 Live from New York, it's Ask an Engineer. Hey, everybody, and welcome to yet another Ask an Engineer. It's me, Lady Aida, the engineer. With me is Mr. Lady Aida on camera control and keeping everything behind the scenes running so that I can do the engineering. And we got an exciting show for you tonight, a lot of news and updates and videos and products. So we're gonna get right into it. Mr. Lady Aida, what's on tonight's show? On tonight's show, the code is deluxe. Code is deluxe, 10% off in the Adafruit Store, all the way up to 11.59 p.m. Eastern time. Or if I fall asleep and I don't remember to turn off the code, you probably have a little bit more time than that. But do try to get your orders in also because it's a time for high demand. Lots of people want lots of things and you get to save 10% off in the Adafruit Store. We'll talk about the Adafruit Live series of shows, including Show and Tell, how to fantastic show and tell. Thank you everyone who stopped by. Oh, that was amazing. Yeah. Time travel, look around the world makers, hackers, artists, engineers. We'll also do some fun retro tech. We did a little bit of a preview of that as I just started. Main New York City factory footage, a look around here at Adafruit, what we're making and more. 3D printing, what November page we're up to and a cool speed up. We have IonMPI, I brought to you by Adafruit and Digikey where Lady Aida shows you the newest product that's on digikey.com. Got new products, top secret. We answer your questions and big news. We did have 33,000 people in our Discord server community and now we have 34,000. That just happened right before we went on air. And you can join us, adafruit.it, slash discord or discord.gg, forward slash adafruit, all that and more on, you guessed it. Okay, so I wanna start off before we do the full show and first off just say thank you to everyone out there who emailed our team, asked us how we were doing. A lot of folks know we're in New York City, a lot of folks know that our team lives and works also in Brooklyn and there was a mass shooting on the subway yesterday and it was terrible for everyone in the city. New York City comes together but this is all still very raw but what I wanted to do is just say here's what happened here in New York City, here's the impact it had and here's some of the things that we did. It's gonna take a while to process this and earlier today before we went live on the shows, they have arrested the person who did this. So that was a bit of a relief because we were all about to commute home, people have kids in school, yesterday there were school lockdowns. So yesterday in the morning, not 8.30 or so, there was a shooting but it took a little while for the news to come out. It was unknown what happened, there was maybe 30 people injured. One thing I wanna mention is thank goodness there was 30 shots all together and no one died, no one was killed. There was 20-something people in the hospital and all but three have been discharged already and it looks like all are gonna be okay. There was some shots fired, there was like a smoke bomb, smoke grenade and it was scary and we all watched this real time on social media and we were getting information and there was nothing on the news yet and so we immediately sent out an email to our entire team and let them know this is something that's happening. Don't worry about getting to work, if there's delays or whatever, don't worry about it, we'll take care of any of the time off, pay you for this, don't worry about that, some people worry about that. And folks got in, it happened earlier and no one happened to be at that spot, we have 100 plus people commuting every day to Adafruit in some way and so as soon as we got some of the news we used our email system together, we also used, we have an internal Slack and then we also, and this is just something that I thought would be helpful to tell other people who work at companies or run businesses, we have everyone's contact information and their emergency contact and so what we did immediately is make sure we could account for everyone who was supposed to be here if they were running late, text them, where are you, are you okay? Cause there was a lot of people missing at the time. And then one of the things, as the situation developed, we reassured folks, if there's things that are continuing on, don't worry about that, we are going to take care of one another because it's unknown what's gonna happen with subways today, it's unknown what's gonna happen with transportation, don't worry about getting to your loved ones, make sure you tell them that you're okay. And it was just a lot of like reassuring folks what was gonna happen in the next 24 hours. I lived through 9-11 and it just, it reminded me a little bit of that and we also had last couple of years have been really challenging. And so after the team got in, everyone was accounted for, we started to get up more information as the story developed throughout the day. They were looking for the suspect, there was information that the authorities were trying to get out and we just kept our team updated. We did an end of day recap. We made sure there was open line communication to everyone, what are you worried about? Some of the things that you don't think about is if you're someone who kind of looks like the person they're looking for, that makes your life complicated and it makes, you're worried that maybe their cops are gonna mistake you for this person and this has happened before and so there's a lot of things that go on and a lot of anxiety when things like this happen. So we made sure that our team knew, maybe you don't take the subway, maybe we could send a car to get you home. So there's a lot of things that go into this and the news paints a different picture of New York than what New York is. It is a very good, fun, safe place. This type of thing is very rare but of course it's very shocking. So a couple of years ago we also added pay time offer gun violence for anyone affected by gun violence because it is a thing in the USA unfortunately and so we made sure our team knew if they had a circumstance, even if it wasn't related to this, that they had that for mental health there or whatever and so today was a bit of relief. I think we all had a collective sigh of relief. The person was apprehended not too far from here. It was in Manhattan, the East Village, first in St. Mark's, one of the places we walk by all the time and so the person had left Brooklyn and they were in Manhattan. So that's what went on here. So I wanted to just give you like, this is like real time, this is from people that you all know and that's what we did to take care of our team and it's not over. It's gonna take a while for everyone to feel safe again and we're just gonna continue to work with one another and on a last note, I don't know how to solve the mental health crisis in the world or the US but what I do know is every single person has a chance to be good to one another every single day. You get to decide every day if you're gonna help someone, if you're going to hurt someone and some people are struggling and they need help and they're alone and things bubble up and things build up and this is one of the outcomes and it seems to be happening more and more. So that extra one minute maybe sometimes to check in on someone or talk to someone in a family that's not doing