 And welcome to Selina. Hey everybody, and welcome to my desk, working on a whole bunch of hardware, including some prototypes that came in to let's get right to it. So let's go to the overhead and I'll show off this TRS Trinkie. So I remember a few weeks ago I mentioned I have a lot of these SAMD 21E18s because I had to book two years worth of inventory through Microchip and then they're like, anyways, we're gonna ship you all two years worth at once. I was like, no, no, please schedule it out. So it's like every quarter I get some, but it's like, no, they just shipped them all to me at once and I was required to take them. So I have like a lot of SAMD 21E18s. So it's like time to do more Trinkies. So one Trinkie I got a request from was from ATMakers for a TRRS Trinkie. And what this has, let me just see if I can, this'll be better, I just wanna get a nice background here so you can see it. This has a TRS jack, which is this audio jack. It's an eighth inch jack, but instead of just having stereo, like normally you have like, you know, the sleeve is kind of long and then you have left and right. This has left, right, like tip ring one, ring two and sleeve. So this is for, often used for like headphone, like, you know, have headphone and stereo audio. I don't have like a, you know, an iPhone headphone jack or whatever, but that's often used for like Android or iPhone jacks. And these are great because you get four contacts on, you know, one easy to plug-in connector that's easy to use. And like you see here, you know, we sell these easy terminal blocked TRS adapters, which I'll use for the demo. The TRS jack connects to the SAMD 21E, there's a NeoPixel, the one nice thing, the really nice thing I like about the 21Es is that you need almost no components. You need a 3.3 volt regulator and like two caps and it has, you don't need a crystal because it does USB, you know, the JK pulse that uses the one kilohertz pulse as the PLL for the 12 megahertz internal oscillator. You see there is this, you know, you don't even need a reset resistor because there's a pull-up built in. You just need a reset button and you're good to go when I have this programmed with the teeny UF2 bootloader. So, you know, again, you can plug it in and then, you know, I forgot where I put them, but you can get headphone splitters. So they'll split this audio jack into like, you know, stereo and mono connectors. So if you want multiple mono connectors, you can do that. Or like I said, just plug this in here. So I'm going to plug this into my USB extender, which I don't know if I can, I mean, it's this. I'm going to like everything's going to fall apart. So I'm not going to do that. And then I have over here two buttons that are plugged in and then let's go quickly to the overhead, sorry, the computer and let me close this. So because it's a SAMD 21, I can once circuit Python on it. Arduino works too. And circuit Python is great for like quick projects. And there's not a lot of RAM. That's like the only downside. The RP2040 has way more RAM. You could do much more. But like, again, the simplicity of the size and cost, you know, the SAMD 21 is kind of great. Just a little demo that uses the keypad and HID libraries that are actually frozen in. So you don't even need any files, make a new pixel. And so what's interesting about this design is what 18 makers wanted was that normally the sleeve is always ground. And then you have like, you know, whatever microphone on the ring one and then or in two and then left and right on wing one and tip. But it's like, oh, can you have every pin from the TRS adapter go to a GPIO? And the reason is that there are some accessibility adapters that are potentiometers. So you need one pin to be three volts and one to be ground. And then the analog input comes in on like the middle pin. But also like, you know, depending on your splitter, like you might have, you know, you want the shared ground. It might be on like the sleeve or it might be on the tape. Like it could be on a couple of different pins. And so each pin from the TRS goes to ground. I'm sorry, it goes to a different GPIO. All of them are analog capable. But it means that what I do is for this configuration. So if you go to the overhead again real fast, I'll just show this. So for this configuration, I have two switches. And of course one, you know, I'm going to use the internal pull-ups. So one pin has to be grounded. And so, you know, I'm going to have the sleeve and the ring grounded. And so that this pin here, ring two and this pin tip is the input, right? Cause it's a switch. You want to have one, the opposite pin be ground. So when the button is pressed, it's grounded. Okay, so let's go back to the computer. So the first thing I do is set the sleeve and the ring to be ground. I set them to be outputs and ground. And so that way when I