 from New York it's a special Thursday edition of Ask an Engineer. Hey everybody and welcome to Ask an Engineer. As always it's me Lady Aida, the engineer. With me is Mr. Lady Aida on camera control and Emperor of the Universe. We're here at the Adafruit, yes you are, we're here the, shh, our secret. We're here at the Adafruit headquarters in downtown Manhattan where we do our testing, kitting, shipping, manufacturing, coding, videoing, guiding and more. So much happens here, it's a beehive activity during the week but right now it's resting and that's why we're here with our masks on and we're doing the show. Yeah, of exciting show tonight, a little bit of catch-up, we went to an event yesterday and we'll talk about that and more. Why we didn't do yesterday, we didn't tell you. And we have a bunch of fun stuff tonight. Let's get right to it. On tonight's show, the code is Strain. We'll make it clear why it's Strain. It's not Strain in a bad way, it's Strain in a good way. Yeah. We'll talk about our Adafruit live series of shows including, we did a little special edition of Chip Shortage on Sunday. Shontel was yesterday with JP, thank you so much. Time travel ground world of Makers, Hackers, Artists, Engineers and more. We'll do from the mailbag. We have some advanced manufacturing made in New York City. You know, there's a city winery thing. It's a restaurant around New York and that's why I said the words combined in my head to form a new word. Speaking of, we're going to do some 3D printing. We have a couple of cool projects from New York. Pedro, we have IonMPI this week is Nordic. We got some new products. We're going to answer your questions. Come over to Discord. Adafruit.it Discord join all 34,000 of us. It's friendly. It's fun. Yep. All that and more on, you guessed it, ask an engineer. Okay. First up, just pay some bills and we do have an exciting new update. First off, the code is Strain, 10% off native strurr all the way up to 11.59 p.m. Eastern time tonight. And we are pleased to announce we have a new freebie, so we were doing Stemas, but now we are doing Keeb 2040. Yes, we finally made enough of these. We wanted to get a lot of pink PCBs so we could keep these going for a bit. We've changed out the freebies. The $99 freebie is the same. Permperto half size breadboard. It's small. It's handy. It's easy to use to take your solderless breadboard projects and make them solderful. But we've updated the 149 discount for almost a year. I think we had the Stemic QT boards as freebies. You'd get a different sensor with each order. This one still has Stemic QT, but now it's a full development board. The KB 2040 is designed for keyboards, but it's basically pro micro compatible. It features the RP 2040. It has eight megabytes of flash, USB-C, onboard LED and Stemic QT connector, lots of GPIO and power pins. And of course, it's a beautiful pink color. And then $199 or more, you get free UPS ground shipping in the content of the United States. Don't forget for Raspberry Pis and other things, including teensies now, you need to have a verified account, two-factor authenticated, on Adafruit.com and you can purchase things that are limit one. And we review all the orders. And I know there is, you know, that one guy who doesn't like it because he was selling them on eBay for 300 bucks each. And I'm sorry that this messes up your eBay business. However, if you look at all the folks who are getting Raspberry Pis who just need one, and this is happening every week, multiple times a week, and hundreds of people are getting the Raspberry Pis where they can't really get them anywhere else. So let me break it down for you. So that's if you have never gotten a Raspberry Pi from us, you will going to try to get you one. Because I know a lot of people are like, I can't do my project. I just need one Pi. If you have a project where you need 10 Pis, you're probably not going to be able to get them from Adafruit because we're really wanting to make sure that everyone gets one at least. And then, you know, once we feel like the quantity of people who needed just one Pi is able to get them, we might relax the restrictions a little bit, but a lot of people still can't get the single Pi that they need for their 3D printer or their project or for school. And you really want to focus on that. So it's important, don't just buy any Raspberry Pi you want. Wait for the one that you really need and grab that one. And also, I know this is like the worst. Yeah, I know some folks, this is the worst thing, and they're declaring war on us because we're like, hey, you know, you've been trying, you've been buying multiple Pis and you've been selling them on eBay. We don't take it personal. So I hope you don't either. We're just trying to get as many Pis to as many people as we can. And so far it's worked out really well. Yeah. Okay. We do a live series shows every single week. This week we did show and tell on Wednesday, 7.30 p.m. Eastern Time. We do show and tell every single week. So if you want, join us this upcoming Wednesday, 7.30 p.m. We put the link in Discord. You can join, show and share your projects. On Sunday we did a special edition of Discalated. I say special edition is because we had three parts this week. Triple, triple the content. Okay, first off, we had, we had gone to the day before Saturday, we went with Friends of the Fruit to the New Jersey Gym Crystal Fossil show and we got some awesome rocks and we showed them off. And people chatted about their favorite rocks. I also showed off, this is a really cool fast-forward animation of a mini-VNA antenna testing, you know, RF testing jig that I got before COVID and I was digging through my stuff and found it because I wanted to be able to test my antennas. I've been trying to get a couple hours so I can really test my ESP32 boards and tune the antennas to even better. So that was the desk part. Yeah, and then we did the great search and that's usually part two. We're going to skip around on this. And what was the great search this week? This week's great search was we had a kick maker who contacted us for an exciting new kit that we're hoping to carry and they wanted some advice on a low-cost, hand solderable, 8 ohm, 2-inch diameter round speaker. So we just showed how we whittled down the 3,000 different speaker options at Digi-Key to get a good speaker. That said, one thing I mentioned in the video, which I will again, is within your budget, get one of each speaker and just listen to it because they're going to be consistent from speaker to speaker, but different models will sound different. And it's hard to know how the sound transfer function is going to affect the audio clips or the audio effects that you have in your project. So I definitely recommend, we did pick one that I thought was a good one, but I always recommend getting a couple different ones, potentiometer knobs and speakers in button caps. I always recommend getting a couple options. We're not doing chip shortage tonight because we did it on Sunday. So I'm going to play this song because everyone keeps asking for the song. I'm going to play the song and then we're going to talk about which chip shortage we did. Right, so what is the chip shortage this week? This week was NXP. We ordered over a year ago some MMA-8451 accelerometer chips because we have a lot of back orders. People want these. They still use this chip. It's end of line. And normally, you place your end of line last time by and we did that and it's kind of been over a year and we're like, hey, can we get these chips so we can just finish out the last manufacturing one. So NXP, please, please, please allocate these to us. We'd like to move on to other better, greater accelerometers at your stock, but we still need some of these older ones. So yeah, that's the chip shortage this week. Yeah, and we'll have more next week and there's some ups and downs with what's going on in the world in general, but also with the chip shortage. So one of the things we tell