so well. It could save a lot of lives. Thank goodness, this particular incident, it was terrible, no one died. That's not always true. So anyways, that's what's been going on here and I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who immediately reached out. Some folks know us really well and they're like, are you okay? I know some of you live right there. So thank you, we appreciate it and we're all okay. All right, let's go on to the show, Lady Aida. So as folks stock up their cart and support a New York City company, I got to roll out- Local employees. Yeah, by the way, we're not going anywhere, we're here to stay. We like building stuff in the USA and New York City and we like it so much, we give you free stuff. That's right, when you order from AdFruit, we give you some freebies in your cart, we're gonna be adding some more freebies soon, we just have to get components but we hope to be adding another RP2040 freebie soon but for now, $99 or more, we get a free permaporto half-sized breadboard, $149 or more, you get a STEMI QT breakout. If you make an account, we'll send you a different one each time. In fact, the Vemmel 770 that we're gonna be announcing today is, it just got added because it's a fun luck sensor, it's very easy to use, works of our I-Squared-C and then $199 or more, you get free UPS ground shipping in the content of United States. Yeah, and I don't know how long the $200 free shipping tier, sorry, the shipping tier that we have is gonna last because we might have to raise it because of even Amazon's raising their prices because fuel and surcharges are getting expensive. Yeah, the cost of ground shipping is up 50% basically. Yeah, it's going up. And another reminder, make sure you have an account, verify it via email and then put two factor authentication because that's the only way to get a Raspberry Pi in a lot of high demand. Yeah, if you want to pick up one of our Raspberry Pies and we tend to put in a couple hundred every week, so just be aware, maybe someone's going tomorrow, maybe someone Friday, make your account, get two factor authenticated, get all your shipping information ready to go, fill your cart with anything else you want so that when we do put the pies in, you can add it and check it immediately. Don't, people are like, oh, I didn't sign up for two factor and I didn't put my address in and then by the time I checked out, I went out of time. Don't be that person, be ready, be prepared. All right, so we did a live series of shows this week. There was a couple of things that got moving around because of schedules and more, but so far so good. We just finished up the show and tell. We do that every Wednesday at 7.30 p.m. It's either a late eight and I or no one Pedro or JP and this week on the show and tell, there was lots, watch it. We showed the connection machine, we showed a lot of cool LEDs, we showed the doom stroller, but I think the thing that was, I mean, they were all good projects, but one of the things I thought that was really neat this week was Matt stopped by and showed all of these IOT sensor things to automate a food bank. And a food bank not as, I have to be careful because the word bank doesn't mean anything anymore. It's where people go who need food. A food pantry. Food pantry, yeah. And so it's a really neat thing that Matt's been volunteering for since he's been 18 and you can see all the problems that were solved. Oh, what's the temperature of the refrigerator? What if the refrigerator is open and that has to reset the temperature of the refrigerator because you also want to know if someone accidentally left it open and there's this cool ticket system and how the numbering works. And it is amazing. So here's just like one, Matt sent this to me, I had a time in case because he did a mobile demo, which is always challenging with like, you know, walking around show and stuff. And it prints out things and it uses a lot of really neat off the shelf things to basically run a food pantry. So excellent work Matt and I'll be using that link when people say, well, what can IOT do? Because there's a lot of like, oh, smart cities. Well, what about smart pantries? What about smart food banks? Well, I thought it was interesting about the food bank is the first thing you should is, you know, people may pick up, want to pick up their food and they don't have a phone. And it's true, like some people don't have a phone or their phone is broken. It's like, you can't have something where it depends on you having a cell phone number and SMS. So you made sure that it was possible for people to put their hand over the sensor and it would just print out a tag with unique identifiers that then, you know, if they didn't have a phone, they at least had a number and identifier that they could use. Okay. On Sundays, we do from the desk of Lady Aida this week. It's always in two parts. The first part, we showed off some things from the mailbag and this cool space ball mouse-like entity that you showed how to use with Python. Yeah, and I got that working and I put the gist app. So if you have a space ball 2000, I mean, there's other projects to get it working with CAD software, but I want to just get the raw data out. And so we did that, you know, I looked at the protocol and quickly threw together a PySerial script and yeah, well, the buttons and the ball rotation worked pretty well. So it's, you know, it could be used for other user interface needs. We also had a weird, or do we know compatible that was pink that we showed off from the mailbag. Yeah, let's keep that. And then the great search that we do every week is how to find stuff because you need to find stuff because stuff is hard to find. Stuff is hard to find. So I looked up a three volts RS232 to serial converter, which would be the chip I'd used to talk to this kind of space ball 2000 device and I thought I'd maybe make a feather wing with it. So I wanted to find a chip that was inexpensive and in stock and I did find one. That's the challenge, not just finding the part, but finding the part you can get. Yeah. JP's product picture of the week was off this week. You will see it coming up soon. JP's show will be back tomorrow. JP was on vacation. And we have this week's highlight that we normally show right after JP's show. So we have this week's Circuit Python Parsec. Take it away, JP. The Circuit Python Parsec. For the Circuit Python Parsec, today I wanted to show you how to use a touch screen in Circuit Python. In this case, I'm using a PyPortal Titano, the big one. So you can see here what I have to start with is this really cool bouncing logo. Touch screen element here can give us X and Y position as well as pressure. I'm just using X and Y. So all I need to do is touch somewhere on the screen and you can see I'm repositioning where that logo is. I'm not changing anything about its sort of inertia and angle that it's going at. But if I have it, let's say bouncing down into the left and I just wanna speed things along and get closer to the bottom there, I can tap it, just moves the logo to that new position. And in fact, if I click and drag, you can see it, it'll follow my finger around until I let go. So the way I'm doing this in code, first of all, I'm importing the Adafruit Touchscreen Library and then I do some display stuff, some set up some palettes and set up my logo as a bitmap. But the touch screen stuff is right here. I'm