 Hey everybody, welcome to the Descalade Ada. It's me, Lady Ada. We're having a long weekend here in America, at least. So it's starting a little late because tomorrow is weekend day of the rest of the weekend working. Yeah, and it's one of those things where it's a day of remembering people who sacrifice their lives to keep this country safe. So we want to be respectful of that. It's also, for a lot of people, a day off. So please be safe tomorrow and continue to do all the things to keep us getting back on track. So the engineering doesn't stop. What are you doing? No, although I did a little board layouts. I sent out that prototype panel that you posted, which included the keyboard that I showed a couple weeks ago. I'm a little bit behind on my new board designs and I'm taking a little bit of a pause. But it's still happening. It's just like I'm kind of distracted with other engineering things, some software and architecture stuff. So let's start off way. They got some keyboard samples. Wait. Yes, knees. Where are we? Alright, well I got the overhead going. So I got some samples of these molds for making silicone keycaps. And like my first attempt was like a total failure. It didn't cure because I didn't realize that this is UV curing resin. So these are silicone molds and you know when you can mold keys in them. So these are just some clear, I put some chips in some clear resin. And they're two part molds. So this is, you know, it's like a one and a half length key, like a shift key or like a control key. And then these are like single one by one keys. And then you get this top which has the cross shape that you would put as a stem on a Cherry MX key. So I got some samples of these key molds. And the only thing that's a little annoying is you have to kind of center them. Like there's no, they're not like some nice molds have like centering dots. So you have to kind of like align these right. But other than like there's two basically two resins you can use. You can do a two part epoxy hardening resin where you do like 50% of one, 50% of the other. It's just like glue epoxy. Except it's not sticky. It's a resiny. And you mix them together and it hardens and it takes like a day. And I was like really lazy. I didn't want to do that. So I got UV curing epoxy which is a lot more expensive. But these are very small keycaps so it doesn't matter. Also it's not good for large items. You want to use UV epoxy for smaller items because of the they just doesn't cure very well for big things. But for small things it works great. And turns out we have, you know, we have a disinfection UV light from folks who remember we were doing some disinfection lamp experiments. Yeah. Back in March of last year all of us are like what, what are we going to do? And so we got UV. And we thought of surfaces. We got UV lamps and then we got a tester because it turns out not all of the stuff actually worked. And then we did a video on that and everyone screamed at us in the version of screaming on the internet. And they're like you're going to die. It's like no, like we had goggles on. Don't worry. Yeah it's fine. Anyways so the UV lamps that are used for disinfection are actually not good for curing UV resin. As I found out after like hours of poking it, I'd be like why isn't it curing? But this lamp that we made, this UV. This was a Becky, a Pedro project. This was a 3D printed nail stuff. It's a nail lamp. Right. It's like a DIY nail lamp. And you can see that there's a promo proto. We started in like a ton of UV LEDs and we blast them and then there's this nice reflection material. By the way, the Keycap community is on a direct collision course with the nail community because I've seen lots of resin nail stuff. It's all the same stuff too. It's all the same stuff. Anyways, so we've got this UV lamp. Sorry, I was like, what are you doing? It's a UV lamp made with LEDs and this is like a 5 year old project. I brought this out and what's funny is just like coincidentally, this fits perfectly here. So it's like, you know, you can cure exactly one package worth of keys. So I tried it and you know, middling success. So because it didn't cure, it took me a while to realize I wasn't curing. These keys have like mega bubbles in them. So and this one, it didn't cure all the way. And so it's a key, but it's like, it's kind of like weird mutant and like the stems came out great. I really learned how to do the stems, which is you want to, I got all the bubbles out of the stems and they look perfect and they're beautiful. Yeah, a lot of times. So by the way, like one of our jobs at Infruit is to make all the mistakes and find all the failures so you don't have to. That's why you pass. Yeah. So these keys, these two came out pretty good though. So this one has it embedded. What did I put in here? RP24. Now this is an expressive chip. This is an ESP8266 chip or something. This is a SAMD21B18. So I'm sure people are going to tell me like I'm the fault of the chip shortage because I'm using the chips for keycaps. These were chips that were, they were dirty so they were not good. But they fit fine. They fit fine on this macro pad. Yeah, looks good. So they're cool and they're clear. There's a little bit of bubbling in them. You can kind of barely see but there's a couple spots. It is a little noticeable but that's, I wanted to go easy with. It's also clear. It's clear. So normally you would have, you know, some glitter or like jewels or gems or something and it would actually kind of hide a little bit of the bubbles because you'd have all this material that would make it. I