 Live from New York it's Ask an Engineer. Hey everybody and welcome to Ask Engineer. I'm going to a slightly choked up Ask an Engineer. It's me Lee. You promise you wouldn't cry. I don't. Thanks for the Academy. I'm Lady Aida the engineer with me Mr. Lady Aida on camera control behind the scenes AV and all that good stuff. We are here at the Adafruit factory that's behind us. It's not a green screen that's really a factory. This is where there was over a hundred people working day and not night to test, kit, ship, video, product, code etc. All the electronic goodies that you love in the Adafruit shop. All the open source stuff that we do. All the tutorials that we release right now. It's nighttime. Everyone's home except for us because it's time for Ask Engineer. We're going to be going through one hour of what's going on and making, hacking, engineering and more. Tune in. We've got all sorts of stuff going on including discount codes. On tonight's show, speaking of the code is gas sensor. 10% off the native for star all the way up to 1.59 p.m. Tune I get to anything that we have in a stock. It'll give you a discount. We'll talk about some of our live series of shows including show and tell. We just did that a few moments ago. Time travel. We're on the world makers, hackers, artists, engineers. We have some special segments tonight. Since things are starting to come back in stock, we have our new segment, the real world. Check that out. From the mail bag, we'll read some of your emails and letters and more to us. We got some New York City factory footage and more of some 3D printing. Now, Pedro are going to share some cool stuff. We've got IonMPI brought to you by DigiKey this week. It is an ocean. New products. We're going to answer your questions. We do that over on discord.it where you can join all 35,000 of us. All that tomorrow. Tomorrow. All that tonight. All that and more. I'm just going to combine words. I'm not a skin engineer. Okay, so first up, Lady, when people put stuff in their cart, not only a discount, but they get free stuff. What do they get? That's right. We have the freebies. $99 or more. Our classic Promo Proto half-sized breadboard freebie is still there. Take your project from a solderless breadboard to a solder full breadboard with the Promo Proto. It's a great way to make your projects more durable. I wish I'd had these in school. $149 or more. We're still giving away PCBs, pink circuit boards. KB2040 is an RP2040 based board. It's got eight megabytes of flash. It's got STEMIQT connector, buttons, cast-layed pad, USB-C, all the good stuff. It can be designed for keyboards. It's why it's called the KB2040, but you can use it for all sorts of things. $199 or more. You get free UPS ground shipping in the Continental United States. It's trackable. It's insured. It's UPS. And $299 or more. We're still giving away a circuit playground. This time is a circuit playground. Bluefruit. It's got Bluetooth low energy. Lots of LEDs, buttons, sensors, and more. It's a great solderless way to learn how to code or do engineering and IoT. It's got Bluetooth low energy, so you can do wireless stuff with it, too. All right. And don't forget, we're still doing the two-factor authentication on our site. We do verified email accounts, two-factor authentication that allows you to buy things like the Raspberry Pi, which are still in short supply. It also keeps your account safe. And you probably noticed everybody in the world is getting emails that say, make sure you secure your account in one way, shape, or form. Adafruit offers account verification and two-factor authentication. If you haven't already on all your other things besides Adafruit, because you probably already did Adafruit, please do. I got an email today from one of the banks we use, multiple different companies that we interact with. And all of them are like, yeah, people will call you and ask for your password. That's not us. You'll get emails that look like different ones. They're not us. Oh, by the way, here's the latest disclosure thing last week, or this week was Uber stuff was happening, some Grand Theft Auto footage is leaked. Tis the season. So computers like to share their bits. That's why we made them. They're very bad at keeping secrets. Yeah. They're called servers, but they're actually keepers. They have everything on there. So anyways, be safe, everyone. We do a bunch of live shows. We just finished up our show a few months ago. Yeah, we did show tell. We hosted it. We hosted it this week for show and tell. There's lots that were great on there. Yeah, there's lots of great stuff on there. However, I'm going to say if you're interested in Raspberry Pi Pico W or PyCow, as it's referred to, check it out. Jeff Jepler has got the start on Circuit Python for PyCows. So if you want to use Circuit Python, we're making Wi-Fi way too easy. So that's what's going to happen. So sorry, you're going to save all this time instead of fiddling around and Wi-Fi. It's coming. It's here. So check it out. You know, you can do it now. You can watch after the show. You can also check out the UF2 that Jeff dropped in Discord and try it out for yourself. A lot of people have these PyCows and they want to do cool stuff with it. Get all the powerful drivers and capabilities of Circuit Python with Wi-Fi. Okay. We do Discovery 8 every Sunday and we're going to do kind of a deeper dive, as they say, on Penguin. Penguin. But what did you talk about in part one? Well, the part one I did talk about Penguin a bit. So we showed off a demo of this new software that Philby wrote for me because I was tired of asking him to constantly do silkscreens for me. Not that there's anything wrong with that. He's very good at it. But you know, there's a lot of boards that I wanted to redo all the silkscreens. So I showed off and talked a little bit about how Eagle CAD, which is the CAD software I use for PCBs, handles fonts or doesn't. And we'll go over that in the guide section. Yes. And then we do the great search where our lady to use our powers of engineering and part searching to search for things on digikey.com. What was the great search this week? Okay. So this week, there's a diode that we use for like almost all of our power supply boards, the boards that all the boards that we have have a power supply circuit in them. And almost all of them use this diode, the NBR 120 VL. Is that a stock at digikey? You know, it's weird. Like the silicon shortage is like it's kind of like up and down. Like there's some parts are really easy to get some parts that are really hard. Oddly enough, I couldn't get this diode. So I was looking for an alternative. And there was a couple little tricks of how I found a good alternative. The initial way I did it did not find me anything in stock. But then I went around the back door and I found a couple of really good options. Okay. JP's product pick of the week. We do this every single Tuesday. Here is this week's highlight ticket away JP. The 10 and the six solid core hookup wire spool sets. These are 22 AWG and they are perfect for breadboarding and prototyping. We get white, black, gray, brown, dark purple, blue, green, yellow, orange and red. Look at the set of six. You get the blue, white, green, yellow, red and black. Here's how you use them. So I will just take a little bit off of the ends of my wire and end up running them like that. The solid core, this gauge works great. 