 life in New York where the machines are high. It's Ask an Engineer. Hi, Hypno Machine tells you to make manufacturing here in New York City. That's where we put the pixie test. Hi, it's me Lady Aida, the engineer with me, Mr. Lady Aida. We're broadcasting live here from downtown Manhattan where we do so much of the manufacturing, kidding and soldering and coding and video editing. Lady Aida is a tripper, by the way. She's a little sick today, but she's like, I'm just going to do it. So we just did show until we're doing Ask an Engineer. We were up late. Our kid was almost sick, but not, but got you sick. Well, she got sick. She got better now. Yeah. So that's the way it is. So nothing's stopping her. She also was doing a bunch of electronics. We're going to do the show. So in case, you know, we seem a little sluggish, it's been a long week already. It's been tough. Okay. But we have all this cool stuff tonight. Yeah. Let's kick it off. Let's tell them the code. Let's tell them some of the videos, some new products and more. Tonight's show to code is Metro RP. There's a lot of good reasons for that. You could probably guess we have a new product that is now in the store. Metro RP, 10% off the native restore, all the way up to 11.59 a.m. Eastern time. You get free stuff and more. Just add the code on checkout. Talk about our live shows that we do, including show and tell. We also have kind of a new thing that we're doing. We'll talk about that soon. It's 10 p.m. Do you know where your engineer is? Desk of Laviator, which includes the great search from DigiKey, JP's product pick of the week, and JP's workshop. We're going to just do some highlights of some of these. Some of these we might not get to this week. Time travel, look around to makers, hackers, artists, engineers. We have a big update on some Raspberry Pi stuff. Yes. Talk about that. Let's talk about that. We have some advanced manufacturing, Main New York City footage, fun, how it's made style videos. They're actually like music videos now. 3D printing, top secret, new products. We're going to answer your questions. We do that on Discord, aimford.it slash discord. Go over there. That's where we collect all the questions and answer them throughout the show. All that and more on, you guessed it, Ask an Engineer. I love the videos you're making. The sounds really good. It's a lot of fun. I think we're going into another phase of Adafruit content creation. I always really like homemade skateboard movies. Because we're just doing these cool tricks and it's like, hey, you do a trick, I do a trick. I feel like we're doing that with people who are doing open source hardware and software. We're like, hey, check this thing out and you're building off each other. So that aesthetic is seeping in these 90s skateboardery type things. Also, MTV liquid television style stuff. I keep the tone. Yeah. So that's what the vibe we're going for now. We'll see how it goes. We give away free stuff in addition to the discount code Metro. Okay. Lady, we got two things that we're doing. Yes. Okay. We got two things, but that's not going to change. But right now order 299 or more and you get a free circuit playground express or all-in-one development board has LEDs and sensors and buttons and more. It's a great solder free way to learn electronics and coding. And at 1.49, we're still giving away the KB2040 featuring the RP2040 chip. Another wonderful microcontroller for learning programming and development. And both these run circuit python, micro python, Arduino. They're very multi-use. And then by next week, I think we're going to have... We might have the UPS back and we might have these coasters. Yeah. I'll do some updates about that. Yeah, we'll do some updates. If you're live, we do a bunch of live shows. You just add more live shows. Why not? Live is special because it means you can be part of it and participate. So on the roster of live shows, we just did show and tell. Yes. So we had a little bit of recap of what data for teams up to. Also, we talked about what we're doing next week, which is show and tell on Friday, 7.30 p.m. Eastern, because it's circuit python day. A lot of the team will be there. Stop by. You don't have to show a python-enabled project. That's just the theme. It doesn't have to be circuit python. It could be micro python or any stable computer python. It could be your desktop python. What's cool is all these flavors of pythons kind of work. We'll talk about that. They're even working more together now. I'll talk about that later in some future segments in this show. So we had some folks stop by. And then some people from the community came by. Had a really cool LED light project. Bob showed the rest of the cool keyboard software. Yes. Analog digital keyboard calculator. And then an ongoing update project of this cool fidget. And Brandon had the LED effects and was like, yeah, MIT licensed source code is so cool. Yeah. We're starting to see, I think, the prolific makers out there seek projects that allow them to do more with it. There's a lot of, I don't know if it's a rug pull or whatever term you want to call it. It's like, hey, everybody, here's code. Oh, but you can't use it for anything. Here's code. But you have to sign the NDA. Here's code. Not commercial. Here's code. It's open, but it's not really. And so I think if you watch where the developers go, they're going to where they can do the most with the code that they want to write. And again, like 99% of or whatever, a very high percentage of what we publish as data fruit is MIT licensed. It's like very easy for you to use and adapt. Builds business around it. You can do just about anything. And since you usually ran, but I'm going to run, because of why not? I'm a little sick. Folks, if I write code that's MIT licensed and people like using it, that's not vendor lock-in. That's just people using it. Oh, right. Yeah. What? Let's just go to the here. We had two things. Yeah. We had two things we had to deal with, some weird GitHub-y things. Sometimes guys come in and they're just like, open your two and vendor lock-in, because it's an MIT license. That's