creating this object, I call it TS for touch screen. TS equals AdafruitTouchScreen.touchScreen and then we're telling it four pins that it uses, a four wire touch screen. And on this particular board, they're named TouchYD, so y-axis up and down, y-u and x-right, x-left. So those four pins are selected. The calibration values actually are set at the factory, so you generally don't have to mess with those. And then I'm telling it what size the display is. That's all you have to do for set up. Then to use it, all we do is query this, touch equals TS.touchPoint. And what that's gonna give us is an x and a y position on the screen. It also gives us that z depth, I'm just not showing that here. And then I'm using those to adjust that value that was already in the code for moving this around. So you can use this for things like painting or placing objects or drawing, maybe even changing vertices on vector IO stuff would be kind of a cool use for it. And so that is how you can use a touch screen inside of CircuitPython. And that is your CircuitPython, far sec. Okay, and as we mentioned on the show and tell, Tim, stop by. And this Friday at 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern, there's gonna be a big CircuitPython library deep dive and especially as Catney. Yeah, so Catney's a snake in that little graphic. We have some news about libraries in CircuitPython later on in the show. But if you wanna learn about how these are all made, how they're structured, how to join in, how to participate. You're welcome. Yeah, come on by. All right, let's do some time traveling. Okay, a little bit of a reminder because we gotta say it every single week, we are still waiting on many things to arrive for the next eight of box. We appreciate all the patience people have. Also, one thing I wouldn't have expected over the last few years. So I would have expected folks to say, well, you know, it's COVID, there's lockdown. Not gonna, I'm gonna cancel all my subscriptions and everything because there's uncertainty. No, we actually had more people sign up for the eight of box subscriptions during that time because they wanted to occupy themselves with things that made them happy and they wanted to get through that time. And then there's been a part shortage and I was worried, okay, well, folks are gonna say, well, I didn't get the eight of box. By the time I thought I would get it, you told me it was gonna be a little later because of the part shortage and right now I think parts of China are still shut down. So would it be the end of eight of box? No, turns out we have more people waiting to sign up for eight of boxes than we've ever had before. So we appreciate the patience. We're shipping soon. We're now calling this the spring edition. We don't charge for eight of box until it's shipped. So you don't have to worry about that, but we do have a limited number of slots. So if you wanna get eight of box, go to eightofbox.com. Sign up, you'll get notified if anyone leaves and that's one of the things that does happen. Sometimes someone will leave and then someone immediately gets their slot. You get notified that you can join in. So anyways, thank you for your patience. We appreciate it, but y'all know what's going on in the world and in every way, shape, and form. So thanks for being patient. Okay, RetroTech. This is probably one of the more popular RetroTech video and photo shoots that we did. So this is a book from the 80s and it's called Inside the Personal Computer and Illustrated Introduction in Three Dimensions. And every single page has a 3D pop-up that has computers, which in 1984, they were very understandable and you could open them up and you could see what was going on, but not everyone had computers yet. And the concepts still need to be explained and a lot of these concepts are still the same. And when you go through each page and I'm gonna show the video without the sound because we showed them at the beginning of the show, it explains what is RAM, what are hard drives, what are, how does it, how does it chip work? And I- It's so cute. And I really hope that, here's Floppy. And I think this is the only book that has a like, quote, functional floppy in it because it shows how it works. But I really hope that there's a a revisiting of this approach because how does your phone work? Wouldn't it be nice if there was like a pop-up book or something that explained the concepts of how the LEDs get on the screen? And so one of the things about a pop-up book though is yeah, we could scan it in, but you kind of have to see it. So we also made a video that highlighted all the different things. So there's a floppy coming out. Next page, it's a keyboard. Here's how bytes work. And it explains all these concepts. So if you grew up in this era, you have a better idea of how computers work. Maybe you went on to do stuff with technology, but right now it's all kind of sealed up. You don't get to understand how all these things work as much. So one of the reasons that we do these retro, retrospect is to hopefully inspire people to do things like this. I'd like to see a pop-up book that explains how the Raspberry Pi works. That'd be cool. I maybe will email them about this. So that's this week retro. Python on hardware. Okay, this week, lots of news. And I'm gonna divide up the news in two sections. Straight-up newsletter stuff. So this is from the newsletter. I've already scrolled down because we're gonna talk about some other stuff in a second, but Python 311 to be twice as fast as its predecessors. Ooh. That's a- To people like that. That's a big deal. Because Python is, Python's not slow, but it could be faster. Yeah, in October of 2022, the plan is to have it quadrupled, but we'll see. Okay. It's in there. So the presentation about all this is more is on GitHub. PSF, Python Software Foundation has a new executive director, meet Deb. Can read about Deb and more. This was interesting. I'm gonna caution y'all who are Super Python fans. So IEEE spectrum, top programming languages for embedded. Python, Python? Could it be? Was it embedded or just- Yeah, so see the little chip? So it's web, it's computer. Oh, and embed. And embed. So Java is still being on mobile, C, mobile, C++, but I think these results are a little skewed and I think it's our fault. Okay. So there's a lot of people getting into programming on microcontrollers and they're using circuit Python, they're using MicroPython, they're using Python on something like a Raspberry Pi. Yeah. And so I think that it's skewing that way, which is fine. I don't necessarily think that everyone who's doing embedded is doing Python yet, but I think we're getting closer and closer because so many people know Python that it translates really well to whatever you happen to be in front of. And batteries included so you get very far, very fast. And when people need to do things, like you were doing this HID mouse from 30 years ago, use Python to interact with it. It makes it real easy, makes it real easy. So it's interesting, like I said, I don't think that Python is number one. And they also classify Arduino as its own language on here so that Arduino is number 11. Python zip to the top at number one. I think obviously there's a lot of people using Arduino for embedded. So anyways, interesting stuff. Take a look at it. I believe Spectrum is serious business so that's kind of neat to see. We have all