 Live from New York it's Ask an Engineer. Hey everybody and welcome to Ask an Engineer. It's me Lady Aida the engineer we're broadcasting live from the Adafruit headquarters in downtown Manhattan. The factory behind us is where we do all the kitting, shipping, making, hacking, videoing, tutorialing, cookie baking and more. We got a fun filled packed show thanks to JP for picking up show and tell. It's always a good time when he's hosting but right now it's me and Mr. Lady Aida wearing Adafruit black. We're nice and goth and cozy. Why don't you tell them what's on tonight's show? On tonight's show the code is Vemmel VML Vemmel yeah Vemmel. Ten percent off a native star all the way up to 1159 p.m. Eastern time tonight. Use it for anything we have in stock. We'll talk about our Adafruit live series of shows including some things that Lady Aida did during the week this week on other shows and more happy anniversary to the folks at Tom's Hardware. Talk about that in a bit. Show and tell people around the world showing and sharing things. Thank you again JP. Time travel and within time travel we're going to kind of do a new segment called retro tech because there's enough of it. From the mailbag we'll read your letters to us. Made in New York City factory footage, 3d printing, everyone's favorite segment I on NPI. New products. Top secret. We'll answer your questions. We do that over on discord we're all 33,000 of us. Hang out just about 24-7 where we answer your questions, share our projects and more. We do that on discord adafruit.it slash discord. All that and more on you guessed it. Ask an engineer. Sweet. Okay so Lady Aida let's first pay some bills here because things are expensive. That's the code. You could save money as you support an open source hardware company here in New York City. Correct. But you also get free stuff at the same time. Yes that's right. You get $99 or more. You get free UPS sorry $99 or more. You get a free promo proto half-size breadboard. $149 or more. You get a selection of one of our many stem IQT sensors. You've got a variety of boards and devices. When you place your order we'll give you a different one each time if you make an account so make an account. And then $199 or more. You get free UPS ground shipping in the continental United States. It's trackable. It's insured. It's the good type of shipping. So order from Adafruit and you'll get all that stuff for free. Okay it's part of our live series of shows that we do every single week that we like to talk about. But this week I thought I'd mix it up a little bit because you did a special talk this week with Pimeroni. Yeah at Tom's Hardware. So they had the 10th anniversary of their pie cast, Raspberry Pi cast. What did you talk about on the show? It's available on their YouTube channel, all the social video property channels and all that. But what did you talk about this week? It was like a fun-filled 30-40 minutes. I was joined by Pimeroni. So we're you know two companies that have been developing so much hardware and software tutorials for Raspberry Pi. And we just talked about the experience we've had over the last 10 years, stuff we've learned, you know things that we've seen people in the community build, our favorite products and projects. And it was like you know kind of a good reminiscence. It was um you know it's been 10 years thinking back on you know when we first got our first Raspberry Pi and played with it and how single board computers have really changed the maker landscape. You know it's cool because every time people are like oh making is dead you know parts are too small you can't solder them. Humans are so innovative and we just come up with a new way to build stuff and be creative and hack on hardware. And I think Raspberry Pi is a big part of that and Pimeroni and Adafruit have together I think contributed so much to the communities in order to make it possible. I think one of the things that I took away from watching the video is building electronics has evolved a lot and some companies and some folks don't like that. They don't like the new people coming in. They don't like the new things happening. There's now scripting languages on microcontrollers. There's a lot of people that are plugging in things because you can't really use a soldering iron. Just like you can't have a chemistry set in a lot of schools and so we had to adapt. We have like StemAQT connectors. We have Python and I thought it was neat to see like Pimeroni because they've always evolved as things have happened and it was neat. The analogy that we always like to use and you use it again is like we're skateboarders kind of showing tricks. Yeah. It's like here's a trick that we're doing. Here's a trick that you're doing. Here's a trick that you're doing. Here's a trick that we're doing and we're building off of it over and over and over again. I think that's very different with other companies in the like electronic space where it's knives out. I want to stab you over and over where I think like a different Pimeroni we're always like hey that's a pretty that's a cool idea that's a cool trick. Yeah we we build on each other's successes like there's definitely parts that I'll use and then I see it in their designs and then there's parts that they use and I'm like oh that's cool and I'll use it in my designs. Yeah. You know we have similar stuff but we don't have you know there's not that much overlap you know like they have the PyKade that's their you know the product they're most proud of. We don't have anything like the PyKade. I don't want to. Well even if we did even if we did I think that would be fine just like there's there is similar products and that's okay and I I don't understand why in the tech communities in particular folks can be so close but there's like one tiny thing like oh you chose a different license so therefore you're the enemy for life now and like we're everyone is it's so close I think we'd be a more powerful group of people if we didn't let those little things so it was good to see you and Pimeroni because we've always been tight with them yeah and I think it's neat to see these companies flourish and adapt to what customers want to. I know we're in it's a totally different world you know. I got a box of electronics of companies that like oh nope we're always gonna do solder stuff we're always gonna do blah blah or it's only Arduino and it's like thankfully now there's like multiple options. So that was a cool show. Cool show go watch it 30 minutes. Yeah I got to be not on camera. Put it on double speed and you can be done in 15. So next up show and tell JP did the show and tell watch it. I caught just one little piece in the beginning and at the end so it was like bookends of joy. I saw Jay's I think Jay was working on some cool shoe things and then Liz's music project. On Sundays we do Desk of Lady Aida. Lady Aida what was on the Desk of Lady Aida this week? Okay this week I showed off some testers. I've been just cranking through some new designs. People have been asking about the QDPI ESP32 and it's it's happening slowly but surely. I got a couple displays got a couple sensors got camera modules so you know lunar new year's over a lot of silicon parts that we had booked about a year ago are finally coming in so you're gonna see some kind of old stuff you know come back to life. And we got the great search where's that part that you need what was it okay what was it this time oh wait it was a power thing so I'm going to be working with the Apple II disk drive and the Apple II disk drive is kind of interesting because it's it's a shoe cart drive standard five and a quarter and floppy drive but they kind of gutted a bunch of things to make it less expensive and then they did with the controller themselves and so you have like