22 AWG works great for pressing them in and getting a solid connection. This isn't falling out easily. I first built this on a breadboard then I just moved it over to the Perma Proto and was able to make sense of my wiring and match my fritzing diagram. That's my product pick of the week. This week it is the 10 and six spool hookup wire set. Solid core. Okay. JP's workshop is tomorrow and then Friday we have deep dive with Tim. So let's do some time traveling. Stuff on our blog and more this week I want to talk about. So it is September and for this month you'll see all the posts we have for National Hispanic Heritage Month 2022. If there's people's stories or inventors or scientists, artists, musicians, do check it out. Maybe students do know you want to suggest us. So it's us using our blog which is pretty popular to help put the spotlight on some amazing folks. So check it out. You could see our posts that we have so far this year and then you could see our previous years as well. We usually have whatever celebration is going on each month for the groups of people that not only work here at Data Fruit but for everyone that's in our community as well. So stop on by. Eight a box update. The update is there is there is no update. However we're getting closer to do to do to having an update. So here's what we're thinking of doing. Depending on how much the chip shortage continues to maybe settle down a little bit. We're starting to get some stuff but it is still hard to get like five thousand six thousand seven thousand plus. We're either going to try to do the winter edition or we're just going to punt to 2023. Don't worry we don't charge eight boxes until we ship them but what we would do is actually send out an email for that because we don't like to be in your inbox for no reason if there's nothing actionable to do. We have plenty of sign-up so if you want to pop out and come back later you probably will be able to but there is a waiting list. So we are seeing a bit of a relaxation of the the part shortage but ever since you have the last six months we've been on allocation which means that we can't even if we have the parts on order they may not get shipped to us. It's getting better. It's getting a little better. And so in celebration of getting a little bit getting a little bit better we usually have a chip shortage video. This week we're going to continue with the new series which is called the real world which is when we get some parts on a reel. This is the true story of nine strangers take 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. Adafruit, the real world. Okay lady Adafruit what part did we get back in stock this week? Okay we got a mega amount of the MMA 80451 this 14-bit accelerometer. I don't exactly know why people love it so much but it's like we had so many back orders and from resellers and a lot of people signed up for it and we have a lot in stock again. This was a last time buy and last time buys that occurred in 2020 slash 2021 were very precarious because it was one of those like will you actually get it? I don't know let's wait a year and a half and find out but they must have a big die run and we you know got a couple thousand chips and so if you've been waiting for the MMA 8451 check it out you're going to see it appear at distributors and at Adafruit. They're actually you know it's funny because we can alternate chip shortage in real world videos but there's actually quite a few boards that are back in stock things that have been out of stock for quite a bit not everything but you're going to see a lot more chips and sensors you know we had some Vienna 055s we had we're still trying to get some samd 51s but we did get some samd 21s so some like neotrinkies went back into stock so we're getting there and also you know I know that folks are addicted to pain and suffering and complaining we're not we're looking forward to only having real world episodes of things that we're getting back in stock. Chip shortage was fun to educate folks what was happening we wanted to be able to look back in time and say oh that was interesting you know we tried to work with the companies we're like here's what we need here's what we use it for there was no dunking no shaming or anything but it can't be complaining in bad news forever so when we're getting more stuff in stock we're going to continue to alternate like if we need stuff we'll say this is what we still can't get and then if we have things and we're starting to get stuff we'll do a real world segment so that's where that comes from. So very exciting that this chip came back in the stock. Yay! It's possible. Okay mailbag. Okay mailbag so this week Eric sent us a note your shipping boxes make really awesome project stork boxes and I look forward to receiving them it's fun to try to get the different sizes if you cut a gpo size rectangle in a small box you can push the pi zero headers out from the inside and put a bonnet on the outside with plenty of room to spare easy pi case with just a sharp object you can add holes for buttons wires etc that's a good idea Python on hardware time. Okay this week on the python on hardware newsletter we cover everything because we do. Yeah actually throw a lot of like lisp and scheme and west stuff into the newsletter too. It is a like programming newsletter I think because if you're doing coding microcontrollers is that little pocket universe that you could do a lot of stuff with anyways. The OG Arduino ID is out a new one 2.0. Looks good. Yeah and so Arduino is already been kind of moving to Python land anyways so we wanted to have you know some coverage on that so you can check that out if you use Arduino. Obviously we've been doing a lot of Python stuff but we're still the top library producer for Arduino so how about it? Yeah we did a bunch of libraries recently. Yep of course DeepDive is this Friday coming up with Tim. CircuitPythonParsec with JP. CircuitPython show if you have not already seen it or downloaded it yet or got it on your pod catching device or however and whatever you use to download and look and see videos or audio. Thea Flowers was the latest person on the CircuitPython show so do check it out. Becky who I used to work with at Make and here at Data Fruit has a new series with Digikey. Do check that out and then lots of other like you know Py related things. Tom's Hardware has their 100th Pycast. They do a lot of cool Raspberry Pi content and more. Some Python tips. This f-string thing is saying I can never remember f-strings. I have to look them up every single time. So handy resources from our team. Our community help desk is back on September 26th so if you want any help with CircuitPython come on by. It's going to be part of you know October Fest-ish. Oh yeah people want to get t-shirts in October. Get ready get your pull requests in. You know we will take valuable I feel bad saying valuable. We'll take pull requests that are not simple typo fixes which has happened in the past. Get a couple PRs in and you get a t-shirt. And a lot of projects using some Data Fruit stuff but this week highlight of the week I wanted to show. This is from Geekmoms Projects. Oh yeah this orb is cool. Yeah so this is an orb. It's called Tiny Orb or Cube Orb and she has a really nice set of like progress photos and how it was built. All the 3D printing this says it's powered by CircuitPython and you get an idea of what a cool project you could build with 3D printer, CircuitPython, open source hardware and software and you could just see like So it's funny