and resistors you can set different voltages and different currents and then whether you want to buck, boost, buck, boost, both on the go, detection mode, all that good stuff. This is the I-squared-C version of the 89. Very, very similar. Same overall functionality except instead of setting the state and floating voltages and currents with resistors, you have I-squared-C connectivity. Both still have LEDs that indicate status. So it's kind of handy. With the I-squared-C version, you have a register map, all the same functionality, but of course, it's, you know, you're not using resistors so you can customize it on the fly as needed, but you have to have a microcontroller. So if you're making a basic battery pack or something that's standalone, you know, you're, let's say you are making an electric drill. You want to have charging, USB-C charging of the drill power pack. You'd use a standalone because maybe you don't have a microcontroller in there. But you have something like a tablet or a phone or another smart device. You have a microcontroller anyways or a microcomputer. You might as well do the configuration over I-squared-C. Usage is pretty simple. You know, it's got current limiting and overcurrent protection. It's meant for big batteries, but you know, you could use it for smaller ones, just set the current limiting to a lot lower. I think it also has multiple different float voltages available from 1.4.1 up to like 4.4. I know that depending on your cathodes, I tend to only use lithium polymers, but I know that other batteries have up to 4.4 volt floating. So it will support those, you know, whatever battery type you use. But only single cell, by the way, will not do 7.2 volt. It'll only do 3.7, you know, 4.2 approximate single cell lithium-charging batteries. Yes, so it does USB-C detection with the CC pin. It will automatically configure to get the most power available to charge. I think it'll probably try to get higher voltages because again, less droop over the power supply. It also does this BC 1.2 detection. I mean, I personally have never really used this, but I think it has to do with the resistors that Apple used to use for their pre-USBC, pre-lightening power charging cables where they use resistor dividers to indicate like light resistors to indicate to the device how much current is available. I know that there's also, the chip also has the ability to detect when the voltage is starting to droop a little bit too much. It will lean off how much current it's trying to source from the power supply so it doesn't get into like, you know, a voltage current collapsing cycle. If you do use the data pins for detection of that BC 1.2, they do recommend, I think it was the Max 4809, is a switch you can use to select who gets access to the data pins, whether it's your mic controller for native USB support or this charger chip. Honestly, I think probably best to leave them disconnected and just use USB Type-C, but looks like they have the capability available to add both, so you choose which one you want. Only downside for me, at least, is that it's in BGA 0.4 millimeter pitch, so you will need to, I'll show the layout, you'll need to have pad, via in-pad. So you're gonna have to use, you know, a fairly, not advanced, but not the cheapest PCB you can get on the market or to handle it, I think four-layer boards as well are going to be needed. This is a recommended layout. So you'll see some of those pins on the inside, the setting pins, not the power pins, you do have to go through the pad and down to another layer to get them out. So there are other chips in this generic family, not like this particular 87 or 89, that come in like a QFN style package, not quite QFN, but QFN-like. So if you don't need it with BGA, there are other Macs, you know, look for Digi-Key, Mac 777, you can see the rest of the family, maybe it doesn't have quite the current capability or like all the configurability, but it's available in non-BGA. Built-in on Digi-Key. It's in stock, 16,000 of them. You can absolutely get these. So check this out, this is the 89, but again, there's also the 87, depending on whether you want I squared C configuration or standalone. And that's our MPI this week. Hi, I'm MPI. Okay, cool. Don't forget, because quality is P, let's jump right in to your products. New, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new. Yeah, as you can tell, we have a little kid that we're singing to constantly. Sing the music. Yeah. First up, revision. Okay. We're crawling along on these revisions 450 revisions in this week. It's a big enough revision. I want to highlight it. This is the ultimate GPS logging shield. People love it because it's USB set. Sorry, it has SD card. One of our ultimate GPS is it has internal or external antennas. You can attach a active antenna to it as well. And then coin cell battery for RTC and you can select what you want, software serial or hardware serial. But the previous version did not use the ICSP pins. It was pre-UNO R3. Yeah, it's been a while, but we were like, hey, we should revise this. Now you can use the 2.3 pin header to select the SPI port or on the bottom there, there's three jumpers if you have a really old style Arduino or an Arduino