of the news that you can expect in our newsletter every single week. This is kind of a neat, portable severance limit terminal. I think Todd bought that one. It's kind of like the DVD logo. And all the projects that you know and love and get inspired by YouTube. There's some fun part. I like the little spinning black and white thing. It's called the Cooks Radiometer. Somebody made like a cyber one. There is a LinkedIn class, CircuitPython, connecting a robot cat to the internet. I mean, look at that cat. Yeah, and E-Ink badges and more, but the news this week, a lot of it is CircuitPython related, because we gotta talk about it. First up, thank you again, everyone who joined the Discord, 34,000 people. This particular month happened faster or the time period to get there. This is what the Discord growth looks like all the way back from 2019. It's pretty linear. And not bad. And we also don't publish our server into the directory because it bots use it and spam and lots of drive buys. And so this is people who actually wanna stop in and do things. Yeah, it's interesting. If you look, it looks like right when COVID hit, there was a big spike. It looks like it was about March, 2020. A lot of people joined. We also did a membership drive when we were in server discovery. We're just like, hey, everybody stop by, but it turns out that wasn't great for all of our moderators and for all of us because there was just a lot of bots spam. And then on Reddit, we just hit 3,000 people on the CircuitPython Reddit and go to reddit.com slash r slash circuitpython. And then we hit 350 libraries. And that's what we're talking about on Friday in deep dive. And here's a chart of how the libraries are going. Looking good. Nice graph. Yeah. And so I guess I wanted to ask you because we turned this little segment into a standalone thing. Why do you think there's so many CircuitPython libraries? There's 350. I vote a lot. But why do you think? Because we have more CircuitPython libraries and Arduino libraries. And why did that happen? We actually have about the same number. But I think we have about, well, I mean CircuitPython, we have contributions too. It's almost the same. Okay, let's say it's, why did it catch up so fast? Yeah, why catch up so fast? Which is a good question. You know, one of the things when we designed CircuitPython is we kind of came at it backwards. One of the things I wanted to make sure is that we had a lot of libraries. It was easy to write libraries. It was these support libraries because at the time, I was writing libraries for, you know, MicroPython as well as for Python on Raspberry Pi. And that was what was driving me nuts was like I had to support both because MicroPython was different enough from Python that the code wasn't compatible. And so we specifically designed CircuitPython to make it so that code could run on a Raspberry Pi computer or a Raspberry Pi Pico now. And it would be the same code. You know, the pin numbers would change, but that's normal. Like that, you know, that always changes. But the functionality and the way the code was written and the libraries was written and supported would be the same. So what's great is that for every product we make now, we make sure to have a CircuitPython library because it covers, you know, hundreds of single board computers because Raspberry Pi and all the Raspberry Pi likes as well as the, you know, 200 different, you know, 250, 260 different CircuitPython boards. And the universality of those libraries was, yeah, it was really important. 295 boards. 290, almost 300, almost 300 boards. It was a graphic company that's gonna be the three. It's like this, but 300. It's like three with 300. And another thing is that, you know, we sell hardware and so I wanna make sure that people can use our hardware with CircuitPython. And also, I wanted, you know, the final piece is that, you know, one of the things that people find annoying about CircuitPython is they're like, why did you redo the bus and GPIO libraries? Like why is it different than MicroPython? Why didn't you just use machine? And the answer was at the time there was actually wasn't a unified interface. There wasn't a unified way to make sure that a library would run on every MicroPython board. You know, later on machine was invented and PiB went away, but for a long time, it was like every board had their own kind of slightly different way of defining stuff. And so having a universal bus library, a bus interface for CircuitPython meant that we could write libraries and they would work on every board. And so far, other than a couple of freaky exceptions with like I squared C and, you know, whether they have clock stretching support or not, pretty much every library will run on any CircuitPython board and that was a goal and I think we've done a really good job of it. And just from like a very high level thing, from I think an observer would say, oh, you have, because you have lots of libraries, you have lots of boards, but because we have lots of boards, we have lots of libraries. Like it's really neat. No, we wrote the libraries first. The libraries came before the boards. It's really neat and there's folks that have entire businesses based on the fact that they don't have to worry about the software for the hardware because every time there's a new version of CircuitPython, it just works because there's universal support across 295 boards. And another, you know, 150 Linux boards. Yeah, so anyways, big milestone. Thank you everyone who's been a contributor and everyone who's been watching this story. It is part of the newsletter delivered to you every single week. We don't spam or anything like that. You can go to AdafruitDaily.com and sign up. All right, open source hardware time, Lady Aida. First up, big news. Next week is the Open Hardware Summit April 22nd. It is virtual. Look at these cool graphics. And we were asked by the Open Hardware Summit folks, will you get the word out about a special thing that's happening? And when I said, yeah, sure. Let me put it on our show. Cause these are the folks that will actually do the call to action as they say in the biz. So, Ashwa is excited to share that SparkFind is sponsoring one more round of goodie bag shipping after the summit, April 2022. They have 95 more bags available globally, as well as free and donation tickets are available. This is the bag you get. So if you want to get a goodie bag, you can go to ashwa.org, check out the link, and then it takes you over to Eventbrite and you can get a ticket virtually and then you can get the goodie bag edition and then you'll get a goodie bag and. Full of goodies. Thank you, SparkFind. It will be shipped. Okay, we have 2,655 guides in the Adafruit Learning System, Ladiata. There is a bunch. The guides get better and better each week. What is this week's guides? Okay, well, we've got a guide for the QDPI BFF LiPoly add-on. That was something that folks wanted me to build and then Katni kindly wrote a quick guide for it. It's straightforward, but good to have. The ESP32 S2 Feather Guide got a whipper snapper page, how to install whipper snapper and use it. We're adding quick start whipper snapper guides to all of our Wi-Fi boards to make it really easy for people who don't want to write any code at all. Even CircuitPython Arduino, they want to get started with a no-code IoT solution to do so. And next up. Same with the QDPI