 It's ask an engineer. Hey everybody. Welcome to ask engineer. You're getting sleepy. No, sorry. You're getting engineering You're getting engineering We're here at the Adafruit factory in downtown Manhattan. There's a thunderstorm Slash hurricane slash tornado going on so power and internet might go out. We'll just we'll just be chill everybody We'll try our best to get back online. We'll see but it's outside of our control mother nature is is punishing us She's trying to tell us something maybe mr. Lady. It was with me Do the best we can stay and dry. They also might be water dripping, but you know, it's cool We got an exciting show for you about one hour of all the latest news in Python hardware electronics keyboards and more We're gonna be here till about nine o'clock and Let's just get right into it. Okay on tonight's show. The code is proximity I'll tell you why later in the show, but it's 10% off in the Adafruit store all the way up to Probably 1159 p.m. Eastern Time But sometimes I turn off the code a little bit earlier. So use the code on check out 10% off anything in stock Tonight only Talk about our Adafruit live series shows including show and tell that some time travel around the world maker attackers artists engineers news and more Some main New York City factory footage some 3d printing I on NPI brought to you by Digi key and Adafruit We got some new products. We got top secret We'll answer your questions. We do that on a discord adafruit. It a slash discord join all 30,000 of us All that and more on you guessed it Ask an engineer. Mm-hmm. Okay. Well, let's do a couple things pay the bills first Yes, and then I'll jump into some of the topics of the night. So don't forget our activity and also Before you check out today tomorrow or the next day. It's a holiday on Monday. And so It's Labor Day here in the US September 6th. So we will not be shipping things until Tuesday and it'll might Be a little slow on Tuesday getting all the stuff out the door So just keep that in mind when you place an order will put banners on the site and In the outbound emails when you place an order, but just please keep it in mind And if you're off on Monday, please stay safe While you're adding stuff to your cart though you get free things Yes, only when you order from Adafruit We give you freebies nine nine dollars and more you get a free promo proto half-size breadboard great for taking your Projects off of a breadboard and making them permanent and nice and solid. I loved using something like this in school I wish I'd had this exact design. This is exactly what I would have loved So I designed it and we're giving it away to you 149 or more you get a free stem a QT board We have a range of you know 20 each different boards We'll give you a different one each time if you make an account These plug-in-place sensors and devices are awesome and easy to use and so many boards now are coming with stemma and QT Connectors and quick connectors. So, you know, this can be a solderless way to extend your projects. Just super awesome UPS ground shipping comes free when you order a 199 or more of stuff That's Continental United States ground shipping. We love it because it's insured and tracking and it's reliable And there's a friendly delivery person that brings your package 299 or more you get a free circuit playground express or all-in-one development board. It's round. It features a samd 21 It's got LEDs and buttons and sensors and more Capacitive touch easy use with Arduino circuit python code.org CS discoveries make code microlisp and more Okay Before we talk about our live shows One saw a question I can just answer quickly because they heard the rain everything they want to know Where's Adafruit in our building? So we have multiple floors. Yes so If there's on the ground floor, yeah, we're not on the ground floor and so if we have Any really bad weather? Not all floors We're gonna get we flood from the top bottom. Yeah, what are you gonna do? It's okay? It's an older building. We're in New York. I mean not as old as buildings in Europe, but for New York It's fairly old. Yeah, okay. Let's talk about some more shows. We have a bunch of live shows that we do each week We just finished show-and-tell really neat show-and-tell this week air quality is check it out I think that was that we get some whippersnapper demos to yeah mark showed Marks on the whippersnapper beta if you ever want to be on the beta folks. Let us know In the IO chat and discord. It's a no-code solution. And yes, we've made it too easy to do internet of things It's our fault. I'm so sorry But there's a lot of annoying websites out there that you can go visit later Yeah, our thing will be too easy other ones They're making it too hard. Yeah Sunday desk of Lady Aida That was me part one. Okay, so I talked about Remapping LEDs and pixels. This is just one of those things That you got to do when you're an engineer you'll have like a grid or circles or some you'll have some elements And you have to map those elements To pins or something and there's always like well What's the what's the foolproof easy fast way to do it? And the answer is there isn't you just kind of go through one by one actually Did the mapping for the matrix finished it today? I just sat down. It takes an hour or two and you do it So I talked about that and just some of my trips ticks and tips and tricks and techniques I also showed off this paper shoot camera, which is a like a low-cost DIY camera PCB and show off some photos and picked out some parts that were on The paper shoot including this kind of nice four-way switch, which was the great search item Yeah, we did the thing called great search every single week brought you by digi key and ate a fruit And what we talked about is using Lady Aida's powers of good to find things on the digi key site So this week was the four-way switch. So these are on guitars Yeah, I mean they're used on you know various your things that things that need a lot of selectors But don't have an interface, you know a lot of people to be honest I see a lot of products these days They use a single button or they use a touchscreen switches are actually a little bit or cake. I personally like them I think they're you know, they're reliable and easy to use But it's just you know the difference between spd t dp dt sp3t and 4t I just kind of go through it and give you some options also tell you what to look for For different slide switches. I just I love slide switches. I think they're I think they're just so intuitive Okay, since we talked about IO I thought we can just answer a couple quick questions as we go along trying to intersperse more questions Also folks sometimes they don't believe that anyone would do a live show. It's certainly not for a decade not live a robot. Yeah So is it possible to do a live webcam? Snapshot and then send that over to IO pull it down to mag tag or an LED. Yeah, we have we actually have a ESP 32 s2 circuit python webcam demo. We have a couple webcam demos to IO I mean, it's not going to be very fast because IO is rate-limited Part of the deal is we make it free, but we don't let you kind of just like blast data to it So it's not a webcam server But you can take photos and especially if you want photos to be