not true. It's not vendor lock-in. If everything's published, I don't know what to do. It's not true. Do that. And just because we don't want to support your startup. And then there was a startup that came in and tried to do pull requests on our kid's book code, because they wanted to put their VC-funded AI company as the in-between. If you use any AI, I was very nice. But it's just like, hey, please don't do that. So anyways. So you put someone like a cat jumping on them? It was like a cat jumping. It's like, no kitty cat. So anyways, that's our little mini rant. And we're not going to change what we're doing. We're going to keep doing open source. So I've set enough on video where someone would just be like, look, you set up a video. Anyways, we also started a new show series called It's 10 PM. Do you know what our engineers are? What? Why did you do this? What was it called? Because it was a news thing that was on the news at 10 PM. And it was like, it's 10 PM. Do you know where your children are? So I can't get it out of my head until I do something else with it. So this is our version that's talking about engineering. It's 10 PM. Do you know where your engineers are? Okay. So that's the intro. And then what this show is, is sometimes we have these videos that are not really a minute. It's like, hey, lady, what are we up to? And it's not an hour. It's something in between. And it's usually like 10 o'clock at night. So this one, you were trying to get Linux to run on a microcontroller. Friday night at 10 PM, Saturday night at 10 PM. It was 10 at 10 PM, I think. I don't remember. Time moves very weird lately. But there was instructions on how to build Linux, cross-compile Linux with the 10th silica, for the USB 32 S3. And I was like, that sounds amazing and terrible. And so I got, and I'm like, and cool. I'll update it once. And so I kind of tried to combine different ways. Eventually I actually did get the cross-compiler working using WSL by editing my path. I tried Mac, WSL, MSIS, virtual box. A lot of things were not super successful, but I did manage to eventually do the build. And then also Dan got it working. And it's kind of cool. There's like, it's got SSH and it's a very minimal version of like busybox Linux. But if you think about it, like 10, 15 years ago, open WRT running routers were not that much less powerful than an ESP32 S3. It's like a dual core 200 and 40 MHz. 10th of a processor. Now granted, there's no memory management unit, so I don't know how they do it. I guess they just emulate it. I don't know. So like, you know, there's no memory protection. That does have Wi-Fi built in. I think they have the Wi-Fi working in MicroPython, which has a build for Linux also runs on it. So you can run MicroPython. It's kind of cool and funky and weird. And I think there's some more development going on with this project. It looks like there's one person who's doing the porting and then one person is doing the build project. And we just did like a five minute video and I just liked it. Yeah. And so we went live with it and we're just like, Hey, here's this like new idea for this series where it's like, it's special, it's random, but it's like, it's 10 p.m. And the, I'll go to the little backdrop. One of the reasons we wanted to do this too is if you look at what the engineers do for fun, that's usually what goes, you know, quote mainstream later. And there's just been like a few months, I think it's because like it's political season again where people are being really crummy to each other online and someone will post up a project and it's like, you're doing it wrong, I hate you. You're this, you're that, what you used the wrong language. And it's just because they're really damaged people that are just hurt and they hurt people. And so they go online and they hurt people and they don't know any better. I feel compassion. And so what we want to do is say, Hey, it's 10 o'clock at night. There's so many fun things to do. And this is, this is a fun time. It's not, you're working for a company at 10 p.m. This is all the fun stuff that you're doing. Where are your engineers at? Whatever they're doing, that's the cool new thing that's going to happen for everyone soon. Just thinking, you know, I was making the joke as I was compiling this Linux. I was like, man, I've been compiling Linux for weird ass platforms for like 30 something years. And you're going to be doing it for another thing. It's like, you know, 10 p.m. is always like, you know, like when I was in high schools, like, okay, 10 p.m. I'm going to like, that's kind of when like night begins. Like everyone stops bothering you and you actually get like time to really dedicate it to something. 10 to one, that's what like engineers, they can really start to do the thing that takes three hours of concentration uninterrupted. So anyway, I'm going to do all my like best designs because like, honestly, you're asleep. The baby's asleep. Like, no, I've no emails coming in. Okay, anybody? Nobody's bugging me and I'm like, okay, I'm just going to bang up this design real fast. That's the idea behind this like little thing that we're doing. And we'll just broadcast it live. We'll keep doing it. But I think the biggest thing is, I think we want to show that there's a lot of joy and fun and interesting, cool people that are doing engineering. But if they only see the bad stuff and the people kind of attacking each other online, they're not going to want to share stuff publicly. So it's nice. Like we showed something that didn't quite work. I wish people would share more of the stuff that. Yeah, we're out there with that. Because that's actually where people learn and they like form a community the most. Yeah, you need to, I think, see other people like you. Like, I think if you don't know how Adafruit works, if you're like, oh, obviously, like, you're never going to show your work. You're just going to release finished products if someone said, oh, this is electronic company. But we show all of our work and we show all the mistakes from things that go on with the company to engineering mistakes, wrong parts we'll get. So