about this it's like you know we did that cube project you know Phil B and Non Pedro did an amazing LED cube like 64 by 54 you know panels six of them and it's like we're done we did the cube and then like Geekmom is this like mic drop time for orbs. Time for orbs and I'm like now we have to make orbs. So this is really fun though it's like actually kind of I'm actually like this is a little more fun than a cube. Yeah so check out if you haven't Geekmom Projects pretty much the best thing on Twitter so do check it out and that is our newsletter we deliver this every single week until you're in box orb orb orb and uh you can go to AdafruitDaily.com you can sign up for it it's completely separate has nothing to do with your Adafruit store account we don't share email address we don't spam it's add free subscribe anytime unsubscribe anytime all that stuff all right it's open source hardware time we have 2,700 and 34 guides in the adafruit store learn experience site yeah bonanza what's on the big board this week lady ada okay we have a couple updates circuit python on the linux and where's the pie guide i think melissa just updated this because i'm trying to remember what changed but i think it was like a python version changed so i want to update that and then don't forget phil b wrote an amazing nudes uber guide you know you want to use nudes safely i don't want to hurt yourself don't want to damage your nudes check out the uber guide and i'll give you tips and tricks on nudes we've also got updates to the pmsa 003i air quality breakout i think this got added to whip or snap or i think that's what updated with this guide which is really cool because we're doing a lot of air quality projects which we'll show a video shortly next app those are updated guides these are the new guides new guides we've got starting from the left pardon me the tca 8418 keypad matrix and gpi expander liz thankfully for me it saved me a lot of time to go up a guide on use how to use it as a keypad reader don't forget it's got a built-in q manager so it can hold 10 push button down and push release sorry button down button release events so like you don't have to constantly be pulling it i'll keep track of a couple of different events for you it has interrupts and it's also a gpio expander this is interesting it's one of the last boards i designed pre-covid like the original design was like february 2020 and then i couldn't like immediately the chips were completely gone off the face of the earth and i only recently got um a bunch of them back so check that out we've also got this awesome canary in a coal mine co2 project so this is um as a cutie pie esp 32 with an scd 40 co2 sensor and a servo and what's neat about this is that this is a no-code project there's no code no id no command line um using ita fruit i a whipper snapper you can data log the co2 levels and then when the co2 levels um fall that the crow the canary in the coal mine that's a crow because we're gothy um passes out i don't want to say dyes i don't read about what actually happened to canaries and coal mines it's not a it's not a fun story um this one just goes to sleep it's fine it's just resting it'll it wakes up when the air quality goes back um that's a great example showing how to do fairly complicated iot action projects with sensor inputs and motion outputs um all using whipper snapper which is awesome of course you can always remake this project in arduino or circuit python but you want to show how to do it without any coding at all and then we've also got a guide uh for this old breakout we forgot to do a guide for it somebody reminded us thank you uh the 24 lc 32 it's a basic i-squirt c e-prom breakout very handy because a lot of arm cortex chips like the rp 20 40 uh like the sam d 51 21 do not have built-in e-proms it's not a common thing on arm core chips common on uh 8-bit micros but not so much on the uh cortexes but you need to store a mac address you need to store some non security based uh information and e-prom is a couple bucks really easy way to do it uh check out the guide we've got uh links to arduino library examples and circuit python library examples and then finally we get to the penguin yeah um we do have a little character this is uh the penguin and penguin helps you make nice fonts for your circuit boards such as let's say if you wanted to have the blade runner font or papyrus papyrus i've always i so i'm gonna basically redesign all of our boards yeah papyrus because i think it's the best font and so one of the things we've been waiting to do until we could have papyrus on circuit boards we didn't want to update our branding yes so um we finally are able to do this now thank you he just highlighted avatar he clicked the drop down menu and then he just randomly selected papyrus like a thoughtless child so what does this do um so what this does is it terrifies terrifies Ryan Reynolds um one of the things that people who use Eagle CAD like me or actually a lot of CAD software have noticed is that they're great for making boards that are hidden inside of um enclosures or you know laptops or PCBs or um sorry uh PC cases but if you want to have your PCB be beautiful and people see it because it's a dev board because it's a badge because um you just like to make beautiful art even if people don't see it um it's it's challenging to it's already challenging enough to add bitmaps but it's really hard to add um text that uses the non built-in font whatever the font that's built into the CAD software you kind of have to use and um in that case it's uh it's a vector font for Eagle CAD and you know i was talking to what i've done historically is i've asked phil b like hey can you like if you look at the uh circuit the circuit playground blue for you see all this beautiful rounded fonts on there that's custom done by phil b for all of our boards which is great when we have you know a popular board that i am very proud of like the circuit playground or the kb2040 but we have a lot of just basic breakout boards and um i i kind of feel like i feel bad asking phil b hey can you spend a couple hours on this board that's you know every week i'm coming out with one and so i said hey can we make a way to add you know proportional font that's not the built-in vector font and phil b says well why can't you just use a proportional font and i'm like aha if you try and you export the gerber the gerber comes out as vector it's a lie um and so i said can you you know look at there's buzzard which is what spark fun uses and there's a couple other tools i said can you look at them and see like anyway for us to use something like this ideally something that works in place so that it's like you know whatever text gets replaced without me having to like redo the whole board because i'm often tweaking the location of text as well and so it's really cool about what phil b did is he actually parses the xml file for um eagle cad so shout out to eagle cad for 10 plus years ago when they moved to xml because you can parse it out extract the text element we were on that conference called saying you really need to do this yeah and they did it was right before the acquisition merger thing yeah and they were like yeah we want to move to xml used to be a binary format extracts it and then you know whatever ttf font whatever two type font you want to use it'll actually make the font size to like match how big the text would be so it's like it does the best it can to give you the