taken based off of a sensor or some event That would cause a photo for sure. Okay. All right next up. So other live shows we do we have JP's product pick of the week Every single week. This is also Something that's remarkable strange unique interesting We do a live broadcast from inside of a product page and we have discounts massive discounts So this week's product pick of the week take away JP It's power boost The power boost 1000 C it is a boost that takes your batteries from three point seven up to about five point two volts and it's a charger now power raspberry pi 4 I'm gonna go ahead and run my Little battery through the power boost through this USB cable into the C Port there you can see it's it started booting up. Obviously, you're not gonna run this for very long on this little battery I would guess an hour or something on this little battery But you could go up to a big Chonker donker like that right there. This is the Lucio blaster running that exact power boost 1000 C Integrated a little charging port here into the side then I have the enable grounded right now if I flip this switch It will turn on and supply power and All of that is being powered by our power boost the power boost 1000 C all right, and JP's workshop is Coming up on Thursday, and we also do a segment but While we're here again. I'm trying to spark a little more. Yes So someone was asking because we're JP's gonna be doing it a tricky Segment on a show soon. Yes. Is there a board that you could plug all the trinkets into yes It's called the USB hub. Ah, and so that's a fun thing that you could do. There's probably some really neat hubs I kind of feel like in the keyboard world There's you know the artisanal looking keyboards I maybe one day it'll be like a hub thing where people will well There isn't there a crowd supply like a circuit Python hub. I think yeah, there is like a smart hub Yeah, yeah check it out. No, I mean one. That's like it's Everyone designs all the different covers Yeah, yeah, like customers. Yeah, I could see that yeah, and then you plug in all your trinkets. So We'll have a future segment on there, and it'll probably be part of the circuit Python parsec, which was Also on the shows this week take it away JP for this week's highlight For the circuit Python parsec today I want to show how you can create a color helper module What is this all about? Well when I'm using Neopixels I have certain colors that I like to use a lot I want to reuse these colors and rather than just copy and paste them from some document into my code What I've done here is created a separate file. It's a separate module and you can see it right here it's just called JP colors dot pi and In this I have defined a bunch of colors that I like to use so red green blue You'll notice you'll also see here I've got this amber color that I really like to use a lot and it's not one that I typically remember Hey, what exactly is amber? What's a good formula for that? So once you've tuned those and dialed those in once you can save those variables in a class here And this class I've created is called color. I've defined a bunch of color values And then I save this as a separate module file on my circuit Python device Then you'll see inside of my code dot pi when I want to use that. I'm simply importing it Right here from JP colors import colors that imports that class from that module file then Whenever I want to use colors. I can just simply call them by name down here So I'm I've created this little function called chase that creates these nice little chase effects And the only input that I have to that is what color chase are we going to do? So if I want to use my amber color, then I say chase color dot amber And the rest is taken care of for me. So I have cyan magenta red black and white And so that is a really simple way that you can create some variables that you want to reuse All over the place in a separate file and that is how you can create a color helper module inside of circuit python And that is your circuit python parsec All right, and don't forget on Fridays Deep dive, it's got I think Scott's gonna be working on some really neat raspberry pi stuff and circuit python and bluetooth. Oh, yeah Maybe check that out time travel. Let's look around and the world makers hackers artists engineers. Okay. What is the news? Well news. I just want to shout out. Hey, Jorvin Jorvin in our chat. Oh, nice. Yeah Hello, we just wish Jorvin a happy birthday not too long. Happy birthday. Well, it was a little while ago And I'm just like, hey, here's some happy birthday to you some robot companions. Anyways, we're about birthday So philby did a really neat video this week. This is part of the vintage computing Yeah, I can't make it a vintage computer fast because we're not going to be doing indoor stuff But this is just why why should we when Because it's a little video each week another item from the vintage box. It's a philips vg 8010 computer Which if you've never heard of that's okay. I'll explain before IBM clones became really ubiquitous There were dozens of incompatible computers and if you bought into one ecosystem, you were shut out of everything else msx was an early standardized home computer architecture software that ran on one machine would generally run on all the others Functionally it was mostly ram and number of cartridge slots that distinguished them since these machines were all largely the same Companies relied on industrial design to set themselves apart and some of these are really amazing msx was popular in japan brazil and much of europe only two models were even sort of sold here So being from the u.s. I have no particular nostalgia for this machine. I just think it looks so cool I mean just look at this keyboard. They really leaned into this 80s squared-off aesthetic It's like the 80s mall food quarter the volvo station wagon of computers. We got to bring this look back Who's with me? Okay, and I have a reminder for a reminder Remind me to mention that eight of boxes almost already full again before we even ship in october We will run out halloween's our most popular box. Yeah, and uh, don't you want to join the cool Unboxing with jp. Yeah, so last year. I thought that maybe people wouldn't do as many subscription services because there was lockdowns Or there's other things because like maybe money would be tight Yeah, but I feel like people are trying to get the most value out of A gift or something they do and eight of boxes. It's fun. It's yeah, it's guaranteed success So more people subscribed in fact the last eight of box was the most we've ever shipped and this one will probably top that as well So go to box calm and consider doing it Because we will run out and there's also a global chip shortage supply So this is the for sure way to get some really good new eight of fruit hardware Okay, colin's lab notes every monday tuesday thursday friday We have miniature versions of colin's lab And uh, i'm gonna play i'm gonna play the one That went out. I think yesterday. So take it away. They're all good. Check them out on the tiktoks of twitter the instagrams Wherever you can view one minute long videos. We post them there. Yeah The voltage divider is one of the fundamental circuits used in electronics You'll