our team is there's going to be waves. So learn to surf, practice the art of surfing, catch those waves, find good people to surf with, build better boards, build different boards than analogies. Be flexible. Yeah, be flexible. Be like water, flow into the container because there is going to be some rough seas ahead and there's going to be some times where you're just sitting around waiting for that that wind to pick up. So we'll see. Okay, so here's an interject a little thing real fast here. Speaking of NXP, teensy 4.1s are also now limited one. Yeah, in addition to Raspberry Pi. In addition. And that's the future. If you want to see what the future is, check out Adafruit.com because whatever is cutting edge electronics, we have it, we make it, we stock it. But then for the things that won't be in for a while, these things tend to go in high demand very fast like Raspberry Pi's and then also teensies. So we're going to continue to do everything we can to make it as fair as possible. Not going to please everyone, but you'll please like 99% of people. Okay. GP's product pick of the week. This is the show we do every single week. GP does a broadcast from the product page live and you don't have to put in discount code or anything. Here's this week's product pick highlight. It is the QT Pi ESP32S2. It's a Wi-Fi dev board. It has 13 GPIO pins on it. It has native USB. It's a 240 megahertz single core 10 silica processor. It has 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi on there. And something I wanted to demo today is using this with whipper snapper. So what I have is my QT Pi and I've plugged into it a couple of different outboard sensor boards. You don't even need to code it in a traditional sense. What you can do is go here to this page. I can click on new component and these are the components that have been already created as sort of almost a plug and play or drag and drop. So we can pick any of these sensors here. And now you've ate a fruit IO whipper snapper to your QT Pi to give you all the info you need. So now my temperature is at 28 centigrade and 124. It is the ESP32S2 QT Pi Wi-Fi dev board with Stema QT built in. And John Park's workshop was today right before our show here tonight because we moved our show one day and JP does circuit Python Parsec every single week. Here is the latest. Look at that light show, huh? For the Circuit Python Parsec today I wanted to show a very simple way to do disco party lights using Circuit Python in this case on a QT Pi. So I have a little QT Pi M0 there and I've also plugged in a Neopixel strip for a sort of bonus. This was a Todd Botte tip and trick actually from his QT Pi tips page which we can put a link in the chat. So what I'm doing in code all I have are a few libraries I'm importing including time that allows me to do a little delay. I've imported the board library which gives me pin definitions makes it easy to talk to some of the pins on this board. I have imported Neopixel which I'm going to use to light up these RGB LEDs. And I'm importing a random integer, rand int from the random library. Then I'm setting up two Neopixel objects one's called Pixel and that is the Neopixel that's built right on the board. So we address that by saying Neopixel dot Neopixel board dot Neopixel. That's a lot of Neopixels. I have one so that's the one there one Neopixel on the board and I've set the brightness to 0.2. The second one is actually this strip of eight Neopixels and I have that plugged into the board's STEMI QT connector. So I'm using the serial clock SCL and then I have eight pixels on that one and I've set that a little dimmer since there are so many LEDs there brightness is 0.1. Then in order to make this kind of cool disco show what I've got going on are two instances of pixel fill one for the pixel one for pixel strip and every time we loop through I set a different random integer for the red and the blue component leaving green at zero. So that means I'm going to get anything from red to blue to all the magenta's and pinks and so so forth in between purples. Then we pause for 0.2 seconds and repeat it again. So we get this really cool little disco light show here that I really like. It's really simple to use and I hope you like it too. That is how you can set up a disco light show on your QT pie using Circuit Python. That is your Circuit Python parsec. Okay on Fridays you can join Tim Pummy Guy Fridays at 2 p.m. Pacific 5 p.m. Eastern where you can learn about all the innards of Circuit Python. Do a deep dive. Scott Speck you might make some guest appearances soon too as he spins back up with probably kiddo in hand. Time travel. Look around world makers, hackers, artists and engineers. This week the usual reminder ate a box of ship. We're still waiting for parts to come in. We thought there'd be a winter edition and now it's turning into a spring edition. We put a new bit of text on our website and the reason we did that is we wanted something that was just even more clear. We'll keep that into it. Here's what we say. Eight a box subscription is currently closed. Please sign up below to be notified when subscription opens up again. Our team is hard at work planning, sourcing, manufacturing the parts for the upcoming ate a box display shortages continue to create some delays and we are doing the best we can to ship out eight a box 21 as soon as possible. Please keep your eyes on the countdown. Your subscription is not charged until the eight a box has shipped. So you don't have to worry about that. So we're going to do eight a box. We're just got to do what everyone else does, which is patiently wait for the remainder of all the things we need to come in. So next up, you're probably wondering, why are we doing this show tonight? Well, we went to an event yesterday called women who hardware and this was at Brooklyn Navy Yard new lab and a couple other groups that were there. If you haven't been to Brooklyn Navy Yard, it is this gigantic manufacturing space with all sorts of things, lots of different buildings. And this was folks pitching bringing the community together founders, folks who want to start companies. You can see a lady over there, special thanks to all the folks who put this together and invite us out. It was Wednesday and we're like, Oh, we really want to go. We really want to seven seven o'clock. Yeah. And we said, Well, we can move the show because they don't do this meeting that often and we do our show every week. And then we snuck around and just took pictures. We found some fairies and then we took a ferry back. That was kind of nice. And we want to see how long it would take from Manhattan to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. There's also the stranger things experience, which happens to be located in the Brooklyn Navy Yard too. Okay, it's time for a mailbag and don't forget we have a mailbag song now. All right, letters. We got your letters here is this week's mailbag. I just want to say thank you for the awesome products and design you are putting together and offering and learn so much with Adafruit and it made electronics fun. I am a mechanical engineer and wasn't at into EE until I discovered your projects and all the good stuff so many years ago. Thank you and long live Adafruit. That's nice. Thank you. All right. It's Python on hardware time. All right, so we'll have there's going to be a song for each section. That's why you got to keep watching the show. Okay, I know something to look forward to. Yeah, so this week's newsletter it is GM packed. I'm going to spend a lot of time on it because we have two big chunky bits of news. So first up circuit Python 730 release candidate zero is released. Please try it out. Please try to break it and please let us know if you do big updates RP 2040 PIO lots of stuff that Jepler did. He's on break and he'll be back but before he left he added floppy floppy IO and did background support for PIO. We also merged in MicroPython 1.18 and we did there's a couple of little