same size text um and then repaste in the generated um scanned scan lined like a vector sorry uh what's the word not vectorized the opposite vectorized uh rasterized font back into the board file um you don't have to use a separate library file actually kind of like puts it in place and then you can move the font uh the text around so you do have to avoid typos because otherwise you have to re-run the tool um but once you've gotten the text about the size and location you want you run this and they can have any font so you know we did papyrus of course and we showed um you know we had klingon and we had yeah we did someone asked if we uh does it work with otf i think that's the font that we use yes we did otf yeah so there is a anything that pillow supports which yeah oh jeff i think it actually probably was of course post script to be honest so one of the things you know all all kidding aside with papyrus we you know we picked this because we were going to do comic sands but i kind of feel like everyone's kind of made that joke um but one of the things that we think is going to be interesting is especially for people who make props in the universe of star wars or star trek or whatever else you might do there's usually a font associated with it so one of the things i think we're going to see is people who do like lightsabers are going to be able to use a star wars font so the inside and the outside of the things that you make for costuming for props for fun uh for or anything um you'll be able to use whatever font you want well it's also like there's things that like i normally wouldn't again i wouldn't wouldn't bug phil be into doing but like you know i'm making these breakouts for the tr 808 step switches i mean they're not tr 808 steps which is they're just very evocative of the tr 808 step switches and like i'm obviously like dude of course i'm going to go like for the labeling i'm going to go pick out like the 808 rolling font right if i can get something that looks similar to label the pit pads because like why not if it's if it takes only two minutes for me to find the matching font and run it um wouldn't it be cool if it had you know that same look um so but you know for for me i just also wanted to improve the you know legibility i think that the vector font while it is quite legible i do like a kind of heavier font so i'm going to go with like futura uh medium because i've always really liked futura the 808 logo futura um so i mentioned be cool to do the like stargate font so anyways we think it's going to open up a whole bunch of a whole bunch of um cool creative opportunities for people to put whatever font they want on their circle board and here's the best thing um we're only charging people $99 a month to use it no just kidding it's free it's open it's open source and go go for it check it out if anyone wants to port it for key cad go for it yeah i don't use key cat that's the only reason yeah our team uses all the different tools and just you know one little um you know soapbox type thing i said this on disk of lady aida but sometimes people get really gate keepie with um how how they think open source should be so for open source hardware the way it works is you publish your files and whatever you use it in because not everyone uses key cat not everyone uses um eagle cat not everyone uses all all team some people so whatever the file format that you used is what you publish it in and then you put it in an open source license then you put the code somewhere and that has an open source license and that's the requirement because hardware is a little different everyone uses different things um for the folks that are you know allergic to even hearing that keep in mind we get emails that says aida fruit's not open source even though we publish all of our files it's all over open source license because the more uses windows so there's this i they're just targeting her because she's how dare a woman does electronics but that's that's the type of gate keeping that we heard and you know the joke that i always say because it's true and it's not funny but it is funny now because it's been a couple years is someone said oh you know the elevator that she uses it doesn't use open source firmware in it um like how would they know that anyways um and so therefore you know part of the process of making the hardware because you take an elevator with closed source firmware it's not open source so it's just ridiculous so you know make sure when you're doing these things uh stay away from hearing that nonsense if you're using equal cad yay you can export as xml um no one has been stopped from making open source hardware because they got all the files and all the open source licenses that were available and it was hardware that's not what that's not where things break down it's when people aren't releasing files are not putting in under license that's actually what's what the problem is um but anyways that's my little rant anyways port to kick out if you'd like go for it yeah okay uh let's do some factor footage all right it's 3d printing time we're gonna play these back to back we've got two things this week uh here comes the uh sleepy crow that has too much co2 and then we're gonna do a um you guessed it skull print speed up because that's kind of what we we love skulls kind of what we do here um each of us have a skull it's true you can build a co2 sensing project using aida fruit i o and whippersnapper inspired by canaries and coal mines this metaphor has become an iconic way to depict warning signs with aida fruit i o you can build a dashboard to log and monitor an air quality sensor using whippersnapper you can easily set up an esp 32 wi-fi dev board and an scd 40 co2 air quality sensor there's no coding required so you don't need to know arduino python command lines or even an ide now you can use servos and trigger them whenever the air quality reaches high values you have control of the servo it can change the angle of the horn by adjusting a slider we set up an action to trigger the servo whenever the co2 level reaches high values then choose to publish a message to the servo with a value that matches your desired angle the setup is really easy to put together and it's free for folks to play around with you can get the parts to build this project links are in the description download and 3d print the parts to build the enclosure and the articulating bird the qt pie esp 32 snap fits into this little holder and gets secured to a mount for housing the servo be sure to check out the step-by-step tutorial by heading over to the aida fruit learn guide the scd 40 is matched with screws and the servo press fits into the mount the sensor easily plugs into the cutie pie thanks to the built-in stem a qt connectors this 3d printed horn fits over the shaft of the motor and is secured with additional hardware now we can slide the circuit into the housing with the sensor poking out of the cutout assemble your friendly bird by joining the two wings to the body and create a rivet by heating up the tip of the pin the wings freely rotate allowing our bird to appear sad when it's upside down and happy when it's upright the bird can then be press fitted into the shaft of the servo in the circuit can be powered over usb-c we hope this inspires you to check out whippersnapper and aida fruit i o for your next iot project yeah so that wasn't a skull apology the appropriate person has been fired heard of like mad magazine every