 Life in New York, it's Ask an Engineer. Hey, everybody, and welcome to Ask an Engineer. It's me, Lady Aida, the engineer, with me, Mr. Lady Aida on camera control and behind the scenes, chit chat and everything and dropping the discount code, which is usually that shortly. I should do that, I'll do that, too. We're broadcasting life from the if we had courses behind us, it's a real factory, so we do all of our kitting and shipping and the manufacturing and coding and videoing and more. Right now, everyone's home safe and sound and snug in their beds. Because we're done putting stuff together, which we were doing all day today and a lot of stuff went into stock today, too, which is exciting. But now it's time for Ask an Engineer, a one-hour-ish of news, videos, butt jokes and more. Mr. Lady Aida, what's on tonight's show? On tonight's show, the code is In-Wing because we have a revision of our product and if you want to save 10% off in the store, all the way up to 1.59 p.m. Eastern time tonight, use the code, In-Wing. Talk about some Adafruit live shows, including Show and Tell, which we just did a few moments ago. Time travel, look around in the world, make our attackers, our engineers, give you some news. What's happening in the world? We also have from the mail bag, we'll read some letters y'all sent to us. This week, no chip shortage, that's good news because we have the real world, our EEL, that is when we get stuff in stock, parts on a reel. We tell you what we got going on. Things are looking brighter. We're starting to get stuff in stock. I've wanted to go through a new job from jobs.adafruit.com. You can post your skills or if you're a company or entity that's looking higher. Awesome folks, post on jobs.adafruit.com, advanced manufacturing and some Made in New York City factory footage, some 3D printing. And then we have two, the segment's so nice, we're gonna do it twice. INMPI, we're gonna do two this week, Ublox and Scotch because last week we had so much stuff going on, could only do one, so this week we're gonna do two. New product. It's twice as nice. Top secret, we're gonna answer your questions and please go over to discordadafruit.it slash discord, that's where we do all of this, join 35,000 of us. We answer the questions towards the end of the show but you can ask questions throughout the show. Community and old shy men can hang out there 24 seven as well, all that and more on, you guessed it. Ask an engineer. Sweet. Okay, so paint some bills. Yes. Don't forget, in wings to code and when people buy stuff later, what do they get? Okay, so we've got still $99 or more a free perma-proto half-sized breadboard. We do not have the 149 freebie today, we actually ran out of KB2040, somebody bought a whole bunch of them. We're gonna be making more ASAP but $199 or more you get free UPS ground shipping in the Continental United States and $299 or more you get a free circuit playground, blue fruit, it's round, it's blue, it's got a Nordic chip, it's got buttons, it's got a buzzer, it's got NeoPixels, it's got alligator clips, it's the blue fruit. A great way to code Arduino or CircuitPython on the NR52840, a really powerful chip that has wireless capability. Okay, don't forget, especially if you want to buy a Raspberry Pi, make an account on adafruit.com, verify your email address and then set up two factor authentication, that's how we're doing it. We put some in today. We put some in today and there was an article I think on TechCrunch about the Raspberry Pi shortage except for adafruit, each week we are able to put some in and it's also managed to defeat some of the malicious folks out there that are buying Raspberry Pis and then selling them for hundreds of dollars. Not cool. Not cool, so this is managed to thwart them so we're gonna continue to do it. Also it's good internet hygiene and security. One little bit of shipping notice, shipping alert is on Monday, it's a holiday here at adafruit, indigenous people's day, Monday, October 10th. It's a float holiday for our team so we'll probably be shipping but there's also... Maybe some delay. Might be some delay. So on Monday, October 10th, indigenous people's days, it's a holiday for the entire adafruit team, ordered place after 11 a.m. Eastern time on Friday. Maybe delayed, please plan accordingly. Let's talk about our live shows, Lady Aida. Okay. By the way, we put all the holidays on our blog and social media and stuff. You can always check each week. We also have it on the outbound email when you... It's also Yom Kippur. Social Yom Kippur. We do a bunch of live shows. We just did show and tell. Be sure to watch all of them. We had some of our team shows, some of the projects we're gonna show tonight. Halloween theme. Halloween theme. But if you wanna see one of our products in action, DJ Divin3 showed off the Stemmahub with all of the backpacks going. Said it works great. Recent update from Melissa as well so do check that out. And don't forget, all this month, come by 7.30 p.m. Eastern time and you can show off your projects and of course Halloween costumes and more. Okay. Okay. Sunday as we do from the desk of Lady Aida, part one of this week's was... Well, I showed off a whole bunch of designs. I've just been on a tear doing a Stemmah QTF vacation. I revisited the Peacowbell, Peacowbells. I did a prototype one and then I kind of promptly left on my desk and forgot about it for two months. But with the Peacow W getting back into Circuit Python support, I was like, oh, I gotta revisit this board. So I made a little update to add a Stemmah QT port and then I showed a little IR breakout and also talked about the TPS 61040 which is a little 20 volt boost converter breakout that I'm designing. Then we do the great search. It's brought to you by DigiKey and Adafruit. This one, Lamar uses her powers of engineering to help you. Yes, you find something on digikey.com often. It's hard to find things because things are out of stock but what did you find this week for folks to help them out with? Yes, so we're still, you know, chip shortages is relaxing a little bit but we're still dealing with end of life stuff. A lot of parts, you know, they would be end of life and you'd have a couple of years to order them but the Fan 5331 which is like really a very popular in one of our favorite all in one boost converter chips. We use it for a lot of our OLEDs, backlight, biasing. Whenever you know something is like, I need 16 volts for this e-ank and you're just like, what the hell? Okay, how am I gonna get 16 volts? This little boost converter would do the job greatly. Unfortunately it is now end of life. So we wanted to find a pin compatible Saat 23.5 boost converter with a built in switch that could take, you know, two and a half to five volts. So it's like, you know, three to five volts basically input and boosted up to about 20 volts. I don't need a lot of current because this is a biasing thing. So even 10, 20 milliamps is plenty just to, you know, activate the e-ank or OLED or whatever. And so we found a couple options. I don't remember exactly which one. TPS 61040 was out of stock and there was another part which if you watch the show, it'll tell you what the part was, that one with the name. Okay. And then JB's product pick of the week was this week. We're gonna do the highlight and then forget of course, JB show is tomorrow, but if you wanna check out the product pick of the week this week, here it