compatible that doesn't have a 2x3 header. Otherwise, it's pretty much identical. Add a little bit of a better ground plane as well. It's otherwise functionally compatible, but now should work with more boards. Next up. Next up, we've also updated the motor hat for Raspberry Pi. It used to be you had to solder in the terminal blocks and the 2x20 header. Now you don't have to. Now it comes to fully assembled. So it should make it even easier for people who want to add motor control to their Raspberry Pi projects. I hear shown with DC motor and a stepper or you can drive two stepper motors. This is what it looks like now. So it comes with terminal blocks, pre-attached, pretty silk screen. And on the bottom is the slim style 2x20 header. I don't know why the thruil pads got filled with solder. I'm going to try to revise it for the next version. To use this with a taller, you know, the not Pi zero, which you can use it with. You want to use it with a classic Raspberry Pi. We give you a lifter header as well. So it lifted above all the components. Okay. And next up, these are coming soon because we have them almost ready to be in the store. Long displays. This is a 4.6 inch long display showing the long cat. It's 960 by 360 pixels color and it's an RGB 666 type display. So you can use it with our quality S3 board. You can't use it with a basic microcontroller. You can use it with a board that has RGB TTL display support. Okay. And then we have a square one. We also have a square 3.4 480 by 480 display also coming soon. So we're going to get all these displays in. I think we only have the round ones in stock for now. But wedding everybody's appetite with some cool funky displays that will be available. Very soon, next couple of weeks, we're going to get all of them in stock to match up with our quality board. Yeah. So expect these to be in stock soon. To start our show tonight, besides you, the lady, our team, our customers, our community, everybody who makes a think go is the Qualia. Yay! The Qualia S3. People haven't seen me work on this for a bit, couple of revisions through. So this is a board that I kind of designed for my own use because I want to test out all these cool, weird displays like, you know, this long tangler display or this round display or the square one, you know, basically once you get past 320 by 240 pixels, you need to use parallel RGB TTL display support. And not a lot of my controllers have that support. You usually have to go to the IMX RT series. But turns out the ESP32 S3, one of the cool things that they added is they have support for these displays. You only get 16-bit color and it uses almost all the pins, but it does work. And so you had a connector on here to let you use these cool displays. We'll later on make versions that are like round and rectangular and square and, you know, all in one, but this is a great kind of starter dev board that will let you explore experiment with these boards. And there's Arduino support and circuit Python. A lot of pins, you know, 16 RGB TTL displays, H-sync, V-sync, DE and pin clock. We do have some pins left over on the bottom. We have four pins for SPI and then two analog pins as well. So, you know, in Arduino, at least we have a one bit MMC connection plus I2S. You can do video playback with audio based on CinePak. So we did a little, you know, example demo of that. And I think in the product description we linked to the CinePak demo. But basically it's like you want displays up to 720 by 720 or 800 by 480. These displays will be able to be run with this device. They just snap onto the end. And then you also have STEMI QT connector. So adding iSquared C to iSquared C pins are available. Two buttons that go through an expander. One thing to watch out for is these displays are a little bit more complicated than most. You need to SPI initialize them. And so we have initialization code. And then after you've done SPI initializing them, then you can blast out pixels. And you have to blast the pixels out repeatedly. So they use a lot of PS RAM. They use a lot of the CPU capabilities. Because, you know, if you can't get to the PS RAM while it's trying to display it through the cache to the display. So it's like you're not going to get... Like it's using a lot of the capabilities of the S3. And you can do like basic animations, basic videos, graphics, of course, in Arduino. And then in CircuitPython, you know, graphics, Ripple and more. So I thought just go to the overhead and I could show just quick. Yeah. Yeah, one note too. So Qualia is the name of all the types of displays we're doing. We're finally able to do all the types of displays we want. So we'll call things like this board the Qualia S3 or the Qualia, you know, the SP32 S3. So you'll be able to know like, oh, that's a type of display technology that Adafruit has. You get all this stuff with it. And then also it works with all these different types of screens. So yeah, square screens. So the thing is that the pinout it works with doesn't work with every screen with a 40 pin display. But usually these, I call them RGB666. They have six bits red, six bits green, six bits blue. And then they often have capacitive touch here on the side. So like, you know, this 3.4 inch