find it used again and again in schematics once you know to look for it In its most common form the resistive divider Two resistors are connected in series between a voltage source and ground to create a reference voltage The relationship between these resistor values determines that reference voltage available at the node between them We can use this simple equation to determine that voltage So with a 5 volt supply voltage a first resistor value of 10 k ohms and a second value of 20 k ohms The voltage available between the resistors should be about 3.33 volts and so it is Thanks again math Okay, other bits of time traveling our latest eight fruit internet. I think it's monthly newsletter went out So we have a bunch of newsletters We do not spam people We don't harvest email addresses. We never use it for anything else It's actually really even hard to sign up for our nice letters because they're on another website Called a different daily dot com because we didn't want anyone to think their store account was ever connected To newsletter different servers anyways So check out the latest one and uh for the folks that were curious about our uh new no-code iot Feature I guess it's a feature within io. It's it's no it's a service. It's a thing. Yeah a new element new new capability You could check that out. But basically you get a beta invite. You can get a beta invite anyone do it and um We call it whippersnapper. So you could check out all the latest Uh iot projects that have nothing to do with ater fruit and then um some of the things that we're doing in the world of iot And more it's one of our popular newsletters and speaking of popular newsletters It's time for python on hardware. Yay, blinca. What's new in python on hardware? Glad you asked so um let's go over to the newsletter. Okay, so scott was on the Real python the real python podcast and this was building with circuit python and constraints of python for microcontrollers and uh tune in I'm gonna talk about linux and a second. We're good to that and um a little bit of a congratulations 150 issues all together. We've done this That's so cool. Yeah, we have almost like 10,000 subscribers, right? That's like 9,000. Yeah, we're crossing the 9,000 mark I think it's the most popular python on hardware newsletter out there It's for sure and it's free and there's no ads and we try to always put good stuff in it I I send stuff that I see there's stuff that makes it to the blog and some stuff that actually does it that i'm like This is the kind of for the newsletter not the blog. So this is a um It doesn't replace the blog It's good to have both because there's not there's some overlap but not fully Yeah, um, we have arduino embracing python. That was good to see. We talked about that last week. Yeah, professor john Gallagher, uh, has the circuit python school. This is a full video course for the fall Yeah, that's kind of nice. Um, talk about our Different issues. Oh, I love this mta sign thing. So they they did the thing That's really hard. So by the way anyone who's like how hard can it get could it possibly be to get proper mta data? Actually really fucking hard they use like this crazy protobuf format And it's like it doesn't tell you when the train's coming just what track segment it's like bonkers So they simplified it and they give you an end point that you can use to like get the data you want Which is very nice of them all right, um, you can see uh Some really neat circuit python powered game. So this is You know asteroids like um, but it is a really really really neat. Yes, and we've updated, you know We we've been updating and improving The keyboard stuff, which is going to affect Gaming because now you can catch key presses even if you miss the button press like that. We have a it's kept as an event Okay, so a lot of this more um, and of course there's still a ton and ton of new Bits of hardware that supports python and then there's also a lot going on with what you can do once you have python on hardware lots of keyboard stuff lots of machine learning stuff Lots of led stuff. So this week's topic lady aida that I want to talk about it's in the newsletter is linux turned 30 years old that's right And we have a little bit of a post about it famous. Linus was doing this 30 years ago So I have a two-part question for you um first up Why is linux been so? important i'm not going to say like innovative and i'm not going to say um valuable Because those are words that are normally not associated with like an open source. Uh, yeah, I don't I don't think those are I mean I think those are like, you know, why did it work out the clickbaity? I think, you know linux You know one thing I will say is linux did did not really make to the desktop And I think that's actually okay. I mean it didn't in a sense, you know linux and and bsd Chromebooks, you know, uh, yeah, it's chromebooks and and underlying You know mac os 10 and of course, you know, there's there's uh the windows Subsystem linux that's available in windows 10 now So, you know every operating system that you would use on the desktop does have access to linux or Unix like operating systems underneath. I mean turns out that people just They want more from an operating system. That's fine. I think that Where it's totally one of course is is the servers and embedded Machinery like that. It's it's just totally dominated by and what do you think that is because that's that's the leap I don't see A lot of these like linux 30 years like what do you think it's used for that? I think, you know, there's there's it is free It's easy to develop for but I think the thing that makes it, you know, so powerful is that you can Strip apart. It's very it's very modular in a sense So you can strip it apart and strip it down to run on, you know, very simple hardware But also build it up to build, you know to create Fairly complicated user interfaces. I mean like, you know, you of course still see Blue screens of death. Lots of things are still running windows Because windows is essentially free with a computer but You know one thing that's nice about linux is it can really be customized in a way that of course windows You'll never be able to because with linux you can create, you know, we had a custom distribution that we did You can really customize you can write device drivers. You can do the specialty stuff that is Very hard to do with linux. I mean every sorry hard to do windows or mac With linux, you know the moment you install linux you have access to all the Tools you need to plug into it to extend it and customize it and you see that a lot, you know, a lot of embedded linux Distributions have custom binary blobs. You can argue whether that's good or bad But it is something that you can do, you know, if you want to It's possible for a single individual to port linux to something like the raspberry pi Right, whereas porting Windows to the raspberry pi is just not possible. You know, that's a thing you have to get windows involved They have to get microsoft to sign on to it. You don't have access to that and I think that that's um That customization that ability it's it's such a small It's a thing that not many people need to do but if you want to have hardware that Has an operating system