 Welcome to Desolateda. Hey everybody and welcome to Desolateda. It's Sunday night at 8 o'clock hacker time. So it's time to see what's going on my desk. It's a little bit of engineering and hacking and traveling this week. First up we went and visited some cherry trees and we got some photos featuring a KB2040 I thought would be fun to share. It was a celebration of spring. And fake PCBs. You know nature and electronics and art are all connected. And it's beautiful that there's colors in nature and colors in the things that we do. And these are some of the photos I took. Bird, bird, bird, bird. And it was great to get outside and soak up some energy from the sun and then use that energy to make cool electronics and more. We'll have a very fun giveaway special thing coming up soon. But that's one of the ways that we celebrated this beautiful spring weekend. True. Okay. Yes, we've got the pink KB2040 which is in this pink floppy disk. We're getting back to some floppy stuff soon. We've been so busy with dealing with chip shortage stuff. But we're always getting parts. So one thing I did this week is I got some chip samples of the CH9102F. We did a little one minute video that Mr. Lady will probably post up this week. But I can also show it to you here. So this chip is from WCH and they make a very popular low cost USB serial converter called the CH340 or 430. And you've seen it on ESP32 boards for sure. So this is the chip here. And what's interesting about this, the CH9102 is it is the same pin out and like pin configuration as the SI 2104 and 2102N which we use a lot in our boards. We really like that chip. And we have some CP 2102 slash 04s on order. But right now the way things work is a lot of chips are on allocation. And what that means is that we booked them and we booked them at a price that makes it possible for us to sell our goods made in the US to you and have it be a good price. But we're not getting our allocation for a bit. And so I'm going to ask to get the allocation moved up a little bit so I can get some more board zone because we actually came up with a lot of very popular boards lately that use the CP 2102N. And we kind of went through our, you know, we had a couple of months worth and then we kind of went through it very quickly. But this chip is a QFN, I think it's 2428. There is one thing about it that I got to figure out which is it does have support for the RX and TX LEDs which I really like about the CP 2102 and 2104. I have some code for the Silab chips to connect over, you know, USB with Pi USB and connect to the chip and basically enable right to the EEPROM and enable the RX and TX LEDs because they're not enabled by default. I have to redo that for the CH series because it's not the same EEPROM. It's not the same commands. I found some code in, you know, Mandarin that does it and I have to, you know, their code and it's in like Windows DLL format, whatever. But I think I can parse through it and, you know, I might, maybe I can get this program to run and then use my USB serial, sorry, my USB sniffer to watch what commands are going over and then I'll just, you know, redo that code in Python to enable the RX and TX LEDs. Not all of our boards have RX and TX LEDs on the serial, but a few do. Like the Metro 328, the Metro Mini, the sniff, the blue food sniffer and blue food friend and a couple others. So some boards don't use it and some boards do. I, you know, I think it's for some beginner boards like the Metro, I think it's handy, but for like the ESP32 feather, I don't expose the LEDs because I figure it's like, there's enough going on that's born and, you know, usually the USB serial part isn't the issue. So if you look really carefully, I don't think it's going to be able to pick it up. I hot aired the, you can barely see it says WCH here. So I hot aired the CP2102N that was on here. Put this one on and you do need to get new drivers, but it worked fine. So, you know, I only have like 20 pieces sample and I'm definitely going to go through these because as I'm learning this EEPROM thing and like totally, you know, the first one I plugged in and I promptly like completely destroyed the EEPROM and it came up with like VIDFFF and I'm like, you know, the drivers won't work anymore. So, you know, because I was like clicking on this program and just messing around. So I'm going to have to do that a couple more times and hopefully figure out how to get that RX and TX LED enabled because that's like the only thing that I need to do. And then for Mac M1, Mr. LaData has an M1 Mac and so I was able to test it and we did get it working. You do have to install a separate driver. Again, it's not, you know, it's not the built-in USB CDC. It's a unique driver. So, you know, not a big deal. I'm noticed M5 Stack, you know, also moved to this chip. I think a lot of companies are because if you can't get your chips on an allocation, that's the same as not being able to get the chips at all, right? It's like, okay, you have them but you're not sending them to me. How is that any different than me not being able to get them at all? So, you know, whereas WCH I think has these available in stock. So, you'll probably see that. You'll see some revisions on boards as we change over. You know, there's some boards that you can't really do revisions on because it's like if you can't get the part, you can't get the part. But the USB serial chip, I'm willing to do a lot of work because we have so many popular boards that have USB serial converter chips on them. So that's the WCH 9102F. If you're looking for a side lab replacement, this seems to work just fine. Just be aware that the RX and TX LED, there isn't like a happy, cute tool like SILabs