square, this round display, this like huge round display, this bar display. These non-rectangular ones tend to work the best. What, you know, if you see something that's a 480 by 272 or 800 by 480, that may not match. You'll have to make sure that you have the right pinout on here for it to work. There's a backlight driver. So a little booster to drive the backlight. This is just running an Arduino demo that shows, you know, it's tough to see, but it's a color swirl on the display. And then this is, hopefully this live demo will work. This is running CircuitPython. So it goes to the internet and this is like my moon clock demo. It gets the IP address, oh wait, I think they reset it right before it. It's a little slower. It gets the IP address and then it tries to find the moon phase and displays the moon, except it's not working. So it's my live demo. Sorry. Yeah, I know. I was messing with it. Don't worry. We have a video that we recorded. We have a demo. Yeah, we have a video that I'll show. Well, it just got merged into mainline like literally an hour ago. But the Arduino demo works great. So, you know, as we get each display working with this board, we'll document it so people can get up and running really quickly. You know, these displays get fairly big. Like this, this four inch diagonal 720 by 720 round is like could make for a beautiful clock display. You can do some Halloween projects with gigantic eyeballs. You know, all the stuff is normally would be very hard to use. You'd have to have like an invented Linux board. But you can have the simplicity of a microcontroller. So we have some in stock to play around with. I think it'll really unlock the ability of people to use these displays because it's going to be very well documented with lots of example code. Yeah, we we saw what was going on in the world of electronics, which is these displays are interesting. They're out there, but there was nothing besides maybe a demo for some of them. And then folks are like, well, I got one and it just doesn't work. So we wanted to make sure when we do it, you can do anything you want with it. And it's fully documented, it's open source, and you can build cool things. That is new products. New, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new. Yeah. So we're going to do top secret, load up your questions. We have a couple more. We have videos with these displays too. Well, you know, your demo worked earlier. I know. Well, it's like I really did just get merged. I think it's, I think maybe I can put it together really fast, but yeah. Yeah, it's not displaying. I think it's not initializing properly. Okay. Well, let's do top secret. You can put your questions up over on Discord if you want. But we're going to do some top secret right now. This is a beautiful round 480 by 480 display connected to a qualia ESP 32 S3. And this is our tester bed. I'm going to go ahead and load using the RP 2040 Pico. I can run a test to program the ESP 32, check all the pins, load in the code to draw a graphic. And then when it's done, it's like, yay, rainbows. So I just got these coming off the panel. And what's neat is that rainbow design, I actually had chat GPT right for me. So I was like, oh, I wanted to show like every hue and like I could have done the math to figure out how to make this pop out, but it did a great job. So always using friendly robots to help with coding. Coming into the shop soon. What's this? Well, this is me testing out 2.4 inch TFT feather wing. This is the original version, which I had to like basically completely redesigned because of chip shortages. Here's the new version prototype green. And when I have a board that has feather connectors, what I do is I grab all of these feathers here. 32 4s and teensy and ESP and Sandy 21 and AVR and anything whatever every 2040. And I plug them in the back and I have one example code that I run on all of them that verifies the touch screen. So that's working. Yay. Verifies they can read an image off the SD card. That's these beautiful flowers and also let me see what else it does. The SD card for reading the image. It does the touch screen. Of course, it does the TFT and the IRQ for the touch screen as well. So all things are tested with all these boards. So this is ready to go to the food shop. This is a round for a by for a display running on the new qualia ESP 32 S3 boards, the final versions. And this is the circuit Python code that's running on it. And you're like, well, I didn't know circuit Python had support. So now thanks to Jebler's intrepid PR that's about to get merged for adding dot clock support. This also comes on the heels of adding IDF 5.1, the ESP IDF upgrade, which actually really improves the quality of the displays as well. So the example I've got running here connects the internet and finds our latitude and longitude by using geo IP and then displays an image of the moon. Now the image of the moon will eventually be like the moon phase that matches with our location. But just to get started, I wanted to just have a moon, but the color looks much better because we have all 16 bit color, no blue wires, one circuit Python beautifully and no flickering coming soon. Okay, we're going to do some questions. And I