ESP32 S2 that also got a whipper snapper guide and the quick start for Adafruit IO whipper snapper. Some of the pages got gutted out of there and we just point people towards the hardware page. Liz did this really cool doom scrolling shell. It's a wireless, we're going to show the video, but it's a scroll wheel. We have this really cool like iPod classic-esque scroll wheel and we thought it would be really funny to make a scrolling controller that you could also play doom with. And also the Feather ESP32 S2 TFT I think also got a whipper snapper upgrade. So that's a whipper. And here's a demo from Liz. And it's time for some Manurex City Factory footage. We can't stop, we won't stop. Here it is. And it wouldn't be Manurex City Factory footage without a view outside Adafruit, which is the Disney headquarters. Ooh, they're putting the windows. They're putting the outer shell on it. That's actually kind of fun. Yeah. All right, 3D printing time. We have Feather video and then we have a speedup. So we're going to show these back to back. You ready? Yep. Hey, what's up, folks? In this video, we're taking a look at the new Adafruit Feather ESP32 V2. This is a big upgrade over the original. The V2 has eight megabytes of flash. That's twice as much storage. It also has two megabytes of PS RAM, mini NeoPixel, Stem AQT, and a USB C port. It's designed for low power usage, so you can use a light poly battery in deep sleep. It features the ESP32 Pico module, so you get extra space for pin labels and mounting holes. With Stem AQT, you can just plug in your favorite sensor breakouts and start plotting data. It's a great way to quickly get your IoT projects up and running. You can use it with Arduino IDE, just like other ESP32 boards. With the extra flash and RAM, even big and complex projects are a breeze. With Whip or Snapper, you can easily make IoT projects without having to write any code. Just install the firmware with a Chrome-based browser and now your Feather will appear automatically in Adafruit I.O. ESP32 V2 also has MicroPython support, so you can write Python code in libraries to create your IoT projects. Follow along with the Adafruit Learn Guide to install and set up your Feather ESP32 V2. So what type of IoT projects would you make? You can let us know on Discord and share your projects on Adafruit Show and Tell. Thanks for watching and be sure to subscribe for more videos from Adafruit. Every Wednesday, so you can learn how to make all this stuff and more with 3D Hangouts. You know, Pedro, the longest running live 3D printing show in the known universe. All right, Lady Aida, let's remind folks of the discount code, deluxe, and let's kick it off with some IonMPI. This week's IonMPI is from NXP, Lady Aida. What is this week's IonMPI? Okay, well, I've got a bridge to sell you. No, it's, well, I mean, technically, yes. This week's IonMPI is from NXP and it is the, let's get the part number right, SC-18-IM-704-UR-2-I-squared-C bridge. That's not a bridge too far. We're not burning bridges here. We're gonna make bridges. You're a really good co-host. You got the good, you got the good jokes. All right, so this is the, as I said, the SC-18-IM-704, long part number. This is a 16T SOP chip that is a RS-2, sorry, a TTL UART to I-squared-C plus eight GPIO converter bridge. So you send it UART data and it will perform I-squared-C commands on the other side. It also comes as a handy dandy RS-232, ready to go UART board. So this has a plus minus 10 volt RS-232 port, has the chip and some circuitry, some LEDs. This is the eval board, but I'll say actually this board could come in quite useful if you have a computer that is so old or some sort of robot that's so old it doesn't have a USB port at all and it just has RS-232. This is ready to go. Dev board that you just plug in directly and it gives you some GPIO and I-squared-C. So this chip is one of many chips. There's a lot of chips in this family. This is a UART to I-squared-C bridge. And you know, NXP is interesting. It's one of the only companies that makes these bridges because I've looked into this and they make like, you know, like UART to Onewire or UART to SPI or I-squared-I-squared-C, like all sorts of combos. And this has, you know, this chip inside that listens to, again, RS-232 commands, controls the GPIO, controls the I-squared-C controller. And the nice thing is, you know, NXP, you know, which used to be Philips, wrote the I-squared-C specification. So you know it's going to work well. I didn't see any mention of clock stretching, but it does definitely support a repeated start, which I'll show in a moment. So this is actually an update to a previous product. I think it goes a little bit faster and it's a little bit more solid. It has like a time-out system, you know, basically you can send ASCII data over UART, which means, you know, the nice thing about this is that no matter what computer you have, if you have like a PC-104 board or some like ancient, even like a 386 or a 46, you're going to be able to get to the UART and send data. So it could be also interesting for people doing retro computing, if you want to like connect something that's so old that only has RS-232 as a, you know, it's so non-standard, it only has UART or RS-232. You could connect your I-squared-C sensors to it. And the great thing about, you know, I-squared-Cs are so many sensors available. So here are some specifications. It's, I like that it has five-volt tolerance on the input pins. The UART is standard eight and one. There's a 256-byte TX and RX-5O, which is handy, especially once in a while you've got sensors or devices that really need very long messages sent back and forth. The UART I think has auto-bot detection and I think you can also program the bot rate and go up to half a megabit per second. One multi-master bus controller and eight GPIO. And this is the structure. I mean, it's pretty straightforward. There's RX-TX as you expect. Power it, reset it, and then, you know, the GPIO pins I thought would be handy, not just of course if you want to control a relay, but say you want to reset a chip. We have some I-squared-C sensors that sometimes need, hey, reset them before you start talking to them. They act a little bit nicer. Or you could use address selection pins or maybe read a busy pin or an IRQ pin. So a couple of things that could be useful for those GPIOs. And of course, you know, there's like nearly infinite number of I-squared-C devices you can connect, ADCs and DACs and expanders and every kind of sensor. We've got thermal cameras even that go over I-squared-C. We've got extenders and expanders and et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, no matter what it is, what I like about having it support I-squared-C is that if you have something with a Yord and you need like a DAC or, you know, a 24-bit ADC, you actually have a shot of connecting it if you have I-squared-C because, you know, I-squared-C, there's almost anything has that as a peripheral available. Like I said, it supports repeated start, so it's kind of handy because there are sensors that really need repeated start or right after right support, something that they thought of because they're an XP. And again, they wrote the spec. This is the format, so there's also, you know, there's commands for the GPIO port, there's commands for I-squared-C. What is nice is that Yord's actually kind of a good protocol to use