time like back in the day when someone would write them i really mean letter they would write back and say the appropriate person has been fired so yeah we we're firing our script writer team i thought it was a skull because like so i think it looks go like it actually from the thumbnail looks like a thing anytime we show a video i could probably just guess skull i'm like i'm right half it takes 75 put a time yeah i'm probably right half the time so just say skull all right and down like okay anyways um have for npi you can watch 3d hangouts every week and you can learn how to make skulls with uh no patreon okay let's do an npi oh you know what let's um remind folks this is the this is the discount code so you can buy stuff save some money and we can hire new writers for the show we need new writers okay okay this week is uh an ocean an ocean an ocean and uh i like their logo because it reminds it reminds me of echo the dolphin which was like the best sega game ever i'm glad you know the product is named echo i'm saying so maybe they really that was a nice game isn't i like that game because it was like i'm just a dolphin i'm just like helping out you know doing stuff okay okay this week i'm actually really glad because this is a product that i've known about for a really long time and this finally showed up on digikey.com slash new and i was like this is a really cool product i want people to know about uh so this is um there's a it's a development kit the edk 350 u and 350 there's two versions uh basically depending on what frequency band 868 or 915 megahertz uh depending on fear in the u.s or uh asia europe so what is this um this is a dev kit for i love this dolphin um it's a dev kit for basically all of an ocean's a wireless sensor technology and energy harvesting uh tools what i like about this it's kind of like a little bento box where you get um one of each of their sensors and switches and i'll show them on the overhead as well as well as the radio control board usb key and everything so you get like a little bit of everything and their software so you get to really experiment um with their you know battery technology uh and i thought that was interesting because you know we i looked back at a bunch of the ion imps that we did recently and you know there's one thing that comes up over and over again is low power sensor iot you know sensors got very very cheap right you can now get accelerometers temperature sensors community sensors for under a dollar which is wonderful um but you know then you're nice to deal with them as an engineer like you you as an engineer have to power them you have to get the data around with them you have to maintain and wire them and that's actually really challenging because the moment you have something that's battery powered as everyone knows you have to constantly recharge it like you have a phone if you don't charge it every day or two the battery runs out so wireless gives and takes it's it's very nice people to take things around untethered but you also have to maintain them um and so you know one of the it was thinking about like how do we solve this in general one if you have a phone you just know you have to charge it if you want to use it um for other you know sensors that we have you know in industry like us thinking you know we solve the issue of like what happens when the battery runs out of your smoke detector right this is a very common wireless sensor it's not iot but it's a standalone but you know it has a nine volt battery in it and it runs for like you know almost a year but eventually the battery runs out and then there's this really big challenge with um especially with fire alarms uh smoke detectors because you know they're they're so safety oriented like you really want to make sure they're running you almost never need them but when you need them they really need to be working and the problem is is that when the battery runs out you can't notify somebody that the battery ran out like there's no indicator of like this thing isn't working anymore and so you have to notify people when the battery gets low but not so low that it can't notify anymore and so you know for um a lot of uh smoke detectors they have like a beep you know but like what if it's a winter helm or a summer home and you don't you're not there and you you're out for the week you're on vacation you come back you don't realize that it's been beeping for a few weeks and maybe the battery has has died and so this issue of what do you do when you as an engineer have a sensor network or sensor nodes you want to collect the data but you don't want to deal with the battery management because you know not only does it take wireless of course takes a lot of power to transmit um and so that's going to drain your battery but even rechargeable batteries have self-discharge rates so um an ocean came up with this idea of well what if we just didn't have batteries they were like what if we just took out that part because if you have wireless to found you but you don't have a battery you don't have to deal with the wiring you don't have to deal with the maintenance you don't have to deal with the replacement and you also place you can literally put them anywhere you want in a duct behind a wall because you never have to get to it um so an ocean um is you know kind of famous for their kinetic energy harvesting but they you know they also have solar which we'll talk about and I remember when this came out in like early 2000s because at the media lab we're like oh my god this is the thing that everyone's always talking about how can we have you know sensor data radios that work without batteries um and so the way it works is and you can you know watch a full video about it but basically you have it actually once we I'll tell you actually um because my part of the time was researching these you know those clickers that you use for your um your stove if you have a gas stove and you have to have a little clicker and it you press and there's this like strong click and then um the uh whatever the the material um activates the the flame and then you can use that you know the gas inside and then you can use that to light your stove or your pilot light so it's the same idea it's like this very it's a very tough spring and you know as you pull back this you know spring activates and then you finally reach this activation point um and it the spring releases and then you get this uh the coil moves and the coil movement uh sorry the material movement through the coil activates a magnetic field the magnetic field um generates a small amount of current that goes um through the coil and can turn on your electronics it's a very small amount you know you have to very quickly convert it because it's ac if you convert to dc um then you have to get it to a reasonable amount um but you can it looks like a big basically are like look you get about 100 to 200 microjoules at two volts which you know might be enough to transmit a very quick amount of uh packetized data over radio um yes so many piezoelectric sparking matters correct uh it feels just like that it's not the same thing but that's what it feels like you you have to kind of press hard and this you know this was a patented design that they came out with and again i remember when when this came out because we were like this is really cool um to see somebody actually take this theoretical um i mean it's not theoretical people had been doing this but take taking something