don't have a vacuum pump machine. I don't have a vacuum pump. I have, I have like a nail art thing. You know what I mean? Let's see. Don't residents usually have the wavelength, the cure at listed? It should make it easier to find them right away. I know but it's a UV. UV. It doesn't have like exact nanometer length. Anyways, so I'm going to try again with, I did it clear because I was like look, I want to make sure that it's not because I couldn't tell if it was, though I first round didn't cure because of the materials like I put glitter and shit in it. I didn't know if it was because of the glitter that was blocking the UV from curing it or if it was actually like a mismatch of the lamp and it turns out because it's saying like you can use a UV lamp but obviously you shouldn't. You should really just use it. Well, maybe. That's the thing. The lamps I mean, I don't know. They're disinfection lamps. I think they're the wrong nanometer. All I know is the LED like this cured it in like a minute whereas I was putting it under this lamp that was 11 watt lamp for like 30 minutes twice, three times and it just never cured. So I'll, you know, the next round will be good and then the cool thing is that if you do it right, like not like this one, which was kind of like a little bit of a nasty disaster, this one which did get cured it's completely reusable. Like it completely pops out super clean. When did you use a heat gun with any of this stuff ever? I used the heat gun a little bit to remove some of the bubbles which like worked a little bit but it only works on bubbles that are at the surface. It pops surface bubbles. I think a lot of it is how you pour the resin. If you like you just have to have experience on how to pour it to make sure that you don't pour a bubble like I think you have to squeeze the bubble out and then once it's pouring then you stick the tip into the resin mold because that way you don't have air bubbles. Like there's a technique anyways. So this kit is something that we're going to stop but it comes with a couple different ships. This is very generic. You can also get these like on Amazon and Etsy has them. There's one with like a kitten pause. That's kind of fun. And then there's one for space bars and stuff and like large shift keys and things. So this would not of course fit inside the LED light but I could do small keycaps or I could just get it to figure out easily. So this comes in all sorts of different shapes and like OEM and R4 and like all that nonsense. I'm going to pick just like ones that make sense and we'll probably stock them in the shop but I wanted to try it out. But I mean like this was kind of fun. Like once you have the right curing lamp it's you're done in five minutes. You want to cure the stem, cure the bottom and then you can pour all sorts of nonsense in here like you know microcontroller and glitter and shit. Okay, so that was fun. I also got a sample of a service. There's a company that they make keycaps that are etched through and I was thinking of trying to get these so you could like laser etch. I don't know if these are fiber laser etched but you know you can't quite see it here but then if I take this off the only thing is my LEDs are on the bottom you can sort of see that it glows through and it has like this etched out shape. In this case it's a you know Korean heart hands. Let me get another one that's maybe a little bit more easy to look at but this was just they were sending these samples of what they can do so we can have like an Adafrit keycap basically and possibly also sell like the ready to laser etch ones. That would be ideal. I'm not sure how lucky I'm going to be in that though. Okay, so this is another. I don't think I have this. Hold on. Yeah, I don't have this set up to do the key color cycling so this is yellowish and then you know if I put it down here this one is kind of a purplish color but it would basically glow through keys. So that's that. This is my little micropad tester. Alright, so there's some samples. Any questions? Yeah, I'm just messing around with keys just playing with these samples and ideas. Okay, so the next thing is I got some enclosure samples as well. So one thing is I want to make a keyboard PCB. I want to do a large like a custom circuit python keyboard. I have the macropad and this is definitely going to happen but this macropad is just 12 keys in OLED. This is fun. You want this but maybe you want something bigger so I got some samples of let's go to me because it's not going to fill your head. So these are GH60 cases. This is an injection molded case. It's a very generic case. It's got some bosses that you can find here and it's only a couple dollars. It's kind of nice. It's cheap. It's not totally flat. I will agree. It's not like the flattest case but like if you want to build a keyboard and you're not quite ready for the $60 aluminum case this is a nice, I like this. It's translucent and you can come in different colors. It's just simple injection molding. And then I also got a sample of solid aluminum milled and then anodized. So this is of course a blink of purple. You could etch this with a laser. This is etchable. We're going to do a keyboard kit and we thought since everything is circuit python based we'd start off with the purple one and then we'll do limited colors and then we'll try other stuff. Of course you can get these anodized in any color. That's not the tough part. Although there's like jewel tones that are kind of most popular. And then I also got a sample of a keyboard that goes with it. These are called GH60, I