have some lined up. I will start with one that just came in and then Lady was the one that we started to line up. So the first one, because we mentioned during the circuit Python newsletter section that we're doing the merge of micro Python and circuit Python that doesn't mean circuit Python or micro Python is going away. It means we're taking the code and we're merging the code and they'll always be called an upstream. Yeah. The lowest be distinct differences, just like there's distinct flavors of Linux. There's Debian. There's, but they have to like get in kernel and make sure they integrated and same thing. So we're working with the micro Python team. Circuit Python has a specific use, specific needs. Micro Python has another use, another needs. And these things interact together, but they're not, neither one of them is going away when the same merge. Okay. First question, eight bit SPI TFT displays have come across a few ESP 32 boards with built-in displays and have eight bit data, but seem to be otherwise SPI have you played with this at all? I have not. Sounds like 8080 or 6800, which is, you know, like the IL-9341 can use eight bit data as well as SPI. I have not used any eight bit SPI TFT displays or ML leds. I'll be honest, like, I think like TFTs are fairly inexpensive and I think the IPS ones look as good as ML led. So I haven't played it with it myself, but it's, yeah, look, the more displays the better, right? By the way, Lydia's demo got working. I know. You know, I forgot it actually takes, I had a two seconds to go on the internet. I had to go on the internet. So now it's working. So this is around a round of moon. We can have them in the background. It's kind of nice. It's like, yeah. Okay. We'll keep answering questions with our, our display in the background. Yeah. Okay. I have an 18 volt DC power supply, but need USB to power Bluetooth receiver. I'd love to use your UVAC. It's rated for 16 volts, but the chip that's built inside is rated to 23 volts. Would it be okay to use? I would check if the capacitors are rated for that voltage. I think the capacitors are rated for 16 volts and that's why. So you could replace the caps. Okay. This one they're going to check back later because they had the balance, but I fell in love with the VS 1000 chips from Adafruit, the audio effects boards. Is there anything even remotely similar for video either in a longer digital, there are a dozen of Android based video boxes, but is there anything more simple like bright sign digital signs that isn't like $800 a player? Yeah. It's tough because, you know, video is, is a lot more complicated. You'd want to have like, you know, the codec to handle all the different, you know, MP4 and move and quick time, whatever. We do have a Raspberry Pi based video player that does video loops and it is like fairly simple. You can just plug in a USB key and it'll automatically loop whatever videos on there. So that's kind of the closest thing. So you can look on our learning system for the, the Raspberry Pi video looper. It was meant for like art projects. Okay. And we just got something else. Yeah. We have a default moon, but it's almost right because Friday is going to be a, a, a actual full moon. Okay. And with that, I do have one thing. Plug in the moon. Plug it because it didn't get charged. Just think. Oh yeah. Charge it up. Yeah. Okay. Now the moon is charged. Now the moon is charged. Okay. We're going to bounce in just one minute, but I did have one, like it's not a comment or a question, but it's a thing that kind of came in. So we were getting kind of pulled into this debate about 3D printing stuff. We like 3D printers. We like showing and sharing how to do 3D printing. We like the design side of it. We like the sharing side of it. But what's happening right now is there is this 3D printing, by the way, has always been kind of like this. There's factions forming and folks are making accusations about one 3D printing company, another one. I've tried to broker some type of peace between like the Prusas and the bamboos and Oshawa and like everyone who is arguing about like 3D printing, it's not really doing a service to the users. So like right now bamboo has a site. There's blocking from printables and you can't export your stuff to their site and their site was, it's because they reverse engineered something and maybe they did, maybe they didn't. And there's just like a tendency right now for companies to try to turn you into unwilling warriors. Like go online and there's enemies. There's us versus them. So I would say if you're finding yourself in that situation, maybe find a community that's not doing that, not dividing you, you know, the Adafruit world, like come on in, like welcome to war. We're not going to like, we're not going to encourage you to go and like terrorize people on social media about their choices of programming languages or what site they put their files on or even their format. Like there's room for everybody, but I'm noticing this is happening a lot. It's happening again in the 3D printing world. This happened a while ago and now it's kind of back. I think there's huge financial pressures on companies that make products like 3D printers and there's really high