a much much finer control over the low level hardware but the trade-off is you need a little bit more power supplies because they like do this biasing for like the thing the magnetic reed head and so I need a negative 12 volt bias voltage and even though I've shown buck and boost converters I haven't shown yet a inverter power supply search so I found one and ordered it and hopefully it'll work out for biasing this Apple II drive. Okay cool JP's product pick is every Tuesday where we broadcast live inside the product page here's this week's highlight. Oh yeah that's the product pick of the week right there the CP 2102N friend it's a USB to serial breakout conversion board lady Ada said why don't you build a breadboard Arduino in order to program this this is plugged in over USB-C and then transmit and receive to the Arduino but to upload this I have Arduino configured to think it's sending out to a due mille nove but it's actually sending USB to my CP 2102N friend which is then sending over serial to the chip here to program it so I'll hit upload in Arduino and then I'll hit reset once it starts to upload that helps it and you'll see it very quickly flashes the board it's already done and now my LED is blinking at that sort of one second rate the CP 2102N friend USB to serial converter. Okay and then on Thursdays we have JP's workshop where we do a circuit python parsec and this week I haven't lined up because I thought it was a good one and it's exactly like the two minute mark so I'm gonna do it this week here we go here's a recap. For this week's circuit python parsec I want to show how you can use the circuit python audio mixer in order to crossfade between two audio files as they are playing. Here you can see I am importing audio core as well as audio mixer and then the audio IO I'm getting audio out so that I can send audio over one of the pins on this board. I'm setting up the number of voices here is two and then my mixer has a in this case a two voice count it sets the sample rate the channel count bits per sample and then we set up the audio mixer and play that object then we're setting up two voices voice zero and voice one and setting their levels so this is the kind of key to using the mixer mixer dot voice zero level and I'm setting that at one so the first voice or first wave file will be at full volume voice one that's the second one that'll be off so here I have these two samples one is a drum loop and one is a synthesizer loop so we start them playing and they they're told to loop forever but we're only going to hear the first one because of the mixer then throughout the code what we do is gradually fade one up while we fade the other one down and then reverse it so we'll hear those come in and out so what I'm going to do is set this to playing and you should hear and see in my serial output what's going on there's the synths gonna play for a second at full volume and then the drums so you can see that's a really cool way to have some synced up loops that are playing and just bring in the ones you want without having to worry about resetting them or timing them to start at an exact moment and that is how you can use the audio mixer inside of circuit python that's your circuit python parsec okay and then on fridays we have a deep dive with scott tune in for all the developments real-time updates and everything we're working on in the world of circuit python all right so time travel we've got a bunch of news and then we're going to do a segment we'll see folks like it will will continue to do the segment going forward in time travel however first up a special thanks to everyone 5000 people are using our aid fruit reddit who would have thought yeah and you know i'll say the quality of reddit has gone up not down over the years it's amazing which i i'm always cautiously optimistic but there was times when you know some online communities when there is not moderation when there isn't folks paying attention what's going on you know it was a little scary for a little bit this was a few years ago but reddit is a good community and i'll even say it's getting harder and harder to find things on google so sometimes i hit reddit and i try to search for something that i'm looking for because someone else is probably so almost like yahoo back in the day where there's like really curators there is a lot of the moderators can do a good job and i think reddit has done a good job of um they've cleared out a lot of the really bad subreddits and i think not only did they clear them out but it sent a signal to people hey this kind of behavior is not appropriate here we don't want it go elsewhere i go to four chan and so i think reddit's and i think the community there had something to lose which is like they spent a lot of time building a community together and like one or two people like literally one or two people can come in and ruin it and so um i think people care more especially over the last couple years about their online communities because a lot of people that's all they had yeah and so um anyways thanks for supporting us over there and uh we'll continue to try to do more stuff um in the world of reddit too eight a box so we are full as far as number people that can get an eight a box which will be shipping out in our seasonal delivery now um it's going to be like you know winter winter you can't call that late technically it's still winter somewhere um it'll still be cold out somewhere um and uh i think that um we should be able to give some more specific updates soon um but it is really tough with uh the supply chain going on and just how the things are slowing up all over the place um i think everyone i think people are more um understanding because everything in their life takes longer slower more expensive so anyhow we'll have some more updates but what you can do is i do think there'll be some churn there's some people will be like oh you know if it doesn't come out by you know next week i i'm gonna cancel for now and i'll sign up later so sign up now and you'll get notified when there's openings on eight a box dot com um also in our world of time travel we do a little bit of mailbag stuff packets back your packet yeah people send us nice emails all the time and i have to remember to read those i i have to read the mean ones um but i can also read the nice ones um so this week dear adafruit you're fast shipping and full color paperwork with pio printout made easy for my bookkeeper she's happy so my thank you i appreciate help with getting this order to go through in the first place thanks again i hope my students built something useful sincerely rob okay thanks rob and i'm glad your bookkeeper's happy yeah all right it's retro tech time um so read a song huh yeah well beep beep boop beep retro tech i might yeah i mean i have some music stuff i'm working on um but just run out of time um so this is the logo but i do i didn't want to kind of go through the other logos and um you know the one thing about like logos and advertising which is good is everyone has opinions not everyone is a computer scientist not everyone is an engineer and so sometimes there's opinions about that stuff and and they don't know what they're talking about yeah but this everyone knows logos everyone knows advertising everyone isn't inundated with logos yeah so i always think it's fun to to share some of the stuff and just because we didn't choose one doesn't mean we don't like it it's just like someone has to eventually make a decision so this was one of the ones we were playing around with yeah and this one and then we uh kind of settled on this one has kind of like a you know nintendo-e look you know it's a calmer 64 like the lines is kind of what did it for me here yeah three lines was very futuristic like not two not four three