think Geek Hack or something. It's the name of the website. I'll show the PCB on the overhead because that's got details to it. So this PCB, you want to... Yeah. Someone asked a question. I answered it in the chat but they said is there like OLED keys? There is but they're like 50 bucks each. It's so expensive and I think they just break. And also by the way, you don't want them on all the time because they'll dim. It's a cool demo. Look the future but not quite yet. So this is socketed. You can kind of see their sockets. These are Kaila Get-Around Sockets. And this fits nicely the enclosure. So this fits in the enclosure. I will say I had to make a slight modification to this PCB to make it fit. These are from two different companies. One makes the aluminum enclosure and one is like okay we'll make a PCB that fits in it. So there's one mounting spot here. This mounting hole, this gold ring, matches with this hole. And because this has like a wide loss to it, this socket I had to actually cut. And then we solder by hand. You can barely you can't see it. But like basically I cut it and then sort of hand soldered it. So something I have to think about if I design a PCB that fits into this case because it's like this PCB was designed for it and it didn't fit. So I was like how many people use this? But I'll make sure that doesn't happen. This is a USB-C. So I'm learning a little bit. This is like the first like keyboard PCB I purchased. So this is kind of a good learning opportunity to see what what are the what's what are people doing in the industry so I can do in my opinion a better job. So USB-C which I like. One thing that I thought was interesting and of course you know it's a gather round sockets there's LEDs for each board. And even though they look a lot like a reverse not neopixels they are not neopixels. Which you can see if you can zoom in. I mean it's tough to tell but you see how in the middle of the LED there's no black dot. Like if this was a neopixel you see how there's like a there's a little black dot there. It's tough. But like if you're you know in bare eyes you can definitely see it. And with these there is none. Because these are not actually neopixels. These are RGB LEDs. The four the four legs are anode you know red green and blue. These are not neopixels. Why? Because neopixels are kind of expensive. Like if you're only if you only need like 10 or 20 LEDs or RGB LEDs a neopixel is going to be like the simplest because you'll need one pen and it's like they just work and it's full color and the PWM is handled for you and like love it love it love it. But when you get to something like this which has 60 plus LEDs is a 61 key keyboard it really adds up because if they're like you know 10 15 cents a piece or you know it you're spending 10 bucks just on the LEDs. So instead these are RGB LEDs not neopixels. RGB LEDs just raw RGB LEDs in quantity are like a penny or two. Like they're much much cheaper and it definitely makes a difference when you get to these large quantities. So I was like oh that's interesting how are they driving this and down here you can see the microcontroller. So the microcontroller is a I think an STM 32F 303. So I didn't actually look up this part number but it's basically a Cortex M3 I'm sure the three is for M3. STM processor doesn't have a ton of pins it's like a 48 QFP it's got the crystal got a little bit of a I think it's probably a buck converter to give it 3 volts or something or maybe it's a booster I don't think so that's probably a buck converter. And then over here oh this is kind of fun there's like a little DFU switch so you can switch it into bootloader mode there's the ROM DFU bootloader that comes with every STM 32 chip. We actually don't have we don't have a circuit python for the STM 32F 303 I think but I'll look if we do I could try putting circuit python on this and it could probably just work. And then there's this chip which I was like obviously this has to be a RGB LED driver because there's nothing else going on on this like it's like there's only one chip and that chip is going to do the LED the key matrix and so this must be the LED driver and this turns out to be a this is the IC 3741 sounds familiar we have a monochrome PWM LED driver from the IC the IC 1331 whatever it's part of the series there's just a lot of ones and threes and fours and sevens so we're familiar with this family it's it's almost certainly an i-squared C controlled RGB LED driver I look at the datasheet and you can drive like a massive number of LEDs all on its own it's not cheap it's like two bucks but it does all the work for you and you probably when you do the math it's still cheaper to have the driver for two bucks and RGB LEDs and to have neopixels because again the neopixels are expensive and you can definitely save a couple bucks on the chips by doing this and also these probably are better quality LEDs too like neopixels I find they can be a little picky they can have difficulty surviving the reflow process so I thought that was kind of interesting to learn and then there's the USB-C one thing that I thought was interesting I'm not sure why they did it is the LEDs are below the keys which is actually not how you're supposed to do keyswitches as I learned from looking at keycaps like we got some samples of backlight through keycaps they're actually expecting the LED to be on the top so one thing I'm going to make sure that I do when I design mine is this should be flipped around 180 the LED should be shining through the top of the key not the bottom but I still like it this is a