is. It is the Halloween M0, spooky eyeball. One of the most versatile boards you can get even though it is super specifically a Halloween style board. And then go to the boot loader and you can drag and drop one of these UF2s. So let's try this dragon eye. So I'm just gonna click on that UF2 to download it. And then I'm just dragging and dropping it again. Sorry, you won't see this because I don't have my screen shared for that, but I'm just dragging spooky eye dragon.uf2. It's uploading it right now. And then it restarted. So now you can see we've got this nice spooky dragon eye. I can cover the light sensor to adjust the slitty pupil dilation there. So that is my product pick of the week this week. It is the Halloween M0, spooky. Okay, and then on Fridays at 5 p.m. we have deep dive with Tim. Tim Travel, I'm getting ready to do some news about Eight of Box. I'll tell you what I think we're gonna do. We have, we're finally at an if then statement, I guess I could say. So if we happen to get the 5,000 parts ish we need before the end of the month, we will do an Eight of Box if we can't, we're gonna send out an email because we don't like to spam people for no, hey, here's no information. We're gonna say, hey, Eight of Box resumes in 2023 because it doesn't make sense to try to ship something if we're not gonna have the parts by then. But it looks like we'll be able to do the Eight of Boxes next year, no problems. It's just nearly impossible to get 5,000 to something, get 100 or something. You can get 100 or something once in a while. Harder to get 5,000 or something. So that's probably what we're gonna do. We're gonna wait till the end of the month. And when we do, we'll put it on Eight of Box.com if we're shipping or not. All of our social media profiles, places, this show. And then we'll send out one email and it'll just be a one-time email like, hey, feel free to cancel if you want. We don't charge anyways until we ship. We do have a few thousand people waiting. So if you leave, they will grab that spot. So if you wanna just like wait, you'll know before it ships. And then I think before the first one we do, if we have to do early 2023, we'll let everybody know ahead of time, hey, remember Eight of Box, ship shortage year? Well, we're about to resume shipping on that. Just have people have an idea that it's coming up. Let's do mailbag. All right, I put the wrong camera underneath the mailbag. Whatever. French fries. Yeah, there's some food. Sorry about that. I visit yourself a couple times a week to see the new products that have appeared. You offer new things so much faster than any other site. It's a blast. So it's certainly contributed to the sheer breadth of items you offer. Please keep going. Yeah. Next week I'll make sure I- Sorry about my snack making it appear. So because we don't have, yeah, because we don't have a chip shortage this week and we're starting to get stuff, we're now doing a new segment called the real world. This is the true story of nine strangers pick in place to live in a factory, to manufacture together, and have their lives taped. To find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real. Eight of Fruit, the real world. All right, we got something in stock, Lady. What did we get? We got chips, we got reels of chips. Okay, so we've got the MMA 8451. We ordered this from Digikey two years ago, almost to the day. And we've gotten some here and there, we were able to fulfill some backwards. We finally have enough to put in stock. So if you've been looking for the MMA 8451, it's an old, I think, NXP accelerometer. I know it's a 14 bit triple axis accelerometer. It was quite popular. We had thousands of people with back orders and signups, but we've almost gotten through all of them thanks to a big delivery of mini reels. And so, check it out. If you're looking for it, it's now available again. And there's a lot of them. It's been two years for a lot of folks, and I'm not gonna... Maybe not two years, sorry, it's one year, not two years, but it's still one year. But a lot of things we have are two years still. And so for... No, actually, no, it was two, I think the end of life was 2020. Sorry, what year is it? Hi, what's going on? So one of the things, I'm not in journalist mode, so I'm not really writing about this, hard to run the business and also write about this industry. So one of the things I'm not doing is writing about some of the things that's coming up. Also, I feel like there's confidential information, even though it's not confidential that I'm getting sent. It's like, oh hey, I'm at XY company, XYZ company, we're going out of business, or we have these parts, we're not gonna use them, or some pretty well-known electronic companies are just saying, hey, we're not, we don't wanna do this anymore, because it's been two years. Especially single-serving companies that have one particular... I was in two and a half years, and it's like, eventually you're like, I can't do this anymore, I can't wait around. You can outrun the bear for a while, except for eventually you can't. Eventually you get tired, the bear is not tired. Yeah. And for a lot of folks, it went from pandemic to inflation, to chip shortage to some workforce challenges, global issues from climate change with disruption in locations where there used to be a way to get stuff, and then there isn't, and then there's weather, and then there's, you name it, it's just been happening, and there's also some political issues around the world. So a lot of folks are like, you know what, we're outie. So we're starting to get stuff, but there is gonna probably be some disruption. So we're still doing everything possible to work around that. You're probably noticing we have more and more stuff in stock on a more regular basis. Then we have the BNL-055 still in stock right now, which is amazing. And one thing, after probably beginning of next year, I'll probably do a little bit of a recap of the things that we did. We're definitely trying to make it so it's not spiky anymore that we have consistent awareness of what's happening with the chips we're gonna get in, with the parts, our production ability, and just all the wacky things that happen. I think it'll be helpful to some businesses to see how we learned a lot of lessons because we assume if this happened now, it's gonna happen again. So we want to, you know, fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, you know. There's that old meme. But hopefully, this will just make us smarter, stronger, better, faster, and have more diversity in our supply chain, and also be able to switch different chips out. So we'll see how it goes. And that's this week's real world. Okay, I wanted, we have a jobs board and it's jobs.eaterfruit.com. And a lot of people post up their skills and a lot of people, you know what? I did it again. I put the wrong camera underneath the thing. That's okay. It's just, you can tell. It works, but it's like, yeah, it's like, yeah. So you can help miniaturization of existing medical technology. So this is a freelance position and it's to take something that currently exists, miniaturize it, check out the job listing on jobs.eaterfruit.com. We look at each one of these. There is just so y'all who are in the world. So there is a bunch of scams that happen. So one of the things to look out for, if you're on LinkedIn, people will approach you and they'll say that they're from other companies