has that it works perfectly. It's in Chinese. And I don't have my computer set up in the right way to even, you know, it's like if I can at least look at the characters, I could probably figure out, you know, what it says, but I don't even have the right whatever Windows mode I have to be in for it to show up properly. I haven't been able to figure that out because it shows up as a toolbox. Okay, so that's that. Next up, I also got this fun sample, which I thought was kind of neat. So this is a USB C cable. And if you look carefully, you can see it says 15 volts on it. So this is a cable and it has like this inside of it or something similar. It's a USB power delivery sync chip and it connects to those CC1 and CC2 pins that you know so well from, you know, USB-C. You have to usually connect them to a resistor to ground to enable 5 volts power. So this one, you know, but there's not like other resistors you can use. Like 5 volts is a special case. If you want anything else, you have to actually do PD negotiation. And so this chip is a PD negotiation chip. And what's neat is that like this cable just has like a DC jack on the other end, which is kind of cool because it's like you don't have to, you don't have to do anything with this. This is cables ready to go. And so you can plug this in. I've got here, if you have a proper USB-C adapter. So this is like a, you know, fancy Apple adapter. And, you know, you can read the text there. It says output 5 volts, 3 amps, 9 volts, 3 amps, 12 volts, 3 amps. 15 volts, 3 up, 20 volts through, you know, 3.25 amps. So basically this can provide 5, 9, 12, 15 or 20, which is almost all of the voltages. I think 18 is the only voltage that isn't provided here. And the point was that, you know, you could use this adapter to theoretically charge your laptop or, you know, any other Apple device depending on, you know, like an iPad I think wants like 9 or 12 volts to fast charge. And your iPhone I think wants like 5 volts to fast charge, whatever. Any device you can plug in and it will automatically get the highest voltage possible, which will increase the charging speed. So when you plug this funky cable in, and I plug it into my desktop power, and then I've got my multimeter here. It comes out with 15 volts. Oops, 15 volts, just as expected. And I put this on my load meter, at a load meter that can, you know, plug in. You power this connected to the load meter, and the load meter you can dial in how much current you want to draw on and you look at the voltage to see like, hey, 3 amps. Yeah, it gives you 3 amps, 15 volts. So this is a nice little cable. I thought this would be really handy if you don't want to like mess around with PD. It's a kind of auto PD effication. And then this chip I got here. So I got, I also got like, you know, the cable without the cable, because I was kind of like curious about this chip. And if you, you know, you can read the text, it's quite small. I don't think it'll show up here. Yeah, it's too tiny. But it says HUSB 238. So you go to the computer and I'll show I had looked that up. So this is a Type-C power delivery sync controller. It's made by, you know, one of these, I think it's an Asian silicon company. They, you know, they don't make a lot of stuff, but they make a couple different chips for the Asian market. But this chip is actually kind of nice because Vset and I set, you know, the thing that checked that sets the voltage and the current request is set by a resistor. And there's also I squared C. So you can kind of do either. I don't know whether the I squared C is persistent or whether it's like dynamic, but it's a very easy kit to set up. You know, you just kept up to the D plus D minus and CC lines. You have a little gate transistor here if you'd like. So you can make sure it doesn't turn on till it's ready. And then you just set the voltage and the current with resistors. And then they give you the resistor kit at the bottom. And like the documentation is actually pretty good. So they tell you like, here's the, you set the, you know, resistor to this kilo ohm. And this is what the voltage, it'll try to get you that voltage. Or, you know, at no more, no higher than that, they'll try to get you that voltage. So I made a quick breakout design with this, with like, you know, all the resistors, and then you can short them to select which one you want. And then you can select the current you want as well. And then at the bottom, there's a breakout or you can use like these big pads. This is the chip and this is the pass transistor. Although it's a little clear to me whether you need to pass transistor, but I think it's a good taste. So I figured I'd leave it in there. So this is a USB-C to power delivery sync. And I tried other chips, like there's the IP 2721. Didn't really like it so much. It was like, did some voltage, not others. And I also like, like I would plug it in, it would pop. So I made a breakout for the IP 2721. I didn't dig it. There's also the ST USB 4500 from ST. And that's like a very fancy programmable PV sync. But it's like totally unavailable right now. I don't know when, it's like, you know, 98 weekly time. So forget it, you know, unavailable. I'm hoping I can probably get this chip and I can make some of these breakouts. Because I think a lot of people want to have a little board where you plug it into like one of these nice power adapters you can get any voltage you want or need for your design. So I think, you know, this little breakout would be pretty cute. Okay, so that's what I've been working on. Any questions? I answered the ones in the chat. You want to do some great search? I thought we'd pop into the great search. Here you go. The great search