pretty nice design they did a good job I just don't know if there's a good reason for why they way they did that but yeah okay so that's it so one thing I did see that I wanted to chat about is and then we can go to the great search now again so some questions great search brought to you by digikey and Ada for it thank you so much digikey for spartan just great data great search is when lady to use all our powers of engineering smarts to show you how to find stuff on key.com lady to what is the great search for this week okay well this is going to be an easy easy but goody so looking at this keyboard matrix you'll notice that there's a lot of diode sorry an LED for each board each key so the key and then there's an LED above it and there's also a diode so this is a diode matrix keyboard which means that you don't have key ghosting when you press multiple keys at once you know for macro pads it might not be that important but that is really inexpensive and you add one per key and it means that you can detect each individual key press no matter what combination are pressed and especially for people who do gaming it's not unusual to have multiple keys pressed at the same time you don't want there to be ghost keys that appear so let's let's go to the computer and I'll actually show I saw like a kind of a nice a site this is a gammon.code.uau this is how normal low cost matrix are made you've got the columns and you've got the rows and you've got these little switches you know you test each row you set each row high and when this is pressed this signal sorry this signal by default is pulled low and then when it's pressed it goes high and that's how you know that this button is pressed so you can scan through the whole matrix to find out very quickly which keys are pressed but what's nice what's not good about this is that if you have and here's a nice little diagram if you have three keys pressed and they overlap on the column or row the fourth key that's like the cross intersection of where those three keys meet that extra key will appear as if it was being pressed which is again not a good idea if you're just doing something like a telephone keypad where people only press one button at a time not a big deal you know you can save 8 cents non-cli diodes but if you're doing any other kind of key matrix like this person was actually hacking an existing key matrix to add diodes because they were frustrated by the key ghosting effect so to avoid it all you have to do is add one diode per switch and that just means that the current only goes one direction you can't have the current flow back through and accidentally trigger another key so what diode to use well you know the 1N4148 is a classic it's not just you know it's a little cliche but it's also just a really good diode to pick why it's incredibly plentiful it's very fast it has a reasonable forward voltage it's super cheap you can get it anywhere it comes in all sorts of packages did I mention it's cheap it's heck of cheap and again like you don't have to worry about not like if all the chip shortages and component shortages you're never going to run out of the 1N4148 sometimes also people use 1N914 it's a very similar family they'll say that there's a lot of diodes out there you can get zener diodes and you can get shocky diodes and etc etc you just want small signal diode you know you don't need a 1N41001 power diode it's not going to be as fast it's not going to be as expensive it's not going to be as easy to solder it's not going to be as small go with the classic the 1N4148 you're not going to type any faster with a different diode this diode is nanosecond speed let's go to digikey and check it out so we can just search for 1N4148 and what's interesting is actually they'll show you some some top searches you can actually like click on these just to get started but let's actually go and just see all the options available real fast so we're going to go with active and in stock because we're going to buy these right now to make our keyboard kit we want about 100 of them because we want like one for each switch and the only important thing is the package you want surface mount with through hole and which size so if you're going to make a macropad like this one which we found on clawboards.xyz you'll see it's really common you'll see all the diodes are over here and they're through hole and they've got these little glass bodies with a black stripe and red glass so you can even sort of see the 48 very lightly on here so if you're using the glass side the glass beaded ones with leads that you saw there those are called DO35 so you pick through hole and then I think it's there's really only like one or two sizes yeah so there's basically die which is I don't know look at small chip and then DO35 there's two options for DO35 axial so let's pick those and like boom all the diodes you can want now every single company that does semi-conductors like the first thing they do is they make a diode because it's like the easiest cheapest thing to make you might as well get good at manufacturing and taping components by making a diode can't go wrong so you have a lot a lot of options for diodes which ones to pick well you can look at prices at you know 100 so you go up here and you enter in how many you want and then you click you know apply and it'll show you the lowest price ones for that quantity on semi-conductor you know classic Motorola they're gonna have about a million in stock and they'll be about three and a half cents a piece so that's a good deal and you can get like you know any quantity