that, so you apply and you give them all your personal information, then they'll say, oh, there's an application fee, all sorts of crazy stuff. For the jobs that are listed on eaterfruit, Lamar and I take a look at each one and make sure it's real company and there's nothing going on nefarious. And so far it's had a really good track record of matching people with skills. And it's really focused. It's like, there's no nonsense here. It's like, these are just, these are maker jobs, engineer jobs. But that's happening quite a bit right now just because of the job market. You're probably seeing in the news lots of companies are doing layoffs and more. So people are like looking for jobs and when that happens. I'm like, oh, I want a remote job. So like, oh, remote, work from home, make $5,000 a week. So just be careful out there. Python on hardware time. Okay. All right. The big and only news we're gonna talk about this week is CircuitPython, 8beta1 and all of the Pico W stuff that's going on. So what can people do? They can watch the show and tell them and see what Jeffler showed off. But why is this such a big deal? What can they do soon? Okay. So CircuitPython 8 has been expressive and wifi based. So a lot of it is about wifi workflow, adding more wifi chip support. And so we did 8beta1. We've been doing a lot of bug squishing. Dan Halbert has just been like crushing the bugs and Jeffler is helping out as well. Good work on them. And then thank you everybody for submitting bug reports. We might also update to Expressive 5x. They did a new IDF release. We're still chatting about it because we only want to do that if it helps squish some more bugs. We have to think a bug list about 30 to get through before we feel like 8 is in a really stable spot. So that's on the expressive side. So Dan Halbert's working on that, fixing a lot of stuff. We fixed a lot of low power stuff. I was a little bit adamant of like, no, we can get 70 micro amps. Like figure out why Dan. And he actually like went out and like spent a week on it and figured it out and got that fixed. So low power for Expressive is also working. And I think he's working on some pin alarm stuff. And on the PicoW side, the PicoW's been out for a couple months and people were like, where's CircuitPython? And we're like, we just got this board the same time you did. But one of the things we wanted to do is once we had, you know, Wi-Fi workflow and a couple other things going, we wanted to go back and make sure that the PicoW had Wi-Fi support in CircuitPython because our Wi-Fi stack in CircuitPython is really good. Like we have a lot of helper libraries and like example codes for like tokens and authentications and our request library is really nice and handles all sorts of exceptions. And people have been able to like download and like stream MP3s and stuff. Like it was very good. We have a really good job of lots of IoT projects, Adafruit IO support. We've had the Azure demos lately, which I want to redo with the PicoW. Anyways, so the good news is that Jepler has been spending a lot of time working on the Wi-Fi stack. So for this Broadcom chip, you know, we had to use this firmware and we have to communicate with it over SPI. Last week we had HTTP working so you could open up TCP and I think also UDP sockets with unsecured connections and that was a really good start. We always love to start with that. But of course it's important for TLS 1.2 support everywhere that we also support that as well. So as of today, Jepler, if you should watch the show and tell did a demo where you can securely connect to an HTTPS site with SSL and it checks the certificate authentication. So it will let you know we actually have a certificate bundle that we've used with expressive chips and the Nina firmware and we copied that into the Circuit Python firmware. So it'll also not just connect securely but it will verify that the certificate you got is signed by a root certificate that is stored within the firmware itself. So first off, we can update the bundle very easily but also it's like really trustworthy security so people can't man in the middle it or woman in the middle it and then we're gonna be working next on adding self-signed certificate support for people who do want, you'll be able to say in a self-signed certificate check this fingerprint or check this certificate public key and also client-side authentication and it's important for us to have a good security for IoT, we really, chips are good enough these days to do SSL. The pull request is still making its way through CI but I think on Monday people can check at the Circuit Python meeting or look at the pull request in Circuit Python you can see a draft PR, subscribe to it and when it's ready for people to check out I think especially with SSL that opens up basically the entire internet we would love to know if it doesn't work on a site we'll add the good certificate. Okay. Okay. And that's this week's Python on hardware I mean of course do check out the entire newsletter but I did want to Great projects in this newsletter by the way. I mentioned that specifically. Yeah. The projects are epic. And on and on and on. And one of the neat things is especially with the PicoW which has been pretty available in low cost you'll be able to do kind of more of these advanced IoT projects that before you needed a heftier device or something that maybe you had a screen or something that was designed just for that but now you get all these projects. Kind of cool. Super cool. All right. We deliver that to your inbox every single week. Go to itforddaily.com completely separate site. Sign up for it. There's other newsletters that we do there too. No ads, no spam. Don't harvest the email addresses. Don't let anyone know about them. The only way we do this is if or why we do this because folks like it. So we're trying to get to like 10,000 subscribers. So we're getting close. So please sign up. That's our like metric. Maybe we'll do a little project with the PicoW that says how many subscribers we have. We can do that very soon. All right. And all this stuff is open source, of course. As always. And speaking of, we have 2,742 guides. So many guides. Yeah. Let's start from the right and we'll work our way over. Noodle Lantern. No paid, we'll show the video. They got our nudes and they were like we want to make art with these nudes. So they made a really cool like sci-fi prop lantern and what we were talking about this on show and tell. What's cool about this prop is it's like, is it a fuel cell? Is it like the bomb you have to diffuse? Is it the key to the spaceport? Like it's kind of like this generic cool sci-fi prop which I really love and it's like it's, you know it's just a very elegant, beautiful like PWM thing that does this cool swirly effect. Is it the key to Vertagon City? Who knows? You don't know. So check that out. It's a really beautiful project and uses a QT pie and our battery backpack friend for the QT pie and it goes into a breadboard proto. So it's a cute little project, very nice all build. Liz Clark has been in a couple of pie leap guides. We're getting close to releasing a new version of pie leap which will add Wi-Fi workflow support. We have a video. We're gonna show the video. We're gonna show the video now. Yeah, this one is how to take a clue board and then with our alligator clip Neopixels you send a program to it and then you can control the Neopixels