you think one of these will do more? Yeah, and it'll probably be like weekends around like Saturday nights or whatever. So anyways, and then speaking of shows, we do, from the Desk of Lady Aida on Sunday, we do a lot of shows. And that's in two parts. We talked about some of the stuff we're doing and then what did you talk about on Desk of Lady Aida? Okay, so I'm trying to remember what I did. So I found like 800 TFTs from like 2014 that I never used because we've been clearing out the factory in prep for our move in a year. That's a great time to sort of be like, do I need this thing? You're in here first. We're getting a bigger space. So I got these TFTs. So I designed a dev board to, I started a breakout board to use them because I don't know where my old breakout board is. And we'll try to get these displays back up and running because it's a bummer that I bought like almost a thousand of them. I also talked about the TSC 2007. I had some weird lockup issues. And I found an app now that talks about the lockup and I show a couple of different ways to deal with lockup issues. And in my case, I happened to have a, no brown out, a reset monitor which holds the reset line down until the power supply stabilizes. I believe that's going to help a lot. So I did a, for my new assistive touch shield, I'm using this TSC 2007. And like I said, I got it to, I even managed to actually, you know, it's like, you're always like, oh, I'm never going to be able to get it to replicate this like flaky error on live video. But I did, it actually replicated. So it didn't work, but worked in a phenomenal working way. So I talked about that. And then I did the great search. Yeah. We do a segment called the great search to buy Digikey and Adafruit. That's one lady that uses her power of engineering to help you find the things that you're looking for on digikey.com. What was the great search this week? Oh, so I showed off the shield, which again had this touch screen sensor that was being finicky. But one cool thing about the shield is it uses surface mount headers because the TFT is like exactly the same size as an Arduino. And so this way it plugs in directly and is like, it is beautiful, perfect overlay. But to do that, I need to use surface mount headers. And I've used the whole headers in a lot of designs, but surface mount not as often. So I showed that you actually digikey stocks a bunch of different surface mount headers in different sizes and configurations and pin lengths, which I don't remember they used to do. So this is kind of nice. I remember when I first designed the shield many, many, many years ago, I had to go to a custom connector maker. But now I digikey stock because you can have it shipped immediately. Okay, and then don't forget on Tuesdays we have JP's product pick of the week and then on Thursdays we have JP's workshop. On Fridays we have deep dive with Tim and or Scott. Scott's back. So I got both graphics. Yay! All right, time travel. Okay, here we go. As of right now, if you're ordering a Raspberry Pi board the rules are you need two factor authentication. That's just good security practices to do that anyways. And you can order one per 24 hour period. So before it was once a month, now it's once per 24 hours. Please don't... Well, it could be more than once a month if some were not available yet. Yeah. Then more like once per life. Yeah, some, yeah. So I'm going to go into some of the specifics with what had happened and more. So you can look at our press page, you can search, web search around. There's a huge shortage. And the biggest problem was people who were in title jerks who said, I need five. And then people who decided to try automation tools and buy them all up and then resell them on eBay and other places or people on Amazon that would, they had a store and they would charge a lot of money for them. And people would happen to us was people trying to get around a very simple rule just once per month because we want to have make sure all the makers can get them. And it caused a lot of problems. Turns out it was actually kind of the biggest issue that we've had in a while. And we've, we've been through a bunch of stuff. So the pattern was dude, she said, well, I need five. I don't care. And so they would change her address. They would yell at our team. Sometimes it was voicemail. Sometimes it was over email. Sometimes it was on Twitter. And we have a terms of service and a code of conduct. So once they started cursing at our team, calling them names, they would spin up proton mail accounts and email. They thought they were emailing what the more they would use tour that go on our contact page. They would leave fake negative reviews online. Because once we caught them and said, don't do that. We would ban them from doing that because they were buying like a lot at a time. And this was people who were buying, you know, five or more. And or they were buying five or more. And they were selling them online. And they were saying that there were some hackers, I know, who were pestering me on Slack while I was in the hospital, giving birth. Yeah. Do not do this. Yeah. We were called MAGA supporters, TERFs. We were set, we, you name the political spectrum. We were there. We were part of deep state because we required to factor authentication. Route that one. You know, we were on high alert because people showed up at Adafruit. One person said they were related to them more. One person said they had an appointment to pick up a Raspberry Pi. One person tried to sneak into the building. So that's what has happened over the last like almost year. Guys, they're single board linux computers. This is really saying it. So the reason I'm going through this is I'm going to not have to talk about it anymore. And I can send a link or a team can send a link. And it's like, why did all this happen? And I, my opinion about why this happened to us a little bit more is it's not easy being a high profile woman in tech. So they saw you, they saw a picture of you and they bundled it with I'm being told no, I'm getting banned for bad behavior. So I'm going to take it on on this woman. So