yeah so you know it has a it has a like nintendo power look uh yeah so uh i showed a preview of uh in celebration of this retro stuff that we're doing of some cookies but these cookies are done and we ate them so here's a cassette take cookie see some different ones here's a floppy cookie we have some folks that are very skilled bakers this is from priscilla uh at our team we have some skull cookies of course because that's that's ate a fruit and uh we wanted to like the frosting yeah nice nice frosted treats nice frosted treats yeah and then um sam was kind enough to uh do the photoshoot with us because we wanted to show uh the size of cookie in human hand so this is cookie to scale so this is sam and yes it is a requirement for everyone to have pink hair and uh dressing black and eat fruit and so then other bits of retro tech that we had is um i was posting this around this is a this is a belt and uh i did the photoshoot for this one and this is my belt i'll be wearing it's a little push to reject uh it glows it lights up and it glows so this will be cool for uh i'll probably wear this at uh hope in july yeah um yeah because uh where else are you gonna wear like a a thing like this well we could go to the the retro um isn't it a retro computer you can go to barcade yeah i don't think they'll give you a free drink but i do think a lot of people try to push your belt buckle that's fine um and then uh we did a time lapse of you putting together this really need a clear apple case for your apple drive so let's play that um you can see what it looks like here um we'll have we'll have more of it shortly and then um there are mac effects yeah in case people are wondering mac effect makes really awesome clear mac and apple cases yeah and uh i'm going to show the video that uh jepper did uh this really cool floppy thing and then um i got another video of a retro thing we're working on so this is a pretty pretty big segment that we're thinking because we had a lot of retro stuff you came out like strong yes cookies hello and happy weekend i borrowed friends commodore sx64 the world's first color portable computer and i have been working on rewriting commodore 64 floppies this one i rewrote with genuine grease weasel hardware and let's load it up we're using the epics fast load cartridge for much faster loading so hopefully things will uh get going within the span of this short demo so with grease weasel you can write data back from a d64 cracked format floppy and then stick it in genuine hardware and load it and here is one of my favorite games for commodore 64 arcan from electronic arts get a load of that so as far as i can tell it is playable and works but what we're seeing is that a large number of retries are needed when writing the floppies or to come okay next up is an example of why we're doing some of this retro tech stuff so um if you look around your home and kind of everywhere there is these dark rectangles that do nothing when they're off or they're um or they'll just be on like a television station like news or something like that it's bad and they're not and the news ain't great and good at all and so we were thinking wouldn't it be cool to have something that could plug into like any tv that could just display art and maybe you would code it with python and then we'd make like neat little patterns and then back in the day there was these um music visualizers and believe it or not atari made one and uh it's it's just like wood box and it's was the atari video music player and uh we got one and we have to repair it and fix it and here's a video of uh this is a very start of this i think this was from last night right this is two nights ago it's all a blur i don't know what is this you are in a dimension of time and space and atari video music so you picked up this atari video music uh device it's kind of a cool video synth um i found a fun tweet with a little circuit that lets me get the composite video out so you can see the composite here on the scope some nice ntsc type signal got a little av to hdmi converter here into an hdmi monitor and then you're making some making some music cool tunes you want to show the monitor different settings that's cool let's go on here and change the color and the controls display oh how many you want four how many two one two two scan rate gain yeah we're making like cool video music synth stuff okay and then last up for retro tech this week is another reason we've been doing this is not everything needs to be designed to be a square or rectangle that is sealed up so one of the things that we're doing is um well we know that people use our stuff for prototyping um or they'll use it in like straight up products yeah and so what we're trying to do is show a little bit of the past with a um kind of a fun is that a tootaloo this is a tootaloo oh yeah tootaloo this is a panasonic transistor radio would you like me to show the tootaloo yeah from 1972 um so one little note the packaging not a square box um it's round there's artwork on the cover it's a tootaloo let's let's look oh dude look at this art this is a thing yeah we do not do art like this is a badge that you could get tootaloo by Panasonic so Panasonic they're a cool company they used to be even trippier and so you can see this definitely has like yellow submarine yeah like vibes do yeah and uh here's a poster of some of the many things it's like if you looked at this would you say this is like Panasonic maybe maybe not and so the one i'm going to show can you believe what we used to have like i will look at that look is that the two no that's the tootaloo yeah that that is pretty sweet yeah so let's unbox the tootaloo really yeah we're gonna unbox it live yeah we're gonna unbox it live and i think one of the things that we could all do is uh learn a lot from the past and now everything is a lot smaller so you can do a lot more so this is a radio you can kind of wear it around the idea is you wore it on your wrist you could if you wanted to okay so you can wear it around my god it's very fashionable yeah and uh half purse half bracelet yeah and then let's uh let's show this on the overhead real quick and here you go okay first off it's got this beautiful metal badge gorgeous and this is the dial i mean look at that font look at that jp you're i hope you're watching yeah i love this stuff oh but wait there's more and then this closes and then this is the tuner and volume yeah so we're gonna panasonic you're probably wondering this is from 1972 and uh does it still work well yeah of course it does i can listen to the olympics right now i can't believe we're in fourth place yeah and so so you know a lot of neat things about this it still works really neat design kind of beautiful um if you put this on a shelf some will say oh what's that cool looking thing over there and this was just a transistor radio and now with all the space and batteries and all the things that we can do um it could be wearable it could be all sorts of stuff so i will challenge all of us to design things like this that still look cool you know 50 almost 50 years this is very cool this is this is a beautiful design yeah i can imagine this being something like a shower bluetooth shower radio now things like that you want to tote it like oh i'm carrying a purse lots of things it could be all right yeah i like the ergonomics of it not a lot of stuff is rounded these that's right showing hardware okay well yeah so we'll have some really great photos of all the stuff um that we'll put on our sites that we like to do now and hopefully it'll inspire folks to think outside the boxes they say i mean i really mean it this things think outside the square yeah yeah to the loop to the loop great name too yep okay uh let's keep going it's python on hardware time okay this