underneath it and you need to have an operating system to do iot stuff now It's very very hard to connect to the internet or to deal with massive amounts of data without why reinvent that Yeah, it's just I mean you can have individual devices that are not linux based But like, you know the people always come to us and they're like, okay You know, I want to have ethernet with ssl. What should I do? I just say like just get a raspberry pi You know if you're if you're if you're just unless you are so power and size constrained Honestly, it's cheaper just to get embedded linux to do what you want because you have access to like All of the tools, you know, you can parse data. You don't have to reinvent everything over and over again So I think that's where from a hardware point of view. That's where I think it's powerful Shout out to bunny who saw this coming with the chumby where he was doing linux on hardware before all of us Yeah, I mean, I love the chumby was amazing. Um, it wasn't the for you know, the pc 104 I think had linux beforehand. It wasn't the first embedded linux board, but it was the first one where the idea was um You know, here here is a development board that has gpio and that has linux and that has just enough Hard work ability to to interface with you can still see our first chumby guide where I was like, oh my god I connected an accelerometer to linux and I could read accelerometer data and then send that over tcpip to something else I don't even know that people were using empty tt at the times. It wasn't like I sent it to Maybe there was people could send it to patch bay or something, but it was it was kind of amazing It was like, okay, we've got hardware and you've got software and you can actually That firmware firmware got eaten by software. It's just you know, I have opinions about Right device drivers part two of my question is so we're the Not the only authors, but we've tried to do something I think pretty important with linux and python and we called it blinka How does that all interact because linux had to happen for this to happen And circuit python had to happen Yeah, I think I think the computers just got fast enough embedded linux computers got fast enough That they can run python and and to me that's really Powerful because you know I've spent I know python isn't perfect with versioning and packaging there. There's flaws with it But it's not nearly as For a lot of simple things. It's not nearly as extraordinarily frustrating as Trying to cross compile C code From driver to from computer to computer especially, you know When you're dealing with stuff like gpio now, we have the gpid but historically you would have to you know memory map stuff To get access to some of this hardware, which just kind of really Made it made it very unportable. And so having a you know, a layer like python made it easy and I kind of you know, I I liked pearl a lot more but You know, we saw python sort of winning the the interpreted language fight and so we're like, okay We're gonna go in on all and on python and you can see my um linux australia talk There's a linux conference australia talk and it goes into this for like 45 minutes of of the evolution of of why I decided to Have a circuit python compatibility layer on linux suffice to say We only really want to have one driver For every I don't like to have you know, four different drivers one for micro python one for c one for sdk one for adrino You know, okay one that's c like and one that's python like and you know, we're done everything else just try to stick to um a standard and so for us Circuit python and blinker was was that standard that we're now 76 different boards and Porting and here's the thing it actually works really well. We get very little support questions for All of the different boards. I mean we get more questions asking to support new boards But for the most part you can pick up any of these devices and then pick up Any of our, you know, iSquared C sensors and plug them in and they will just work Which is like pretty cool Making it easy pretty cool. Okay And that's uh, I want to spend a little time on this because it's part of linux is 30 years Check out the lca time I really maybe someone can post the link because it really like I I spent a lot of time on it and it was I did I think on january 21st or something it was in mid january And uh, because I remember you were you were helping me with the talk and it really goes into People are like, why why did you decide to do this? I explain everything of why you can you can argue with me that I didn't decide Right, but I'll explain to you why I decided and uh while we're in here people are asking about circuit python And ours are third party libraries And yes, we have the community bundle and a bunch of the 50. Yeah a bunch of the contributors Happened to just be in the chat too. So I really look I mean I know a new standard is a standard Which means you have now another standard But really if you're going to write driver code that you want to run On linux, please, please, please write it using our circuit python capitol billy layer We will take care of all the Nonsense of making it work from board to board and even i-squared c you often need a gpio pan for reset Or for address select or for interrupt and and that stuff is not well exposed in linux That's that's the annoying part is each board has a slightly different way of of doing gpio And so we kind of abstracted that away for you and you know, yes, you can use sisyphus, but sometimes sisyphus isn't available You know or that they don't use it or it's very slow Um, so it's like it you know, it's a solution looking for a problem or vice versa I'll put uh one more question in for this. Yeah, uh, is it safe to assume that any circuit python board that's in there now Will be supported forever Probably to some extent. I think that the the sammy might not be physically available The sammy 21s will eventually just not be able to support a lot of the stuff that we do because the chips are just small So I think you know if you're I think the bigger chips, you know, they're gonna last longer It's a little bit like arduino Yeah, we still we still sell the original trinket with the at tiny 85, but I really don't recommend it We tell people don't buy this people do and we tell them do not buy it. It's only for old projects Yeah, but to flip that around it's uh When we do an update with circuit python Hundreds of boards get all updated. Yeah, right away. Okay, and that's python on hardware this week Okay, lady. We have 2,532 guides At learn dot adafruit.com this week on the big board. Okay, I had a bunch of guides go live this week Um, all right, so we had the cnc milled keycaps and the four by four neopixel keypad We're just finishing up some keyboard projects that are working on the cnc milled wooden keycaps is a pretty cool guide because it's a it's a very advanced guide on um on milling and jigging catney got a guide for the new scd 40 and 41 co2 Sensors we've also got And I used to use a scramble pad at work And so she kind of made a diy scramble pad using the macro pad just cool And it controls a solenoid so it's showing how to connect some external hardware How about I show you it working? Oh, yeah, sure. I got