I had a filter in our support system for pink hair because why is someone emailing about pink hair? Well, it's because pink hair, curse, curse, curse, curse, curse, curse, curse, curse, curse. So we have like, I didn't, I didn't want our team to have to deal with like kind of the worst of the worst. So there's filters and there's a lot of things. I don't like being like this container of all of this terribleness. So I'm looking forward to trying to forget about it. But one per day, please don't try to say like, well, what if I go to speed of light and I'm in a plane and like I go backwards in time and like the earth is actually flat. And I think I fly over it. And that's actually about actually not 24 hours, you know, not really 24 hours. By the way, what about a leap year? Okay. So there's a lot of things that please don't do that. And for the folks that we had to ban, like unless there is a really good reason to change it, it was because they, you know, did a pretty bad code of conduct violation or terms of service or the really sloppy folks would show the invoice on their eBay page when they were charging like $300 for a Raspberry Pi, like geek nuttiness. And we would actually see their order number and it's like, okay, that's you. So we have to ban your store account. So, anyhow. Also people who lied and were like, oh, I totally, this was the only one I'd never bought them. I have no idea why my order was voided. Yes, you do. Yeah. And then the other thing was, so RPI Locator did a good service. Yes. Where it's on all the social networks was on Twitter now X. The only issue is people piled on and they would go into Twitter and they would lie and say, oh, Adafrit ban me for no reason. And they're like, oh, so we only have one person blocked on X on Twitter right now. And it's because they were attacking our support team, Kelly specifically. And they were like screenshotting like curses because they didn't want to get banned from Twitter. So Twitter doesn't really have the same pile on bite it used to. Some of the worst people moved on to like Mastodon and they're terrorizing people there, I guess. So it's not as bad, but we just went through just like an unending pile on of people just being really crummy. There was some guy who just kept moving Better Business Beer Complaints again. So somehow I had. How many better Business Beer Complaints did we get in the end? It was like 78? It was a lot. And all of them were, it's not fair. I should be able to buy as many as I want and scalp them, scalp them, which is a terrible outdated word. And I should be able to do whatever I want. And they banned me from the store because I lied. I should be able to lie. Like it was it was it was entitlement in a way that made no sense. These are a little single more computers. So that is the entire story. Glad it's kind of over maybe. I don't have a bad view on humankind. I think anyone would. It was very tiny small group of people that did this, but they were very persistent and they wanted it to ruin it for everyone. And we're just not going to fold or give in. We're going to keep doing a good job. We still have all these monitoring pieces in place. So if someone does get out of hand or if they try to do stuff, we can always deal with it. But hopefully that chapter is over. Okay, let's go on to fun stuff. Back to school kits. We have a bunch of guides and things for kids. So back to school tools and accessories, tools and gear. It is already back to school season. Can you believe it? Somewhere in the summer season. So check those out. Our team spends a lot of time on these. These are back to school kits. These are the classic packs beyond the basics. You can see all the things that we put together each year for all the kiddos going back to school. You can use the discounts back to school projects, stock up on the school supplies, young engineers, Raspberry Pi, product picks at $2,023, books, accessories, $100 or less, new products, and JP's product picks of the past. Okay, another series of things that we do each day on the various speaking of socials. We do these PCB of the day things. So these are works in progress or they're redesigned or they're whatever that lady is doing. And then for some of these, I'll turn them into like fun animations. So you can, if you download the videos, you can turn these into like little video art things. Sometimes there's music in the background. Yeah, sometimes we turn them into patterns that would be like a neat like dress or like pants. Yeah, they're a little kind of Indian. Yeah, so we think PCBs are very artistic on their own, but then you can do neat things with them and make all these fun graphics. So you'll see some of those things that are daily that we do. We have a lot of revisions, so it makes a lot of sense. Yeah, a lot of revisions come up. Okay, let's do some Python on hardware. All right, Blinka. Yeah. Okay, the Python on hardware newsletter this week lead story. You can listen to a fantastic interview with Damian George, Mike or Python Lee. This is on the Invented FM podcast. Download it, read it, listen to it, do all the things. You can check out that on our website, on the Invented FM website, on any of the streaming services that you use that have podcasting. I think I'll bundle up this into two pieces, because we're going to talk about the sort of Python day. But sort of the biggest news is you and the circuit Python team kind of made a decision a long time ago. So for the super beginner, there's a little you where there was a little you micro in front of Python stuff. And that meant it's like, oh, this is a micro Python thing. And we decided not to do that. And now micro Python is also not doing that. Yay. Why did we not do that? Why is micro Python not doing that? And why is this all good? Why is this, why is this, why is this better? Yay, we're doing the same stuff together. So one of the decisions that micro Python made and a lot of code, you know, a lot of things about code is making decisions. And you just stick with one or you change your mind later. But they decided to go with UOS and UJson and U-Sys, a lot of putting the