again with your phone. Leap into wirelessly controlling Neopixels with an Adafruit clue and pie leap. In this project, you'll use the pie leap app to wirelessly load the project code onto your clue. Then you'll connect to the clue with the Adafruit Blue Fruit Connect app to change the colors and animations of a strip of Neopixels over BLE. This strip of Neopixels has alligator clips that can clip on to the clues pads making for a simple circuit for this project. After pairing your clue to the pie leap app scroll to the BLE controlled Neopixels with clue project. Open it and press run it to transfer the project files to your clue over BLE. Your clue will start running the project code. Once you've connected to the Blue Fruit Connect app navigate to the controller module. The control pad lets you choose animations with the number buttons like rainbow and starry night. The up and down buttons affect brightness while the right button scrolls through the animations and the left button turns off the Neopixels. With the color wheel you can select colors to send over to the Neopixels. You can change the saturation by moving the slider. Enjoy dialing in just the right color and watching the fun animations dance around the pixels. What else we got? Okay, Darth faders. So we got those motorized faders in a couple of weeks ago and JP absolutely loved them. He did a really good getting started with motorized faders guide for Arduino and circuit Python. And then we actually sent me a cool project. Somebody made like an art servo project with like waves and I was like, well that'd be a cool thing to do with the motorized slider. It's totally not what it's designed for, but like, why not? So we made this like cool, weird 1980s, goth, sci-fi, fader artistic project that goes on your desk. Yeah, and there's a little video clip. But wait, there's more. Okay, and then finally, we have another project, a team effort here at Adafruit called Cheek Mate. It's a wireless haptic communication system. We actually recently QTFI'd the DRV2605 and of course we've got those wifi QT-pies, the ESP32 S2 and 32 and C3 and S3, all making really small wireless projects super easy now. So we thought, let's see what, and we also have the backpack for the QT-pies. So this is a perfect timing to do a project about how to transmit data wirelessly and then use a haptic buzzer to signal. So I thought we could for- Well, we wanted to do though, and I'm gonna start off with, I'm gonna tell a story. Tell a story. Well, this isn't myth busters, but it's kind of close. We wanted to get to the bottom of some of the rumors we heard about cheating and chess. So this was on CNN today, chess.com. I can't argue with chess.com. They've been investigating all this reports of chess cheating and they say, according to chess.com report, cheating in an over-the-board setting, which means like you're playing two people in the meat space, various message, such as hand signals from a nearby coach or accessing a phone in the bathroom, a hidden device in a shoe or a wire or a buzzer taped to the body. Well, we've got buzzers. So we thought, well, let's see, what would this actually be like? And could you do it? Is it actually practical? We have to investigate the science. We wanted to assess the situation and rectify this rumor. So here is the, and this is in Morse code. Then we're like, oh, and the guide's up, by the way. I guess I can go to this here. Yeah, and it's a real guide. And what's funny is this is actually pretty useful if you want to make a wireless haptic controller. Like there's people who are always like, oh, I want to like notify someone, but not audibly I want to do it with the haptic feedback. The DRV2605 is a great haptic motor controller. So we took a deep dive in this and we wanted to make sure that we knew, okay, so that's possible. Looks like you could transmit Morse code. I think that was queen to C5. And then we wanted to make sure it could go through because it said, oh, like, might be taped to a leg or a shoe or something like that. So. Then it gets a meat. This is meat. And this is it getting the same message transmitted into meat. And it's probably, this isn't probably how people are cheating at chance, by the way. Apparently it's extremely loud and noticeable. Probably not. But it's good to know. Yeah, so we wanted to make sure that we... Science must be investigated. We're gonna delve deep. That's right. So we wanted to make sure that we knew all the ins and outs. You know, some players play with their gut. Some need help in other ways. And I think we got to... We didn't want to make any assumptions. They could be flying by the seat of their pants. You don't know. So that project's making the rounds right now. We'll see how it goes. It's like a weird idiom too. Like, how do you fly by this? Yeah. And you know, if you're thinking of coming a crack chest champion and beating Magnus, here's your shot. But I don't think it's gonna work the way you think. Still, the codes up and it's open source and could be recycled into some other nifty project. Yeah. Okay, let's do some factory footage. 3D printing time. And we have two of those projects that I think we alluded to. One is the new lamp and the other one, what was the speed up? And it's a cup of tea. Okay. Kind of cool. It's Halloween. You can build a sci-fi inspired lantern using an Adafruit cutie pie and LED noodles. We 3D printed parts to build a container that showcases these flexible LED filaments. Each LED noodle is squished into these 3D printed holders and mounted vertically. A sheet of pat material wraps around internal mounting plates to resemble a glass container. Powered by the cutie pie RP2040, six individual LED noodles are wired up to the GPIO pins and controlled with PWM. The cutie pie snap fits into a small primer proto board so it's modular and easy to swap for an upgrade. It features a latching push button with a built-in LED ring for turning the lantern on and off. There's also a print-in-place handle with a built-in hinge that allows it to swing back and forth. It's running off a cylindrical LiPo battery so it's portable and will last for several hours. The LED noodles are individually controlled using the PWM library in CircuitPython. The USB port is accessible and can charge the battery with a LiPo charger BFF add-on. In the code, if the button is pressed, the LEDs slowly fade and if the button is not pressed, the LEDs stay off. CircuitPython makes it easy to drive LEDs so you can quickly develop your next DIY project. The enclosure features parts that are 3D printed without any support material. 