have the, oops, the tip and the ring two, the other two pins, I make them into pulled up low pressed keypad presses. And then I instantiate an HID keyboard. Thing I love about Circuit Python, one of the demands I made was we have to have, it make it very easy to do HID keyboards and mice cause it's like, you can do it in Arduino but it would be great if it was really trivial to do. And then thanks to the keypad library, we just, you know, we just have this in the background, this keypad is handling the event stuff in the background. And then when a button is pressed, I just get a report. So what I'm going to do first is I'm going to, I'm going to quickly, great thing about Circuit Python, I'm going to just comment at the part that does key presses so it doesn't like mess up my editor. And then when I have these buttons, when I press them, you can see it's like, oh yeah, you pressed button one, you pressed button two, got it. And then, you know, to make this into an HID keyboard, you just save it and then one button, it actually types out the word hello and the other button, it does a shift key code A. So you can have multiple, you know, can do control, delete if you wanted to. And then, you know, again, if I press this button, you can see it's typing out hello and if I press this button, it types the letter A. So really easy to do accessibility projects with this. And you know, with all the pins being available, you just configure it however you want. You can have three push buttons because you have four pins and so there's one ground and three inputs or you could have two potentiometers, you know, one power, one ground and two pots or like one pot, one switch or, you know, you know, one LED and one switch and you can do a couple different things. Also, if you know, not maybe in circuit in Python, but if you're willing to use Arduino, you can connect an IR receiver into it and have it receive IR and you just like, you know, screw the terminal block and use like a little through-hole IR receiver and now you have IR and a switch. You could even do a rotary encoder. Again, in Arduino, I don't think you wouldn't be able to do it in circuit Python, you'd want out of memory, but you have two pin, so you know, two GPIOs, power and ground and then, sorry, a switch. So you could have a rotary encoder with a push button. So a lot of accessibility stuff available and then I did a quick update for the final version. I was like, well, you know, even though again, not useful in circuit Python, but maybe in Arduino, I added a right angle Stem IQT connector. So, you know, you could plug in an I squared C device or just get two more GPIO pins, basically. So if you wanted even more AT pins, you could do it, but I thought this could be, you know, kind of handy for accessibility projects and like it's really small. I like how compact it is. Let's go to the overhead and then I'll show the next trinky. So yeah, it's very compact. And again, if I did this with the RP2040, it would be, it would basically be feather-sized because like the RP2040 needs so many more passives and a crystal and, you know, like capacitors, resistors, it needs a lot more components, but it's again, much more capable. It'd be really great if there was an RP2040 that had the flash memory, can you need the flash memory and the crystal? So if it did USB crystal syncing, so you don't need external crystal, and if you could have the built-in two megabytes of flash, that'd be like so cool. Maybe one day. Okay, so that's trinky number one, so this is good. So I just made that one change, move the Neopixel over here and then in the spot over here, there's a little right angle QT port. This is working great and I think there's a PR, Dan, how about did a PR to circuit Python? And then it's got, like I said, Arduino and circuit Python support. And then the other trinky, if you remember, is just a pixel trinky that will let you connect. In this case, dot star, but you can have two Neopixels or one's a dot star LED. Same, basically, you'll see it's almost identical. SAMG 21 reset button, 3.3 volt regulator, one little signal Neopixel. And then when I plug this in, boop. You know, it just does your standard dot star rainbow. So it's like, what is this good for? Well, I think that there's just new Windows 11, I think I mentioned this, it's a Windows 11 dynamic lighting. Okay, so can you go to the computer? So there's this new thing where within Windows 11, there's an HID protocol for controlling basically Neopixel devices and so they have learned.microsoft.com too. Everyone got learned. And they even have code for Arduino and MacroPad, which is like great because it's like that hardware that we make and use. And they're also gonna have all these hardware platforms like Logitech that'll let you do synchronizing. And so I thought it'd be kind of cool if we had