competition, but it's starting to turn into like, well, anyone who does 3D printing, you're in this camp on your, and this is your religion and you can't like anything else. And if you do, you're going to get attacked. And we don't really like that. So check out our 3D printing show that we do every week where it's not about the printer you choose. It's about the things that you make and share. And I think that there's a big opportunity for a 3D printing company to kind of get to that where it's like, take a page from us like circuit python.org is a place where there's other things besides data for like, basically we're a sponsor of like circuit python now, there's more non native reports. And I think there's a 3D printing company that can be like, hey, we're just really into the art of 3D printing and we happen to sell a 3D printer, but we're not going to like weaponize you. Someone in the chat just said, yeah, I started doing pottery instead. That's the right way. It's true because this happens a lot. I think that's pottery fights though. This happens a lot. Glaze off. Yeah, this happens a lot with people in the electronics world and the 3D printing world where they really, it's like sports teams or political parties. And that's not what we want to do. I think as a group of technologists and creatives in definitely in this community. So anyways, I just want to, you know, we're trying to get people are trying to pull us into this. We already interviewed Prusa. We have it on our website. It's a very measured. I interviewed, I tried to get comments from Ashwa. I tried to get comments from Arduino. I tried to get comments from, you know, spark fun. And there was all these things that were going on. And I think that was a very boring way to do this because I think folks really addicted to drama online. So in the 3D printing world, if you see this, like maybe encourage folks, we have a great community that does 3D printing. Doesn't matter what printer you use. Everything is built on something else. Sorry, it is. Yeah. So it's, I see it's come down to slinging mud. That's funny. But yeah, this is the thing. I'll give you an analogy and then we're going to balance. So the ham radio world, which like you're part of and everything, this is, you're part of it. And back in the day when we were starting Make Magazine, the ham radio community, it was turning political and it was like kind of older guys just kind of pushing, like no one could come in and was gatekeeping. And where is ham radio now? It's not growing. It's shrinking. And what happened? Wifi came along, MQTT, wireless Lora. You'd think like ham radio would be like the center. Everyone's into Lora right now and like shielding. Yeah. And that could have totally been like a ham radio. Yeah. And so instead of like bringing people together and like, Hey, here's a cool trick. You do this. You do that. This is just me, you know, being like, you know, 20 years older now from the start of electronic communities, especially online. Huge missed opportunity. People were pushed out. There was gatekeeping. There was like, you don't have this equipment. You don't have that. You're not this political party. You're not this get out. When you took your ham radio license, there was like jerky guys there. And I've seen and heard this before. So everyone kind of moved on. So I'm a little worried about the 3D printing world that is doing the ham radio museum. And they kept saying like, oh, so how many radars has your husband have? And I was like, he doesn't, he doesn't have any radios. I'm like, I'm the one with the license. Like I was looking at this like radio museum and they're like, what? Yeah. It's funny. And, you know, someone mentioned in the chat when, you know, when the maker world came along that they, it wasn't one individual. This is like the vibe that the ham radio community just made fun of us. They're like, look at these idiots doing like art and LEDs and like, not really engineering. Yeah. Not real engineering and all that stuff. And so, you know, this, what happens is people just move on and they go to different, different communities and like, I'm thankful people found a home in Adafruit, but I'm noticing this fracture in the 3d printing world and also in the open source world. It's like we should be doing tricks together, coming together. And there's a huge void for leadership bringing people together. There's a lot of like separate weapon eyes, us and them. And I think social media kind of made things even worse. Like you're defined by who you hate instead of the things you like. I think be careful about that. When you're starting to list the things, like I'm only going to get along with someone because they hate the same things I do. Maybe go the other way and find people that like the same things you do. Just an idea. Just an idea. Anyways, that's as much as we're going to get involved with. Read my article about all the stuff. We put it there. It's not going to make anyone angry. So it's not going to get the clicks. So that is our show for tonight. Thank you so much everybody. This has been another episode of ask an engineer and eat food production. We will see everybody next week. Here is your moment of Xenar. Good night everybody.