to production which would actually be usable by engineers um as a module so they've sold the ecco the echo 200 um and this little module you can see the coil you can see the little the mechanical switch um the magnetic and this is what does the energy harvesting and then you match it up with a radio because of course the radio has to be designed so it can work at the voltage and the the microjoule capabilities right you can't take too long to wake up you have to wake up instantly sense the data you need to and immediately send it because there is the the data is only available for that few milliseconds after the click um it's not a long-term harvester uh so there's also a data sheet about this so you can you can get the individual modules um and then you know what's what is interesting is you probably have seen this we actually had one of these hu taps um so you remember it was a kind of like you had to press the button and you it would click and then it would turn on the lights so this was kind of a brilliant idea because the phillips hue is a uh zig zig be wireless um led lighting system and so having a wire switch didn't make a lot of sense and also like why have batteries that you have to maintain and manage when you don't have to you it's okay to have the feeling of oh i'm clicking something to to turn on off the lights so it did make it into you know popular industry um they have a bunch of different modules like i said 800 uh say 168 900 uh they also have bluetooth 2.4 gigahertz which is kind of cool they have zig be um all the individual radio pieces uh you know you can mix and match to to make it work with your existing system although i think the best efficiency you're going to get is when you use your own radios of course um and they've also expanded to not only have uh piezoelectric no piezoelectric magneto electric uh kinetic energy harvesting also solar solar is of course going to be a little different because you know you you put it under a fluorescent light you know an office or something and it you know slowly slowly slowly charges up a little uh you know super cap or built-in um lithium coin cell until it gets to a certain amount and then uh it can then burst data out this one of course you know may take longer for it to um charge up but it can be repetitive you know something that sends data once a day and again there's no maintenance you can put anywhere you want as long as there's some light it works basically the way a solar calculator does and there's a couple modules for that as well there are things like a humidity and temperature sensor and of course the built-in radios um they also have like a really funny youtube video that's three hours long where this guy and he like kills like three hours he wants to say like hey normally if you have to install a wired switch and you have to pull the wiring through the wall it takes three hours and 20 minutes so for three hours and 20 minutes he's just on this youtube video anyways uh check it out dribble onto the key and it is in stock yeah i thought i would just show it really fast i did pick one up do you want to uh go to the room yeah i'll just quickly show off what they call the unboxing and see how yeah i mean i i kind of unboxed already you get the the manual you get a usb cable um so this is the control board so this is the receiver which you would usb power um and it's what would get the data in so you can um this is not what this is not the wirelessly charged part this is the receiver that would be part of your like your data harvesting setup or your you know hue bulb controller and then um this is the solar panel yep with uh you can sort of see this the solar cells um little battery um and this is a a microcontroller um an antenna and then um the fun part is yeah so this is the um mechanical switch so you know as you as you click it it is uh generating a little bit of current and what's interesting about this is it's actually designed to not require soldering so um i removed this from the back of you know this was uh radio is attached on so there's these touch points and if you look carefully you can see there's these little gold pads where this would just clip in and so you know if necessary you can replace this part um and then this is the clicky switch also this is basically the same thing inside of here but it has a nice two-way switch up or down so you can have two options and then here's another radio receiver so you can use their radio network and use their software to you know detect basically when you've you've pressed the switch up and down so i think it's interesting you know this is this is you know you want to do energy harvesting it's totally a pain um because there's so much tuning like i remember like you know talking to people who are trying to do this kind of thing on their own and it was basically like you spend all of your time tuning an inductor and the coil and trying to get it to like work exactly right and then the amount of it's hard to measure because as you measure it it's not reliable unless you use something like this yeah it's basically like they really figured this out so if you want to do energy harvesting um or kinetic powered electronics like just get their module and you plug it in and like you're ready to go okay we have a video hi i'm waltsis against the CEO of an ocean we are the world leader in energy harvesting wireless technology what got me hooked to this company is this little device called mechanical energy harvester by pressing this switch we generate enough energy to send the wireless signal now let me show you what our customers have built from this technology this is an example of philips is a switch that can turn off a lamp an led lamp and generate different scenes different colors another example is what's called the water sensor this sensor functions on the base of the same technology in the back you'll see some letter rings that will expand when in water and press effectively the same device to send a wireless signal turn off the valve and prevent more water damage other sources of energy that we use are light like in the example of this window contact that senses whether a window is open or closed another alternative that we use is temperature like in this heating valve this an ocean enabled heating valve uses the temperature differences in its own radiator to adjust the temperature based on the control system it's connected to also no wires no batteries now i got hooked to this company by this device the mechanical energy harvester i'm curious what can get you hooked to an ocean to our technology and what products you can think of using no wires and no batteries okay before we do new products code is gas sensor you'll figure out why in just a moment let's uh just the new products all right first up sticking to engineering okay by request somebody emailed in and said could you guys make some sort of like passive hub for stem and qt that's very small that's like the size of your standard stem and qt size and i had a good idea it's we made one so this is a board that does pretty much exactly what it sounds like there are seven vertical ports to make you know so there's you can have more than two because usually they go at the sides there's an on led to tell you that it's powered but basically all the scl sda's powers and grounds are connected together so this doesn't do like i squared c address renumbering or sharing i mean everything still has to be on a separate address but if