is brought to you by Afrud and Digikey, lady user of powers of engineering to show you where to find and how to find the part that you're looking for on digikey.com. Lady, what is a great search this week? Okay, well, let's go to the overhead. So this week, oh, so actually, can you show the photos? We went to the botanical gardens and we celebrated pink. I thought we would take some photos with our nice pink PCB. I just want to show you. I'd love to show these photos again. And this inspired me today because you were asking like, oh, you know, we have these pink PCBs on the overhead. This is the pink KB2040 PCB with the custom pink solder mask from our PCB house we use. I know PCB way will do prototypes. Wait a second. You can do it. You can get that protection PCB way, but our PCB house we got these custom pink PCBs and you were like, oh, you know, can we change this green LED to be like pink or purple because it would look a lot better than just green, right? If you wanted to go with the pink aesthetic, which we do love here at Afrud. And I thought, I'll take an excuse to show how to get weird colored LEDs on Digikey. And also a lot of people always like, oh, there's so many LEDs on Digikey. And it's like, I just want to like get it to a reasonable amount and then I can pick the color and then how to use the nanometer selector also to determine what color you're going to get. So even though I didn't end up finding pink exactly, I did find something very close. So let's go to the computer and let's go to Digikey. Okay, so what we're looking for is an indicator LED. There's illumination LEDs and those are like really bright, like white LEDs for back lights. Indicators are like what you saw on that PCB. It's a little light, usually a 402 to 1206 size, you know, 20 to maybe 200 millicandela, just enough to indicate to a person that something is working or not working. So we want discreet, which means individual because there's ones that are in arrays and there's one that are like, you know, pilot light, like panel indicators. We want individual ones. And then I'm just going to show you how to pare it down because I particularly want pink but I also was, I ended up not being able to find pink so it's like what was the closest thing I could get. So there's a lot of LEDs and I know it can be very tough to find LEDs. So the first thing I'll do is I'm just going to look only for the active ones. It's a quick way of pairing down about half of them because, you know, we don't want ones that are discontinued or unavailable. There's also the configuration. So there's some of these are dual color like they're red and green and you can turn on both to make them amber. So they're bidirectional or they have common anode or common cathode. If you see common anode or common cathode, that means it has to have more than one LED otherwise it wouldn't be a common to it. So what we want is independent standard and dash which means like, okay, didn't get categorized with that. So that'll maybe get rid of a couple thousand more because we don't want an individual LED. The next thing we're going to look at is I only want surface mount and I only want surface mount pointing up so I'm going to just make sure that I've deselected all the two whole ones and that I'll cut it down by half again. So you see just you're cutting it down by half half to get to where you could actually pick parts because now if you look we're actually getting little surface mount LEDs. So it's a lot closer. So the next thing is that they do have color and so you can pick out color here. Another thing you can do because I'll note that some of these are a little, they're a little annoying because you're like, well, you know, what is green yellow versus green? Like green and green, for example, green can mean two different things in LEDs. It can be like a yellowish green which is, let me try to remember the, I don't know if they have the chemistry behind them but there's like the INGAN and the IMP. I don't think they have the chemistry here. Oh, interesting. They don't, yeah, they don't show you but basically the chemistry that we should make the LED determines the color of the LED. So some interesting colors like pink particularly, there's no such real thing as a pink LED. Usually it's a white LED that's painted over with like a pink paint and so the white shines through the pink and kind of lights up pink, you know, the painted light bulb. So what you might want to do is to hear the lens color is you might want to look at the wavelength peak or the dominant wavelength, either one. Actually I'm going to deselect independent because I think I'm seeing that there's RGB LEDs here. So let me go back to this and I'm just going to click standard because I don't want, I don't want the multi LEDs. Okay, let me get a couple of few. So, you know, blue, what does it blue mean versus like ice blue? This is where you might want to search by the wavelength. So let's see, you can search for like nanometer wavelength, maybe color. There's a whole bunch of, you know, there's like these diagrams that'll show you the nanometer wavelength. So if you're looking for something reddish, you know it's going to be 740 and if you're looking for something like light yellowish, you're going to be like, actually this isn't a very good diagram. Hold on, let me find a better diagram. Ooh, this is a better diagram. Okay. Yeah, so this is, if you want something yellow, yellow-greenish, it's going to be maybe like 570, but if you want like a deep greenish, it's going to be 525. So let's look at, for example, like ice blue. That's probably going to be like 470 or something. Maybe 475. So let's go back here because I was actually kind of