week on the python on hardware newsletter by the way please sign up on uterforddaily.com it's free we deliver this newsletter to you every single week we don't spam we don't do anything like that good aterford daily i think we got about 9 000 subscribers i think it's the most popular python on our newsletter right now um i think it's the only one um we have 500 total actually more than 500 total certifications it's way more than 500 yeah but we like to celebrate the bigger numbers so um ate a fruit got to 500 first and we have 500 so right now we're currently the most certified open source hardware company why do we do it well it's just you could talk the talk and say we love open source we like to be open but um if you just put your files up and put a license on it and then use their little certification thing you can have your hardware certified so i think it's an easy good thing to do why do we do it um i'll be straight up um there's a lot of people who say they do open source and they don't and so for us it's like well here's a here's at least a group here's a way that people who do this agree that it's open source i you know i think it's good to show also a lot of people say like oh well you know i was going to open source it but after i recoup my investment and if the business is successful but i want to show like ate a fruit i think a lot of people can say it is a successful business um we employ a lot of people we do we we do right by them um yeah we were in a meeting with a open source company and they said well we're not going to be open source until we recoup our money and it's just like well imagine what is that what is that imagine if we did that like when will we recoup the investment of ate a fruit well never never right it's your there's there's always something right so i think it's good to show you can have be a successful business and do open source hardware these are actually two separate things that don't you can be open source and not have successful business you can be successful and not do open source but you can do both it is possible the other reason we did it is um we want people to build off of our hardware and make their own devices and own businesses and that's why there's a flourishing circuit python community there's more circuit python boards from other companies than ate a fruit yes easily um in fact tonight one of the things i'm going to share is there's a circuit python show it's nothing to think of it i hadn't i didn't mean to organize it um so our circuit python 720 alpha 2 is released um there is some beta stuff that you can play around with raspberry pi i think the cool thing that you mentioned on the show that you did um was raspberry pi also stood for python it did yeah it does sorry yeah the pie spelled pi but it actually stands for python and and that was a big thing that pushed us towards circuit python blinka having python as being the next step up because you know we wanted to have an interpreted language and and i'll be honest like i didn't really i was i like code in pearl and i coded a little bit in lua and i code in tickle and python wasn't like a big thing for me but um but this kind of cemented it's like okay the raspberry pi is going with python as their official library as you know um official interpreted language let's do it and it's working out um there's some benchmarks 32 bit verse 64 bit for the raspberry pi for folks that are into that um this is the episode that we were talking about on tom's hardware joey has this really neat uh crowd supply we're a backer of this watch this is the watch at circuit python compatible i love seeing one of the first yeah it'll be one of the first circuit python powered wrist watches um and then the thing i wanted to show besides all the projects so i guess i should scroll through these relevant there's there is too many projects every single week where we are at that point so i have to pick one thing each week um there's a bunch of macro pads i think that's one of the things to uh to to check out um but the thing that i picked this week was the uh trailer for the circuit python show okay so i'm gonna play the trailer and uh please check it out and this guy this this um mailing was jam packed yeah this is there's a lot of stuff going on um so here we go i'm gonna play the trailer and then uh that'll be our circuit python and python are her news this week welcome to the circuit python show an independent podcast hosted by me paul cutler each episode i'll have an interview with someone in or around the circuit python community in season one i'll be talking to catney rembore professor john gallagher todd kurt and more guests to be announced season one of the circuit python show starts the first week of march you can find more information about the show at circuit python show dot com or follow the show on twitter at circuit py show that's circuit py show use your favorite podcast app and hit subscribe today and that is python on hardware we're like marvel now where this is like the multiverse trailer just just dropped well there's a lot of variants two more two more weeks okay let's do uh open source news and more um we're an open source hardware company we're just talking about that to prove it we have two thousand six hundred and twenty four guides we had a lot of guides this week too yeah so this uh this is the guides that we just published lady to what's on the big board this week okay um well we've updated a couple guides uh so the feather has uh esp 8266 so this is actually very exciting this this feather actually the guide got a page on whipper snapper uh implement like how to install a whipper snapper because we're ready to have more people join in and a lot of people buy their hardware from us and then they're like what can i do with it well now in the guide they'll tell you how to install whipper snapper so you can have a no code iot um installation you can get sensors buttons leds and stuff working immediately um with your hazard esp 8266 which is super exciting um Eva also published a guide on um using the kb 2040 with the gherkin 30 keyboard uh just good enough to be kind of useless but you can still kind of type stuff on it um i think these are adorable keyboards um i think we updated the guide on the mcp 25 set 47 25 it's now qt if i'd we've revised the board to be semi qt compatible and we've got a bunch more new guides um from no page and list we've got the party parrot zoetrope so this is interesting because it's zoetropes um you know they're just spinning they flash an led but this one uses neopixels to flash different colored leds and they showed how did they built the whole thing with 3d printed parts and a cricket it's a really nice little robotics project it's kind of intermediate based after you've built a basic little rover you can make a zoetrope uh charlin did a really cool project called the exercise buddy which um uses the led glasses driver actually which is a circuit playground circuit python compatible bluefruit board and it has an accelerometer in it and so what she did is you know with a little bit of battery because it's got a built built in battery charger she's 3d printed a case taped it to the inside of her exercise bike wheel and it can detect when she's pedaling and when she stops pedaling it pauses the video she's watching it sends like the pause remote control command so she can use this to you know watch a movie while she's pedaling and kind of keep her from sometimes you get so excited by the movie you sort of stop this will kind of inspire her to keep pedaling the more you peddle the more you get to watch so that's that's good uh catney did a guide for the new ad excel 375 high g accelerometer with i squared c arduino and spi support and for the i lights we now have display io support thank