U in front of the library names, because they were customized to be for micro Python. And there were a couple of trade-offs with that. One, it made the code much smaller because they could just shove functions that were necessary for micro Python in any library that was convenient. However, the downside is, is that the code for micro Python was no longer a true subset of CPython. So, you know, when you're doing import UOS, and then like OS, UOS.mount or whatever. You'd have to remember. You'd have to, well, you'd have to have different code depending on whether it was running on CPython or on micro Python. And while micro Python was designed to be very fast light, one of the things that we wanted to do with circuit Python is to make it as close as possible to CPython running on a micro controller. And so we decided not to have do, sorry, we decided not to change any existing built-in functions in libraries. We may not implement the entire capability of the library, but... Like NumPy or something like that. Yeah, we have micro lab, which is a totally different thing. Like we don't say it's NumPy because it's very different. NumPy is, of course, massive. But with stuff like, you know, OS versus UOS, we took out anything like those, I think maybe like a real-time clock call. So if you learn Python once, you get to use it everywhere, essentially. Yeah, like instead of having like the SD card mounting code, because CPython doesn't really have SD cards. That's not a thing that happens with CPython. Like you have your built-in storage on your computer. You're not like mounting a disk drive. Whereas with micro Python, circuit Python, you do. And so those functions lived in UOS and made UOS like it was much more compact where we pulled them out and put them into a new library called storage. And, you know, we wanted to make it so that any code that you wrote as much as possible, we wanted to make it run on CPython or circuit Python. It's just a structural decision. So also like we have Blinka when you do stuff in Linux land. So that still all works. Yeah, and that's another thing. Like almost all the examples for all of our libraries can run on a microcontroller or on a single board computer. There's another powerful thing. So now Python and microcontrollers, desktop Python, whatever you want to call it. CPython. CPython. And then pretty much the ways people are familiar with Python. They're learning online and classes or if they're reading books. All this stuff should kind of work all the same now. Ideally, yeah. It's like you should be able to actually follow along with a Python class on a circuit playground express or something. Yeah. There's nothing new, you know, like you should, it should be as transparent and similar as possible. But the trade-off is again, it's a little bit more bulky. But I bet like in my opinion, these chips only get bigger and faster. I remember what was it like six years ago or something? We talked about this. And I think we made a bet that chips are going to get faster, lower costs and more storage. Yeah. Because we show up as a USB drive essentially. And we're like, well, pretty soon, it's just going to be like a full-on computer. So why don't we just assume, why don't we work back from, this is going to be Python Python. Yeah. So that's kind of big news. I think one of the cool things too is since schools are doing curriculum in Python, they can have a microcontroller. One of the bits of feedback that usually here is, because they're like, well, I just don't want to type in a screen all day. You could do physical computing with something like a circuit playground express. And you can blink LEDs and you're learning Python. And you get the REPL and you get all these things. And you don't have to remember different types of Python for microcontrollers. You just, if you know Python, you know Python. Sorry, that's kind of big news. Yeah. So a lot of the micro-Python is doing the same thing. I think that's really, it's mature. It's all good. And do you think it's great? Listen to the podcast. And then also just a little note. So someone had emailed Adafruit and said, oh, I want to do, I'm not going to buy electronics, but I want to donate money to you because I like that you do open source. So do you know what? Micro-Python, we help with the fundraising each year to get people to sponsor the Micro-Python project on GitHub. Yeah. And they're working towards their goal. We do a separate sponsorship in addition to the thing that's on GitHub, because we're tight with them. We actually send them money. So I said, just donate to them because that's one of the things that Circle-Python is based on. A lot of people use Micro-Python. All these things work together. It's open source. Just like there's multiple flavors of Linux. You may not want to use one flavor for one thing or you might want to use both or you might want to use either. Yeah. Some people like Genevieve. It's great. Some people like Debian. Some people. It's fantastic. You can choose and all of these things work together. Same kernel. Same kernel. Different distro. Yeah. So I suggested that and they did it. So that was cool. So the festivities, by the way. Begin. Begins next week. Circle-Python Day is August 18th. It starts at 10 in the morning. Circle-Python Day introduction with John Park, special edition 3D hangouts with no pager and Liz. 11 a.m. beeps and boops. Circle-Python Day panel discussion posted by Paul. 12.30. There's Circle-Python Day game jam with a foamy guy. There's the Matrix Portal board build with maker Melissa. There's Circle-Python Day chat with Jeff, Dan, and Catney. There's special edition JP's workshop. There's Deep Dive with Scott. We're doing a show until and there's Ask the Engineer. That's a full day. We're going to be in the Discord server. We're going to be broadcasting in all the places. It'll be super fun. It's super laid back. I know people still aren't, you know, traveling quite yet and stuff or they're just starting to whatever the timing never works out for people to hop on planes. Maybe we'll do a physical one. People do these around the world, but this is