things here and there and then MDNS which is part of Scott's project over the next few months to work on Wi-Fi workflow. It will be very interesting. So you can check out the Raspberry Pi Pico learning path that's on the Pi site. We have the PyCon US 2022 highlights some news from the Python software foundation running Python in the browser and there is this a bunch of stuff in the world of Python hardware from individual projects to events to all the things that's going on across anything that can run Python. Check that out. But the big news is a follow-up from last week. So last week we talked about MicroPython needing monthly support on GitHub sponsors and I was a little disappointed that we tried to do a fundraiser to help them out like last year and it was still basically the same number of people. There was 84 people and it was pegged right before it got to the 5k. They're just looking for $5,000 a month so they can pay developers. We asked you to contribute. And you showed up 116 so it went from 84 to 116 and I want to give a special shout out and thanks to Fred over at PyCon. Thank you so much Fred. You were one of the folks that put them over the edge over the top and it was really nice. PyCon uses MicroPython and this is Fred and Bettina and I just wanted to say thank you because there's a lot of companies that use MicroPython and I've contacted a bunch of them and you know crickets but y'all you said hey this is great and now there's a way for organizations to contribute and so the only bad news with this is I was talking to Damian the founder of MicroPython he's like oh once you hit the goal it doesn't say how much is there and you can't tell where you need to reach it so they set a new goal of $10,000 a month. So they're halfway there of course because they got to the 5k mark and if you want to join great we're going to continue to help out MicroPython in all the ways that we can and if you enjoy using any form of Python on hardware this is you know the the base that we all build our stuff off of. So there's a lot of cool companies PyCon's one, Pimerone's one, Aideford's one that is putting the money where our mouth is. We all say we like open source but even if it's just you know even if you're a company and times are a little tight you could do 50 bucks a month you can you just can. Think about all the free development time that you get from having MicroPython which is so well supported for so many different boards. It works so well. I know a lot of companies and makers are basing their products off of MicroPython or CircuitPython. Speaking of. We don't take donations but MicroPython does. Speaking of and like you were saying there's so many boards. So many boards. We just had 300 compatible CircuitPython boards and just to be you know horn tooting not about Aideford just about what this community did. Thank you everybody. There is 300 and more than half are not from Aideford. So when you look at all the boards even the popular many of the most popular one Pico. Yeah and so I think it's seed we now shall yeah so I think this is teensy for one this is an indicator of when you build a good community it's okay if there's other people playing together and that's the whole point you know this is like the skateboard ramp and we all have our different boards literally and I think that's one of the things that MicroPython CircuitPython we're very aligned I think that's why you know you see merges and you see collaborations you see all that but if you want to help support all of this you could buy a board from us you can when MicroPython has boards again there's cheap shortage buy some boards from them we resell their boards you could buy a board from us and we're buying boards from them or you can do the thing that would help them out the most which is sponsor MicroPython bam you know even if if you're an individual 10 bucks a month no big deal and you know once again I want to thank everyone who did that and thank you MicroPython for building something that we could base Micro CircuitPython off of and now there's 300 boards and like I said more than half aren't even from Adafruit love it and that is Python on hardware don't forget you can sign up at AdafruitDaily.com we don't spam we don't harvest your email this is a completely separate site and we deliver this every single week to your inbox via a pink snag snags as a service yeah sass okay we are an open source hardware company to prove it we have two thousand six hundred and seventy five guides Lady Eda what's on the big board this week a lot of new guides and a lot of updates from known Pedro they did a cool 3d printed accessory pack for apple airpod max headphones you can make a little side bits and top bits and then they made the ones with Lego dots you could like you know add custom Lego designs Liz also released a guide for the CP 2104 and CP 2102 and friend we didn't have a guide because there's not a lot going on but we're like hey people want pinouts and schematics so we wanted to get back to that we made a quick guide for people who want to use those boards yeah and then we're going to show the harp video and the led markets video yeah yeah um catney updated the welcome to circuit python guide with a great page about different ways to add libraries to your circuit python board you can use dot mpy files you can use dot py files you can freeze libraries in and each one of these has different implications for flash and ram usage so do check that out because you give us through details step by step what all the different types are when you want to use each one and how you can tell if you have a module frozen in for the matrix portal m4 i think melissa updated some documentation for that board thank you melissa there's a new project from liz wireless led maracas you know we saw the you know once we started stocking the wireless leds you know we thought wouldn't it be fun if we made um little maracas with them that glowed and you know the the the seed beads or whatever you know um noise making elements in the maracas would be these wireless leds and so they would look really cool at night and um i'll show a video and then melissa wrote up a guide uh for the 2.7 inch e-ink displays we've separated out all the different sizes of e-inks into their own guides because we had one big e-ink guide which is a little bit confusing because there's so many different chip sets and options uh so we wanted to like separate it so people could easily um tell you know what chip set they should be like of two or three choices rather than like you know 20 choices for each e-ink display and then um with a laser harp video liz also did an update um to the laser harp to add a mode that takes advantage of the different heights because it's a time of flight sensor so not only do you detect you know that the led that the laser is broken because you put your hand in front of it but you can tell how far it is and so you can do like a kind of half pheromone half harp effect okay and we're going to play those videos in a second i want to uh just mention something so at eta fruit we do hug reports or not we don't like physically we just call them hug reports instead of bug reports and um i just want to say hug report to trevor flowers who said oh i didn't realize micro python accepts donations via github i just did that now done and done thank you thank you thank you so much even a couple dollars helps them out and so you know this is the thing that we can do as a community is show if you put your stuff out there take that risk put your you know this beautiful thing that's in your head just code and say here you go everybody do pretty much anything you want with it just like credit me once all um what's another thing it's very very very rare to see firmware projects that are cross-platform the way micro python is you know usually if you're getting like a usb stack or like um you know a wi-fi example it's usually developed by it's developed by the company and they have a license and they