you for the community for helping out i know mark worked on it and a bunch of people worked on it um you can now drive it with circuit python directly thank you so much for picking that up and running with it and getting it to work so it's now in the guide all right let's do some factory footage and it wouldn't be factory footage unless you could see some of the weather and some of the view outside our window this is the uh disney building across the street slowly emerging soon it will block out the sun yeah i heard you know there was two bits of disney news today one was like oh it was so cool like pixar they they didn't they didn't have a copy of toy story two and there is this woman she happened to be on maternity leave she had a copy and now she's the director of like the new buzz light year and then the other disney story i saw was they're going to have like giant communities of disney villages for adults kind of like what they were going to do in epcot so this is starting to turn into it is this is disney yeah disney um in the wonderful world of disney when they were talking about epcot the idea is people would live there and that was so cool um like in the in the epcot center that was the idea was going to be like a community where people like lived and the the staff lived there people in the 60s love domes they're just like we were put humans in domes yeah round things with toodaloo it's called the yeah there was there was a lot of like logan's run imagery yeah back in the day okay let's do some 3d printing okay we're going to play these videos back to back the first one is the video from noam pedro this is the um spinny thing that lady was talking about and then we have a speed up hey what's up folks in this project we're making a party pair zotrope a zotrope is an animation display that gives the illusion of motion by displaying a sequence of frames that progress over time we were inspired to design a zotrope with 3d printed parts and edge lit acrylic it's powered by the aid of root cricket and the feather and four running circuit python it uses a dc motor and a photo interrupter to trigger a neopixel whenever the sensor detects a break each acrylic panel is slotted into the top cover and cycles through different colors in a list there's 10 panels and each one has an engraving of a single frame for the party pair animation the t-slot photo interrupter is mounted to the side of the enclosure and the neopixel is mounted on the other end right below the acrylic each time the sensor detects a break the neopixel changes color there's an encoder ring on the top cover that has notches and passes through the sensor in motion the top cover spins freely like a carousel and keeps the acrylic panels in place the dc motor has a gear that engages in internal gear in the center opening of the top cover with circuit python you can easily make projects with motors neopixels and sensors in the code a list of colors are set up as each frame of the party pair animation the loop begins by starting the motor and whenever the sensor detects a break the neopixel color is updated to the next color in the array be sure to check out the guide for a full tutorial on building this project we hope this inspires you to check out aid of root cricket and circuit python for your next project all this stuff and more turn into turn into turn it turn into a 3d printer and then print yourself now um yeah that's kind of it's a it's a science fiction story um tune into 3d hangouts every single wednesday at 11 am all right uh let's uh do ion mpi okay okay this week's ion mpi brought to you by dgq and a fridges from cnk lady what is this week's ion mpi this week's ion npi for the cnk enc optical rotary encoder um i always love to show people how to make their products more reliable um one of the things about doing maker electronics is like i get to work with a lot of low cost components um but that makes me very very well aware of what um the limitations are of low cost components and when you want to step it up and use something a little nicer uh so this week's product is a very beautiful photo of the optical encoder with a little jstsh connector as well so this is a rotary encoder there's i think a 16 and a 24 um pulse per rotation version and they use an optical sensor inside instead of a mechanical sensor and this makes it really good for um you know the typical applications are like automotive industrial test equipment and medical equipment and i think these are actually you know pretty good examples of when you want to use an optical encoder because i actually have a um my uh old tech scope that i got you know now it's 15 20 years ago um but the rotary encoder on it is gotten really flaky and the rotary encoder is the the one that you may use this channel one zoom one and so it actually really makes it like kind of sad to use um the oscilloscope because this rotary encoder is busted because it's a mechanical rotary encoder not an optical one and so if you're basically if you're working on something that's going to be like more than the thousand bucks uh go with an optical encoder and not a mechanical one because you don't want to have like your very nice industrial or medical or test equipment product fail because of like a two dollar mechanical component going bad um so a lot of people know rotary encoders uh you know they kind of they've been around for a bit but like i think the ipod classic is when a lot of people think of when they think of rotary encoders um and even have a a click wheel encoder that i can show because it's a really good way to understand how um rotary encoders function the most common rotary encoders people tend to use are sort of the pack 11 style um these are five five or six pin um mechanical rotary encoders they're very inexpensive they're like a dollar or two uh they sort of directly into the pcb um they have a little d-shaft knob and um the way they work as is as you twist them the common pin gets connected disconnected from the two side pins in a grid code and by keeping track of these pulses uh you can tell whether it's going forward or backwards um and how many times it's been clicked um oh sorry can you go back one uh so actually let me go to the overhead because this is where i was gonna do my overhead show off okay so this is your standard uh you know pack 11 type encoder um so you've got the shaft and you know the nice thing is unlike a potentiometer it goes all the way around with about 20-ish pulses uh clicky detents uh for rotation so these are often actually you know you'll you'll probably have one on your stereo in your car to or any other device where you have to kind of scroll through something because you can rotate kind of forever and it's good for um you know you can go one detent and a time to slow down or you know mechanically you can kind of spin it very fast um to scroll down quickly through a list and um like i mentioned uh you know this is these two pins are for the button there's a little um push button but the the rotary encoder part that people are familiar with is this three pin uh setup here where these two pins connect and disconnect from the center pin as it rotates so that's that's all good and everything um and this is a um a click wheel breakout that we have and so you know this rotates and clicks around and i go move just so you could see what's going on inside there's this little you know leaf spring contact and you can see it's got these little like touch pad like bendy parts that come down and um as this rotates you see there's a little pattern in um cut into the the bottom contacts and as this rotates it connects and disconnects and like that connection disconnection is how it can can count um the rotations which is wonderful right but here's the problem and here's also why the the