with converting to I-squared-C bridge because, you know, Yord is a synchronous, but it's like you can send commands and I-squared-C is a truly synchronous protocol, which can make parsing a little easier. Like you're not gonna get random data coming back on the RX pin from the Yord, you know, you'll send a command and you'll wait for the response because you send I-squared-C data and you get a response or you get a knack. Here's some example bytes, so they give you some, you know, if you wanna read or write an SM bus register, pretty standard stuff you wanna do, also how to set the GPIO input output and value. This is the eval board, which I actually picked up. I can also show it on the overhead real fast if you wanna do that. Yeah. Again, you know, I had these, it seems a little ridiculous because it's like, you know, why would you have this gigantic, you know, RS232 port? But, you know, there's so many times I've had to interface with really old computers or devices and it's like they didn't have USB or they had one USB port, but nothing else. They didn't have I-squared-C, you know, so many like industrial computers that I've seen only have an RS232 port. And this could be, you know, an easy way if you don't have USB. There are USB to I-squared-C converters that I've used, but, you know, if you don't have I-squared-C, this is a solution and this will drop in work quite well. So, check this out. This USB port right here just for power, for convenience, you can also power it because RS232, of course, doesn't power. You can also power it, of course, through the pins over here. You said bridges, so this is bridges. Yes, so I don't want to mention, if you're like, well, I don't really need UR to I-squared-C. I could use I-squared-C to SPI or SPI to I-squared-C or I-squared-C to UR. Worry not, because NXPs that you covered, they've got like every kind of combo. Some of them have multiple URs or multiple buses, whatever, all available. So this is just one of the family which popped up on digikey.com slash new, which I recommend, but there are others in this family. So if you want to add a UR to a device that has SPI or I-squared-C, that's actually pretty common need as well because a lot of times microcontrollers or microcontrollers or microcomputers only have one UR and sometimes you're like, I need a GPS and a cell module or something. You could use one of these bridges for that use case as well. Available on digikey. Well, it's not available right now, but it will be. I will say it's getting tougher to get devices that, so if you go back one, I did type in. So it looks like in two months they're gonna get at least 1,000 in stock. So if you order now, you'll get it in two months. In the meantime, you can design with it. Of course, if you need some samples immediately contact digikey, they will hook you up with samples. Yeah, and we have a pretty good video. It's one of the better ones that a manufacturer makes. So we're gonna play it. It's two minutes, but it's worth your time. Yes, covers the entire family. During device selection, the host and peripheral normally have matched communications protocols. Take for example, this conference camera. The 24-bit DAC has either an I2C or a SPI interface which matches the embedded processor. However, there can be situations where in mid-production, there is a sudden long-term supply constraint. For example, in this case, the I2C DAC is no longer available and it requires a permanent move to an SPI DAC. The easiest solution is to use a protocol bridge that translates the different protocols with minimal change to the embedded process of firmware. There is also a similar case where the embedded processor must be reused for new platforms due to extensive use of legacy firmware, but the interface of the peripheral required for the application is different. Again, the solution for this situation is the drop-in bridge that translates between protocols. NXP has an array of bridges that overcome the limitation of different protocols between the host and peripherals. These bridges easily convert between UART, I2C, and SPI buses. This allows greater design flexibility and the ability to retain the original design investment while providing faster time to market. This also allows the ability to link legacy systems to new systems. There are four types of bridges, with the first being this family of five I2C or SPI to UART bridges with different SPI speeds, number of downstream UART channels, and number of general-purpose IOs. The next device is the SPI to I2C bridge, which allows the SPI to communicate to fast-mode I2C peripherals and is multiple-master capable. There are five general-purpose IOs for things like LEDs and switches. The next device is the I2C to SPI bridge, which allows fast-mode I2C to communicate to SPI peripherals. The three GPIO can be used for the chip select in SPI parallel architecture applications. The next device is the UART to I2C bridge, which allows UART communications using RS232 protocol to fast-mode I2C peripherals and is multiple-master capable. Hi, I'm MPI. Okay, we're gonna do some new products. Yeah. I forgot the code is deluxe. All right, Lady, I gotta kick it. Yeah. Noon, noon, noon, noon, noon, noon, noon, noon, noon, noon. Noon, noon, noon, noon, noon. All right, you said you needed a lot of new... We had a special request for that. Long story, it'll make sense later. Yeah. Okay, we have it coming soon. I'll stick to the engineering. Okay, so the new Create 3 from iRobot. It's not quite out yet, but we do have a sign-up. We're out of the Create 2. The Create 3, it looks like a nice upgrade. It's got Wi-Fi, I think it's got Bluetooth. It's got... Python, powered. Python, this looks like a really cool robot. Maybe we'll get CircuitPythonPlanca. We will. We're gonna have you pretty sweet. Just for the folks, so one of the cool things about iRobot is they're like, oh, we solved the biggest problem with robotics is like you need to make power supply. You need to make this. You need to make that. We happen to make it. So it just comes without the vacuum parts, basically, but it's a learning robot. But that's... It's a great platform. That's the genesis of this. Yeah, and it's a really good deal. You get the battery, you get the motors, you get the sensors, you get the computer. I mean, you couldn't build it for less. So coming soon, sign up. All right, I don't know what this is. What is this? I think... Built from the blueprint of a Roomba robot vacuum, meet the Create 3 educational robot. iRobot's new mobile robot development platform for learning ROS2. A canvas for your creativity, the Create 3 arrives preassembled and ready to go with a suite of smart technology. Program the Create 3 to perform simple behaviors, sounds, and movements to grasp the fundamentals of robotics, computer science, and engineering. Or tap into advanced applications including autonomous localization, navigation, and telepresence. The Create 3 lets you mountain power payloads, connect and run third-party hardware, use its cargo bay for storage, and dock the robot on its home-based charging station. As a connected robot, you can talk to the Create 3 in multiple ways and choose between running ROS2, the iRobot coding app, or iRobot Education's Python web playground. Looking for ways to get started? Explore the iRobot Education Learning Library for basic tutorials and sample projects. Or check out the 