it. I think this is the one. Yeah So it scrambles it You type the numbers in and then I believe this is the unlock one or a solenoid. Well, yeah, there it goes. Okay What else you got going on? Um, we've got uh at the corridor wrote a guide For people who are still using dhj 11s and 22s Um, we really want you to stop doing that. Uh, please stop using these sensors. They are Not fun to use. They are very difficult, especially with linux because they require a real-time operating system But even on arduino, um, it kind of sucks, especially when there's a our toss behind the scenes So, uh, please don't use it catney or to guide. Um, we fixed up some audio playback on the rp20 40 with circuit python You can play mp3s Um on the rp20 40 using circuit python So that could be even on something like the pico where you don't have a lot of disk space You can you could put on a mp3 and it can be a you know a minute or too long If it was mono and I think you know 16 kilobit per second not the most amazing quality, but you also Maybe that's all right. So check out that guide if you want some quick code to try it out And from non pager, we got a new prop this week. It's a 3d printed rat catcher controller We saw the suicide squad. You'll have that in the video. Okay, uh, main new york city factory footage ater fruit factory take it away Try it. That's cool Ater fruit factory footage unless there were as uh parts of the the disney building Uh Many floors now driven there or being constructed That's a beam. This is a time lapse and then um, I was uh testing out this black and white camera thing And so I also have something to contribute this week Here's a black and white photo of the outside of the front of ater fruit And then I took this photo right before the show as the rain started coming into new york, you could see And all right 3d printing Time to catch some rats. That's right So we're gonna play these two back to back. The first one is going to be the rat catcher and then the second one is um, this 3d printed uh geordie la forge visor See this here. So see you on the other side Hey, what's up folks in this project? We're making rat catchers communicator from the suicide squad The rat catcher communicator is a device used by the rat catcher to control and manipulate swarms of rats We were inspired by the suicide squad to 3d print the device and light it up with ater fruit circuit playground express Circuit python is great for beginners who are looking to use new pixels in their cosplay projects With the led animation library you can experiment with different effects using our demo code With circuit python, you can quickly make changes and see your project's update in real time on just about any computer The parts are 3d printed using different colors of filament. The various pieces are joined together with some hardware screws The wireframe pieces are 3d printed with a bit of support material With some adjustments to your slide settings. They easily come off with a pair of flat nose pliers The handle has a few details like these knobs that are attached with screws The pommel lines up with the mounting holes and secured in place with additional machine screws This 2200 lipo battery slides into the handle with the power cable facing out We routed a jst extension cable through the stem piece with the excess wiring fitted through the holes in the bottom The mount for the circuit playground is attached to the stem piece with more screws, so it's nice and secured The mounting holes on the circuit playground are lined up with the built-in standoffs insecure in place The two domes are then attached to the stem piece again with more machine screws The wireframe pieces are then fitted through the collar of the stem and secured with another set of screws The handle can then be fitted under the stem with the two mounting holes lined up and secured with you guessed it more machine screws To turn it on just connect the battery cable to the jst extension and that's it We hope this inspires you to use circuit python in your cosplay projects and check out aether fruit circuit playground express And share your projects with us on aether fruits weekly show and tell and don't forget 3d hang out No pager every single wednesday at 11 a.m video. Are you ready? Yes It's time for high on api. That's right. Not an api brought to you by digikey and aether fruit. Thank you digikey this week On api is conductive containers What is it? What are they? What is this? Okay conductive containers? I think I want this you do well They're very nice packaging for electronic we talk a lot about you know components and PCBs and soldering processes But um, you also have to take your boards and you have to store them or you have to ship them Whether because you're shipping boards to a customer or a subcontract or to your packaging location And um, you know, I've seen the packaging that uh, cci sells but I kind of didn't think that I would want to buy it and obviously you want to buy it right because you want to You you like many other manufacturers or makers need to ship around hardware and they make a nice series of Boxes they make two types that we're going to cover here. One's called like the pillow stat and these are um, esd Cardboard esd coated cardboard with esd foam in two layers that kind of fold over each other And that's the the one I've got here and then they've also got um The core stats, uh, which is the corrugated Like pink foam and these I've definitely seen I've had like, you know vga cards or whatever shipped in this These are just larger. They have the corrugated foam. So they're they're better for and the foam is softer These are better for like large PCBs and end designs that you want to sell and of course You know you could put the boards inside of an anti-stat bag inside of here But it is kind of nice because it's it's all anti-stat the whole thing. It's from like top to bottom nose to tail anti-stat And another thing that's really nice about these packages is that um, they come in multiple off-the-shelf sizes now You know, you can uh, absolutely, you know contact this company and get custom sizes And if you're doing something with a hundred thousand or ten thousand pieces, you know, I think they're in michigan And I'm sure they'd be happy to quote you and make it But chances are you can use one of the off-the-shelf sizes. Um, they have quite a few uh, here are pardon me, they have uh The this is the Pardon me, um, they have the corrugated pack sizes and you can see it's like seven by five and four by four And ten by ten so multiple different sizes available off the shelf The new thing for this week is the the pillow stack which are these, um thinner They're they're kind of component boxes. You can use them for pcbs. I thought maybe you'd show that on the overhead real fast how they come so It's all black, but you'll you can you can just deal with that Comes in eight or free black Okay, um, so they come, uh, you know flat Like this, um You know packaged so, you know, you can you can buy large quantities of them and they come flat and then you fold them up When you get them, um, and here for example, I have a trinket and then this is, uh, you know, a very nice soft foam Layer, um that can kind of cradle if you have