3D models of Adafruit parts are available to download on the Adafruit CAD parts GitHub repo. To power LED noodles, you want to use a choke resistor to limit the current flowing from your power source. Here we have a 3.7 volt LiPo battery with a 220-ohm resistor wired up to a solderless breadboard. Alligator clips make it easy to connect to your breadboard for testing polarity and your power source. Start by connecting an alligator clip to the cathode end of the noodle. The anode or positive end features a notable hole in the metal contact so it's easy to spot. For more documentation and some demo code, be sure to check out the learn guide on the Adafruit learning system. We hope this project inspires you to check out LED noodles and use CircuitPython for your next project. And don't forget, if you want to learn how to make all this stuff and more, you can hang out with Noam Pedro every Wednesday for 3D hangouts. Okay, we're gonna do two back-to-back IONMPIs. That's right. Two eyes. Yeah. With a cup of teeth. You ready? Yeah. Okay, this week, the first one is U-Blocks. That's right. What is this week's IONMPIs? I love featuring U-Blocks. They have such good quality products. They've been making GPS modules for 20-ish years. You know, I remember when they first came out with their first series and I was like, wow, these are really, this is really cool that they have GPS units that are so sensitive. Their specialty is the high quality, sensitive, a lot of information. There's cheaper GPSs, but they only give you NMEA data and U-Blocks will usually give you a lot more. And they're a lot more configurable and customizable. So their 10th generation of GPS modules are out. The MAX-M10, there's the S-Series and the M-Series. Both are very tiny. I'll show them on the overhead later, but these are, you know, this is like a centimeter by a centimeter. They're very, very small. They don't have the antenna built in, but they're very powerful. And like I said, this is the 10th generation. So they're just improving and improving on the technology. So the MAX-M10, like I said, this is their super miniature module. You do have to add an external antenna. However, you know, data does come out of it. You know, once you connect the antenna, it can connect to up to four different GNSS satellite systems. And it's been compatible with some previous products, not all of them. I mean, I know like some of them were bigger. They've gotten smaller since then compared to like the rectangular style that were popular for so long. So there's the M10M and there's the M10S on the right. And they are slightly different. So the M10M, I mean, they're both basically the same core on the inside. They came to the same GPS, GLONASS, Galeo and Beidou. So GLONASS is Russian, Galeo is European, Beidou is Chinese. I believe GLONASS is up. I think Galeo and Beidou are not completely up yet, but I have to check because I don't subscribe to GPS daily. So I'm not totally up on which GNSS systems are up and running. Both have UART and I2C. We'll take a look at that. The M10S has slightly higher sensitivity because it has an additional low noise amplifier and saw filter. It also uses a temperature compensated oscillator that's the T under oscillator whereas the M10M has the crystal oscillator. So it's a little cheaper. But it's, again, not as sensitive. So basically, if you want low cost, go with the M10M. Another nice thing is it goes up to five volts to 1.8 to five volts towards the M10S. It has a little bit of extra hardware in there, temperature compensated, only up to 3.3 volts. But it gets you another, I think it'll show another 3 dB of sensitivity while tracking. So what it looks like, and I think we'll look at the pinouts in a bit, but basically inside is, it's a microcontroller that handles the, grabbing the data and doing the calculations and then converting it to the interfaces. So there is firmware running on it. The modules you can see here, it has the RTC crystal and then the temperature compensated oscillator optional. And then the low noise amplifier and the saw filter also optional on the S series, not available on the M. There's power, there's VDD IO, there's VDD RF. There's a couple power supplies and of course there's a V backup, which is the coin cell or I think you can also use like small rechargeable alkaline or lithium coin cell, solderable coin cells for battery backup to keep the RAM backed up so you don't have to re-download the entire Almanac each time. This is where you can see all the specifications, but basically the detail you want to look at for the difference between the two is in acquisition underneath sensitivity. The M10M has a negative 164 DBM and the M10S is a negative 167. It also has slightly faster aided start. Otherwise it's pretty much the same. So just tracking is a little different. Otherwise they all have similar specs. And this is the pinout, very simple. I like how it's very straightforward. You can see there's right hand side, there's time pulse out, that's pulse per second. There is the battery supply, the reset pin. Left has I squared C, right has UART. There's safe boot end because I think you can upload the firmware if you have custom firmwares because again there's the mic controller inside. And then there's an RF and LNA area which you'll talk about when you have a active antenna, you can use it to power the antenna and also do some detection. Okay, so you are interfaced. So, you know, standard, your NMEA output is classic for GPS units. If you need that, you got it. This one is going to be default 9,600 BOD, but you can see it goes up to almost one megabit or down to 4,800. You know, all these standard BOD rates that you can use, of course, if you haven't, you know, giving you 10 hertz updates and you have all the sentences enabled, you'll want something fast like 115 or 230 kilobit per second, eight and one. And then what I really like is they also have I squared C. I do like I squared C because, you know, for things like a Raspberry Pi computer or even some microcontrollers, they don't have an extra UART or it's annoying because, you know, UARTs are, you have to buffer the data yourself. So as each byte comes in, you have to quickly put it in and into your buffer queue and then keep track of it. Whereas I squared C, it has its own internal buffer for I squared C. And then if you see at the bottom there, the register layout, most registers aren't used, you use registers FD and FE to read the number bytes in the queue. And then you can just read continuously register OXFF to get data bytes in. I don't know exactly how big the queue is, probably like 64 or 128 bytes or something. Very handy, you can run it at 400 kilobytes. One thing I do want to mention, I'm sorry, kilobits per second, there is a clock stretching interface. So, you know, some chips do not like clock stretching. Just something to be aware of, you know, earlier Raspberry Pis didn't do a great job with clock stretching. You'd have to lower the frequency rate. So you'll have to figure that out. I don't know how long the clock stretches for, but it is in my controller inside. It's not a hardware I squared C interface. These things are so small because they do not have a antenna, like some modules that you might be familiar with. And so you'll have to add either passive antennas what a passive antenna looks like. In this case, it has a UFL connector or an active antenna. Active antennas are powered by clean 3.3 volts, biased into the RF line, but of course you're gonna get much better performance. We know with the addition of the draws an extra like 10 to 50 milliamps, whatever it takes. This is an external antenna. So which do you use? It's totally up to you. You get to decide because you get to put the circuitry in. So this is what it would look like for an active antenna. You see there's the antenna supply. You have an RC filter and inductor to feed it into the antenna RF in. If you're using a passive antenna, you just leave all that out. So super easy. You decide which one it is. There's also a antenna supervisor circuit, which I kind of think is interesting. I think this is really handy because a lot of times people, I've noticed people using, you know, they're using antenna and it gets disconnected