you don't want to chain your i squared c if you want to like have it being a star formation which one it will reduce the capacitance of your line which means you can run a little bit faster but also maybe has more elegant wiring um then this uh board will do it also has breakouts if you want to use it with a breadboard but it's designed to be used uh solderless and i can i can just show real fast this is the uh this is just the demo again you don't have to plug in five things but ideally you know you would have your controller and then now you can have five boards you can see each one is getting power and then this has a power led as well so you know that it's working just a handy you know a couple bucks for the wiring simplicity some people were asking for it it's got mounting holes and we made it the same size as like you know 90 percent of our boards are one inch by 0.7 inch so you see it if you have like mounting holes in that location uh this will fit just fine okay passive hub next up uh we now have the yellow seven segment ht 16k 33 uh fully assembled uh it's come with stem and qt ports for a bit but you still have to solder it together and now we sell it pre-soldered so uh even less work you just plug and play that on the overhead you can still use it with a breadboard if you like like our original version um but uh we've been stemming qt fying uh as many boards as possible so uh you know plugged in here um and you see you just uh you have these vertical ports you can chain them together and since the ports are vertical you can have them end to end if you would like to have gigantic numbers of digits you can have uh with the address select jumpers you can have up to eight of these in a row and they're the same size and mounting holes as before they just have the stem and qt and they now come in eight if we block all ready next up okay next up um so one of the things that we've been doing during the ship shortage is finding alternatives for parts that we can't get some of the parts that we couldn't get for a very long time with the cp 2102 or cp 2104 usb serial converter and we use it in a lot of boards and so this was a little bit of a crisis um but thankfully we got the w ch uh ch 90 102 as an alternative and so this ship is uh pretty much pin compatible with the cp 2102 and cp 2104 it has slightly different behaviors which i'll talk about right now so usb serial converter is really handy because a lot of ports have sorry a lot of computers have usb not rs 232 but just about every microcontroller your esp 32s you're at mega 328s you're 8051s they all have a serial port that's like three volt or five volt um so first up this is a five volt compatible but three volt logic uh you can change the voltage from three to five but i'd say keep it on three and then um you can always input five volts and it will be fine with it it does have uh control lines and dtr dcd ring dsr rts cts you know all those popular ones which means you can use it to upload to arduinos and esp 32s if you connect the rts and dtr pins you do need to have a driver um the driver is not built into operating systems of the linux for for mac and windows we have a guide that shows you how to install the driver it is less expensive than the cp 2102s or the ft di chip so there's that a lot of people are starting to use this for just not just because availability but for cost savings bomb savings um one or two things i do want to mention because they tripped me up one is the tx led does not blink continuously when you're using it uh usually the rx led does but the tx led like will only turn on every five seconds for a second or two it's a little bit unusual it does work but you have to be like constantly sending data for the tx led to work whereas the ox led seems to just kind of like work as is um second in linux and only in linux the cts pin does not work with the default driver in the product page i link to an out of tree linux kernel driver which you can compile and install uh that will add cts support i verified it on a raspberry pi so the out of tree driver does work and hopefully it'll get worked into mainline kernel eventually but it's only cts pin all the other pins work fine i don't know why that pin was the one that just sort of got not tested for some reason with the driver um other than that you know it's very fast it's very reliable i've used it for uploading code to esp's to arduino's to all sorts of chips and it works great so as long as you don't care too much about those leds and you don't care about the cts pin on linux this is a very good replacement an option for the cp210x series all right next up the starter show tonight besides you lay data our community our staff all of our customers and more is not this it's the it's not this that's right i asked you to put this in for reason a lot of people like to use the ccs a11 it was a very popular air quality sensor from sciosense ams and it was discontinued over the covid break it was revised a couple times and discontinued very sad however it was replaced uh the ccs a11 is now known as the ens 160 it is a greatly improved sensor it still does effective co2 it does total volatile organic compounds it also has air quality it has inside of it four individual box sensors and it kind of uses the combination of them to do the algorithmic stuff what's really nice is you don't need any weird firmware binary blobs it does emit the data over i squared c like as just very easily so i was able to port this to python and circuit python um one thing i'll note is it has both i squared c and spi interface however uh the sciosense arduino library and the circuit python library does not support spi at this time um i'm sure it does work but we and we test all the pins but only i squared c is in the interface is used uh right now we might eventually add spi as well later i will now drop something that's right and now i can we can confirm gravity is still working here all right so uh here you go here's just a quick demo what is that another nice thing about this sensor is that um you can calibrate it with temperature and humidity so um these sensors are affected by temperature humidity because the the ox the wetness the dampness of the humidity um will land on the mock sensors and change the resistance um which means that as the humidity rises it'll think that there is more organic compounds or there will think there's more uh co2 however you can if you have a separate temperature humidity sensor um there's functions that you can tell it here's what the um humidity and temperature is in in the area and it will use that to calibrate and and fix the output you know basically you know like most mock sensors um they're not calibrated so you know it is effective co2 it's my true co2 sensor it's a basic air quality indicator um it does a fairly good job of detecting alcohols and stuff um but you know you're not going to compare with a 60 co2 sensor so just be aware of that said for the price which is about 20 bucks it's a very nice sensor and it's a nice upgrade to the ccs 11 and for everyday indoor air quality measurements it does a very good job yeah probably not a bad idea to have these around so bring a nice little sensor and that's new products for this week all right don't forget the code is guess sensor because we just showed a guess sensor that's how you know um we're going to answer some questions um because we had a bunch of stuff to show this week so go to eatafruit.at slash discord join us