parts on the bottom They won't get crushed and then you fold over this foam and then Yeah, you can probably even turn on the light. Turn on the light. Yeah, it's a little bit nicer. Uh Yes, you can see the foam so you have the foam and then you cover it with foam So now it has anti-stat foam on both sides and then you fold both pieces over and then on the top you've got, uh, The esd warning and you you can tape it closed if you want and I've gotten parts, you know closed I've got chips and lcds and stuff in this This packaging before and then, you know, the core stat, which is the pink foam is is larger I neglected to get one of those but um, you've probably seen harder that you've received come in it And what's nice is that you don't need to have You know an anti-stat and then anti-stat bubble and then like an anti-stat box. It's kind of like all in one It's it's very compact and effective and it's very fast Um, especially if you can just get the um off the shelf stuff. All right, and then you have this other Uh, oh, this is just all the options for the course. This is the core stat And this is the pillow stat the pillow stats kind of for thinner stuff and the core stats for larger stuff Um, and while you're at it, you know, we do uh, they do have other really cool stuff at cci Which I recommend you check out and did you keep carry some of them? Um, this is a really nice esd like all folded cardboard box with a little handle They also have reel storage, which we use here Actually, uh, you'll feel can look and see that we have all all this core stat That's used to hold our reels here at the aid of food factory Um, it's really durable. It looks great at last for a very long time Even though it's just, you know wax coated or whatever coated cardboard Um, we've we've used a lot of uh, cci stuff to do our esd handling in house You know, it's it's I've heard from manufacturers are like, oh, you know, I skipped an esd step And actually that's what was killing 10 percent of my boards. It's a super shame You know if you go to all the effort to do some manufacturing and then, you know Somebody who's a little bit Dried out and and staticky and wearing wool Zaps your hardware. So that's why I recommend packaging it in esd safe Um all your pcbs and esd safe materials and we do that here at aid of fruit and uh, now we have another option from cci All right available from digikey And you can check out the short reel here or the part number you can search for it by its name or 207 9308 and there's a whole series. I picked I picked one box I think this is the box that I've got here, but um They have a bunch of different sizes. So don't uh, and we dug up They have a video channel and we have a video so we're gonna play it's about a minute or so We're gonna play the video Correct pack shippers made with core stat conductive corrugated the outer box provides for the fair day cage You open up the containers the containers has foam laminated to the top Loose in the bottom the foam construction is convoluted where it has fingers and a base If you put a board down in there the foam on top comes down and encapsulates the board By the fingers up here matching the base here and it surrounds the product So you don't have any movement once it's inserted into the box Box is a front lock mailer So the tabs lock in place just like that has all the appropriate symbols on it for usd This version is a pink Uh, non-permanent solution. So this would be a one-way shipper You can upgrade the box to a black permanently dissipate a foam again convoluted. So it's universal You could also Change out the mailer portion of it to conductive fluted plastic which adds a little more rigidity and Longevity to the to the box correct pack shippers This week's iNMPI. Thanks first time iNMPI Oh, kidoki lady eight uh before we do new products Proximity's code. Yes Okay, we're ready for the new new new new. Let's do All right. Okay. It's time for new first. All right. So we got some ma keycaps Um, we've carried dsa keycaps or xda keycaps But do you do all the colors right now? Yeah, so we have white. We have cream white Actually, it's on the overhead too. We've got red Kind of like a nice cherry red. We've got this kind of cyan blue light blue color Keep going the gumdrop deliciousness blue blue blue. We've got like an orange a deep orange Dbl orange. We've got like a cream sickle Nice orangey yellowish color. Yeah, and we've got a blink of purple A lot and we've got a kind of a pastel pink lots of colors So, um, oh so many colors. Um, okay, so you go to the overhead and I can show somebody's all So all these different colors available kind of a mint green Okay, um, so each one of these is mx compatible It's got that cross at the bottom. So you know It's a mx so you can use with cherry mx's you can use this with gateron kales or whatever As long as they have that kind of standard Cross at the bottom All the buttons are totally symmetric and you know what I like about them They have this kind of this cool like they're square at the bottom And then they kind of come up to this almost circular shape It's got a little bit. I don't know. I kind of feel like it's got this little 60s 70s kind of feel to it It's a little bit more old school They're chunky But I like these key caps. I think the colors are really good Like this purple it's not like a bright purple. It's it's kind of a nice chill purple And the the mint green is also quite nice So because they're symmetric, you know, you can put them either way I'll say of course they come blank as you can see you get five per and they don't have any writing on them You can write on them. You can also attach a sticker or you can do some sort of You know embossing if you like I don't think you should laser these because they're probably made with a pvc And so they're not going to laser very nicely I'd recommend a sticker or just you can draw on them or just leave them like as is But so these are called m a Profile so just keep that in mind. They're they're much taller than dsa or xda profile. Okay Next up lady that is Okay, uh next up. We've got the WAC Laura hat Pi four enclosure. This is just the enclosure That you would fit a pi four into again, you know the pi four switched around the ethernet and usb and the two hdmi So if you want to use the WAC wireless Laura hat, which looks like it just looks kind of like a square. So I'll show it on the overhead in a little bit Um, you would use this case this case. It's a very nice Case with anodized aluminum and it's got all the slots and holes to use the Laura hat, so let me Let me show it and it's it's not attached inside of it, but then maybe y'all can Understand what I'm going for here. Okay I've got these key caps still hanging out So this is the pi four and you can see it's bolted to the bottom and it's got it was a nice. It's a nice case and then Over here you see all These holes and slots. Well, if you attach the Hat this is the laura concentrator hat. So this allows you to make a Laura gateway an eight channel laura gateway with a raspberry pi These holes let you mount all the antenna ports onto it So, you know this this, you know, you don't have to use it with the laura hat But like it's kind of designed for it. It sort of makes the most sense