3D simulation of the Create 3 using Ignition Gizibo or the iRobot coding app for increased access to robotics education and research. What will you create? Okay, watch this. Watch this. This is the Bangal.js2, and this is really cool. When I saw this watch, I'm like, this is sweet. I'm gonna show it on the overhead actually because it's, of course, you want to see the watch. So it's got the sharp memory display. So here's something interesting. So you see how this display is still on, but it's like really dark. So this is a display that, I mean, I can see it, but you can't because it's like the polarization of the screen, it's all tough to see, but you can still read that, right? You can read that. It's always on screen, but it's not yank. It's got like, it's a little bit like the pebble, two or three, I think, had a screen like this. And when you press the button, it does turn on the backlight. It's, I think, a nine-bit color screen or something. And this is running Esparino. So, hold on, I have to remember how to make it do stuff. Okay, so there's a capacitive touch screen and there's all these programs that you can, this is, I think, actually running Esparino. So you can reprogram it over BLE and it's got temperature reading data and you can just have data scroll through. Looks like there's actually a bug in the app. Oh well, I probably shouldn't have done something I didn't know. Oh wait, there you go. So you can write custom apps for this in JavaScript using Esparino, which is super cool. They had a watch before that was a little chunkier and this one is, an off-the-shelf watch, I think it's called the QA3 or something. There's a heart rate sensor, there's a temperature sensor, I think barometric pressure and all that. So you can do heart rates and blood oxygen. But what's really interesting is there's a little magnetic cable that of course I have it plugged into my computer and bring it with me that plugs onto here and this actually is power ground so you can charge the watch up of course. But then the two middle pins are SWD clock and data. So you can actually reprogram this as an NRF 52-840 BLE microcontroller, you could install Arduino on it, you can install CircuitPython on it, you could code it directly with the Nordic NRF API. I think this is really neat. You know, Esprino of course is a very easy way to reprogram it, I don't know how to get out of this app. I just got this, I just got this thing, why am I making it? Maybe it doesn't quit. But you got the button, capacitive touch screen, I think it's like 200 by 200 pixels program it using the Esprino Bluetooth app. Maybe we'll do a little video where we show how to do that because this is kind of interesting. And the processor inside is the Cortex-M4 NRF 52-840 with one megabyte of flash, 256K of RAM, and it's also got additional eight megabytes of SPI flash memory storage as well. So all the sensors and a great reverse engineering of this off-the-shelf watch by Esprino. So check out on Hackaday IOI, they actually have a document with all of the settings. So if you're interested in learning about the internals, you can do that there. There's also a Kickstarter that completed its funding and so we've got this in stock now. Next up, Revision. Revision, the Vemmel 7700, one of the last sensors we made before we started turning everything into STEMI QT, this is now STEMI QT-ified. So it's great for plug and play usage. We have a right angle version and this is the flat version. So you can see the sensor is pointing straight up. It's the same PCB for both versions, just one has the chip like rotated. And this just shows it gives you lux output. It's a really easy to use sensor, it's really reliable and we've got circuit python and Arduino code for it. Okay, we have more of the D-Lux D-Lite LEDs. This is by our friend Mark who we've worked with and been friends with for over a decade. And we have more types available. So that was the blue round one. You can see. The round ones are like this kind of crystalline globes. They come five in a pack and we have green ones. Green ones, also spherical. And as Philby said, this is not a drill. Skulls. This is real. Skull shaped LEDs. White skulls that you could also paint if you wanted to have them. I can't think of another company besides Adafruit that you would expect to have skull LEDs. These are beautiful. I don't know what folks are gonna do with these and that's what the cool part about is. But it's gonna be got. It's gonna be neat. It's gonna be interesting. They're gonna be like cool macro photography with them. They are fantastic. I love them. Got. Good work Mark. Skull. And we'll have Mark on one of our shows in some way, shape or form. And we're also gonna do a whole bunch of other additional photos. These are nice too. We also showed the crystal one. It's a crystal shape last week and we have more permutations on the way. Mark is deciding if there's enough demand, all sorts of different ideas and designs. I think there was a request for dragon shaped ones. Maybe that'll happen. Who knows? But if folks pick them up and if you use the code, we could tell Mark, hey, these are selling like not hot cakes. They're selling like deluxe delight LEDs. Which. Like skull cakes. Like skull cakes. All right. So besides ULA data, our team, our city, our customers, our staff, our community is. The VL53L4CX. So this is another time of flight sensor from ST. And you're probably like, aren't there like eight of these by now? And the answer is yes. There's about eight of them. And they all look very similar. But this one is actually kind of neat in that it is a very long distance one. So far that previously the longest distance it could do was four meters. The VL53L4CX can do six meter distance and it can do multi-target. So that means it can actually detect if there's two objects at different distances within its range of vision, which I think is about 18 degrees. Right now there's only an Arduino library. And I will mention the Arduino library is really like chunky. So it can't run in an UNO. You really do need like a Cortex M0 or M4 ESP32. But they do have a library written for this sensor. I just got it working yesterday pretty much. And it's got an amazing range of 10 millimeters to 6,000 millimeters. It can actually go a little bit under 10 millimeters, but it's no longer linear. The multi-target is cool too. We were chatting with Liz and we said this would be a great sensor for making like a laser harp. But it could also be used for robotics if you wanna do like distance sensing, but against six meters away is really far away. I could also do, I think, if you wanna make a digital measurement device, what's it called? Like a tape measure. Like a laser tape measure. A distance sensor? A distance sensor, but like not, usually distance sensors don't aren't that precise. This one is precise to a couple millimeters. So check it out. It's the same format as our other VL53 sensors. But again, we don't have circuit Python or Python code. As of yet, we're gonna start writing that library hopefully soon. That's new products. All right, don't forget the code deluxe. You can use it, you know, to get these skulls. Skulls. And other things, but like, this is what you want. Skulls. You got five of each in that. All right, we're gonna do questions, but first we're gonna do some top secrets. So load up your questions in adafruit.it slash discord where