touch wheel the click wheel isn't used now it's it turned into a capacitive wheel on the ipod is these little um copper contacts you know they're rated for you know let's say they're really good quality they're rated for oh you know 500 000 maybe a million rotate you know um contacts that's a lot for a button you don't usually press a button that many times but it's really easy to spin a rotary encoder around a lot and every time you rotate it that's 24 times two contacts so it's like 50 contact rotations let's say it's rotated 10 times a day because it's something that's being used often you do the math and i did the math it's basically three to five years you're likely to have a contact failure um and again it's a downer especially if it's a solder in type because to rework these is a real pain like you have to desolder and it's not easy um this one even had a mechanical um tabs that i removed to make this breadboard friendly but it's like it's a rework job it's not it's not something that you can use your service it's not even a service center job you have to usually send it to an expert who can desolder and repair um which is why i've you know i've been waiting around to fix my um the rotary encoder of my my oscilloscope so it's nice about the optical encoders is it doesn't have that mechanical part because this is this is a common thing if you have old stuff with rotary encoders even if there's no dust that got into it the contacts will eventually fail with an optical encoder it uses an led and two sensors or a sensor into leds instead so there's no contact failure so they're much much more durable like you don't have to worry about 50 000 100 000 rotations i mean it's going to wear out like the mechanical bumps before anything electrical fails inside and in addition this has a user replaceable or at least service center replaceable jstsh component you can plug it in and unplug it very easily to swap out the component which is what this part is so just be aware you'll need to get a separate cable for this to plug it in they suggest uh you know this is the part number and um digiki has the cable and stalking get the cable and then you can have it plug into your setup so these are very nice they're not going to fail on you after a couple years um definitely for automotive for medical for test equipment anything that's like if you don't want to have to deal with them sending it in for repair after three to five years and a lot of products that are at the higher end do have service contracts or people expect quality if you're if you're buying a four thousand dollar oscilloscope you want it to last a long time and it's a real bummer if it if it fails because of the of a cheap rotary encoder so get an optical encoder they're very nice um they work exactly the same and um they won't fail on you so check out the c and k part in stock at digiki and that's high on mpi okay we're gonna jump right in new products with first the good is them all b e m l use on check out 10 off the native restore all the way up to 11 59 p.m or if i fall asleep before that i might have a couple extra hours but i wouldn't bet on that don't count on it who knows all right next two new products new new new new new new new new new new new new all right first up uh good news uh well not for long though we have grand sensuals back in stock but I think people are buying up really fast because we didn't have them in stock because for like global parks shortage so anyways get them while you can and you can even get 10 off right now you have the ones with headers I think the ones without headers were still waiting to get that there's not a popular but I know people are waiting for these. We ordered the SAMD 51 P20s a year ago and they finally came in. So we're starting to, to manufacture. You'll see a couple of things that have been out of stock for like a year come in because everything had 52-week lead time and we're like, okay, we'll order now. And that was a year ago and it's been 52 weeks. Here we go. You've got this grow pigtail cable. So this is a cable that you can use to plug into devices with Grove connectors. I even have one. Can you go to the overhead real fast and I'll show it just because it's an interesting connector. Just show it off. So this is your handy dandy, this is like a Grove Feather particle adapter. So you might have seen these connectors. These are Grove connectors from Seed and they're used for digital analog and I squared C. And a lot of people are like, oh, I want to make my own custom cables or extend them or adapt whatever. So this is the cable that plugs in and it's even got the little latchy bit. So this is kind of the nice thing. I know you can sometimes shove JSTPHs in there, but this pigtail just has bare wires on the end. So it's great if you want to make your own custom cable. We also have an adapter cable from Grove to Stemma QT or Quick if you happen to need that particular cable. But if you're, you just want to make your own. This will also do the job. Okay. Next up. Next up, another pigtail cable. This is a Molex, you know, there's a part number to this, but it's just called like a Molex IDE or floppy drive cable. So we are using this stuff because we're trying to do floppy things and we need sometimes 12 and five volt power. A lot of people have power supplies or you can get a floppy power supply or a disk drive power supply. And this will just break it out for you. You get two grounds. The red wire is five volts and the yellow wire is 12 volts. Also really handy for making your own wire harnesses to connect to those high power power supplies. Okay. And then it's finally here. Keep, keep. That's right. Yeah. So we have all these characters for, you know, a lot of our stuff and people assume we're doing NFTs. We're not. It's just a fun character for this board. The KB2040. Yeah. Yeah, it's funny as we came up with that character before NFTs. Yeah. But now that's the style. Everyone's like, oh, you made a character. Yeah, I know, I know. It's not. It's just a happy character. You can right click and save it. You always could, always will be. Please do. He's a very friendly keyboard. Yeah. So this is the KB2040 board, which we've had for a while, but now it's in pink. I talked to our board house. We gave them a Pantone shade and we're gonna try to get all of our RP2040 boards to come in a beautiful pink color with black highlighting, which is kind of Adafruit shade. And it's extra good for this one because if it's gonna be like a keyboard, it's piggy, pink is a piggy color. So this is a great board for if you have keyboards that you are using like a pro micro with, but you want something more powerful. You can run circuit Python on this. You can run micro Python on it. Hey, I just subscribed. There's a QMK pull request to add RP2040 support to QMK, which is going to be massive because QMK is what like, it has like 13,000 pull requests. Everyone uses QMK for their keyboards. So having the RP2040, you know, this is a chip that's available right now during the shortage. It's a powerful chip. It's a fast chip. It's gonna really make these keyboards fly. And in addition to all the pro micro pins you know and love, it's got USB-C, it's got STEMIQT, so you get extra two pins. So you can do a 10 by 10 keyboard array if you'd like. It comes with headers, it's got cast-related pads. You can short the USB if you want more power, if you want to skip the fuse, and they bring out the two USB data pins. Could be handy if you're doing like a really funky wiring setup and you really want to, you have the USB port totally separate from the board. Yeah, and you get to keep this graphic for fun. And you can right click on that graphic and download it and give it to friends and funge it all you want. Yeah, okay. Funge away. All right, and