say you can't use it for anything else and it's very restrictive it's amazing that micro python has worked so hard to support such a wide range of microcontrollers um from st to nrf to esp to at mal to this is like everything everything and it does have the same potential together like right once run anywhere for microcontrollers we're getting really close with circuit python micro python so anyways thank you for very much appreciated and you know spread the word um if folks are out there building business on these things a lot of it is just intent and signaling hey you're valuable you're important and here's a place where I can show it even if it's just like a few bucks a month it's okay um it is the thought that counts and a lot of these things begets other things when other people see it they're like oh you know I should I always say I'm gonna do it and uh you know one last thing if um you're not feeling great about yourself you know what makes you feel good giving donating your time a little bit of money volunteering helping someone else trust me it works okay um so I want to play two videos the LED miracles thing Liz did a really cool video and then the harp video is is one minute long but it's worth it it's it's actually one of our like long term we have to make this project one day I've always wanted to have an LED harp but so Liz did an amazing job amazing job so here we go wireless LEDs look magical but what do they sound like you can build some maracas using wireless LEDs the LEDs are pulling double duty here since they're providing the sound and visual aspects of the project the coil sits vertically in the maraca so the LEDs are always lit up the coil plugs into a triple a battery pack making this simple to power and assemble clear plastic bobbles let you see the LEDs perfectly at all times the bobble sits in a cardboard tube wrapped in washi tape technically it could be any kind of tape but using brightly colored washi tape makes these maracas even more fun find everything you need to build your own in the learn guide at learn.adafruit.com a laser harp is an electronic instrument that lets you pluck laser beams like a harp to play notes in this version we're using a featherboard with the music maker feather wing it can use MIDI input to output synth instrument voices you can also use this as a usb MIDI controller by updating the code and speaking of the code is written circa python it can be fully customized for your musical needs the key components of this build are the time of flight sensors we're using them to detect and measure distance this data is used to play notes and send other MIDI messages such as cc messages program changes and even pitch bend the lasers don't really have any practical purpose here their only job is really to make the project look super cool which they definitely achieve since the music maker feather wing has a headphone jack output it can integrate easily into a tabletop synth setup just add in a fog machine for maximum vibes to learn how you can build your own laser harp check out the learn guide at learn.adafruit.com and it's time for advanced manufacturing New York City factory footage here out of your New York City unless there was a time lapse of the Disney building being built across the street from this is fun from the windows they're filling it with oil no that's just a shadow sorry I thought they were filling a whole building with oil my mistake that's that's this is the strategic baby oil reserve of America all right three to bringing time okay every single week know I'm Pedro print up amazing things this week we're going to show these back to back the first one is these apple air pod max covers so if you look around so any city especially in New York you just see people walking around with headphones all different types of headphones but the thing about wireless headphones we are for the IMPA and one of the things that back in the day when I worked in in advertising one of our clients was Timex and they talked about wrist real estate and this is when we had worked on this internet messenger watch it was like one of the very early internet connected things sort of it was basically a pager but when they would talk to people there's there's valuable real estate there's necklaces there's bracelets there's watches there's rings there's shoes there's shirts there's all sorts of stuff but if you think about headbands or headphones they're not where like say if you look at the apple watch every single part you can get a different cover band band you get a cover you can change all the faces and you know we're so lucky we finally get like three different colors of you know headphones now um there are some cool funky headphones but they don't have like you know interchangeable shells and you can't there's no e-ink thing on the side or displays or neopixels or or oh what if you want cat ears one day and you want like a unicorn thing the next day so what if you want to be a cat unicorn what if you want to be a cat unicorn oh boy a caticorn um you're doing good with the word word combinations today yeah even you're on it my hemispheres are multiple multiple connections today so um we thought this would be just the start of some neat things and then we thought you know if we're just gonna do it why don't we make the side of headphones the legos or at least uh lego brick compatible things building brick compatible um i'm gonna get a oh i hear the leg by the way just you know what actually you know what by the way um we don't like to dunk and we don't want to shame anyone and i tried to keep this as positive i could but lego uses a bunch of micro python and they're lego and i said hey lego like you you do a lot of cool things with micro python would you consider um donating to micro python crickets and my email the emails that i could find but they bounced um so i don't know if anyone's at lego um you know your spark stuff that you use the bot and everything yeah they use a lot of micro python you could consider donating just a little bit like maybe even like one lego kit amount one please mr scrooge one brick okay so anyways i'm gonna play these videos back to back but uh lego you should do the right thing hey what's the folks in this project we're 3d printing accessories for the apple airpods max headphones we designed a 3d printed ear covers that snap fit onto the headphones these can help protect them from getting scuffed up and can be printed in your favorite colors they're two pieces that are printed separately and then glued together they feature lego compatible studs so you can build fun designs to personalize your headphones we also 3d printed headband covers that can help protect the knitted mesh in the canopy they're printed in flexible filament and work nicely with lego dots for making mosaics and intricate patterns they just press fit into the canopy and can be easily removed we think it's a great way to personalize your headphones we use ninja flex cheetah filament to make the flexible headbands this flexible filament offers some features over regular ninja flex like the ability to print faster and better quality parts since it's soft and flexible you can make fun headbands like cat ears monster horns a unicorn horn and some mouse ears we hope this inspires you to 3d print some fun accessories for your favorite pair of headphones thanks so much for watching and be sure to subscribe for more projects from adafruit and we're gonna do the code uh lawn makeson the chat had a good suggestion big corporations donate once per fiscal year so it's a good idea to poke them once in a while we will so good idea oh we won't stop we don't we don't stop we just want to you know the world can be a really good place we just got to get together um strange to code 10% off the native for star all the way up to 11 o'clock 9 p.m. let's do ion mpi okay this week's ion mpi is nordic brought to you by digi key and adafruit lady adah what is this week's ion mpi i'm wearing my nordic shirt uh