one place and you can watch all the live streams later. And that is our news of the week. Again, next week, Circle-Python Day. You can get the newsletter delivered every single week. Go to AdafruitDaily.com. Subscribe. We don't do anything with your email address. It's a completely separate site. Okay, let's do some open source hardware news, Lady Aida. The news, by news, I mean guides. We have some new guides this week. What guides are on the big board this week? Okay. Well, Nan and Pedro are still walking out, making these rebuilds with the new PropMaker Feather. They did the Lightsaber, which was one of the most popular prop builds that they did. Now better, faster, easier to make using the PropMaker RP2040. A lot less soldering. And then there's also this week, the Zelda Master Sword, also a very, very popular project that was very complicated to build, but they were doing a really good job simplifying it. There's a video to make it easier than ever to make. And the new PropMaker Feather, again, very little soldering required anymore. We noticed a lot of people were trying to build these complicated builds, these complicated props, and they were like struggling with the soldering and the wiring and sandwiching two boards together. Yeah. We wanted something that's like cosplayer in a box. Like you just get started, you can make something right away. We use like a Lightsaber as a thing. But we also thought this is kind of like on our way to Imagineer in a Box, which is all the things that Disney, I think they'd want people to become Imagineers one day. But there really isn't. You can't go to a website and just be like, I want to make animatronics and have lighting do stuff and little robot arms. There's not like one, maybe eight of them. But there's not like something that if you want to go on that career path, it's like, here's a bunch of stuff to get you started. So we made this. Yeah. This is our idea. And I think that's the new guys for this one. That's it. All right. Let's watch some factory footage. Making stuff. Let's go to some 3D printing. We're going to do these back to back. We have projects from Mario Pedro and a speedup. Build the sword that seals the darkness and defend your kingdom with Adafruit's ARPY2040 prop maker feather. This iconic sword has been upgraded to be much easier to build. Additionally, the assembly is even more durable. The new dev board packs all of the features into one, making this project even more enjoyable to build. The prop maker feather is powered by the ARPY2040 chip and features better audio quality with an I2S amplifier. With eight megabytes of spy flash, USB battery charging and screw block terminals, it's the best step forward for building cosplay props. The circuit python code has been revised to handle the new pinouts and features adjustable settings for the accelerometer in NeoPixels. We think it's a great source for building similar props that feature motion activated effects with LED animations. Get the parts to build this project. Links are in the description. Dedicated 3D printed mounts, secure the electronics and the blade utilizes hardware screws making it a battle grade prop. Dual strips of NeoPixel LEDs provide total brightness, making it eliminate any darkness. To learn how to build your own, check out the guide at learn.aderfruit.com. The hilt and blade parts are secured together with stainless steel screws for maximum durability. The built-in standoffs and wall thickness have been increased, making the parts much more rugged. Each component has its own mounting plate that perfectly fit inside the hilt with enough room to house the various cables. The two halves are joined together with hardware screws making it serviceable in case anything gets damaged. To garnish the sword, a piece of green paracord wraps around the handle for a better grip. We had a lot of fun upgrading the master sword and felt it ease letting the kids cosplay with it outside. We hope this inspires you to check out the RP2040 prop maker feather for your next cosplay prop. That's the 3D print of the week this week. Don't forget to code as Metro RP. Let's do some new products. It's time for new. All right, what's new? All right, this is a board from Espresso. It's the ESP West board. There's a training system online from Espresso. You can see the URL. It's like ESP-RS. Yes, I'll go back there. Training you how to use and program West and specific for micro controllers on the ESP-32 which is kind of neat. West is a more secure version of a low-level programming language, a great place to move from C or C++ to this dev board. Features the ESP-32C3 which is a risk five processor with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It's also got some buttons, Neopixel, battery charging capability built-in temperature humidity sensor and built-in IMU which I think is a six degree of freedom. I think it's a thermometer and gyroscope. I don't think there's a magnetometer on there from InvinSense. It's a great keyboard but it's also great to... Oh, it's also turned out, I think it's feather-ish, compatible-ish. Feather-ish. Feather-ish. Yeah, I mean the pin numbering looks like it could work with Feather. So, check it out, particularly this is for if you want to follow along with their online training system. But also a great dev board just if you want the C3 with a bunch of sensors built-in. All right, and now in stock and is now the start of the show. So I do believe that our team, our customers, our community is... Yay, the Metro RP-2040 is finally in the shop. We talked about it a couple of weeks ago that it wasn't going to be, but now it's available. You can buy it and you can even get... Use discount code. Okay, use discount code. So we love the Metro shape and series. It's basically allows you to use Arduino shields with new chipsets that Arduino may not have made boards for. In particular, this is for the RP-2040. So you've got your dual 130 megahertz Cortex M0 plus in there. I pair it with 16 megabytes of flash. So plenty of storage for files and images and firmware. All the GPIO, I tried to make them as compatible with the classic Arduino