all even if we're not around we're not broadcasting live uh we're usually around and so as our team ask your questions there hang out and more let's uh answer some questions I have some lined up let's hit me hit let's hit it okay all right so the first one is if the sam d09 were available would it be possible to make our own board featuring the c-soft firmware totally if you can get the sam d09 or sam d10 which unfortunately is very hard to get which is why you'll see that I've made a new version of the c-soft firmware for the 80 tiny 816 806 series of chips um so it's under like it's there's c-soft another c-soft firmware there's another library that compiles under Arduino which you should be able to port to uh more available chips the 80 tiny 816 seems to be somewhat available these days all right penguin which was shown on ask an engineer which is part of the 80 fruit live series of shows so you can put papyrus on your boards um what is pillow because that pillow is the um the python imaging library that's the pill and it was I think pillow actually got discontinued it got replaced with pillow which is like another version but basically that's the thing that can take the font make a canvas out of it and then rasterize it okay um a couple folks commented on how they are able to use our schematic pcb layout and eagle cad um and they design their own uh board and key cad yeah so that's why we put everything up there because that's what people are doing so as someone said in the uh the chat you know don't listen to the the haters that are trying to get you not to use the tools that you like to use if you can use an all open source tool train gary but it's not required to do open source hardware that's one of the cool things about it because you might use a mac you might use windows you might use some commercial tools you might you might do a lot I was kind of job where their first day of work you installed gen 2 yeah and it was cool but like I kind of just got to work instead and you know the just a little bit of history so way way way back in the day um lemur and I and windell from evil med scientist laboratories we were doing a bunch of community outreach to eagle cad um when they were called like eagle soft or something yeah yeah it was cat it was cat soft it was cat soft it was before they were acquired and we spent a lot of time convincing them for an xml export and they did it and we wanted to kind of future proof these tools and now that's one of the ways that all the file format goes there and you know it's funny sort of is uh when when people say oh you know you're you can only use open cat or or key cat when meanwhile one of the things that would be great is an open file format for everyone that's one of the things that we we really wanted for everyone and we were able to do it so that I think that's the approach and then over time more and more people can use open tools and more and more tools become open um I feel like you have to participate in some way to bring more people together instead of just shouting it at one another so anyways um clock a little history maker history some of us 10 years ago now um what's the difference between a continuous wave and a pulsed laser diode I don't know I didn't do very well in my laser class but um I do know laser cutters use a pulsed laser they make little holes um maybe it reduces the risk of fire I don't know okay uh not a question but I want Phil know I'm going to be forcing some friends who lost a wager to watch hackers good good uh next please expand on the step the switch project I'm sorry please expand on this step switch project you're working on where you're thinking about using the rolling font step switch breakout for one switch or more oh just for one just make it web more friendly okay dullest tiny question should all shop pages have a no rating available uh Google Google customer reviews overlay on the bottom right I wonder if it's because I'm in the UK yeah the UK might actually have different rules that it might block so in the US it says Adafruit has 4.9 stars but um with the way Google has to operate different in different countries they may not have um the ratings available but anyways um nothing we can do about that yeah uh saying thank you for all the Adafruit does for Circle Python just finish up a reflow soldering hot plate all code in Circle Python oh thanks Brad hey uh yeah bradding bradding braddling drop us a note if you take some photos or whatever and let us know we'll feature in a newsletter you can email pt at Adafruit.com Brad sweet and we'll feature it thanks for letting us know that's why we do this stuff one of the cool things about Python and then Circle Python and then Adafruit stuff when you combine all this thing all these things together you can make things that make things anything soon you'll be able to use a pico w and have it be wi-fi controlled it's probably not a good idea don't be able to cross the internet turning on your hot plate all right um also you know if you're making something like that come on the show until next week Wednesday at 7 30 i'd love to see it um i think we are almost answered all the questions oh bradding is going to be on the next Circle Python show okay great like see by the way all you have to do is make something with Circle Python and you're gonna be on a show you're gonna be in a newsletter you're gonna be able to have so so just to you know remind everyone well just to remind everyone it is code plus code plus community we're not going to change the logo well maybe we will because we got this cool font now but anyways um that's why we do this that was cool all right uh is there any way to get a Trinket M0 to act as a i2c uh with Circle Python i need 10 to talk don't want to you see teaching some students oh do you want to ask it as a peripheral um so the Trinket M0 i think we don't i don't think it has enough space to add the i2c peripheral support however i do know the rp2040 does so if you don't mind switching boards to use the rp2040 like the qt pi rp2040 or the kb2040 which we gave away free with some orders um it's about the same price and that one does have i2c peripheral support somebody did add it i remember seeing the poor request yeah okay and you got through the questions good work lady all right everybody that is our show for tonight don't forget the code is a gas sensor i think dakara is back and behind the scenes in our slag hey look back i'm trying to find time to hang out with dakara because i have i have some important things to chat about to say hi um so i do are and uh let me just make sure because excuse me yeah yes i think dakara is in the chat so i'm gonna say hi to dakara a bit um so uh that's our show for tonight this has been an ate a fruit production we'll see everybody next week thank you so much everyone for spending time with us we very much enjoy being with you thanks for making this one of the nice corners on the internet where we can all come together show and share things i think world needs a little bit of that not gonna wait for it to happen get to just do it here and we're gonna do it ourselves and we're gonna make things that help people make things and keep doing it and use papyrus and uh we're gonna use fonts that some folks aren't gonna like sometimes or typefaces and we're gonna mix up fonts and typefaces too which one are we talking about clads and stripes polka dots all these things uh we'll see everybody later here is your moment of zener