you want they'll come on tape so you know it's one wheel and you just pull them off the tape and you're ready to go so this is this is a perfectly fine diode love it let's say you want to do and again they have these are all different photos but they're all the same thing you know micro chip makes diodes V-shade makes diodes NTE makes diodes you want diodes you got them all for about three to four cents so let's go to the overhead for this keyboard controller to make the manufacturing easier they don't use the through hole the through holes easier for humans much tougher for machinery so this is a diode that's SOD 123 size you're probably like how do I know what sizes well first off I didn't deal with the size of the diode all the time but you also google for diode sizes and my computer can you if you look for diode sizes there's there's all sorts of like comparison photos and like this is a good one there's lots of picks available that will compare the different this is not a good image because these are not the scale you want this to scale image this this is down the internet barely works anymore let me find a you can just view this image well it's small but you can kind of see it so there's SMC SMB SMA SOD 123 and SOD 123 FL SOD 123 is kind of like the solder but you can still get a wide range of signal diodes SMA and SMB and SMC they're power diodes you don't really want those so let's look for SOD 123 and this was also a really good image here because this shows you the comparison I use 323 and 123 but 323 they're a little tiny so again pick and place machine does a great job of them but for human I'd say 123 so let's look for this in 123 so we're going to delete this filter and this filter and these two okay and then now when we look for the packages we're going to do surface mount so that's the whole clue we want to pick and place and then yeah over here we have 123, 323 and 523 again it's a little confusing but the bigger the number the smaller the package you know what are you going to do the FL and FL just mean how thin they are so you can they're basically equivalent so let's pick the SOD 123 and 123F together and Ditto let's look at pricing at 100 pieces or more and then we've got this one I mean you're not going to you know this it's a very tiny picture but looks like you can you know there's not um oh wait hold on they do have oh this is a um sorry this is a marketplace let's exclude that so you can basically get these for about 6 cents a piece they're more expensive which is interesting like they really want you to buy a full tape and like a full reel of these surface mount diodes but again if you're doing a pick and place design you really need to have these so I would I would probably just pick up you know one of these or one of these I think if you're getting a reel which is a thousand quantity yeah they're like 3 cents or so 36 cents oh wait hold on I did apply weird I don't know why I didn't come through um you can also search by stock number and it looks like Vichay these ones they have about $188,000 in stock and they're about again 4 cents a piece so diodes they're great they're wonderful do you know like you know they're not super cheap right 4 cents does add up um but when you're if you end up getting like really large quantities I think they go down to like a penny or two and you kind of do need them like especially if you're if you're making a macro pad you might people get away with not having them but for a keyboard with humans are typing on you really don't want any errant keys to come out and there are I have seen people like post up um matrix maps where they try to tell you here if you pick these keys on your rows and columns you're least likely to have key ghosting um but if you're going to make a keyboard and you're going to sell it people are going to probably pretty much demand that you have individually diode protected keys so one and four and for eight I don't know it's a great diode uh used it for decades never done me wrong good every day signal diode it's a great turn okay a couple of things I will uh answer or ask yeah um so there's a company that will print out things on top of keyboards SVG I'll put a link in the chat it's uh WASD keyboards yeah um for other things a vacuum chamber right up at the bubbles best carrying way wave length might be 320 to 400 nanometer and then for the uh LEDs some keyboards have LEDs above the switch so the legend shine others have LEDs below because certain key cap profiles only fit with the switch in that orientation weird all right I mean yeah this is the thing it's like most most keys I mean why would they only they're supposed to be fully symmetric I mean every every key I've seen that has glow through it's from the top it's it's the keys on the top which makes sense because your finger would be covering it otherwise because your finger covers the bottom of the key so if you want to see the key before you press it then you'd have the legend on the top would it be possible to create a library to make this LED driver's chips compatible with the neopixel libraries no totally different totally different okay all right that is just the way it is we'll see everybody during the week we have shows uh there's no shows on Monday usually so everything is normal this week as far as shows go and we'll see everybody Tuesday we have GPs show yes and we're back on Wednesday we've got Pedro's 3D hangouts and then show and tell and then ask an engineer and then Thursday we have GPs workshop on Friday keep that with Scott all right thanks everybody bye everybody bye