like a really quick board that you could plug in and then could do this Windows 11 lighting protocol and maybe also can look like a DMX controller and then you could just like plug in and have it, you know, manage up to 512 I think LEDs within a DMX universe. So you could do like lighting without having to have like, you know, an Arduino in the middle or something because it was just, it was a plug and play and you could power it from the USB port. And then, you know, so this works, you know, it's not nearly as complicated as the TRS Trinky. I just have the power and ground come from the USB port and then level shifted two pins from SPI clock and mostly pins so that I can do DMA neopixels on the mostly pin or you can do DMA dot star LEDs using the SPI peripheral. So that's pretty easy. And then one thing I'm thinking about and it's just like, I have to finish routing this board is let's go to the, oh yeah, sorry, I'm on computer. One thing I thought it would be neat is I get once in a while these neopixels that are 12 volt or even like 24 volt power. And so I thought it would be cool if there was, you know, this wouldn't fit maybe on a small board but if you have USB-C, you could in theory request from the USB-C using a PHY chip to get the power delivery up to 12 or 20 volts. And so, you know, there is this possibility of like, okay, I want to drive 12 volt neopixels and power them from USB-C. It could do the power delivery request and get you up to 20 volts. And then you'd have to, you know, your power supply would have to be a little bit different because you're, the power from the USB would be five. You would have to like have a regulator that could handle up to 20 volt input. But then, you know, you could drive pixels that had this high voltage output without needing a separate power supply because you could use just like a laptop power supply that give you up to 20 volts. So, only thing is like, this is still like, I'm still figuring this out because I need to get rid of this 3.3 volt linear regulator or place with a buck where, you know, it's just getting complicated. So, I'm thinking about how I want to do that because I think it would be really useful to have it be USB-C and give you 12 volts. Cause like, you know, it's, otherwise it's a pain you have to get like, separate five and 12 volt power supplies. It doesn't mean you need, if you could have a quick switch that would just like, you know, mechanically select one or the other. Anyways, so, still thinking about this, not nothing, nothing quite done yet. All right, how are we doing on time? 15 minutes. Okay, great. Let's go to the great search. The Great Search brought to you by Digikey and Andrew. They do use their power of engineering to help you as you find something on digikey.com using her vast years of experience, creating electronics, looking for parts. And this one is kind of internet famous at the moment, disease. I know. We saw this coming around us. Yeah, this is a good one for the great search because frankly, I didn't even know you could still buy Z80 chips, but so a couple of days ago, April 15th, you know, you file your taxes and you find out that the Z84C00 product line is end of life. Yeah, there's still products that are, you know, probably white goods, automotive industry that uses a Z80 processor. So there basically is an end of life for the Z80, you know, probably because like the wafer foundry, you know, I can only imagine the wafers must be like, you know, 200, 300 nanometer process. It must be incredibly old process. And very few chips are using that process. And the places that are making these wafers and processing them are probably like, yo, we're not gonna do this anymore. And we actually see this quite a lot. I remember there's been a few chips that I've seen from, I don't know which part it was from analog, that they were like, not only not making this chip, but because there was, if you guys remember, like a few years ago, there was I think some fires in Taiwan. I think was it like in Taiwan? There was a fire in the Taiwan or in the Philippines. And a big foundry was damaged, like a big chip packaging foundry factory was damaged. And they were like, well, if we're gonna rebuild this factory, we're not gonna rebuild all the old processes. And so I think XP was also affected. A couple of companies were affected and a couple of chips were like, hey, all of a sudden factory we used to make them is no longer gonna be, they're not gonna rebuild that old machinery. So it's end of line. And also like, I can't imagine that Xilog is selling that many Z80 processors. So this was the Z84. What was cool about it? It came in a dip format, which is just like so cool and so classic. It is last time by, however, there are a bunch available. The last time by date is, sorry, I forgot to say mentioned to go to the computer, but