or the UFL or there's a short and like my GPS doesn't work. It's very hard to debug a GPS because basically either you get a fix or you don't. So having an antenna supervisor is really handy. It is a bunch of extra circuitry you have to add. They do give you the layout. So like this is the three pin circuit. So it lets you detect open, closed, shorted, whatever is connected. It basically does everything, but it does require you to see comparator and a bunch of transistors. That said, if you wanna build a really rigorous GPS into a product and you want to alert people that the antenna is not working or maybe they kicked it the wrong kind of antenna, the kind of thing is what makes your product a little bit better than just like, hey, you know, either it works or it doesn't. Cause again, GPS is so opaque. Like either you're getting NMEA sentences and either there's a fix or there isn't. It usually doesn't tell you why you're not able to get a fix. Another thing that I thought was interesting as I was researching this is that they actually came up with a kind of a cool idea. I'm hoping I'm describing this correctly, but they have things stream, things stream, things stream, which is their IoT asset management, you know, service, cause they do wifi and they do RTK and they do GPS. So it makes sense that they have their own IoT backend that you can stream data and I believe they use MQTT. But what's another interesting thing is that normally when you have a GNSS receiver, right? It's, you're not getting the data from the satellites. It's like telling you what your location is. You get these, you know, time pulse signals and you take the calculation of the deltas and you figure out like, okay, based on like the movement through space and the almanac of where all the satellites are, it'll calculate for you, you can calculate your location by using triangulation. However, that does take energy and time and you have to have that almanac to know where every satellite is. And so that's why it can take like 45 seconds to do, you know, a cold start. And then this idea, which is like, well, what if you don't do that? What if you don't have to keep track of the almanac? You don't have to calculate. You just, as long as you can get a couple signals from three satellites, you can upload it to their service and their service will do all the math for you. So it's really, really fast because you don't have to do a cold start. And then as long as you do have some wifi connectivity, maybe you have like an NBIOT, you know, you can quickly turn it on, send some packets out of Laura, send out that timing data to their service and then it will calculate the location for you. So it's an interesting idea because on one hand, of course, you have to have wifi or cellular connectivity, but you don't have to keep track of as much, like the GPS doesn't have to do as much work. And that's kind of an interesting idea, like offloading the GNSS calculation. And then finally, good timing, there's actually a webinar that they're doing with DigiKey in a week. It's a week from now. So sign up. If you go to Ublox or DigiKey's Twitter account, they've just posted it. It's also, if you just Google for Ublox, accelerate your wireless solution development, uses their Explorer IoT, Humanity and Temperature Centers, IMUs, Sincereon, Micro-E, looks like the SCD-40 or 41 there. Looks like a really cool way to get started with, you know, their IoT platform module that has wifi, NBIOT, cellular, Lora, Bluetooth, and it's got STEM and QT and Quick Connectors on it so you can add more sensors. And I think the webinar is free and you can pick up the Explorer IoT Kit, which has one of these, I think Max 10 GNSS modules inside of it. So it can be a really great way to get your asset tracker or GNSS project up and running. Available at DigiKey, it's in stock. That's right, 9,000 of them. It's over 9,000. So they have the S in stock. I think the M isn't, but I will say one of the things is that like, this was not in stock when I first started the IMMPI, but I was like, they were so cool, I thought I would do it. And then like two days ago, suddenly they came into stock. So I did get some, I can show them on the overhead. Okay, you wanna show that video after that? Yes, but I just wanna show this really quickly. They have a cute little video, but I just wanna show how unbelievably small they are. I'm gonna have to let it refocus cause it's so tiny. Very tiny little module. So I mean, it's amazing how small it is. Of course you'll need the antenna, but the antenna usually goes on the outside anyways, and it comes in a tape and reel. Okay, here's the video, see you on the other side. Yeah. All right, we're gonna take a little bit of break in between the IMMPIs cause we're doing two this week. That's right. Cause we wanted to catch up because last week we got super busy. In regular old Adafruit news though, in a wing, that's the code. Use it in the store to buy all sorts of things. And you of course get free stuff on the way out from shipping to cool things like a sort of playground, blue fruit. You can maybe, you can buy some of Chai's and you can stick up your body. No, you can't do that. Don't do that, you're editing that out. We're editing that out. Don't do that. All right, let's do the next IMMPI. IMMPI. Okay, next up is Scotch brand, which everyone's probably familiar with, I don't know the most well-known brands in the world, but what do they have that could possibly be a new product that is gonna be in here this week? Okay, so it's scissors and you're probably like Lady Aida, you know, usually do electronics, advanced Wi-Fi modules, chips, the latest, you know, microcontrollers. Why are you highlighting scissors? And the answer is have you ever had bad scissors? Because if you have, it's like, it kind of ruins your life. On Twitter today, I saw it was National Scissoring Day and it wasn't what I, it's a wrestling thing, by the way. I thought it was something else and I'm just like, oh no. And I'm just like, what is this? Well, not a special media. But it's a wrestling, like wrestling move or whatever. So it's very timely we're doing this. These are really great scissors. And, you know, I used to sew when I was younger, but now I do electronics and, you know, my pair of these scissors, and I got a couple pairs of these, are so handy. And what I really like is, you know, once in a while, I'm like, here's this most advanced electronics. And sometimes I'm like, here's a tool that you just toss into your DigiCart. And then next time, if you're checking out, it'll be there waiting for you. And then when you get it, it's like a gift. So it's actually a series of a bunch of different scissors. These are the precision scissors. I did get two pairs, one I kept at home and one I brought in. So I'm gonna put on my desk. They're really smooth. They're comfortable. You can use them. I'm right-handed, use them with the right hand, but apparently they're left-handed as well. You know, if you care for them, they will last you forever. And they're great for, you know, I use scissors all the time with electronics. I'm cutting open packaging. I'm splicing cut tape onto the, you know, pick-and-place feeders, you know, cutting conductive or foam tapes. There's always materials and stuff I'm cutting. I'm using my scissors all the time. And really good scissors are really, really satisfying. I found this like ASMR video about