pin out. So pins two through 13 on the top, the UART RX and TX pins on the top right area there. I squared C, SPI. And then there aren't six analog pins. So there's four analog pins A0 through A4. And then GPIO 24 and 25 are where normally you'd have A4 and A5. And then of course the power supply, you can give it 6 to 12 volts DC. There's a linear regulator that gives you five volts and 3.3 volts. One of the nice things about having the Metro layout is it's kind of big so you get to fit a lot of stuff in it. Like the feather and the QDPI are designed to be very small, but these are bigger boards. And so there's space for an SWD debug port and also a Pico probe port. There's a Neopixel on there. There is both DC and USB power. There's a stem and QT port and there's even micro SD card slots. So yeah, there's a lot there. Because I was like, well, you might as well just kind of pile it, pile it on with all sorts of goodies. It's very affordable. The RP2040 chip is a lot less expensive than the SAMD21 or the SAMD51. And so you can get close to like SAMD51 performance and definitely better than SAMD21 and definitely better than any of the 8-bit mega chip speeds from this board. But the pricing is 15 bucks. So the stem and QT port, boot port, boot button, the micro SD, the micro SD is also wired up that you could use it for SDIO. Even though that's not kind of officially supported in CircuitPython or Arduino. There is some example code out there and we verified that it works, but we don't really have SDIO support. And then the RX and TX pins are on a flipy switch. So you can swap whether RX and TX are going to 0, 1. So either you have the numerical pins going 0, 5. No, that one, yeah. So on the top right, the logical order is RX and TX, but the numerical order would be 1 and 0. And so like if you want the numbers to be in order, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, up to 13, because you want to use those pins in order, that's flip the switch one way if you want it so that the hardware serial port is on. The pins that it's expected to be on, you flip the switch the other way. So all together kind of like a jam-packed board, a really great dev kit for the RP2040. Everything's maxed out. So you can design, debug, and then if you want to shrink the design later, use KB2040. Yeah, for the folks who are like, I'm going to use RP2040. We've seen a lot of people do that. They'll use a Metro, they'll design something, and then they'll shrink it down with all the stuff they don't need later. And you can do that because we publish all the files. Right, that is... Okay, don't forget because Metro RP, we are going to do some top secret while we're doing that. They'll please post up their questions at different.it slash discord. I collected some from some of the other chats. So I have a couple ready to go, but you can post up any questions. We'll do that. Let's do some top secret. Okay, we've got a couple of videos. We're going to show those, and then we're going to bounce right to questions. Take it away, top secret us. Hey, lady, what is this? This is actually older products are NeoKey orthosnap apart. So this is an orthogonal five by six matrix of diode connected sockets for Kale, Gateron, MX switches, and LEDs. And they're actually connected up row and column, but they're broken apart. There's little traces that go between these mouse bites. But what I want to show as a tester, because one of the things that's kind of funny is like, how do you test something that has so many Pogo pins? It's actually like physically hard to hold it down. So we actually have a little helper sheet, this little plastic plate that lets you quickly press down all the pads easily. So when you see them all light up green, that means they all pass test. It's tested every column and the wheel connection. So it makes it quick for testing all 30 PCBs at the same time. Hey, lady, what is this? This is an update to our resistive touch TFT shield. This has been a stock for two years because of part shortages. And I've been meaning to redesign it. And I finally got around to doing it in my last couple of weeks. So the touchscreen controller has been updated to the TSC 2007. I kind of waffled back and forth, but decided in the end to go with an I squared C touch controller. So it uses the I squared C pins here. And it still uses SPI for the display and micro SD card. And it's got like the socket here for SPI access. And I'm also using it to test at the same time, SPI and I squared C on this Metro S3. So you plug it in. And I'm using the IRQ line to detect touches. So very nice, very fast. Like you see like a very smooth touch detection going on here. So pretty much ready to go into the shop. So I'm going to order these soon and you'll see the revision. Lady, what's this? These are the final Metro RP2040 PCBs that came in. This is kind of neat. It's rare that you'll see an A circle on our boards. That means the first revision worked very rare. Usually you'll see a C or a D or even an H when I have to do many revisions. But all the GPIO are tested working. I bumped up the flash to be 16 megabytes. That's nice. You've got that RX and TX switch. So you can swap RX and TX pins, buttons, STEMI QT. And then this is the tester. Again, I'm using my Pico Brains to program the UF2 that is loaded onto the Metro. It lives on the SD card. And I can press the button if it says I'm waiting for the USB device. Then it resets it. Copies over the UF2. And then test the output and it passes. So this is now ready to go into the shop. All right, rolling right into questions. Yeah. Have some light up. And then you get to have some chicken soup. Yay. All right. First up, I from the mountains of Colorado. Can you recommend a sensor that can provide measurements on a CO2 and VOC? I looked but it seems there is not a sensor that has all three. I don't know if a sensor that does all three. CO2 and VOC, I mean, depends on if you want effective. I mean, here's the thing. If you want like true measurements, you'll have to use individual sensors. You can do effective CO2 and VOC or TVOC on like the SGP series. I definitely recommend