yeah, this is the Z84 C008, eight megahertz processor available in dip. They do have a couple thousand available last time by. A last time by is when you basically, if you are using this in a product and you really need, you're like, look, I need three years to transition to our design. Or if you're like, look, I want 10 years worth of product because I want to finish the end of the product line. And I'm guaranteeing 10 years. You can usually put in a request and say, hey, I want the last 10, 20,000, whatever quantity. And then what DigiQ will do is they tell Xilog and Xilog will bundle up all these last time buys and do like the final run. I will say that during the chip shortage, there were many times in which I put in requests for last time buys and they did not pan out. So not saying that's going to happen this time, but the last time by is not guaranteed it's a request. There is no guarantee that you'll actually get those chips. But again, part shortages were a welfare time. That said, if we go to embedded, first off, there are Z80 emulators you can get, emulators like implementations for FPGA. So you can always mimic it if you need to, although to be honest at this point, if you can move your chip to something else, please do. But under microcontrollers, the first off you can look under this series and you can see there's Z8, which is probably related to the core processor. Let's see if that's where Z80 might be mentioned. There's the EZ80. Actually, I didn't see this before. I wonder what that is. Looks like there's a couple other chips. So the EZ80 is probably, well, it's a similar family, not available in DIP, but it is available. And some of them just continue, not for new designs. So let's look at ones that are, it looks like these are, these are kind of fast. Let's look at active ones. So it looks like the EZ80, F91, these are all gonna be, they're big chips, they're LQFP, big and they're only eight bit, but they are available and looks like they have, they come with peripherals at this point, not USB, but they do have I squared C and RDA. They do not have a lot of space. So you only like 256-ish K and 8K of RAM. So these are not big chips. These are also not five volt friendly. So if you're looking for a five volt friendly, that's not it. But let's look for others, the 80 chips. One thing they'll say is, sometimes these microcontrollers are kind of split apart. Sometimes they're under microprocessors. So if you look here for the Z80, this is where you'll see like that Z84 series, which is last time by, but they also do have some active. So again, if you select active and you'll see these are available in five volts. So there's a couple of options. This one is six megahertz, this one is 10, wow, super fast. Both are five volt friendly. They're available in 100 QFP. Let's just take a quick look at this one. But that is, one thing I'll say is I, not every chip got discontinued. So this one is still available if you absolutely need a Z80 core. And yeah, it looks like Z80 multiple ports it's a scanned PDF of a hand drawn data sheet, just like super cool. And I assuming that this must implement, yeah, this implements like the Z80 architecture. It's just, it's not gonna be a surface mount part. However, you could solder this to a board that then has like 40 pins brought out and like adapted into like the pinout you would expect for a Z80 if you need to upgrade an existing Z84C chipset. So it's possible, but it's gonna be more complicated than just like having the nice drop-in replacement. That said, you can still get a Z80 processor if you want especially the Z84. So you'll get that last time by, but you know, you could theoretically use this chip. And like I said, just make an adapter chip, adapter plate that would plug in. And as long as you have all the peripherals that you were expecting and an amount of RAM and flash, you could program it as is. Something actually we did for the Zoxbox, we used a 64K flash chip that was dip. It was the ATMEGA64. And then eventually the ATMEGA, it wasn't enough space. People wanted the ATMEGA128. I remember somebody made an adapter that took the TQFP at MEGA128 and brought out the pins into the 40 pin like the two by 20 pin, 0.6 inch wide package. And people would plug them to the Zoxbox into the socket. So such things are possible, but you can still get active Z80s on Digikey. So do that last time by, or you can pick up one of these. It's my pick for the great search. Where in the world is the... Alrighty, that's our show. Okay. Thanks everybody. We got to everything. See everybody. During the week, we have a bunch of shows from 3D printing to show and tell, to ask an engineer, to deep dive, to all the videos we publish, check it out on all the places every single week. We're active. We're doing so much. Bye everybody. Bye bye. Have a great week. Bye bye.