curious about this ice blue color. Where was I? There you go. Ice blue. So let's see what comes up when we search for ice blue. Well, there's like one. So this is a discrete ice blue LED. It does look like it's a, you know, a white LED with like maybe a phosphor on top of it. And, oh, it doesn't have the dominant wavelength. Sometimes they don't, especially if it's, because it's a white LED and it's covered with a fluorescent. So it's actually not a true single color. So let's actually look for like a purple. So purple or pink LED is going to be more towards, sorry, more towards like at the end here. So maybe like 425. You can see here it's like 435 or something. So let's look at, let's go back and look at the filters and let's look at, there are so many options. Hold on, there you go. Pink and purple. Let's see what comes up. So yeah, there weren't a lot of options for pink and purple and the pink, they do have, but it's unfortunately in this large package, which it's not for me. I mean like, this will be a really beautiful pink LED because it's going to have like this nice phosphored. It looks like it's probably a blue LED with like a pink, orangeish phosphor on top and the color mixes. So yeah, this one also won't have a dominant wavelength or peak because it's actually a mix of colors. However, this purple LED, actually looks pretty nice and it's fairly inexpensive. It's a marketplace, so it's from another vendor, but this one does have, it's a single emitter LED. So this purple LED is a true like single wavelength color LED. So you're going to get 420 nanometers, which is, you know, over here past blue or on this one, it's over here purple. And don't forget to also check the datasheet because the datasheet could also have some really good info. For example, it tells you, also just verify the wavelength. It also might tell you whether it's a, the material in again and so it's, it's like they just push that blue, what would normally be a blue LED all the way into purple just by doping it. And then the lens is water clear. That means that the light itself is purple, not, you know, white painted over because that would be a different lens color. That would be like a, I think they would just call it like a milky white lens. Let's see what they call the pink one. Let's look at this datasheet, which I didn't look at, so I'm curious. This one, they say it's pink in again and yeah, so this one, it's like they don't, they tell you the chromacity because I guess it's covered, but they don't tell you what it is originally. Oh, interesting, it's even binned. These are nice LEDs. So for this one, it doesn't, again, you don't get a wavelength because it's, it's a white painted cover. It's not a clear lens. So in the end, I was like, wow, this thing has a cool logo. Did you check out this logo? That's cool. That's Venkel. I wasn't expecting that. This is like a company that Johnny Mnemonic gets his computers from. That is very futuristic. I know, that's cool. Somebody definitely went to art. Venkel, never, never change, please. Never change. Yeah, do not re-brand. Dude, don't get normal. Do not re-brand. Keep it weird. Okay, so this, so I actually like this one because I actually kind of like the idea of like a pure purple light coming from this 0603 LED. So I think I'm actually going to go, even though this one's pink, for it to work on my PCB because I need it to be a 0603, I'm going to go with this one, the CTL 0603 FPU. So I'm actually going to try to get a couple samples of this, put it on the pink PCB and see how it looks. It might look really good. And that is, great search. Okay, a question that came in. That's really like pink PCBs, of course. Is it possible to get pink headers? We do have some red headers. You can get custom pink. I'll tell you the thing, you can get custom anything, but you have to buy a lot. Although maybe I should get pink headers. What do you think, Phil? Well, we're getting pink GSTs, so yeah, let's try. Yeah, I can probably look for pink. The thing is, what pink exactly? There's a couple of different pinks. I think a light pink could be nice. Yeah. Okay, let me see if there's anything else here. Probably is that you have to be careful of solving them, because that's the way you could brown them a little bit. Okay. Oh, someone wanted to hear the chip shortage song. Okay. So every Wednesday, we have this new segment. Last week, we did microchip, the chips that we need. It was like the SAMD 51Js or something like that. Yeah, good. Memorizing on the part. That's right. Go get them for me. Yeah. And then a week before that was Bosch Sensor. So here's the song. Here's the jingle. That when you're doing your engineering work and you're like, and I can't get that part, you can sing along. And this is the song. Sing along. So yeah. We have a new one coming up this Wednesday. I'm asking an engineer. There's no shortage of chips. There's no shortage of shortages. There's shortage, yeah. Yeah. So that's our show on the desk of Lady Aida for this week. Thank you everyone for joining us and spending some of your Sunday with us. We know you have lots of choices and other things you can do and more. We very much appreciate you and being here. Is there a show shortage? There's not a show shortage yet. But you know, the time that we have, we try to do the best we can with what we have, including the parts we have, the time we have and all the things that we can do together. So we'll see everybody during the week. We got lots of fun stuff. Every single day this week is going to be super fun. We're posting up on all the different social media places, our blog and more. So tune in. We'll see everybody next week. Bye, everybody. Bye, everybody.