gliding your scissors. It's so nice. Again, I was used to cut fabric, but if you do, look, you get two of these, one can be used for paper, one can be used for fabric. I found, you know, I was like looking for funny memes about, you know, why you shouldn't use fabric scissors for cutting paper or metal like I do, you know, if you're cutting copper tape. And I found this and I was actually kind of like a little bit weirded out by this comic because I was like, wow, that's an MIT mug and it's the correct logo, which is a very big deal for me because they changed the logo like a couple years after I graduated and I think I don't like the new logo. So I was kind of like, why is, why does this person pick the correct logo? And then I realized it's Jen Lopez who used to write for Voodoo and do cartoons. And I think probably lived in Senior House. Really cool. And she has like a company now that does quilting and does comics about engineering and making and crafting. So check out her comic series while you're waiting for your scissors to ship because this is both a very funny comic. It's very nicely drawn and she's got a very cool maker company. There's about 10 different scissors available. They have kid scissors, crafting scissors, little snippies, big scissors, multi-purpose. I picked up two of the multi-purpose. They also have, of course, the precision, but there's basically a whole set and they've got a bunch in stock and they're super inexpensive. They're like under 10 bucks a piece. Another thing while I was looking for more deets about these scissors is I realized 3M, again, it's another thing to do while you're waiting for your scissors to ship, they've got a cool science at home experiments page with like dozens of projects. And it looks like they even got some celebrities come by and do some projects as well. But during COVID, but we can benefit now even if kids are back in school, they just posted a ton of science and maker and STEM projects that you can build with stuff around the house using, like you guys would expect, scotch tape and scissors and cardboard and whatever materials else you've got. So check it out. These are really awesome science experiments. Great for young kids, classrooms. If you have to kill some time on the weekend because it's rainy out, maybe the kids are indoors for the holidays and you've got to entertain them and keep them off the Netflix. Check out some of these science at home experiments. They are really heartwarming and they teach good science too. Good crafting. Available as a key. They have some in stock. Yes. And do you want to share data? I could do the ASMR of scissors. So I got a pair. I was like, well, you know, I guess it's a good excuse for me to get extra pair of scissors. Here's the thing. If you have used somebody's fabric scissors to cut paper and now they're angry with you, buy them another pair of scissors and be like, and it's like a peace offering and they'll be happy. So this is, it's really nice. That nice, nice smooth action. Yeah, these are, so these are the, these are not the precision. I will admit, I got, I kind of miss clicked. I ordered the general purpose scissors, but they've got the nice soft, this is like hard plastic and this is like soft siliconey rubber. So they're very comfortable and they've got a little place to you put your fingers and ooh, they're so nice. So anyways, I really like these scissors. All right, and we have a little short video too. Oh, and then also, by the way, the tips are nice and strong too. They do the thing. You actually want this where there's, they're curved. See how they're not, they're not flat. That's actually good. It means you always get a really strong cutting edge and you can nip with the ends very easily. Okay. There are thousands of tasks where you need scissors and Scotch brand has the right scissors for any job. Scotch multi-purpose scissors are perfect for everyday use with a soft grip handle and quality stainless steel blades. The right choice for daily cutting needs. Great for around home and office, anywhere you need to cut. Scotch precision scissors get down to detailed cutting business with smooth cutting action. Precision sharpen blades and a variety of lengths for precise cutting big or small. The scissor when details matter. For tough, sticky tasks, Scotch precision ultra edge non-stick scissors have three great features. Titanium coated blades that stay sharp beyond 100,000 cuts. The scissors for hard-working cutters. Non-stick coating resists build-up of adhesive residue for cleaner cutting and a soft grip handle for comfortable repetitive cutting. Scotch precision ultra edge non-stick scissors are making the cut. Scotch multi-purpose precision and precision ultra edge non-stick. High quality scissors for every task. Okey-dokey and for new products this week we're gonna do this. We have a revision this week. It's a light week. Yeah, so we have one thing that we wanna go over because we're gonna get out of here pretty soon. We have two NPIs. But let's do a new product. New, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new. Okay. Yeah. It's a light week, but don't worry. There's a lot coming. It's just, we had a lot of new products last week and I've been doing a lot of revisions. Don't worry, there's more on the way. You're gonna love it. But this week we just did a one revision one to get a product back in stock. So the INA 219. Oh, I gotta say this, the star of this show tonight is the product. Is the product. Our staff, our team, all the folks who makes this possible, our community. Everyone here at Adafrit. Not the guy who posts on Twitter. He's in fired. Yeah. He's been sacked. The person who's responsible for sacking him has also been sacked. Yeah. We gotta accept it to be the new cast members on SNL. So we're ditching this electronics biz and we're just gonna do parodies and puns from now on. Anyways, the new product of the week is. The INA 219 feather wing shown here. It's great for doing high or low side voltage and current measurement. Not a new product because we've had this for a while. This is the version we used to have. Oh, it's so cute. It uses the SOT 238 version of the chip. Use the 219B version, although we never really said the chip specifically was the 219B. However, that package of the chip, we can't get right now, but we can get. Is the SOIC version. So we just rotated this. Yeah, we have to retake the photo. But I wanted to line up. This photo is from the space station today. This went on, a lot of people don't know. This was on the SpaceX launch today and this is how it was shot. What do you do? Let's look at the next photo because it's a little bit more clear. So basically, instead of that tiny SOT 238, we're now using a SOIC8 chip instead, which means that the jumpers for the address move to the bottom. And we also may use the 219A or 219B. The 219B I think has 0.3% precision. The 219A has 0.5. Here's the thing, the resistor is only 1% anyways. So it's, you know, you're not gonna get better than 1%. It's still an excellent, excellent chip. But just, we wanted to keep it in stock. We didn't want to wait, you know, we're getting lead times of another six months until we get the smaller chip version. We'll revert to that when we get back to it. But for now, again, we wanted to get this back in stock and doing a quick PCB revision to use an SOIC size chip did the job. It otherwise works exactly the same. It