it's very comfortable and i like the like the style so um i even wear it sometimes when i don't have nordic on ion mpi but this week we do um i left a feature uh nordic chipsets and i saw this new dev kit show up on um digi key and one of the things i like to do is combine not only npi but why i picked it for the npi and hopefully you learn some stuff uh so this week's um ion mpi is the nordic nrf 5340 audio dev kit uh which is kind of like this super beefed up nrf 5340 development kit which is of course audio based but like hint hint it's also a really good dev kit in general uh at the end we'll show a video that goes through um with one of their engineers through like every feature of this dev board but it's a very it's a very classy looking dev board and if you have the ppk and you like that middle glowing plastic section thing they got this is uh this has the same thing okay so to start off with um you know when we talked about bluetooth audio um a lot of people think you know if you think about the you know 90s and early 2000s um the basic you know the the the killer app for bluetooth classic was these bluetooth headsets um you know they combine a microphone and a headset uh sorry an earphone you could pair it with your phone very easily by pressing a button um and uh you could use it hands-free it'd be great if you're working while you're on the phone you don't listen to music uh we want to chat um more advanced ones eventually added you know buttons user interfaces and even audio commands um they're also uh bluetooth classic audio is still used all the time with um bluetooth speakers uh even stocks a bluetooth speaker i just was like hey i wonder if you can get one uh yeah client tools makes one it looks pretty well getting cool um and um yeah this is very common and low cost and again you can pair it with any computer any mobile device any tablet pretty much anything that just bluetooth audio is going to do bluetooth classic audio and and we've been you know living with it for like 20 plus years um maybe even 25 plus years uh very happily um but you know one thing i've noticed is you know we've moved from bluetooth classic to ble for a lot of devices like a lot of the gadgets that you have that use bluetooth if it's not a keyboard or audio it's using ble and that's because um apple had this restriction on if you wanted to you know pair your device with the apple ios um device for bluetooth um if it was bluetooth classic you had to go through the made for um ipod sorry ios or you know bluetooth uh certification because everyone was using the spp protocol um and so it got very complicated to add bluetooth classic devices but ble you know you really don't need any permission all any app can connect to a custom ble profile but again bluetooth audio and bluetooth keyboards have been lagging still all most devices that are bluetooth audio um are still classic and um classic audio has has one thing has a couple things about it that at the time of the design made a lot of sense but are a little restrictive now one is that classic audio is a single stream it's point to point you have a thing that sends the audio and you have a thing that receives the audio and um in bluetooth audio this is called the source and the sync this is an example you can have um you know a phone that is acts as a source it has audio and it plays into your headset and then of course you can also turn the microphone into a stream and then the device is a sync and you can basically only do one or the other you can't you can't do both sorry you can do both but you can't have um multiple devices and um here's you know the the process in which you you know in bluetooth classic um this is the uh a2dp protocol certification which is what a lot of audio devices and believes the classic use and how it kind of negotiates like the codec and the rate and all that good stuff and sets up the communication between the sync and the source um the other choice that was made is the codec so the codec um the default codec for bluetooth audio is called sbc for subband codec um it has a pretty good rate of reduction it goes from 1.5 megabits per second to you know a little bit like maybe a quarter of that 350 kilobits per second um you know at the time when this was invented there was a limited memory and limited computation you people had to fit the capabilities of encoding and decoding um the audio onto the small microcontrollers that would fit into a hand uh a wireless headset or into the mobile device and so it wasn't like you could do really advanced codecs compared to what we can do now um which did create the prolifer also the quality was you know some people say hey the quality wasn't as good as it could be um because again they were limited it's like they had a fixed bandwidth on the input and the outputs they had to kind of the loss was defined by how much computation you could do to to squish down the required 1.5 megabits down to 350 kilobits per second to to get over the link reliably um so in the years since there's been you know the proliferation of other codecs you know aptx was one of them and ac is another one of them and um not too surprising as folks who do codec stuff are will learn is that they're all very heavily pant and licensed and you have to pay you know high licensing fees to use these codecs so it's like if you want to update or upgrade from sbc to aptx you have to pay qualcomm a buck a piece and you know a ten thousand dollar um you know starter fee um so uh you know nordic and uh bluetooth bluetooth.org have have a pretty good discussion of like hey you know bluetooth classic is really popular but you know there's a couple things that that those two things the fact that it's point-to-point syncing source and the fact that the codec is is you know the default codec is is not really designed for like 2020 levels of um low power computation you know um the kind of processors that we now consider low cost enough to stick into a headset uh we would be considered as powerful as a desktop computer back then and um you know again the it was really hard to pull people away from bluetooth classic it was cheap um it's easily available it's you know very compatible everybody knows about it until um the killer app came for what would be bluetooth low energy audio which is airpods and airpods interesting said airpods don't use um the bluetooth low energy audio they actually use their own proprietary protocol and the reason they need to do this is they have a special problem which this is le audio but the the idea is the same here which is if you have if you look at all bluetooth classic headsets there's always like there's a wireless connection but there's only one wireless codec and then the two speakers are connected to each other with a wire because if you have like one sync you can't sorry if you have one source you can't have two syncs um i mean you could but then they wouldn't be synchronized whereas with airpods and like wireless earbuds you really need the left and right to be like perfectly in sync and that's really really hard for bluetooth classic to do so for like the airpods apple of course came up with their own protocol and their own chip and everything because you know they they're apple and they can afford to do that but if you want to create something that is basically a multi stream connection so you can have two speakers that are independently powered both getting the same synchronized audio stream um bly audio is where it's at um another thing can do is broadcast which could be really useful for like if you think of like audio tours or like you know if you're listening to translations of something um in a group and you can set like your headset to to just pick up that translation basically what you would normally use FM radio or like CB radio you would be able to use bluetooth or energy of course also these are used for hearing aids as well and there's there's use keys for that too because again now you can have uh you know two