you can join. I figured how to quit. You have to hold the button down. Oh yeah? Yeah. So let's do some top secret. All right, first up for top secret this week. This is just a bunch of stuff that we're working on. So no other information, just like you can expect some really neat cube things. Not explaining what it is. We're showing these off on some of our shows, some of the things that we're up to. And there's a lot of interesting projects you're gonna be able to do with accelerometers. Get in the cube. With LED panels. The future's cubic. The future is cubic. And I think there's another demo. I can keep lighting this play. Well, I mean the globe is kind of neat. I think there's another demo too, I don't know. I'm just gonna let this play all the way to the end because it's so cool to watch. Like how Arizona's just getting squished constantly. Squish. Flat land. I think this is it. And next up, this is a little bit of a preview of what we showed off. This is the music, I guess, visualizer for the connection machine. And then the other top secret is one that we just shot today. So we're gonna play it. All right, Lady, what is this? These are still panelized ESP32 S3 QT Pi. So this is coming soon. We released the S2 QT Pi. The S3 has dual core and it has BLE and a lot more RAM. So this is a lovely little chip now in QT Pi format. And this is how it comes on panels. So, you know, I like this panelization technique where it's routed out and then V-scored because it's really easy to just break them off. It's like little like grapes or something. And then this is the tester. So the board goes in here. I plug it into USB-C and then there's a little testing jig. And the test code was gonna test the GPIO. It programs it, test the WiFi strength and everything. So I'm finishing this tester now and this is going to be in the store really soon. QT Pi ESP32 S3. Okay, let's do some questions. All right. We're doing this. All right, here we go. Let me hit Discord. The gigantic question. I'm gonna scroll back. Could the Crate 3 run circuit Python? If not, is circuit Python gonna be able to run stuff like this in the future? I don't know yet, because I'm not, yeah, I don't know anything more than that press release, but I think we could probably get circuit Python Blanka working on it if it's Linux. Okay, there was a question about the, I think it was the IonMPI. Was it like I squared C or something? But I'm having a hard time scrolling back all the way. So we bet it is. Well, if I missed your comment from a while ago, go ahead and post it up in the chat. Yeah. Let me go to the other question that I have lined up. I think. Not a question. Sometimes there's tons of questions. Yeah, well, no, it was a, I want the one that you, Bridges, you are. I got that. Yeah, if you could post your questions again, because I got, I lost some of the chat. It looks like, sorry. We might be, I had a schedule here. I think it was like, what protocols did that NXP sensor use? The inputs you are, so you send it just like binary ASCII data? Is it on the bridge picture? Yeah. Okay, well, the one that we showed is you are to I squared C, but they have ones that do like every other kind of combo. Yeah. I could show more of the watch, but like not mess it up. Yeah, you wanna do that? Yeah. Okay. I'm like, I just got this and it's like, I'm supposed to be an expert. So, you wanna go to the overhead? When will the next TFT nine inch come out? The TFT nine inch? I don't, I don't have a plans for nine inch. Okay. Okay. So there's Anton clock. Let's go to a Q clock and then, yeah, so the thermometer, this hung, but then it eventually, maybe it didn't work, I don't know. Oh, does the ESP32 V2 support circuit Python? The ESP32 does not, only the S2 and the S3 support it right now, but we're thinking of how we could support the ESP32. But you could use MicroPython. All right. Someone, so these arrived in the show, they wanna know how is New York City doing with the latest COVID variant? So I'm glad you asked because, yeah, I'm glad you asked because like, so by the way, let me just do a disclaimer as usual. More than I live together, we're the only people here during the day-to-day, we've decided to keep the mass on indoors and our team is fully vaccinated. So this is my observation. The number of COVID testing pop-ups like the independent business ones in New York City, there's definitely less of them. There is more rapid tests in every possible place that people can get them. And a lot of people have them. There's no run-on rapid tests. We have a bunch here at Adafruit if we need to give anyone a test. And then our staff has these at home as well. And we can give any to anyone as well. We have enough to do that and everything has worked out that way. But those aren't reported. And when they're not reported, the numbers that we used to be able to get, like what's the positivity rate and how do you know what's really going on? It's a little unclear. People don't seem to be getting severely ill at all. In fact, the two people right now that are isolating and or have tested positive with a rapid test out of 130 plus people, mild symptoms and maybe one of them does or doesn't have it. So, so far so good, but it does seem to be like another wave. So our mayor in New York City is isolating with COVID. Lots of folks that are well known in like the media in New York, I think like Anderson Cooper or something to some positive. And it's just like a lot. It's like it's been happening and happening and happening and happening and happening. And folks are okay, but this variant seems to be spiking up again. So we'll see what happens, but it's getting a little difficult to know what's really going on nationwide because some states aren't reporting anymore. The wastewater numbers seems to indicate that there is a spike happening. And so I think we're all just gonna have to continue to live with this thing. And if you work at a place that allows feedback for things, our team has decided together consistently that it didn't make sense for us to take off masks indoors when we're around people. So we do that here when there's people, it just happens to be the two of us now. And so we're gonna continue to do that until our team collectively says, well, enough's enough. Yeah. Or it doesn't look like we need to do it anymore. So that's the way you gotta be fast and flexible. Okay. I think that is no response time listed for the time of flight sensor. Any idea what it is seems like? You have to check the datasheet. I don't know what it is, but it's usually about 50 Hertz. Okay. All right. And I think that's our questions for today. Okay. All right. A little bit of a reminder. Don't forget the code is deluxe. Pick up some skulls. You may as well. Pick up a skull. And- He'll be your friend. I wanted to say thank you to all the Adafruit team members for running things behind the scenes. Dakar is running it in select behind the scenes this week. All the Adafruit community members that are here in all the chats that have been helping out in the moderators, students, and stuff on Discord. Thanks for getting us 34,000. We did it together, everyone. It's a safe place, a cool place, a great place to bring people together. And that's why there's a lot of folks at Stop By. We'll see everybody next week. This has been an Adafruit production. Thanks, everybody. Here is your moment of zener. Goodnight, everybody.