So I do recommend it. Um, and of course we also have a kit You can go to the kit next and the kit gets you the case the hat and a power supply and You would basically just add in a pi four the reason why the pi four isn't included Whereas before we were trying to include a pi is there's four different kinds of raspberry pi four With one two four and eight gigabyte of memory and You know, some people might want more or they might want less We don't want to assume so instead, you know, you just add on the pi four. We have them in the shop to make your Laura gateway and then once you've had this gateway, you know, of course use the pi four as a laura to internet gateway You can then add other sensors that have laura radios to send data to the concentrator Which then uploads it to the internet and now you've got your mesh network good for you. Okay next up Next up from solder party. Uh, if you have a pi pico and you're like, I want to use the Um keyboard feather wing from solder party and you don't want to use it with the feather You want to use it with pico this little couple dollar board Is a little adaptive thing comes with some header and you just sort of solder it in place with the attached header And here you go. All the pins are rerouted. You could also use this for like generic feather wings, by the way You don't have to use it for just the Uh keyboard feather wing, but like boy, it's designed exactly for and it's got the mounting holes and everything ready to go Okay, and uh, this isn't the start of the show, but it's it's it's up there because we have uh Trinky word debuting but I wanted to give this one special attention. This is the digikey key Yes, this was featured in eight a box 19 uh, we you know, we found a supplier that would make us these custom keycaps and we're just like so in love with them So digikey logo looks awesome as a keycap And these are the ones that we have a couple left over from the you know, the eight a box You always get extras in case we have to do replacements Um, we have a couple extra digikeys, of course stocking this and we're stocking it Um, if you have a keyboard, um, this is you know, cherry and mechs compatible like almost every key we have Um, it has this glow through design. So if you have an rgb keyboard or backlit keyboard, of course, it's going to look extra good But also looks good without um with a cool modernized digikey logo So check it out on the digikey site or at adafruit and uh, you can pair it up with our other Cool custom keycaps including the adafruit one and all right. Here we go world premiere More trinkets star of the product started star of the show this week for the products besides you lady ada Yes, our team Our staff our customers a new trinkie. There's trinkies. This one is the proximity trinkie. Yeah So the proximity trinkie, um, it's kind of the last trinkie of my first batch I mean, we'll do more trinkies, but this was the first kind of batch of trinkies I put together Um, this uh trinkie it features a samd 21. Uh, it's a very low cost and small microcontroller board Plugs into usba and it features Compassive touch some new pixels and as jellies Elegant waving shows you it has a proximity sensor as well. It has an ap ds 9 9 6 0 One of our favorite sensors. It's a low cost. It's only like a dollar or so and it has color proximity light and Even gesture gesture sensor. Honestly, I don't think it's nothing we're at home about but it does have it But it's really good at proximity and color and light. This is what it's it's excellent for Has built-in IR leds and detectors and then You know, you can see how the color light does not interfere interfere with the IR light, which is kind of nice So you can have both these neopixels shining as well as The proximity the IR light coming off of the proximity sensor To let you do distance sensing and I thought this would be cool because you can plug into your computer And then, you know, you can have this new interface That most computers don't have, you know, you can have a mouse and keyboard and sometimes there's a capacitive touch but you rarely have, you know a Proximity sensing element. We saw that like cano made a sensor like this, but I think you got discontinued So we thought it would be make for a great trinky. So I thought I'd show a quick demo On the overhead it could control a volume knob A volume slider you can do hid and midi or you know have it You know, you can run arduino or circuit python on it Um, okay. So actually this is uh, yeah, so if you see with my hand gets closer and farther It's just making the LED brighter and then uh, if I press this button I can change the colors It's just a demo showing capacitive touch Neopixels and proximity But you know the apds is a really well established Friendly and happy sensor that people have used arduino and circuit python So I think it's it's an easy one to quickly integrate and the proximity sensing I think is quite solid It's one of the nicer surface about proximity sensors that I've used. So it's a good Way if you want to add like simple gestures or motion or You know hand movement up and down and then there is a gesture sensor built There is a gesture capability for doing side to side gesture sensing But it's kind of a pain. I don't I don't really like it. It requires like exactly the right speed and it's hard to You know with practice you can get good at it But um, I I think for color sensing light sensing and proximity. This is this is great and you just plug it into usb So it's very easy to use You got sensing any computer And that is the new products for this week. Thank you bat trinky Okay, um, we're going to do a little bit top secret Um, when we do that load up your questions over on adford.it slash discord We'll get to those in just a few moments. Please put them in discord. Let's do some secret lady. Okay You got two things. All right first up First up we posted this on the socials and more. What is it? Oh, um, you know I'm redoing all of our stemma All of our sensor boards to be stemma qt and the vammal 7700 was one of the last sensors We did in the old style before we added Um, semi qt connectors to everything and so, uh, you know, I was looking At this sensor for some other reason and I was like, oh my god. I forgot to convert this over to stemma qt So i'm doing it and um, we also found that we can get this sensor in both, um, like Vertical and horizontal mount. It's the same sensor But because the pads go around it can stick out or can stick up And so I thought I'd make two versions and that's why the light sensor is kind of at the top there Um, it's very rare to find a light sensor that's right angle. Usually they're just you know, they point straight out from the pcb So I thought it could be interesting to make a version that's pointing outwards Um, and so you could edge mount it onto something if you wanted to do light sensing that way Okay, and then next up you had a thing you wanted to show Oh, yeah, I can plug this All right, here we go. Yeah, okay, so, um for the I'm going to turn the line off on this. I know it does not like the bright leds. It's like what are you doing? Add it. I must add it. It doesn't like it. Okay. That's good enough Um, so we had the led ring mapping done and now I did the