hearing aids and they can be synchronized um the other thing is the codec has been greatly improved um it's higher quality and uh the data rate is lower which means lower power you know the processors that are available for available now that will use bly of course are more powerful so they can do much more computation and still hit that i2s you know uh time based synchronous um audio stream and get the data out so that's that's also really important so there's a new better codec as well um okay so you want to you're like okay i'm interested i want to move from bluetooth classic to bluetooth little energy audio uh and this is where the nr 53 840 sorry so 5340 audio dev kit comes in um so each dev kit what's needed is they're independent but you can use them as part of like um a broadcast or synchronized setup so you just get as many as you need to kind of simulate the project you need so if you're doing like broadcast you'll have one source and then you'll have multiple um of these adks as your end devices so you can you have a very controlled uh simulation of you know a um a movie studio sorry movie theater where everybody has their own headsets for example and um you know this dev kit is uh jam packed um it's got the nr 5340 in it it's a dual core um arm cortex device and um it's got like these arduino headers buttons and uh uh codec chip and um headphone in and line in and line out headphone driver um and all that good stuff yeah oh hold on yeah i'm um i have to do one thing before we go on to the next slide okay this one was so jam packed lady to no i know well i need a break because this is like this is a pretty long ian p i yeah so we're still here okay so yeah each each dev board um you program independently can act as you know one ear blood or the other um okay so this is like a map of the whole thing i'll see that there's we're going to play a video which goes through like all of the different options but um i'll say this is also kind of a nice dev kit for the nr 5340 even if you're not doing audio um there's like the battery monitor and power management and buttons um there's sd card slot um there's arduino ish headers there's power monitoring uh well you can like you know easily um plug in your uh ppk or something if you want to monitor the power or you can even monitor it through um i think it was still scope or a multimeter and there's rgb leds as well um and the nr 5340 is really good for this because it's got a dual core processor so you have one that just handles um like the le audio controller or like the codec and stuff and then the other one can handle um your application or um you know user interface or whatever else you need to you know the the leds the buttons or whatever and so it's it's good this is you know a handy um a handy time to have a dual core processor and you can still take advantage of like the low power modes that nordic is really good at i mean like one thing that you know if you want to do low power bluetooth you're not going to get anything lower than than nordic um so even though it's a dual core you'll still be able to cut your power usage quite a bit which is why many companies some of which start with a used nordic chipsets in their devices um and finally there's a uh big tutorial that comes with it with software examples the two big examples are of course the connected isochronous stream where you have two separate sinks whatever called sinks but they synchronize with each other so that they're within a couple microseconds apart which is pretty impressive uh so they they get data and they also kind of communicate with each other a little bit and then the broadcast where there's one sender and then people can kind of join in to the to the stream whenever they want to listen in not necessarily synchronized but they're all receiving the same data at once available on digikey and you can actually get them yes there's a lot in stock so again you know the reason it's good that there's a lot in stock is because you'll probably want at least two if not three in order to prototype your project especially if you're you know i want demo the broadcast example um but the code looks really easy to use it's all um you know python installation you just use a command line and the nordic sdk is is really well established and so like you know you get the demo running you can go in and customize the user interface le is how you want and then take that and turn it into your final product all right we're going to play this video and that'll be ion mpi for this week this here is the star of the show our nf 5340 dual core bluetooth soc it supports bluetooth le nfc and many other wireless protocols what i'd like to highlight for bluetooth le audio is the audio pll and the dual core setup this enables the soc's great le audio performance the audio pll supports an adjustable frequency with 3.3 ppm resolution in two frequency bands it has very low jitter and is ideal for audio applications the dual core setup enables us to run the application and codec on the application core and handle communication on the network core this is the cirrus logic cs47 l 63 a high performance low power audio dsp for earbud headphones it is optimized for direct connection to the headphone load the power management and battery charging are handled by our npm 1100 power management ic it is a super small highly efficient PMIC for charging batteries and power delivery its power conversion efficiency goes up to 92 with a footprint of only 27 square millimeters this includes all the passive components you can even get as small as 23 square millimeters for size constrained applications at the side of the board we have two 3.5 millimeter jacks to get your sound in and out of the audio decay one jack is to be used as a headphone connector and the other one for line in making testing your application as easy as possible if we look to the right of the board we have buttons for play pause volume up volume down and two user programmable ones in addition to that we include four user programmable leds on the board the top led is an rgb led that can be freely configured for power measurement we have current measurement pins located here the different pins enable you to measure the part of the board that you are interested in here we have the swf port for f measurements if we now look at the back side of the board we see the battery connector here you can connect the battery that is included with this kit this is a usbc connector and can be used for powering the board or programming and debugging we've included a digital microphone that is located right here this is an sd card holder if you need extra memory and here we have rgb leds to light up the logo at the middle of the board and the colors of okay um we're going to do the code it's strain and now we're going to kick it off it's new product time new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new new all right yeah new products this is an update yes okay people have been waiting the rg boys back in stock this is actually a video of the previous version you boys are back in town the boys wait rg boy um we now have the rg boy fx um which has a fancy new silk screen says fx and it comes with a built-in chip uh that has a loader code on it so there's a lot of games already on it and you can select which game you'd like um otherwise it's the same hardware and setup you program it just like an original rg boy um so we did get a shipment of like a hundred and I think we sold a bunch um if we have them in stock it's I don't know we're gonna be able to get some more these I think are probably affected strongly by the chip shortage took a really long time to get them so um which is totally sweet um but do pick these up these are a very fun development platform for writing games um and the industrial design is of course lovely look it up next up now this looks just like a normal breadboard but what you don't know is that this is a premium breadboard um yeah so you know I use breadboard these