then started this show tonight besides you lady at our community, our staff, our customers, all the folks that help keep this thing going is. The Vemmel, Vemmel 7700. This is a STEMIQTification, but with a twist. So this sensor actually comes in two part numbers. One is like the vertical type and one is the horizontal type. And this is the right angle, this is the horizontal version. So if you see the sensor, see that little pink, purpleish square in the middle there, the sensor points out, most of our light sensors point up off of the board. And this one sort of points parallel to the board. This could be very helpful if you're doing like some sensing through a slit or if you have to mount it in a certain way or you're like, you're trying to measure something passing by. Not sure what, but I thought it would be kind of handy. And while we were at it, we STEMIQT if I'd the whole thing. So you can plug and play it with all of our I squared C boards like the KB2040, which has a STEMIQT port on the end. Also, cool thing, Catney Edition. It's the Catney Edition. Catney worked on this board and she also has been doing so much work with the STEMIQT application. She gets to have her signature on the back of this. Another thing that I think is kind of cool is electronics and have the people that make it. People made electronics. That's right, Catney made this. Now you know. So check this out. This is a great low cost luck sensor and we're probably gonna add it to our giveaway or freebie giveaway and it's such a handy one. And that's new product. Boom. Okay, well, don't forget, you can save a buck or two on the way out. Let's do some top secret. Load up your questions. I saw a couple in Discord, but go over atetrafford.it slash discord, join all 33,000 of us. We'll do the questions right after some top secret. Let's do some top secret. Okay. Ooh, we've been in the balls a lot lately and there's gonna be a lot of boards coming out soon. Yeah, we got a lot going on. So top secret, we're gonna show this little time lapse. Do you wanna talk about what this is? This is a part that you just got. Oh, this is the VL53L1X to VL53L4CD conversion. So ST's been coming out with a lot more variants of their really popular time of flight boards sensors. And so because it's pin compatible and we got a reel of the VL53LC, which is like a very short range time of flight sensor, I just, this is what it looks like when I hot air a part off and hot air another part on and it's a great way to test. Time lapse. Man, this one's hot off the press. We just did this right before we came to the office. This is a little tiny LCD. It's so cute. What's the name of this? This is a very small three character seven segment display. I got some of these adorable samples while there's like one big mama seven segment, a lot of little dual ones. And this is a triple. So it's funny, here is I'm driving this directly from pins on the microcontroller. You do see a little bit of ghosting, but there is an app note from Atmel, ABR241 on how to directly drive LCD displays. And like you can do it. I mean, you need a lot of pins. Usually you have a chip or a special peripheral to do this, but I just haven't hooked up here to a QDPI-SAMD21 and just counting up the numbers. The most fun thing here is it's not what you think where there's like seven segments and three commons. There's actually four commons, six segment pins and they're like split in half, but it does work with a little bit of ghosting, but definitely legible. And then here's the, I guess you wanna call it first article inspection. Yeah, this is the first article. And one of the things we do is after we have the first board come out, usually I do visual inspection. The person running the line does visual inspection. And then we write G on the back for gold. And this is actually something people ask us. They're like, okay, you make testers, but then how do you test the tester? Who watches the watcher? The gold does. The gold is how we test the tester. The gold is visually inspected, personally inspected, and then also a tester inspected. And then we keep that with the tester so that when the tester fails or is acting flaky, we can check it against the gold to make sure. All right, and then we have the QDPI ESP32 tester. And then the board, so we're gonna show this. Earlier, what is this? This is a QDPI ESP32. This is a prototype, so I got some backwards text, but the final PCBs are going to be showing up in a couple of days, so I thought I'd get started on the tester. And like the other QDPI ESP32 S2 tester, I'm using a Raspberry Pi. And the reason I'm using a Raspberry Pi is, one, I can run ESP tool from it, and so it's really easy to program the chip directly because this is Linux. And the second thing is what I do is after I've tested all the GPIO, I test the Wi-Fi. And I check the signal strength and the MAC address to make sure it's the right device. And that way I know that the antenna got set on correctly and all the passive components. So this is past test and this is ready to go. And then we get the boards in. Coming soon. We have a bunch of hardware coming out, but they should be in the store, maybe in a week or two, maybe two weeks, two weeks. And that's top secret for the week. Very exciting. Okay, we're gonna roll right into questions and then we're gonna skedaddle questions. Okay, so here's the questions that came in so far and I think I'll answer the first one. Question, my kid got me a gift eight-a-box for the holidays. It's just a single box and I'm looking forward to the spring. I'm concerned that the list is closed. I'm not signed up yet for a subscription pass. The gifted box does the gifted box guarantee me a spot for the summer box. So here's what you do. Sign up to get notified when there's an opening. That way you have the choice of getting onto the spring eight-a-box or you can get on the summer eight-a-box after that. There's always, there's a couple of people who always, they get their payment expires or they move. And so after the box, there's usually a fuel. Yeah, if you want to get the summer one, they'll be slots open right after the spring ones. If you want to get the spring one signed up now, you might get notified right when we ship those. So the answer is probably yes. Yes. But you'll get something no matter what. You sign up though. We do notify them when there's slots open. There'll be a little bit of the feast and famine, like all things electronic right now because there's not a lot of parts. A lot of parts. Okay, folks want to see more pink boards. You got it. So yeah, we're going to do that. I want to do more colors too. I was thinking like teal and mint green. I think mint green is a good color. Okay, I'm trying to add, I think that's a, that I, L2, R2 buttons to the PSP 1000 series joysticks on my PyGirl zero using a zero two W. And I don't know how to do it. I'm trying to add L2, R2 buttons and PSP. That's the same thing. Okay. They put the same thing. So I think, you know, there's GPIO available. More buttons can just cook up to the GPIO and then we have a script that you run. So like mechanically, that's the hard part. But then you just go to some of the free GPIO and I know that there's extras. Then in the program that we use to generate the keystrokes from the buttons, you'll just add that GPIO and then like make a new entry for the key that you want to add. Okay. Todd helped out with this one. So I'll probably just repeat the answer but the person was saving a circuit Python code to a feather and zero express includes libraries, Toronto SSD 1306 OLED. I believe there wasn't enough memory. Does that seem right? And the answer is yes, it's too small for circuit Python seven. You could do it in circuit Python six though specifically not in the frame. Yeah. So circuit