for CO2 sensors, if you want to have like a true CO2 sensor, the NDIR sensors, SCD 30, SCD 40 are kind of the best ones. And then carbon monoxide. I don't know any digital sensors. I think if you use an analogue sensor, so you might have to couple together a couple different. I don't know anything that has all three and does true sensing the ball three. Okay, I tried to summarize this from a couple different tests that I saw. When someone's shrinking down design, let's say they use the Metro RP 2040. And they're like, okay, I got it kind of working the way I want. What are the things that you can normally eliminate and then what's a good form factor that folks kind of can target or go out? Yes, the metro is like, it's bigger, there's more space in it. And it's designed specifically when you want like wall power, because that's the thing it hasn't done. It's not portable. So it's not really meant for portable design. It's meant for like you're plugging it in, but that can be very handy. Like if you want to control a 12-volt motor, you don't have to have two power supplies. You have one power supply and then you can feed the 12-volt out of the metro to drive your motor shield or your stepper or whatever. So you've got that chunkiness. If you want something portable, the feather is really good because it's built in battery management. And if you want something really, really tiny, the cutie pie is just going to be the smallest. But as you go down, you get fewer pins. You get fewer like that. And people are like, why don't you make the cutie pie? But also it has battery charging. It's like, well, it would be the feather. Grand Central Metro Feather Cutie Pie. Yeah. Kind of that. The itsy-bitsy is kind of- Itsy-bitsy is in there. So it's like, you know, they get smaller and smaller. But it's- There's also like Circuit Playground Express or could be a case where you might want a round circuit board or something like that. All the good stuff. Yeah, but usually for developers, they'll start with a metro because you can't have everything as brought out. And then, you know, if you want to- Even like a Grand Central because like you can really- Yeah, that's what you have. When do there's enough pins? Totally the same if you do one comes in, you know, you have to have enough GPIO to support all those pads. All right. If we ever do a board where we start with like a Metro RP2040 and we shrink it down for whatever reason, maybe we'll do it. That's what you're doing. Like we did a series with Digikey Maker to Market where you should designing the Circuit Playground Express. So maybe something like that. Okay. Except, are there plans to make boards that can be put into din rail slits? I find myself using din rails for projects more and more. And it's hard to find dev boards that are shaped well for din rails or come with the sled. Again, I don't really do din rail stuff. I agree that they're very good. Usually people will take adapters. They'll make an adapter for the din rail instead. We stopped a couple in the show. Okay. I think the question was something we were playing on the top secret section. Is that capacitive touch? No, it's resistive touch. Very nice for resistive touch. All right. Some boards have more than one I-squared C set of pins. Do you see a time? At least the second I-squared C set is also brought out in quick ports. Reason may be the first I-squared C pins are taken or examples. So it has another I-squared C set. The QT pies, if there are two I-squared C ports, will have a different port on the Semi-QT than on the main pins. And I believe the KB2040 also, there's two I-squared C ports and one is on the GPIO pins and one is on the Semi-QT port. So I absolutely, yeah, whenever I can, I try to have it be on a separate port so it doesn't conflict. You have access to both ports. Okay. And then if you can, if you're willing to give a preview, there's lots of different pipe portal permutations I know we're working on. Any clues to what's next with some pipe portals? I'm trying to, yeah, the Matrix Portal S3 was my first foray into getting rid of dependency on the SAMB 51. So that moved to the S3 chip and so far so good. We've made sure all the projects worked and people are using the Matrix Portal S3. So the next one is to redo the pipe portals also with the S3. And I've seen other companies also have like TFT displays being driven by the SP32 S3 and JEPLA is working on adding circuit Python support for parallel displays. So you'll be able to have like 800 by 480 or 720 by 720 cool round displays. You know, it'll be really neat. I should actually look to see if there's there's TTL displays but maybe there's a TTL to something converter as well. Okay. You know, there's TTL sometimes to HDMI or TTL too. What for portal pipe portals what's your chip of choice that you? Is it the S3? It's totally the S3 like the same one that's on the Metro the SP32 S3 Metro which is in the shop for SINA. It has 16 megs of flash and 8 megs of PS RAM and so plenty of memory to buffer these big displays. It's kind of cool. Them's are questions. Thanks everybody. You can keep hanging on the chat. Folks will be there. You can also hit our forums if it's after hours of the shows and hang out in Discord 24-7. There's usually some of us around including the entire community. decode is in Metro RP. Want to thank everyone for coming by tonight. Thanks for tolerating my rant about a couple of things. Gotta get it out sometimes. So do we have a lot of new products and sometimes we have a lot of? We have a lot of news this week. And then you're a sticky pet. So we gotta get you some water and soup and more. So you can design more products. Especially thanks to this card who's doing stuff behind the scenes here at Adafruit. Tell them people emailing us and more during the show. Thanks so much for that. Thanks everybody. This has been an Adafruit production. We'll see everybody next week. 8 p.m. Friday. Don't forget. Don't forget. It's your birthday. A lot of blog posts and everything. But we'll see everybody next week. This has been an Adafruit production. Here is your moment of zener. Good night everybody.