solderless breadboards all the time and you know as I was using them I was like you know I bet we can get better ones and um so I looked around and I worked it actually took me months of working with different breadboard factories uh to make a solderless breadboard um that is buttery smooth as Philby would say um so one of the things is I took this apart to show is um the clips are not flat they're actually um let me zoom in because this is this is the secret sauce I'm giving away on my secret sauce Phil um so if you look here you see how there's like this little bit of a notch at the end um this notch makes it easy to insert but gives it a good grippy effect and so what happens is uh when you have something like a feather or maybe you have a teen c4 one something with a lot of pins and um you line it up and normally it's like a little bit of a struggle to get the board into the breadboard but this is like buttery smooth can you just can you say yes here you try it tell me how buttery it is just try pressing that in did that just go in like smoothly easily yeah it is like nothing fighting you it is like a hot a hot knife through butter it's like a hot PCB through yeah breadboard that's uh and they're easy to remove as well you don't get opposite of a fidget spinner it's like I feel calmer doing this yeah oh yeah okay um and it's also easy to remove board so maybe I'll show it from the side so you get that you get that action it also makes the sound it goes ah really nice uh so the first board and also I like black rather than blue for the negative marking I'm just like that a little bit um and I want to try to get these with a with a brighter white color but for now they're still the kind of classic cream color um but these are very very satisfying breadboards I'm going to say this if you have something that you use every day like a toothbrush spend a couple bucks on it if you have something every day that you're going to use like a belt spend a couple bucks on it if you're going to have something that you want to last spend a couple bucks on it if you're going to use a breadboard I think this is one of the ones that be choosy because it's your hobby time also comes with the metal plate forgot to mention that okay so some people like that you know you peel off the bottom here I'll bring this back out a little bit it's kind of like if you if you start cooking and stuff like that you should probably get like you know a decent cutting knife um the metal plate uh can first off you don't have to worry about it sticking to your uh um desk because you've got this metal plate protecting it um but also it can it can reduce EMI a little bit because you have this nice metal nice metal backing so um and here's the deal it's the same price it's just better now yeah it's just all around better uh and I do want to get the rest of the breadboards um changed over as well but right now this is the only one that we've got so just uh just be aware that if it says premium and I use the phrase buttery smooth you know that and you know what for folks out there that that like their hobby and do the Pepsi challenge um put one on your desk and uh try it out and then compare it to the the other ones you have you know some people might like a different uh feel to their breadboard some people might really like this if you find a better one yeah let's know for the same price let me know because these I think are the best you can get for a couple bucks um premium step next step okay we've got another update so I know I just released this board and it's like hey how could you possibly be revising it so quickly yeah it's I don't know if you know about this chip shortage it's a chip shortage I've heard this song um it just won a billboard award um okay so I'm just gonna look at this image because this is kind of has everything we need so oh no go go back go back one yeah stay here stop um so the chip in the middle so the chip on the right is the ESP 32 Pico module which is a wonderful module that forms this feather uh ESP 32 V2 and we love it the chip in the middle of the USB serial converter which is the um CP 2102N originally uh however our shipment of CP 2102Ns is not on our way to us quite yet um hopefully we'll be soon however we wanted to make sure that we could keep this board in stock and so um we decided to um adjust this design and you know because it's a new design so maybe people aren't as wedded to the CP 2102N on it and now comes with a CH 9102 which is similar to the CH 3400 sorry 340 or 341 which you've probably seen on a lot of dev boards this is just one that is like the same pinout as this CP 2102 otherwise the board is exactly the same we have links to the drivers and we also have a guide coming out on how to install drivers on mac and windows um it functions the same the low power usage is the same the um the draw is the same uh the speed of upload is the same it actually seems a little bit faster everything is the same um I think this is a really good candidate as a replacement and it allows us to keep this board in stock okay I'm going to have a couple other pictures of the same because the only thing that change is that chip pick it up okay next up we have a new thing this is a little bit kind of a weird uh device but I thought it would be cool to stock so this is a it's designed for um as a controller for heater modules in like a vest or a jacket um it's a uh you know slow PWM duty cycle um power on off switch type thing uh it comes with a couple different modes um it's actually easiest for me to shoot on the overhead because it's um hold on let me turn it off and then I'll start from the beginning uh so okay let me move this breadboard it's not a premium breadboard out of the way okay so this is like a rubbery what's nice about this is kind of like a weatherproof rubbery button um and you connect the black and red wires to uh your power supply which can be I think between three and 24 volts or three and 12 volts uh check the product page you press once uh to um set it to be red and hold on oops this wire got disconnected and then you connect the output uh ground to the blue wire and uh power to the red wire um and here's like a fan to demonstrate it because a fan it's kind of nice it's a nice visual way to see it um when the light is red it's 100% on and then when you press it again and it goes to blue it goes to 30% off 70% on so it's like a 70% duty cycle and you'll see the duty cycle isn't like a fast duty cycle it's actually maybe take two seconds um on and off so this would not be good for like an LED unless you're okay with it blinking um it's good for heaters maybe fans peltiers other kind of slow um heating or cooling devices or or powering devices um and then uh green is um 30% duty cycle so 30% on uh 70% off and again the duty cycle is you know a couple seconds long um so it's designed for these heater vests but you know it's I thought it was kind of nice you know weatherproof enclosure it's inexpensive even if you just use the on or off functionality oops I reset it even if you just use the on or off functionality um I think it's still possibly useful for some project and I like that you can sew uh the outer edge here there's like a little bit of a lip um you can sew it to um make a wearable project so you can cycle through and then when you're done you press and hold to turn it off okay and the star of the show tonight just said you Lady Aida our staff our customers our community and everyone who makes all these good things go is okay we've got the finally after many years the na u 7802 uh strain gauge ADC it's a wheat break wheat stone bridge ADC um very precise um differential input that's designed for strain gauges but you could probably use it for other sensors as well this was a product that we actually started designing right before COVID and then COVID hit we kind of got busy designing ventilators and face shields and then we went back to the design the chip wasn't available but we did get a shipment finally