Python's gotten bigger and more feature filled and one of the side effects is the M zero which was the really minimal board. It has difficulty now with some of that code. One thing I'll say is, while you might not be able to use display IO, you might be able to use the raw non-display IO, SSD 1306 library was the old frame buff style. It used to work, but yeah, it's been a while. I haven't tried it lately. The feather M zero express is it can do stuff but like a displays do take up a lot of memory because you have to buffer the whole display so. This is a good example of the skateboard analogy. Todd did a trick. You did a trick and this person gets a lot of help and they understand all the things that we're doing. Yeah. And now they can decide which processor is right for them for the thing they're doing. Yeah, it's like if you have an old laptop, it's like, you know, you may not be able to play the newest games. You might, and even like Microsoft Word gets more and more bloated. Like, you know, it gets bigger and bigger. Microsoft Word on the Windows 3.1 computer of my youth is not the same Microsoft Word that runs on, you know, a Windows 10 machine now. It's massive. All right. MTO asks and some people already respond. This is good chat tonight. My son wants to learn to program and I know we'll restart ideas. And suggestion was Python and you can get a circuit playground express and then you use the make code programming blocks. Make codes fun. Yeah. So one thing, if you have a circuit playground express, you could go to makecode.atafruit.com and then you could get started with moving all these blocks around and that gets the concept of like, oh, if then and something happens and here's something visual that I can see and it automatically runs on the board. Yeah. It's made specifically for that. It's using schools. It's really popular. But if you use a circuit playground express, you can always kind of flip the switch literally sort of by dropping other code on it. And now it's Python or it can be Arduino or it can be a lot of different things. So I think that's a good start. Some folks have suggested Lego Mindstorms, the EV3 platform with the first Lego league. Folks have suggested Python Codecademy and Python or CircuitPython like the CircuitPython Express mentioned. Oh, Megan Hacken had to compliment for the question and the answers about the space on the M0. And I'm gonna get to the next question now. Jennifer Keyboard, can you connect the USB keyboard and an Arduino to do different commands based on keys? So I don't know that Arduino has USB host capabilities. So you can't connect another keyboard to it over USB. What you can do is use it. What it's designed for is to make keyboards from scratch. Usually you have all the keys and you listen to the key switches and then you emit the key codes. If you want to read from an HID keyboard, I think honestly your best bet right now is a TNC36. That's what I've used because it has a separate USB port for reading keyboards. Okay, what's the best and most fairly efficient way to ensure the proper voltage? I find new pixel by accidentally plugging into 12 volt DC. I want to step down or simply block the wrong voltage suggestions. It's really, really hard. There are circuits that can do voltage protection over voltage, under voltage protection. We use it on some of our boards. So for example, like the Cricut has an under and over voltage protection circuit to make sure you don't put too much voltage into your motors or too little. I think all the RGB matrix hat also has a chip that we use but it's actually like kind of hard to do, to be honest. Traditionally this is why we always had a regulator so that no matter what you put in it would always be dropped down but once you start making stuff it's very easy to plug things in backwards. It's an unfortunate lesson that happens as part of making. I still do it sometimes and it sucks but it's you learn something, right? Next up, I noticed one of the sensor data sheets, the Aht20, it says that it needs to be rehydrated for a certain amount of time of a certain humidity. Is this done on a breakup board that we carry? Is it a problem if it isn't done? We don't rehydrate our sensors. However, leaving it like outside, just leaving it in a room, it will slowly rehydrate it might get a couple of days. I'll say the Aht20 it's not high precision humidity sensor so there's gonna be some variation. You'll still see the number go up and down it just might not be like accurate to the percentage but if you're using it it will slowly rehydrate over time just by being outside and not in an oven. All right, can I sort sensors, boards or X by price? Not yet, so we have almost like 4,000 products and then within each category of products there is a lot of range so like sensors it could be almost anything and then there is out of stock in stock. So we have an update coming for our site that's gonna have a lot more filter and a lot more search things. So check out, we'll make a big deal out of it. It'll be on our site and it'll be on our blog and we'll also probably break some things and fix a lot of things. So check out the update that's coming soon but it is a challenge. It was a lot easier when we only had 10 products now. Yeah, we had like 5,000. Next up. Okay. More votes for starting off with MakeCode. Cool, yeah MakeCode and Scratcher are a great way to kick it off. And some people like it, some people don't but it's free and it's easy. MakeCode Arcade is also very popular. Yeah, okay. I think that's gonna be. Oh yeah? Yeah, maybe the Adafruit grade search. Yeah, we're gonna have to start doing now. Like how do we search our website? Yeah, I know. It is a little bit of it. Start by PCB color. You know what we should do on circuitpython.org slash downloads is start to have it by board color. Yeah, it's important. You have to accessorize. I would like to see all pink boards. You only wanna see the pink boards, only the blue boards, the green boards. Okay. What if they have multiple colors? Let's wrap up the show. Well, thank you everybody. Okay, thanks everybody. That's the show for tonight. That was our questions. Zoom. But stick around, you know, in the chat and everything. We got a lot done. We're hanging out. That was a, that was a. Damn, Pat. That was a nutritionally dense show. Don't forget the code is Vemmel. 10% off of Native Restore. Zay, thank you. Zay is running the show as a slack behind the scenes tonight. Sweet. And thanks to all the community members, all the team members that have been helping out, thanks to the customers that keep us going. And then I thought what we could do is do a very special sending you, get well and good vibes to Chris Young, who, from what I understand, was briefly in the hospital, but he's out today. Yeah. So what I'm gonna do is find the time code of this URL. Yes. And I'm gonna send it to Chris. I'm gonna say, Chris, I'm sending all sorts of good thoughts your way. I don't know if it works, but I do it every single time. I'm sending infrared vibes, because he's always hacking on infrared stuff. Yeah. So, and then everyone in the chat, you know, have some good thoughts for Chris. He's very important and. He's a treasured member. Treasured member of Data for Community. And it sounds like he's on the mend, which is good. So that's the best time to continue to give someone super nice vibes across Ether. So I'll send you, I'm gonna send you this thing right after this show, Chris. All right, so we'll see everybody next week and have a good evening everybody. Thanks everybody, have a great night. Have a great week. Your moment, oh yeah, this was a native fruit production. Oh right. I'm gonna need to even say it. I just like saying it. It's like the credits of this for a while. All right, here's your moment, Zener.