matrix mapping so you can see Um, it's a 16 by 5 matrix of rgb leds Yes, it's working out again, but um, but I just can't look cool. It's kind of like a little bulky look And you can see that the um led mapping especially around here with the rings Um Uh as you're around here with the rings, it's a little bit uneven But it means that we can have an overlay ring as well as a matrix. That's why you see like this little This little lady right here is kind of pushed in a little bit and this one's a little pushed out The last one right here is where you you see the the um ring and the matrix kind of intersect But I think it's good enough. Okay, and that's this week's top secret Back in the vault back in the vault All right, let's answer a couple questions. We're going to do some questions and then Uh I'm gonna go fix a leak by window. Yeah. Yeah, we got it. This is water happening the glamorous life of running a company Okay, so here's some of the questions Uh first one, um that I had lined up, uh, does the aida fruit Bq24074 solar charge will simultaneously charge a lipo battery and a power load Yeah, it's got a split the power supply is load sharing. Um, so it will It will as long as you have enough solar power coming in you can do both But it will always prioritize the load over the battery Yeah, uh, someone's asking about our not forever trinkets and I want to be really clear aida fruit is making Aida fruit's making physical electronics and I made a joke that we're calling these not forever trinkets aida fruit does not do nfts Um, and uh, we don't endorse nfts, but the not forever trinkets. We have a bunch of them lined up We just have to we just have to get to them. Yeah, we have a really like there's some really neat unique Parts that will be able to make like maybe a hundred and that'll be it and I think that's it's a fun thing It's like a not forever trinket. Yeah, yeah request for Our boards, uh, usbc folks like usbc. It's good for everything but not everything we tend to use it But sometimes we don't yeah, so if we don't there's a reason we don't yeah, but for the most part we do Okay, uh There are some there's there's always a reason if we don't are the leds going out because of the camera Or is it actually the code? No, it's just like that's just a camera. Yeah, okay Uh, jake is a lot of tricky. Yes Yeah, we'll work on that High voltage is a plenty are we going to convert the tcs 3 4 7 2 5 color sensor to stoma as well We will but we might find a different sensor. I don't that sensor kind of drives me Real crazy. Oh, oh, it's national emergency alert. Yeah. Oh, did you know it's really rainy? Hey global pandemic now. Uh, yeah, there's a flood warning. There's a flood tornado warning. Yeah Yeah, okay That's what that's what's going on. Okay, uh, if you're using An air sensor trinky. That's a good idea. Um question if you're using you can use our stoma qt trinky and just plug it in You could do it. I'm not going to make every sensor possible. So just be aware but that but but air sensor one That's one up there because like every everyone everyone has air sensor things Uh question if you're using the lipo charger the feather Can you still use the feather usb for charging or only the solar chargers usb? Do you need to disconnect the don't don't connect the two? You can only use one or the other proximity leds coming Question mark I don't understand what you're asking Proximity question proximity leds glassing glasses coming. Maybe they mean for the I don't bump into things. I don't know how to tell you Look look ahead of you Anyone have suggestions for a low-cost rf mixer that can down convert frequencies in the 1.4 gigahertz Range lower frequencies to be sampled with a low-cost analog digital converter for a radio telescope project I don't know off the top of my head. I know mini circuits carries that sort of thing Um, yeah, you're gonna pay for it, but it will do the job. So Um, you know mini circuits is carried by digit key, but you might have to go to the mini circuit site and search specifically There's a bunch of like very rf specific module sellers You know, they'll get you'll have an sma connector and then you can go to town Okay, uh, is there a way to detect someone touching any part of a circuit without using a visible foil as uh, they'd use in Passive touch. I notice with the multimeter the resistance goes up by 0.001 Ohms well your multimeter can't measure 0.001 ohms so Not really. I mean you could you could try to put the capacitive touch layer in an inner layer, but I think if you want to do that you would have done that So the fact that you're asking kind of makes me think you're trying to do it without any copper and that's not possible. Okay um Suggestions for positioning indoors Um, we we covered last week's impi. We covered a indoor positioning system that you can use with bluetooth Okay, um, when we're showing you proximity trinky, uh, someone was thinking of a theremin. Could you make a theremin with it? Yeah? There you go Theremin trinky. Maybe we missed out on The proximity trinky. Maybe you shouldn't have been a bat. Maybe you should have been some theremin playing I didn't I think that the theremin is a little bit too easy. I like that. It's like it's not just a theremin It does other things. Okay, you're okay with being a bat. Yes Also, theremin is is a two parts. It's more complicated. It's not proximity. It's Capacitive load and it's it doesn't do that. It's something else. Okay, uh, do you have recommendation for cheap circuit python wi-fi board? Uh, yeah, check out the ESP32 s2 Okay, is it crazy that I want to use stemming qt for neopixel strands? Not a great idea because uh, the wires are quite quite thin. It's not high power Uh, yeah two inches of rain everywhere. Thanks. Yeah Yeah Everyone's getting like if you're on the east coast right now. It's like yep rain rain rain. Okay. Well, that's our questions for tonight Okay, well, we did a lot of questions. We did a bunch of questions. Thank you everybody. We'll continue to uh, monitor the chats. Oh One just not gonna. I'll uh, I'll do it right before Any other uh rp20 40 boards coming tons? No Then that's as much as we can say. It's not out yet. Don't ask. Yeah Okay, thanks everybody. All right. That's our uh Show for night this week. Thank you just behind the scenes. It is super rainy. I have to go fix a leak and more and uh, please everyone stay safe and uh Do all the things you need to do to continue to stay safe I'd very much like to see people in person one day at some type of giant gathering where we all get to hang out and Show our projects together But until then we have show and tells we have ask an engineer. We can keep doing this We'll keep sending out all these cool electronics for you. We'll keep doing open source. We'll keep publishing We'll do all these things because you all seem to like it and uh, if you're gonna support us Save 10 percent approximately as the code I can tell it's getting wet in here. Yeah, so we'll see everybody next week I'm gonna do a moment of zener. I'm gonna play a little bit music And then we went on a ferris wheel in time square and I'm gonna play one minute footage from that Okay, all right. Here's your moment of zener. Bye everybody. Have a good week. Stay dry