of these chips and so I wanted to get this STEM aqt board out because we sell strain gauges you'll want to read them and this is a great i-squared c um strain gauge reader uh it comes with uh the new botan na u 7802 this is a 24-bit ADC um we only exposed one of the ADC lines because most people using us with a strain gauge that you know you only need one ADC um e minus and e plus are the two um exciter sides of the wheat stone bridge so left you know e minus is ground e plus connects to um the voltage output from the na u it can generate a voltage between like 2.0 and 4.3 volts reason for that is i think it you know you can get a nice clean voltage reference there's seven qt port so you can just plug it into your microcontroller board or microcomputer we've got arduino code which i've got on the demo that i'll show uh the jelly also showed very kindly and uh there's also from um cedar grove a great circuit python slash python library that you could use with uh circuit python board or like a raspberry pi or something so let me show you how it works um so you connect uh the four points of the wheat stone bridge strain gauge in this case uh to um the sensor i actually have the exciter um and adc pins backwards but it's okay because the wheat stone bridge is actually symmetric so it doesn't matter um and then i have some arduino code working on this feather that i just have plugged in and um you'll see i have the gain up really high so you'll see like even even me touching this makes the number kind of uh go up and down because i'm i'm applying a little bit of strain just picking it up if i if i set it down it'll kind of stabilize a lot more um and then of course you can add more filtering on top but then if i apply strain you can see i'm so strong um and then the other way it makes a negative number because it's a differential um reader so you know of course you can measure if you know positive or negative um change in current through uh the resistive bridge that is attached to this uh chunk of metal this is a one kilogram uh strain gauge i haven't actually tried it with other wheat stone bridges but there's absolutely no reason it wouldn't work with others so if you have other projects that need a 24 bit adc and you're okay with you know it's not going to go that fast i'm running this at about 10 hertz um to get good um precision out of it but i think it goes up to about 300 i think you probably use a couple bits lose a few bits of resolution at 300 um that's the trade-off it's an inexpensive board um that's designed for slow measurements of of weight and there you go so new new new new new new okay don't forget the code is strain you can use it for anything in stock 10 percent off in the interstore all the way up to 11 59 p.m and you support us a 100 percent woman owned independent open source hardware company manufacturing in new york city i heard women hardware you're a women who hardware i am the woman yeah so we're gonna do some questions um ask your questions adafruit.it slash discord or discord.gg forward slash adafruit um this is what it is uh there was some questions earlier um do you think you'll do uh some half-sized breadboards of the uh super butter i'm just waiting for them to come in the first ones that arrived um you know it's it's really tough to get stuff in the first ones that arrived are the half-sized breadboards but i'm hoping in the next week or two we'll have sorry the full size the half-sized uh teeny and other um i hope we'll be able to come in soon as well but this is the first one the two tied out okay um there was a couple questions i'd start up from the other chats when earlier when it got started um does the bluefruit connect le app work with our the Arduino UNO um you could use it with our bluefruit friend um it's it's going to be a little bit of a struggle you're not going to have a lot of memory but using our ur or spi friends you could probably do some very basic projects okay uh what do you think about obtaining a degree and well you did well i did um if you want to be able to understand some of the theory and math behind some more advanced uh electrical engineering concepts um go for it okay what are some of the uses for the string gauges um string gauges tend to be used for you know measuring weight um that's that's the most common thing so you know the one kilogram one is is designed to handle up to one kilogram of of force if you put something on top of it would you hang something off of it how yeah you you attach you know basically you attach one side to something stable and then you let the other side have the weights press on it so there's these mounting holes it would hang off the side yeah so what you do is this this side you know you mount it to the table or something's in a strong way and um this side would be the part that you know can you know this is this is above the table and then this side um would get the pressure and then you'd be able to measure the weight because um the amount of strain is related to the amount of um weight that's pressing on it all right uh i got the tazmodo iot firmware working on the feather esp 32 v2 board just the other day and submitted a template page to their repo so people now to get it working guess i'll need to set up another pr with info for the uart chip range glad you were able to keep it in stock yeah oh do you want to change from yeah i should probably change it so it's not to stare in the house um yeah go for it i think you know you're going to see a couple i i've actually seen m5 stack change their boards over to the wch chips as well it's i'm not the only one who um with esp 32's had to had to go through this um i don't like it but um it's what is chip shortage done oh see grover's right hey see grover uh see grover's an excellent community member and uh also has some uses for strain gauges strain gauges work nicely for measuring rotational torque as well check out uh see grover's uh feather wing using the na u 7802 i think they use the dip version because they also notice like you can't get the through whole version the surface about version for like a year or two uh we were we weren't willing to to make a through whole version of the estemic it looks like five six years really like in pio because it's impossible to get deterministic results from higher level code like circuit python particularly on rfes esp without it pio is you know really good for that i'm not going to say you can't get deterministic results but it depends on what you're trying to get what what you're measuring okay and go to once go on twice that's your questions okay all right um if you want to hang out you can always hang out and uh the discord is open all 34 000 of us all right one more any more on the ch 552 cutie pie um i'm waiting for chips which are unavailable right now um but when i get chips i can put together the prototype yeah our second album will be the chip shortage continues yeah i mean i design things and but that doesn't mean i can necessarily get the parts and then i'm going to do chip shortage unplugged and then um featuring the um the wireless led maracas yes we have a lot of musical instruments um so that's our show for tonight thank you so much every everybody ben thank you behind the scenes and aford slack thank you everyone in the chat the community all the folks that are picking up stuff thank you everyone who's patient with one another especially during these times of uh you know what's going on um be good to one another um and also be good to yourself forget yourself it could be good to other people it's usually how it works put the oxygen oxygen mask on you make sure you're doing okay and then learn teach and share all that good stuff with other people we'll see everybody next week we're back on wednesday 8 p.m we're going to be doing some cool stuff during the week we have a lot of stuff to publish and more we'll see you next week here is uh oh this is a native reproduction um here's your moment of seeing her thanks everyone