just looks a little bit different. Surprise. New, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new, new. Okay. Don't forget, in-waying, it's a code. Let's do top secret. Go over to discord, a-different.it slash discord. Put your questions in there. Let's do top secret and then we'll get to the questions I have lined up. Okay, this week, this is one that we just filmed. Just a few. Just testing on a profile. Feels like moments ago. It was yesterday. All right, lady, what is this? I'm testing out a new design I made. We actually just published a project that uses WLED on an ESP32 QT Pi. And Erin was like, oh, I wish it was an easy way to level shift Neopixel signals for LED work on QT Pies because they're all three-volt logic and Neopixels really want five-volt logic. So I made this little BFF, this little backpack. You can select different signals. Mosey, SCK, RX, TX, SEL and A3 are some options and there's a signal pin here. And this is a 74 AHT125 G1 level shift or so it'll shift the three-volt signal to five volts and then it also gives you a five-volt signal from the USB line. So for strips of up to like 100 pixels you might be able to power directly from USB or clean Neopixel signaling. Okey-dokey, and that's this week's top secret. I got a bunch of questions. We do, I have some lined up. Here we go. First, a completely random question that Cherry used to make the locking MX switches. There would be a great fit for the Walkman a couple of weeks back. Also sourcing new ones would be really nice. Yeah, I know what you mean. I've not seen anything like that but they would be really cool. Okay. I agree. The inner here is a possible to import libraries like Mapplotlib, NumPy, OpenCV to CircuitPython. It's a good question. So CircuitPython that runs on microcontrollers cannot import something like OpenCV or NumPy or Mapplotlib. However, there are some similar libraries. Like instead of NumPy, we have Micro Shoot ULab. Yeah. Yeah, we have ULab which is NumPy-like. It doesn't implement all of NumPy but it does have some array optimizations. It's a sped up version of, because built in C, it's built into the core. What you can do instead is if you really need OpenCV, you need something like a Raspberry Pi computer to do it with, you can run CircuitPython libraries in code by using Blinka which is our layer of, it's a library that basically lets you use all of our sensors on something like a Raspberry Pi computer. So that way if you want to use these advanced libraries you'd run Python 3 on your single board computer and then get sensor data to do your data analysis with using Blinka which is a CircuitPython library layer. Okay. For the haptic communication system, do you need to be a back end developer? No, you can use the no code stuff from Adafruit IO and could someone possibly install a backdoorness? No, not really. I mean if you're using CircuitPython you can inspect the code and everything. I'm not sure I get that. It's all open source software. It's all open source. Okay, next question. Speaking of pins and headers, any way to engineer an RPI camera onto an RP, sorry, a Pi 400 which lacks the camera header? It's a really good question. I don't believe that they have even a socket for it so you want to use a USB camera. Okay. It's one of the, you can't use them the microphone, there's no audio and there's no camera. Any RA8875 upgrades? Not only are no upgrades, that chip is basically being discontinued. It's kind of a bummer because I rather like it but it's not long for this world. The price is only going up and up and up. Eventually we'll no longer be available. All right, this tutorial seems to be getting all the questions this week. So where do you get these little tubes? Oh, this is actually a really great question. So these tubes are, they're called soda bottle preforms and they were used in the POI project. And where can you buy them? I mean, I think you can Google for soda bottle preforms but I remember Phil be mentioned. Yeah, I think I still have these from back then. I haven't charged these up in a while, but these used to be like two liter bottles. Yeah, they're what they're used to make two liter bottles. Yeah, they heat it up and then they get expanded. So these light up and you spin them around. Honestly, I would just Google for it. I'm sure they're available from like crafting supply stores or maybe like Amazon or something has them available. Okay. They're really great. They're like waterproof and they're durable and they're very easy to use. And of course they have a standard cap top. Yeah. So good for a waterproof project and they're quite large. You can definitely shove a lot of electronics in there. How hard would it be to make a host transceiver for a Bluetooth headset to take the place of the smartphone or computer? For example, in IndraCom. Oh boy. A host for Bluetooth audio. ESP32 may have example code for it, maybe. Although I think they only have client side. I know Raspberry Pi could do it because it has a full Bluetooth stack and people connect their speakers to the Raspberry Pi computer. That's probably the easiest smallest thing you could do. Can you connect a low power three volt PIR directly up to a PCF 85, sorry, 8375? Probably. I don't see why not. If it has like a totem output, like a push pull output, it should work, but I'll say I haven't tried it. All right. Last two questions of the night here. I got some MCP 23017 ESP NDs, but nothing in the datasheet is ND, some kind of nomenclature I don't know about. ND is just DigiKey's new DigiKey part number indicators. You just ignore that. Okay. Next up, one will be more colored OLEDs with high resolution and small form factors like two inch or 2.3 inch available alternative to the ISP TFT. I don't actually see a lot of new OLEDs coming out, especially not in the maker hobbyist pricing market. To be honest, all of them are Mipi. They're not going to be SPI if they're OLEDs for phones. Instead, just use IPS TFTs. IPS TFTs look really good. All right. And here's another question. How hard would it be to make a custom Bluetooth headset? It's kind of like a pain. I mean, you know, Bluetooth audio is just really, you know, if there's a thing that does exactly what you want out there, I know that there's a little like Bluetooth audio, you know, adapter boards you can use. They're really low cost and they're really simple. If they happen to do exactly what you want, you're good to go. But like firmware, it's really hard to write firmware for Bluetooth audio stacks. It's just like, it's just not, like it's just not well documented. It's not really common. It's not like Bluetooth that I don't do with a lot of example code, like Bluetooth audio. It's like either, if the examples are great, if it isn't, it's like, you really don't want to be messing around in that stack. It's kind of, kind of sucks. Okay. And that's our questions this week. Thanks everybody. All right, so that's our show. Don't forget to code all the way up to 11.59 p.m. tonight and wing, get you 10% off in the store. I think it's free stuff too. We'll see everybody next week. Thanks for helping us get to the bottom of a lot of mysteries this week. We'll see everybody next week, 8 p.m. Ask an engineer. Thank you, Jesse May behind the scenes. Thank you, Jesse May. He's been helping out with stuff. This has been Native Fruit Production. Here is your moment of Xenar. It's all my fault. You're the blame me. Yup.